Anyhow, once I have worked out a "plot key" which will unlock my mystery, I know where I am going, even if I don't know how I will get there. I wish I could illustrate with examples of "plot keys" from these present novels without destroying your pleasure in them in advance, but I am sure you will discover them for yourself and, best of all, you won't be abandoned with the sense that the "outcome" was thrown in from left field. The climax will be carefully planted and foreshadowed, which is simply a matter of sweat and blood and hard work called "plotting."
French critics have noted that my heroes all are "disillusioned knights in rusted armor, often at battle with the very forces which employed them in the first place." I had no idea, as I wrote, that this was true, but in the face of so much evidence, I must concede. No one of my heroes is ever permitted, by his own disenchanted sanity, to believe in the sanity of the social "order" around him. For example, a nation in which an administration bases its policy on industrial/military complex greed, can talk blandly the insanity of "winning a nuclear war," insists upon sixteen thousand atomic warheads when three will be more than sufficient, and spend billions on it while refusing crumbs to dependent children and closing the Library of Congress at 5 P.M. daily; perhaps because that leadership got where it is by having never read more than three books in its combined life span, and wishing to provide every youth that same opportunity. My hero cannot put on the happy face. He is pushed to the place where he can trust only himself, even when he recognizes the impossible odds he faces. This does not stop him because he would rather die fighting than to surrender to greed, corruption and mean-heartedness, which places him as often at war with himself as with the uncompassionate and cynical power structure.
***
I often quoted FORGIVE ME, KILLER as answer to those who wanted to know how long it took me to write one of my suspense novels-and what delayed me?
With FORGIVE ME, KILLER, the answer is either four years or one month. I make no attempt to resolve the question, I simply state the facts: On March 8,1952, I signed a contract with Fawcett Gold Medal for a novel (in outline) called MY BLOODY HANDS. Nothing went right. It was planned as a novel about a crooked cop named Mike Ballard who is gut-sick of corruption and his own smell of evil. He tries to atone for and redress the wrongs of his rotten city. But, as I wrote, I and Bill Lengel and Richard Carroll at Gold Medal saw it lacked something. One knew from the outset what the end would be. They had paid me a $1000 advance which they told me to keep and to get to work on something else.
By 1956, I was still stewing over that Mike Ballard novel and getting no answers. I accompanied a friend to a prison to interview an inmate for a
True Detective
article. When we arrived in late afternoon, we walked through a vaguely illumined, vast tomb-like auditorium where, far down front, the prison orchestra was rehearsing.
With this strange, eerie picture in mind, everything suddenly fell into place for the long abandoned novel: its mood, tempo, structure, complication gimmick, everything. Mike Ballard was no longer a disgusted cop but a man on the take and content with status quo. Don't ask me why, because I don't know, but when I returned home, I started anew and in about a month had finished the Mike Ballard novel. I now called it HELL CAN'T WAIT, Gold Medal called it BRUTE IN BRASS, the French publisher Gallimard called it VINGT-DEUX and many French critics called it "one of the best of the
remain noir
genre ever written."
Did I write FORGIVE ME, KILLER in four weeks, or did it take four long years? Whatever, I hope you find it intriguing.
***
FIRES THAT DESTROY was written to the classic mold of "character proof." (Becky Sharp's selfish ambition in VANITY FAIR is the best example). You establish your character with a strong (even obsessive) character trait and then prove that trait when in a crisis the character has the opportunity to be something more or less than the inner drive prodding him. When he behaves "in character" no matter the cost, his trait has been proved. I am betraying no secrets when I tell you my protagonist, Bernice, wanted above everything else to be regarded with the esteem and respect shown the loveliest of women. How she is given that attention and proves her trait is the story of this novel.
The hero-and he is one of my few truly unblemished heroes-in TICKET TO HELL is indeed the battered knight tilting against terrible odds and for no promise of reward. This does not stop him from fighting for what he wants-a truly disenchanted knight in rusted armor with only what he is inside, and an old long-lost love he cannot recover, to sustain him.
WEB OF MURDER, on the other hand, is one of those sweetly plotted novels Day Keene, Fred Davis and James Cain used to concoct. We start the protagonist almost casually down the road to Hades and then follow him on every cruel twist and turn through increasing terror to the pit beyond hell. The reviewer who said WEB OF MURDER "proves that the death penalty may not be the worst punishment" exactly expressed the key to this novel. If you have half the fun reading it that I had writing it, we've got something going here.
The events in THE DEVIL WEARS WINGS are totally true and documented. This botched, bourbon-laced crime was one I wrote for editor Joe Corona at Fawcett's
True Detective.
But I could not get this tragic-comedy out of my mind, so I structured the true events enough to give them form, a beginning, middle, end and desired emotional effect.
The novel here titled A MOMENT TO PREY had a history almost as varied as its titles. When I wrote it, I called it NEVER FIND SANCTUARY, which Gold Medal changed to BACKWOODS TRAMP and which the publisher Galli-mard, of Paris, called LE CHANT D'ALLIGATOR. It is one of my favorites. But I suppose a writer is like a proud parent: among his children he has none but favorites.
August 1986
THE RIVER
A bottle fly buzzed around her head but she didn't bother to brush at it. I heard it
muzz-muzzing
from where I stood in the bare sand yard. The sun was bearing down on me hotter than the fires of Hell.
Even after I asked her again, she didn't move. I wasn't more than five or six feet from her but I got the helpless feeling that maybe my voice didn't carry that far any more.
She leaned against the door jamb of the fishing shack and watched me, without blinking. I was going to ask her again because I had to, but I knew it wasn't going to do any good. She'd heard me all right. It was in the way her fingers twitched when I mentioned his name. I'd got to watch for any faint sign because her refusal to talk was the reaction I'd been getting ever since I had come into the scrub country three days ago. I had moved slowly, asking about him every time I'd met somebody on the road or come to a farmhouse. They'd just stared at me and shaken their heads or hadn't answered at all. It was like that with this girl.
"Do you know Marve Pooser?"
She stood there in the shadowed doorway carrying an iron skillet. I saw how she was different from any other cracker I'd met. Even through the sickness inside me I felt this curious thing about her. It was there to see: she was looking for something, she wanted something, and she would kill to get it. Once you saw this curious truth about her, you could never think she was like anyone you ever saw before. You shivered a little, but had trouble pulling your gaze away from her.
It wasn't that she looked like so much standing on the fishing-shack stoop. Her dress was something she'd outgrown or wore to spite somebody, as if she hated the people who looked at her and made herself as unlovely as possible. And this wasn't easy. She'd developed suddenly, so even though she looked swollen and full, she wasn't quite finished.
You could look at her and see she had nothing on under that cotton dress, but this wasn't what gave her the look of being practically naked. What did that were her eyes.
Her eyes were as black as that cypress-fed river out there, and implied that she'd just got out of a warm bed and would topple right back if that was really going to please you. But because of this other thing about her, you knew her eyes were lying to you and her full-lipped mouth lied easily, too. What she really was was sullen and defiant, but you had to look close to tell the difference.
Her hair made me think of some of the dark places I'd crossed in the cypress swamps. It was that black. She wore it pushed back from her face, soft and thick as moss about her neck and shoulders. She could have been beautiful if she'd ever bothered to brush her hair.
She was barefooted and her feet were muddy, streaked and caked between the toes. Her legs were briar-marked, but you knew she was beautiful under that careless hair and mud streak and cheap dress, and you knew again how badly she wanted something. It was something she couldn't have and all you really saw when you looked at her was the anger.
***
It was early summer. The fishing shack was set on stilts on a curve of the river. The current of the river was swift and it swirled in white cones where it struck swiftly against the curve and the wooden pier and the boats chained to it. Out front a white road passed the shack and followed the river down to the highway. The men who came out from the towns to fish pulled off the white road and made dust clouds all the way out to the river. They parked in the sunken yard behind the shack and some of them slept in the one-room shacks on the other side of the pier.
The scrub grew close against the white road. There were scrub oaks and red oaks and black jack, all heavy with moss and all growing close against the road and endlessly beyond it. Along the river it was swampy, with cypress and water oak and bay and gum matted together with myrtle and elder. It was dry and hot in the scrub and damp and hot along the river.
There were five or six cars parked out behind the shack, some in the shade of a chinaberry and some of them baking in the sun. They were expensive cars, with trailer hitches and expensive gear locked inside. There were tobacco signs and soft-drink signs and beer ads nailed onto the brown wooden sides of the shack. Its white corrugated tin roof flashed in the sun. Out front somebody was gunning an outboard motor and blue smoke came up like a mist from the river.
She came out onto the stoop and placed the skillet on a board shelf between the two-by-four uprights.
"Is this Sistrunk's Fishing Camp, miss?"
"Yes."
"They said I might find out about him here."
"Who?"
I held on tight. "Marve Pooser."
"No. I mean who told you that you might find him around here?"
"I don't know. In Ocala. They said he might be out here."
She let her gaze go over me again and then she turned and walked inside.
"Wait a minute."
She stopped but did not turn around. Her hair was jagged between her shoulder blades, as if she'd hacked at it and then got tired.
"Do you serve dinners here?"
"Yes. We got fish and grits."
"All right. Where do I eat?"
She came back outside and pointed to a sagging screen door at the side of the shack. It opened on to a wide screened porch. I went in the door and sat down at an oil-clothed table. A half-burned candle was set in a cloudy milk bottle in the center of the cloth.
After a while she came through a door from the kitchen with a cloth. She wiped at the table and the front of her dress tilted. She looked at me and her mouth twisted, knowing I was looking at her and hating me for looking.
"What do you want?" she said.
"You got fish and grits, that's all right."
"You ever eat fish and grits, mister?"
"Yes."
She shrugged. There were ten or twelve other tables, the floor was scuffed, and the place showed a lot of abuse. Men drank and ate in here. They spilled fishbones on the floor and put their feet on the chairs.
"You do a pretty good business?"
"Yes. Noon. Middle of the week. Pretty quiet."
"You serve a lot of people though?"
"Yes."
"You ever serve anybody around here named Marve Pooser?"
She closed her fist on the cloth. That was all. She walked away and did not look back. In a few minutes I heard fish frying in the kitchen.
I mopped the sweat off my face and looked through the screen at the gray nets strung along the slicked rails of the pier. The pier was narrow, cypress boards with ropes coiled on metal bits, fishing gear stacked beside outboard motors.
I watched the two men at the end of the pier. They were laughing and talking with somebody in a boat that I could not see, but I could hear them laugh and hear the motor when it was gunned. Then the motor would die and they would curse. They passed around a bottle of white shine, drinking it hot and straight from the bottle. After they had a couple drinks they would try the motor again and whether it caught or not they would curse some more and laugh.
I looked at the two men, knowing neither was the man I sought. One was as dried as yesterday's bait, and his skin was the color of the cypress planks. He wore a straw hat and blue overalls, without a shirt. He looked smaller than ever beside the big man. This one was about fifty. His face was the color of a drunk's face and his laugh was drunk. He was dressed for fishing, but he'd been dressed by a tailor and his rich dothing gleamed. He wore boots tied almost to his knees and khaki trousers. He leaned against a railing that was so rotten it gave and he almost fell into the river. He caught himself and they both laughed and had another drink. They couldn't get the motor started.