Kill Your Darlings m-3 Read online

  Kill Your Darlings

  ( Mallory - 3 )

  Max Allan Collins

  Max Allan Collins

  Kill Your Darlings

  PART ONE

  THURSDAY

  1

  Heroes aren’t supposed to die.

  But heroes, at least real-life “role model” type heroes (as opposed to such mythic figures as Hercules and Davy Crockett), are human beings; and human beings, even the best of ’em, sooner or later, each and every one, wind up dead.

  My hero was dead in a bathtub; drowned, apparently. He’d been drinking heavily, earlier that night. He’d been dead drunk when I walked him up to his hotel room. And now he was just dead.

  A few hours before, he’d been vocal-embarrassingly vocal-sitting in the cocktail lounge downstairs. We were in Chicago, in the Americana-Congress Hotel, and it was October.

  “There hasn’t been a goddamn mystery writer worth reading since Dashiell Hammett died,” he slurred, at a table of mystery writers. Tomorrow was day one of the Bouchercon, the annual mystery fan convention.

  “You’re worth reading,” I ventured, smiling, trying to keep it light.

  Roscoe Kane, the shoulders of his plaid shirt flecked with dandruff, his patched brown sports jacket slung sloppily over the back of his chair, looked at me with disgust lining every wrinkle of his basset-hound face, his rheumy china-blue eyes like nasty lasers. The hoarse voice wanted to be contemptuous, but sad self-pity got in the way: “I used to be.”

  Across the table from us, Brett Murtz, in faded blue workshirt and jeans, leaned over and gestured, his long curly hair and free-flowing mustache making him look like a hippie Gene Shalit; he had the kind of enthusiasm it took to have driven here from Colorado in a Datsun.

  “I’ll bet you could still write a hell of a yarn,” he said. “You ought to come out with a new Gat Garson!”

  A bigger chill couldn’t have fallen across the small party of five if somebody had turned on the air conditioning; the rest of us-me, Peter Christian, Tim Culver-were well aware of Roscoe Kane’s unfortunate situation, where publishing was concerned.

  But Murtz rushed in where angels fear to tread.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got writer’s block!” Murtz said, good-naturedly. “I wrote you a fan letter back when I was in high school, and told you I was trying to be a writer, and said I had a book half-written but was stuck-and that I was afraid I had writer’s block-remember? And you wrote me back and said…”

  “ ‘There ain’t no such thing as writer’s block, just blockhead writers,’ ” Kane said, with a mirthless smile.

  Murtz’s grin went up in one direction, his mustache in a couple of others. “You remembered!”

  I smiled and nodded. “He told me the same thing, two years ago.”

  Kane said to me, “That’s the advice I give to any jackass in that situation, Mallory. I need another Scotch.”

  A pretty brunette barmaid in a short skirt took care of that; Kane didn’t seem to notice her, even when she bent over and gave us a view right off the cover of one of Kane’s Gat Garson paperbacks.

  I was hoping the question about why Kane wasn’t publishing anything-why he hadn’t published a new novel in the United States in fifteen years, in fact, and anywhere in the world in the last ten-had been forgotten in the wake of Kane’s latest Scotch, a long slow joyless sip of which he took, and then got right into the inevitable harangue.

  “I was the biggest name in paperbacks,” he said, launching into a variant of a speech I had heard half a dozen times before and read as many times in letters from him. “Spillane came along writing his violent junk, and took the paperback world by storm. It was postwar, and the vets wanted some hair on their books’ chests, and the Mick, for all his faults, knew that. You don’t take a guy who’s been in the Battle of the Bulge and give him a book about a guy in a white suit whose gun goes bang and makes a nice clean tidy little hole in the bad guy’s black suit. Naw! You have your guy shoot a big unpleasant bloody hole in the bad guy! A hole you could drive a Mack truck through. That’s what a reader who’s been through the Second World War goddamn well expects. Carnage. And he doesn’t expect the sex to be prim and proper, either. He’s looking for it hot and horny….”

  Kane was wound up, now; this story used to be delivered more articulately, but the Scotch-not just tonight’s-had taken away a few too many brain cells for Kane to be in top form. What he was saying was true, of course. In the postwar paperback boom, sexy, violent novels inspired by the success of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series were the backbone of the fledgling industry. But of Spillane’s many imitators only one-Roscoe Kane-had given the Mick a run for the money. Even Richard S. Prather and John D. MacDonald were runners-up, compared to Kane. Why?

  “Because I was smart enough to use humor. Oh, not that broad campy crap Prather used to dish out-”

  Murtz, hearing one of his idols besmirched, interrupted. “I like the Shell Scott stories….”

  “They were lousy!” Kane ranted. “My humor was subtle. My stuff was Hammett done tongue-in-cheek.”

  “Low-key,” Peter Christian said, eyes intense behind dark-rimmed glasses. “Somehow the humor never gets in the story’s way. Wonderful.” Pete is a dark-haired, stocky, vaguely disheveled man who happens to be one of the most knowledgeable guys in the mystery business, having coauthored the definitive Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detective Fiction a few years back.

  Next to him was Tim Culver, who in his tan corduroy sports jacket and wire-rim glasses looked like Woody Allen’s older, better-looking brother. I’d never met him before, and he’d seemed quiet, even shy, as the evening began; but a few drinks loosened him up a bit and he occasionally spoke.

  Like now.

  “I always got a kick out of your stuff,” he told Kane, with a soft-voiced intensity. “It’s the Hammett understatement done to a turn. The average reader could appreciate it for its surface-a fast-paced story, well told. And a slightly more hip reader would appreciate the put-on.”

  The folds of Kane’s face turned into a hundred smiles. He liked compliments. He liked them from the likes of Pete, who after all was partly responsible for the Encyclopedia, which had given Kane the only literary recognition he’d ever received in his long career. Paperbacks didn’t get reviewed back when Kane was doing them; they still don’t, mostly. But the kudos from Culver meant even more to him, I’m sure, since Culver was considered by many critics to be the best modern writer working in the Hammett tradition.

  I was hoping these compliments would forestall the tragic story that, should Kane tell it, would no doubt end the evening. Because once he got into that, the party was over.

  “Murtz, Murtz,” Kane was muttering, looking suspiciously at the hardworking writer whose counterculture background was still apparent, and even today would label him a “longhair” to a conservative eccentric like Roscoe Kane. “What have you written?”

  “Some occult-oriented private eye stuff under a pseudonym,” Murtz said casually. Kane asked what, specifically, and Murtz told him, and Kane said he’d never read any of ’em. Trying to hide his hurt, Murtz said he’d sent Kane copies, but Kane ignored that-which is probably what he’d done with the copies.

  “Anything else?” Kane said.

  Murtz shrugged. “I’ve ghosted some stuff. I wrote some of the Exterminator books.” He was referring to that enormously successful-and enormously silly-paperback series about a Vietnam vet who takes on the Mafia single-handedly, and wins. And wins. And wins.

  “Garbage!” Kane shouted, with his usual tact. “The guy that writes that tripe wrote me and said he was a fan, and wondered, considering my ‘situation,’ if I wanted to do some ghosting for him, myself.
It was his way of ‘paying me back’ for ‘teaching him,’ the condescending twerp. You know what I told him to do?”

  He then told us, just as the zaftig waitress was bending delivering Kane’s latest Scotch; the effect of the expletives I’m deleting was to put a blush on the paperback-worthy view she’d been continually giving us, in a crass attempt to get us to leave a big tip, no doubt. I planned to leave five bucks. So far.

  Maybe Kane’s tirade would stop here; his mind was wandering tonight. And his eyes had finally wandered to the waitress, albeit in a clinical way; for a writer of sexy novels, Kane seemed for the most part uninterested.

  But Murtz said, “What do you mean, ‘your situation’?”

  Kane stood. The bar wasn’t crowded, but there were people there. Some of them were mystery writers and knew Kane. Some were civilians. All of them were invited to Kane’s curtain speech.

  “I,” he said, in his hoarse, commanding baritone, “was blacklisted! Me. The tenth mostly widely translated author in the world. Me. The best-selling writer of paperback originals in history. Forty million paperbacks. That’s just America, kiddies. Forty goddamn million! And they cheated me from word go. They did their own accounting. And I sued them. Sued them! For a million dollars. Melvin Belli, God bless him, got every cent and court costs, and I did something every writer in America dreams of… I beat the system! I beat the publisher! I won. I won. I won.”

  He stood and waited, as if expecting applause. Appalled is more like it. Pete Christian was trying to think of something to say, and poor Tim Culver was obviously wishing he were on another planet. Kane sat back down and the bar-room murmur and clink of glasses returned mercifully quickly.

  “Only I lost,” he admitted. “No publisher in America would touch me. I wrote five Gat Garsons that were never published in the United States. They were published overseas….”

  “Yes,” Murtz said, nodding, all of this news to him (not the million-dollar lawsuit, which was famous, among writers at least: but the blacklisting of Roscoe Kane). “I have those, in British editions. I always wondered why…”

  “They’re published in sixty-five countries, young man,” Kane snapped, “but not here. Not in my own hometown, the old U.S. of A. Not a single one of my books is in print. Nobody wants me here, ain’t it funny? The blacklisting bastards!”

  “That’s nuts!” Murtz said. “No publisher is stupid enough to turn down a sure thing! Even if you did take your publisher for a million, some other publisher would’ve grabbed the Gat Garson series.”

  “So one would think,” Kane said, hoisting his Scotch.

  Murtz, though a professional writer and a good one, was thinking like a fan: later, he’d probably, on reflection, figure it out. The heyday of Roscoe Kane was 1950 through 1960. Even then, his phenomenal sales figures had begun to show a downward slant. By the early ’60s, and the James Bond spy boom, Kane was out of step; he was still turning out his tough, tongue-in-cheek private eye stories, with no discernible difference between his 1965 style and his 1950. It was in ’66 that he went to court, charging the publishers with doctoring the ledgers to deny him his rightful royalties, and the million-dollar lawsuit took several years, during which time Kane did no writing.

  By 1970, when he began approaching new publishers with his Gat Garson series, he was sadly out of step, out of date. He had never written a novel that wasn’t a Gat Garson story, and as unique and genuine as his talent was, it was a narrow talent, apparently suited only for the sort of tough detective story he’d begun turning out in the 1940s, when he broke in by writing for the renowned pulp magazine, Black Mask.

  Had Kane not alienated himself from the publishing world by airing its dirty laundry in public, had he not a reputation for (literally) punching editors in the mouth (he broke a hapless copy editor’s arm for inserting too many commas into one of his leanly written manuscripts), had he been a normal, non-wavemaking, sane writer, he-and Gat Garson-might have found a new home in the publishing world. His sales figures alone would’ve been impressive enough to get him a contract with some smaller company looking for a name, even if that name belonged to a guy who made derbies in a world that was wearing sweatbands.

  But if Roscoe Kane had been a normal, sane writer, he wouldn’t have been Roscoe Kane; he wouldn’t have had the stuff to create a figure like Gat Garson, who had spawned twenty-five novels, a radio show, a couple of bad movies and an equally bad TV show, but who (Gat, we’re talking about) was a genuine popular culture figure that most folks on the street would even now recognize by name. In Europe, Gat was as well known as Lemmy Caution, and the general European taste for private eyes kept Roscoe Kane in print and even in vogue.

  Kane’s continuing success in Europe-and his dwindling million-had kept him alive. He was on his third wife now (and his tenth Scotch tonight), and was a cantankerous self-pitying old bastard whose private eye books I read as a kid had made me want to write mysteries when I grew up, and so he was my hero. Still.

  And he was standing again.

  “The sons of bitches blacklisted me!” he shouted, waving his hands, though not spilling his drink-a trick few of even the most serious drinkers can pull off. “Let’s drink a toast to ’em!”

  A hushed pall overtook the bar, like the room was one great big cake that fell, and we were the unlucky ingredients. We were all caught in his grip. Lunatics have that power, you know. Any time they want the floor, they can have it; sometimes they use a gun, but more often just obnoxious behavior.

  Because there is something irresistible about a lunatic in full swing; somebody out of control who can control all those about him.

  “Let’s drink a toast to ’em!” He held his glass high. “Let’s toast the American publishing industry! The sons of bitches who keep me off the paperback racks!”

  He stood there with drink held high, and everybody in the place knew that he would stand there like that till hell froze over or they toasted with him. Some time passed, and it got chillier. But eventually we all toasted with him, and the poor old bastard sat down. The party was over.

  “I think I better get some shuteye,” he said softly, with a weary, suddenly lucid expression that people sometimes get shortly after behaving like lunatics, realizing what they’ve just done.

  “I’ll walk up with you,” I said.

  “Thanks, kid,” he said.

  The other men at the table rose and gave him the respectful and friendly goodnights he would’ve deserved if he hadn’t gone over the edge the way he had; these men, like me, loved this sad old guy, and he could’ve hung naked from the ceiling shooting rubberbands at barmaids and we would’ve found a way to ignore it, or at least forgive it.

  I guided him by the arm-it felt bony, the flesh on it slack. Was this small, shrunken man the guy who’d posed, a la Spillane, in a muscle shirt, wearing a.38, on the back cover of his paperbacks? Sadly, it was. A long, long time ago. We got on an elevator. A wealthy-looking couple stared at Kane disgustedly and I gave ’em back my best withering glance. And I’ve got a pretty good withering glance to give, when I’ve a mind to.

  We were on Kane’s floor, the seventh, and were heading down the corridor to 714, when he said, “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific, Mr. Kane,” I said. “You said a lot of things tonight.”

  “There you go with that ‘Mr. Kane’ crap again! I’ve known you for ten years, Mallory. We ’changed probably a hundred letters. You were to my place half a dozen times. And always ‘Mr. Kane.’ I hate that!”

  But he didn’t hate it.

  We were at his room.

  “What I didn’t mean was that thing about no mystery writers since Hammett being worth reading,” he said. “Chandler’s worth reading.”

  That was generous of him.

  “Do you have your room key, Mr. Kane?”

  “In my pocket,” he said, getting it. “The Mick’s worth reading, too, but don’t tell ’im I said so. And John D. And Culver’s
good.”

  “Yes.”

  “And me. I’m still worth reading.”

  “I know you are.”

  “And so are you, kid. You are, too.”

  I smiled, and felt some ambiguous emotion stir in me; I wrote mystery novels myself, in no small part because I had dreamed of being as good as this man one day. I certainly didn’t deserve being listed in the exalted company Roscoe had mentioned; and Roscoe knew it-he was just being nice, or as nice as that cantankerous old bastard was capable of being.

  Still, hearing him say that felt like getting an A from your favorite teacher-even if your favorite teacher did happen to be dead drunk.

  “Thanks, Mr. Kane.”

  “G’night, kid.”

  That was the last time I saw him alive.

  2

  I was on my way back down to the bar, to see if I could drink enough to lose the sad taste in my mouth, when the elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor and Tom Sardini, wearing an off-white shirt and dark slacks and a preoccupied expression, climbed aboard the otherwise empty cubicle. As usual, youthful, handsome Tom (handsome in a baby-face way he tried unsuccessfully to mask with a beard, the mustache of which never seemed wholly grown in) had a glazed look behind his black-rimmed glasses, as if even now he was working on his latest story.

  Which he probably was. Sardini, at thirty years of age, was the current Fastest Typewriter in the East, turning out crime novels and westerns and an occasional spy novel (under various pseudonyms), as well as his “top of the line” books about private eye/ex-boxer Jacob Miles (under his own name), at an alarming rate. He worked so fast and wrote so much that writer friends of his told him to slow down, pretending (to themselves as well as Tom) to be worried about his health, while envying his productivity. Tom, meanwhile, sat at his typewriter in his Brooklyn home, writing, collecting royalty checks, quietly turning into a corporation.