<<
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2003 18:24:51 +0100
From: "Geir Glosvik" <
gglosvik@online.no>
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Bouchercon discoveries
After reading this interesting story, I checked my
shelves and found a
Gil Vine book anno 1959: A Body in the Bed - published
in a Norwegian
translation in 1962. I never read it, but I'll sure
read it now. I'm
often amazed by what those publishers found it worth
translating and
publishing - everything from trash to
Hammet/Chandler.
Regards,
Geir Glosvik
>>
I'll be interested in what you think of Vine, although I have
not read that novel, and am still just sampling the series.
Curiously enough, one of the pulps I bought at Bouchercon has
a very early Gil Vine story, although at the time I bought it
I was a few hours away from being briefed on Stewart Sterling
by Art Scott.
The pulp is "Top Detective Annual" with a banner across the
top "The Year's Best Mystery Story Anthology" and just
underneath that "1952 Edition." After getting it up to my
room, I looked at it more carefully and was annoyed to find
that I was wrong to believe my lying eyes. It wasn't a "best
of the year" annual at all and in fact I don't believe there
is a story from 1952 contained within. It is a reprint pulp
that has an assortment of stories from the Thrilling
Publications pulp chain with editorial director the legendary
Leo Margulies. Stories from as far back as 1935 were selected
from such mags as Thrilling Mystery, Thrilling Detective,
Thrilling Adventures, Phantom Detective, etc.
My irritation passed as the contents included new-to-me
stories by Dwight Babcock, Fredric Brown, Wyatt Blassingame,
Murray Leinster, William Campbell Gault and among the group a
lead story by Stewart Sterling.
It was only this weekend that I noticed the Sterling story
and was pleased to discover it is a Gil Vine story "The Glass
Guillotine" from the November 1940 issue of Thrilling
Detective. It's long (over 30 pulp pages) and the opening
chapter caught my attention. The story predates Vine's hotel
security career and is told in the third person, unlike the
first person novels that followed. Vine is introduced as a
private eye who has had a one-man agency since he left the
FBI five years before.
I have yet to find any reference to the FBI in the Vine
novels. The most notable background I've found in the novels
is that Vine went through the Guadacanal campaign in the
Pacific.
In the novels, despite Vine's colorful lingo, he is portrayed
as something of a sophisticate. It may be that Sterling made
these choses purposefully as Vine was at the crossroads of a
cultural clash with the Fifth Avenue hotel setting and the
more earthly chores of being a house detective. Then again,
Sterling may have scattered the high-brow and lowbrow
references willy-nilly. In one of the later stories, Vine
dines on foie gras Strasbourg, venison steak sandwiches, and
Stilton-in-Port. This is not a meal I would have chosen,
although I had some rather odd combinations when I lived in
Brussels, but Vine enjoyed it immensely.
Vine will also throw in an italicized non-English word,
sometimes plopping it down into otherwise Americanism patter,
such as when he once described his hotel thus: "The Plaza
Royale is pretty generally classified as an upper-crust
caravanserai." Two lines later he explains that his hotel
doesn't cater to the convention trade. "...the high-powered
wheels who flock to our Crystal Room would put on a flap if
we let in the whoop--de-doo bunch for one of those
water-pistol squirting get-togethers."
I'm trying to imagine Vine saying that with his mouth full of
foie gras.
The pulp novel presents a simpler Gil Vine. He's the classic
tough-guy private eye sitting at a table in "a disreputable
joint" called the Bachelor's Club
(so named because no one would ever take his wife there). The
plot is rather unusual for a pulp novel. Vine spots the
leading candidate for the presidential nomination of a major
party now holding its convention in the city. He is a member
of the cabinet who Vine knew well from his years with the
FBI.
Vine is stunned to see the dignified man in his early sixties
at a ringside table, sloppy drunk and clutching a
"honey-haired wench." Knowing that reports of this behavior
would sink the statesman's candidacy, Vine makes his way to
the table to rescue him just as a photographer appears with a
camera. The blonde clutches the old guy and strikes a pose
for the picture but Vine steps in the way and knocks the
camera to one side. When objections are made by the bouncers,
Vine pulls his .45 and stands them off while he escapes with
the candidate and the blonde.
As sometimes happens in the pulps, the blonde turns out to be
an okay dame and Vine eventually enlists her help. And he
needs a lot of help because they no sooner climb into a cab
than it's rammed by a laundry truck and the old guy is
slammed into the meter box. So instead of continuing on to
the Turkish Bath where Vine was going to sober the guy up for
the big speech the next day, he directs the cabbie to steer
the still-functioning taxi to a doctor Vine knows. Doc Easter
"was not drunk but he had been drinking" but the observant
Vine noted that "the fine square-fingered hands were steady."
And drunk or sober didn't matter much anyway because Doc took
one look and said "This man's dead."
Now at this point I was disappointed to see the old boy wiped
out so quickly as the political plotline was interesting. But
I have learned with Sterling that he will kill characters
quite unexpectedly. The writing in this story is cruder than
in his later novels and, given the penny a word or less
rates, that isn't too surprising. I doubt that many pulp
writers did much rewriting--Chandler being one obvious
exception. But the absolute hell-bent pace carries the reader
past bumpy spots in the writing and scattered cliches and as
the reader whizzes along, the story takes several odd turns.
The pace and the impossible-to-anticipate plotting reminded
me of a A. E. van Vogt science fiction novel from his heyday
in Astounding. Van Vogt wrote everything in short scenes and
he used every idea that came to his mind. He feared that if
he rejected an idea, it might block the flow and create a
mental logjam. So he would let a central character die
because he trusted his imagination would figure out a way to
revive him in the next chapter.
Harder to do in a mystery, but back to Gil Vine. He's
standing there mourning the death of his favorite statesman
when Doc Easter murmurs "mistake somewhere" and uses one of
those fine square-fingered hands to snatch the hair off the
corpse's head. A wig! And the nose comes off as well. There's
a young man underneath! An actor, for Christ's sake. The
blonde confesses that she and her dead pal were hired to act
out the scene in the club. Vine stuffs the wig and the nose
in his pocket, asks Doc to hold off just a little bit before
calling the cops, grabs the blonde and heads back to the
nightclub. If that ain't the dead statesman, then somebody is
holding him. He has to be out of circulation or the phony
scandal wouldn't work.
I won't go into much more detail on a story no one else will
be able to read but the scene shifts from the nightclub to a
bowling alley to a ritzy hotel to a huge commercial laundry
and finally to the convention hall. Vine is in separate
knockdown fist fights with a political boss, the nightclub
owner and his partner, the laundry truck driver, the laundry
truck driver's giant friend and a chauffeur. Actually, some
of these guys he fights more than once and two or three he
shoots when they pull weapons in the course of the fist
fights. He rescues one minor character from a torture
chamber, is given a mickey
(nicknamed "the glass guillotine"), and gets the statesman's
wife to give an emotional statement to the national political
convention that buys time while he searches for her husband.
The penultimate scene is in this huge laundry where Vine and
the finally located cabinet secretary are trapped in a
tightly sealed room where the villain pipes in hot steam that
well-neigh cooks the two before Vine can manage their
escape.
The final scene has Vine producing the rather
worse-for-the-wear candidate in time to receive his party's
nomination. The crooked political boss is confronted by Vine
but he plunges into the crowd before the .45-waving Vine can
stop him. Rather than chase the fleeing man, Vine goes to the
podium, grabs the microphone, and announces to the delegates
who was responsible for the kidnapping and attempted murder
of their revered nominee. "For a moment the crowd near one of
the exits appeared to mill around like cattle in a stampede.
Then there was a shrill, thin cry of terror."
Whew! I think I've gotten my money's worth of entertainment
from that old reprint pulp and there are eleven more stories
still to be read. But, Geir, you should know that the
character of Gil Vine herein described is very different from
the hotel security chief in THE BODY IN THE BED, which opens
with Vine finishing a gigot d'agneau for lunch.
Richard Moore
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