The Black Mask Murders

  William F. Nolan

  The Black Mask Murders

  ***

  Mystery and suspense readers are in for a rare treat with The Black Mask Murders, a unique achievement in the art of sophisticated action entertainment. It is the first in a series featuring the three seminal authors of the American private eye novel-Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner-each, in turn, as himself, the detective-hero. In the first of this delightfully offbeat mystery series, "Dash" Hammett is the narrator, with the other two in subsidiary roles; their turns will come in subsequent books. The reader encounters high-stakes crime and corruption in a dazzling murder case in the chic glitter-world of Hollywood during its golden age. Colorful sequences extend from New York to San Francisco's Chinatown to Southern California's Big Bear Lake country.

  Authentically recreated, the legendary masters of suspense fiction live again as they follow a complex, danger-filled blood trail in pursuit of a fabled jeweled treasure-the real-life inspiration for Hammett's classic novel. The Maltese Falcon.

  Gritty and glamorous, fascinating and fast-paced, bold and brilliantly conceived, here is a compulsive read for those who seek the unusual in the best of mystery and suspense. There's never been a novel quite like The Black Mask Murders.

  ***

  From Publishers Weekly

  Veteran author Nolan (Logan's Run) launches a series to be narrated by those crime writers he calls "The Black Mask Boys"-Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner. Hammett leads off this 1935 plot, jam-packed with movie stars and moguls, gangsters, blackmailers, nasty pre-Miranda cops and even a gem-encrusted human skull dating from the Crusades. Readers will be reminded less of The Maltese Falcon than of Hammett's early pulp fiction. This tale, featuring some incredibly daring sleuthing by all three writers-made-characters, moves along like a crumpled cocktail napkin caught up in the windstorm and seems to have about the same weight in the end. Cameo appearances include those by Scott Fitzgerald and Heinie Faust, who wrote as Max Brand (and other names). Nolan dredges up some pretty portentous prose in this plumbing of the past (an encounter with Fitzgerald leaves Dash ruminating: "All that talent-and all that booze. A bad combination."). Of interest as a period piece and for its insider allusions, this is no hard-boiled tale.

  ***

  From Booklist

  Dashiell Hammett was a real-life detective as well as the author of several classic detective novels, including The Maltese Falcon. Now he's also a fictional character, the narrator of this series debut that also features two of Hammett's fellow contributors to Black Mask magazine, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. The real author, William Nolan, is a scholar of Black Mask-era fiction and the author of Hammett: Life at the Edge (1987). Set in Hollywood shortly before the appearance of the Falcon movie, the story finds Hammett asked to deliver a jewel-encrusted ruby to a local mobster. A shootout occurs, and the bad guy gets the icon and the girl for which it was to serve as ransom. Hammett, Gardner, and Chandler work to recover both the jewel and the girl. Nolan mixes as many biographical facts into the narrative as possible, serving up a healthy portion of literary history along with the action. There's gunplay, humor, and just enough realism to humanize Hammett and his cronies. The premise may ultimately wear thin, but for now, it's perfectly good fun for the hard-boiled crowd.

  ***

  "A talented original."

  -Ross MacDonald

  "William F. Nolan is a hell of a writer! I have real admiration for his stories."

  -Peter Straub

  "I envy Bill Nolan's successful productivity, and I also envy the incredible spectrum of his work-fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense-Nolan is a fine writer."

  -Richard Matheson

  "Nolan's scholarship is impeccable, his organization of material flawless… his work belongs on every serious mystery reader's shelf."

  -Joe Gores

  "Mr. Nolan has considerable skills… His stories are bright and individual."

  -The New York Times

  "A gifted writer… intriguing and imaginative."

  -The Los Angeles Times

  ***

  DEDICATION

  For my oldest friend, WILLIAM J. HENNESSEY, who shared the Kansas City years.

  A thousand memories, Bill!

  ONE

  A Friday afternoon in late October. Dim and gusty. Halloween weather. The soot-colored sky was packed with swollen gray clouds fat as dirigibles. The radio said we'd have rain tomorrow from a storm blowing in off the Pacific, a sub-tropical downpour, the kind Los Angeles specializes in.

  Rain doesn't bother me. Makes everything shiny and new, scours off all the caked-dry desert dust, and I like the fresh clean smell of it. After a Los Angeles rain, the air is full of honeysuckle and pine. Makes me think of summer days when I was a kid back in Maryland and I'd sit on the bank of the Patuxent and watch the rain slash down, cutting into the surface of the river like tiny silver knives. Those were good, easy days. Southern days. All I had to think about was the moment at hand. Becoming an adult with adult problems was impossible to imagine, a million years away.

  Of course, that was when I was very young. It hadn't lasted long; I was forced to grow up fast. My father was a rigid, severe man with questionable morals, and my mother was never quite comfortable in the world as it existed. Aloof and dreaming, her mind was fixed on our French ancestors and the fantasy life she was sure they'd enjoyed. I had to quit school at fourteen, and I've been on my own ever since.

  Damn! Why was I dredging up all this stuff from the past? Anything to keep from writing, eh, Hammett?

  I turned away from the gray cloud mass outside my office window and rolled another sheet of paper into my gleaming studio typewriter. Fancy machine. Some German brand I couldn't pronounce, imported by Global Studios. I preferred working on my Smith Corona Super-Speed-I wrote The Thin Man on it-but the studio would never have approved. Global's writers were supposed to use the latest equipment, and for what I was getting paid, I wasn't about to rock any boats. Last year, in '34, I pulled in eighty grand (thanks in large part to M-G-M), and this year was ever better. Hotcha! The long green had my name on it and life was plush. The Great Depression wasn't touching us here in Hollywood; we all lived in our own golden bubble, and that suited me fine.

  I'd been hired to create a screen scenario for the reigning queen of Global, Sylvia Vane. Sultry Sylvia, the slithering siren of sex. With those big, long-lashed bedroom eyes and a figure with more curves in it than Sunset Boulevard. The public couldn't get enough of her; women lusted after her seductive secrets, and the men just lusted. Her pictures were box office dynamite: Arabian Love Slave, Flame of Desire, Pits of Passion, The Devil's Playground-all produced so they didn't actually transgress the written standards of the officious prudes at the Hays Office. Global was expert in twisting the censorship regulations so its films were approved, but just barely. And it was the "just barely" that had catapulted Global to the top.

  But Sylvia got ambitious. She wanted to be considered a serious actress, another Garbo. So she told Ernie Bulow, who owns Global, that her talent was not being exercised and she needed to stretch her creative muscles. Ernie blew his top, but Sylvia was adamant. She demanded a change of pace, a "totally new" kind of role to sink her dramatic teeth into. No more panting sex sirens in feather boas and low-cut evening gowns (who, in keeping with the Hays Code, inevitably paid for their scarlet sins at the end of each film). She informed Ernie that she wanted a role with "class." She wanted to play a sexy gangster's moll. Don't ask me how a sexy gangster's moll adds up to "class." Who can figure actresses?

  Which is where I come in. Right away, Ernie Bulow thought of me. I'd built a rep for this sort
of thing. At Paramount they'd hired me to develop a gangland saga for Gary Cooper, City Streets. Coop loved it and so did the studio. (I'd gambled away my five grand bonus for that one in an all-night poker game with Ben Hecht.) And for Zanuck, at Warners, I'd written Private Detective-about a seedy private eye involved in the New York rackets. My Glass Key was now in release, featuring real life tough guy George Raft, and there was my hotsy Thin Man series starring Bill Powell for M-G-M. When the movie moguls wanted a slick gangster story whomped up for the silver screen, Hammett was their boy.

  God knows, my stuff is authentic enough. During my years as a national operative for Pinkerton I worked the full range of crime, from petty theft to murder. I'd exposed counterfeiters, investigated bank swindlers, trapped blackmailers, trailed jewel thieves, uncovered missing gold shipments, arrested forgers, tangled with gangsters and holdup men, gathered evidence for criminal trials, and performed services as bodyguard, hotel detective, and strikebreaker.

  But all that was over, and so here I was at Global, sitting in front of a German typewriter in my office on a gloomy Friday in October, trying like hell to finish the last twenty pages of script I needed to wrap up Blood Roads. Sylvia Vane would star as an orphan girl from Kansas City who hooks up with John Dillinger's gang as his number one blonde floozie. We weren't actually calling our guy Dillinger, because the real John D. was supposedly shot to death in Chicago last year in front of the Biograph Theater. (Personally, I don't buy it. I figure he's still on the lam and that the gundown in Chi was a setup between Dillinger and some crooked Indiana cops, and that a pigeon named Jimmy Lawrence is the one they buried-but that's another story.)

  In Blood Roads our gangster was "Johnny Dodge"-but I had him robbing the same banks Dillinger had robbed, and I used Dillinger's escape from the Crown Point jail (where he carved a gun from a stick of wood) as one of my key scenes. Johnny is wounded after an armored car job goes sour in Kansas and the G-men close in. Sylvia thinks he's dying and she rocks him in her arms like a baby. I made sure there was plenty of ham in the scene for dear Sylvia. She loves to sob onscreen and I knew she'd have a field day with this. Guaranteed schmaltz.

  So, okay, fine. I had my big scene but I was twenty pages short of winding up the script and nothing I'd written so far was any damn good. All hack junk. My wastebasket was full of lousy pages.

  I needed a cigarette to help me think, but after Erle Gardner kept ragging me about how smoking dulls your senses and ruins your heart and cuts down your sexual endurance, I'd quit cold. It was the sexual endurance part that got to me. So I munched on a pencil instead. I'd chewed my way through four Ticonderogas when someone rapped sharply on my office door.

  "Dash! Goddammit, are you in there?" A woman's voice that I recognized instantly. Sultry Sylvia. The cinema queen herself.

  "It's open," I told her.

  She swept in. Understand, Sylvia didn't walk into a room, she swept into it. And she never sat on couches, she draped herself over them. That's what she did on mine. Silk whispered on silk as she crossed her long legs. She was wearing a casual little afternoon frock that would set back the average secretary two years pay. Her handbag and pumps were trimmed in antique gold and they matched the tony Tiffany circlet around her celebrated swanlike throat.

  "Got a cigarette?" she asked, looking at me with her big, long-lashed siren's eyes.

  "Gave 'em up. I chew pencils instead. I can offer you a fresh Ticonderoga."

  "I hate people who give up things," she said. Her voice changed, dropped to rich velvet. "Excess," she intoned softly. "That's the real secret of living. Give me a man who is not afraid of his passions, who tears the heart out of life."

  "Devil's Playground," I said. "Scene just before you seduce the gypsy's brother."

  She broke into hard laughter. Tallulah Bankhead laughs like that, a harsh grating sound. "Damn you, Hammett! I can't vamp you for sour apples!"

  "Oh, sure you can. I'm a pushover for a slim ankle and a sucker for a wet kiss." I grinned. "But you're not here to seduce me."

  "No," she said, "not really."

  "And you're not here to ask me how the script is coming."

  "No, I'm not."

  "Then why are you here?"

  She leaned forward on the couch, her eyes suddenly intense. "Dash… I'm in big trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "Gambling trouble."

  "Meaning you've been losing and you owe somebody a lot of money."

  "Tony Richetti," she said. The velvet was gone; her voice was almost shrill.

  "How much?"

  "Over fifty thousand."

  "Faro? Roulette? Craps?"

  "Roulette."

  I shifted back in my chair. "Been going out to the Lady, eh?"

  "Every weekend. That ship's been a curse! Even my salary for this picture is gone. Ernie paid me in advance when I told him I needed the money."

  She dipped into her purse and passed me a note. Handwritten in midnight blue ink on custom ivory paperstock as thick as clotted cream.

  Pay what you owe me or suffer the consequences.

  It was signed with a sprawling R. Richetti.

  "He's not kidding," she said. "About the consequences. I've heard what Tony's done to people who don't pay him. They end up in a hospital. If they're lucky."

  "I'm sorry," I said, handing back the note. "But what can I do about it?"

  "Find out if his wheels are rigged. You're an experienced gambler. You can find out if Tony's using a brake."

  "I'm out of it, Sylvia," I told her. "Gamblers never win. That's the title of a mystery I read once in Baltimore. It's still true. That's why I quit. It's a fool's game."

  "You've never been aboard the Lady?"

  "Never. Too damn tempting."

  "Look," she said, standing up and walking toward me, "I'm not asking you to start gambling again. I'm just asking you to find out if Tony's running a crooked wheel."

  "And what if he is? You'll still owe him the fifty gees. And the law boys won't help. Richetti's operating beyond the three-mile limit. The cops can't touch him."

  "I'm not thinking about the police," she said. "If I was certain Tony's been cheating me… if you could prove it… then I'd make a deal with him."

  "Richetti doesn't make deals with anybody."

  "He will with me if I have the goods on him. Deal is, he forgets what I owe him and I don't spill the beans to his customers. I know a lot of people in this town. If they ever find out the action is dirty on board the Lady they'll switch to The Lucky Horseshoe and Big Bill Kelly will get all the play. Tony will be out of business."

  "So I'm the guy you've come to for a bailout?"

  "Because I know you can do it. You can get me the proof I need."

  "And what do I get out of it?"

  She was sitting on the edge of my desk, letting one leg swing slowly, seductively. She licked her full lips, red as firetrucks. "Me," she said.

  I thought that one over. We'd kidded around some, but I never figured to end up between Sylvia Vane's silk sheets.

  It was a nice thought. And it kept getting nicer.

  "Well… what do you say, Dash?" Her look was languid.

  "I say sure. Okay. I'll do it."

  She reached over the desk, gave me a soft kiss on the cheek, and slithered out of my office, leaving behind the scent of her very expensive French perfume to remind me of how big a sap I am for beautiful women.

  TWO

  I left the studio in my chauffeured limousine. I don't drive-and there's a reason. I was in the army once and I got assigned to the Motor Ambulance Company at Camp Meade, in Maryland, as a transport driver. But I was never any good behind the wheel and I hated manhandling those big, clumsy, top-heavy machines. The roads were lousy, just ridged dirt full of rocks and potholes. I was transporting a load of patients to the hospital one morning when I hit a half-buried rock and the whole shebang went ass over teakettle. The road was filled with groaning patients, but luckily nobody was killed. I sh
attered an elbow and never drove again. In or out of the army.

  A limo is wonderful. You just sit back and relax on that soft leather seat and let the driver do all the work. My chauffeur is a lanky guy from Haiti named Leonce Lebert Aurele Desvarieux. I call him "Buddy" because I can never remember his real name. He always calls me "Chief." He understands the crummy moods I get into from time to time. Thing is, I was trying to finish another novel for Knopf. I had a title, There Was a Young Man, and a plan for the book. It was going to be about the years when I was an operative for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency.

  Not the kind of wild melodrama I wrote for Joe Shaw in Black Mash. This book would be the genuine goods, the way it really was. But I didn't get much done on it because big-bucks studio jobs kept getting in the way. One thing was certain-I wasn't going to get sucked back into writing for Mash. Shaw was sending me these tear-stained letters telling me how his readers kept asking when I would return with another Continental Op story and I kept writing back to say Never is when. Never. But Joe's stubborn; he doesn't take No for an answer.

  Ray Chandler picked up with Mask where I left off, and Erle Gardner is still churning out four or five of his Phantom Crook novelettes each year for Joe, even though his Perry Mason character is taking off. Warners has done three Masons just this year, so Erle knows he has a tiger by the tail. Chandler keeps talking about trying a novel, but he can't seem to get past the shorter stuff. He's always been a slow worker and novels can take a while. With Ray, you don't push. You suggest, you advise, but you don't push.

  My novels aren't such hot stuff. I don't think much of them. The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon are okay, but Red Harvest is too damn bloody and The Dain Curse is crap. Just silly crap. That's when I was trying to be Gothic! Jeez! I hear that Hemingway liked Curse, but he's nuts. That Farewell to Arms of his is full of sappy love scenes that could never happen between a real soldier and his nurse. Some of the war stuff is good, but Hemingway just can't write women. Gertie Stein told him that once, and she should know when it comes to women. I like The Thin Man best because it's earned me the most money. It's like a slot that just keeps spilling out jackpots. That's a good reason to like a book.