This is a book of fiction about one character but it is not a novel; it is not at all the sort of thing it might have been if I’d chosen to write a novel in twelve or fourteen chapters about Charlie Dark. One brings different muscles to the two tasks. Each of these stories was written independently of the others and each is essentially a self-contained exercise — a puzzle or game, rather than the sort of inquiry into human affairs that one is more likely to find in a novel.
Charlie is a con man. He indulges in capers in which he can outwit his opponents by guile and wit. These stories are conceits — they hinge on their plots and maguffins — and they were written for fun and I make no apology for their lack of profundity.
Normally I have no patience with continuing series of yarns about the same characters. Many writers are happy to devote their lives to the production of lengthy series of novels and stories all of which put the same characters into repetitively similar situations: the detective genre is particularly crowded with such series. As a reader I enjoy some of them but as a writer I sometimes suspect that the authors of those series are taking the easy way out: they’ve opted for security and some of them appear to intend to keep doing it until they get it right. For myself, on the few occasions when I’ve written sequels I’ve found that it was sheer tedium to try to write an entire new novel about a character about whom I’d already said whatever important things I’d wanted to say; such sequels, for me, have invariably proven lackluster.
I would not perpetuate Charlie if my only interest in the stories were Charlie’s character; and I could not do it if Charlie were a character in a novel. What keeps the stories alive in my imagination is the challenge of coming up with new worlds for Charlie to conquer. Charlie is a game-player. Each of these stories deals him a new hand of cards to play — as if he were a poker player. A poker game lasts but a few hours, of course; and a short story can be written in a few hours. One would not care to play poker without interruption for six months at a time; similarly, one would not care to spend six months writing a novel about a game one has played before. After a while the hands must all begin to look the same; the game only remains exciting when it is played at infrequent intervals, and briefly.
In a slightly different form, “Charlie’s Game” — the opening yarn of this book — was the first story I ever wrote for a magazine. I’d written dozens of short stories in my teens but the magazine publishers of the time did not realize what they were missing by turning me down; all I ever had to show for any of those stories was rejection slips. My first publication was a novel, in 1960, and thereafter I made my living as a writer of books (and, later, films) without ever selling a short story to a magazine until, in 1976, Eleanor Sullivan — managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine — insisted that I try my hand at the short form. Had it not been for Eleanor’s amiable badgering, and that of Fred (“Ellery Queen”) Dannay, it never would have occurred to me to begin writing these stories. In a way, therefore, Fred and Eleanor are Charlie’s godparents.
I hope the book justifies their faith in Charlie.
Charlie’s Game
When I turned the corner I saw Leonard Ross going into Myerson’s office ahead of me. By the time I reached the door I heard Ross say, “Where’s Charlie?”
“Late. As usual. Shut the door.”
Late. As usual. As far as I could remember — and I have phenomenal recall — there had been only one time when I had been late arriving in Myerson’s office and that had been the result of a bomb scare that had grounded everything for three hours at Tempelhof. His acidulous remark had been a cheap shot. But then that was Myerson.
Ross was shutting the door in my face when I pushed in past him and kicked it closed. Ross said, “Hello, Mr. Dark.”
Myerson only glanced up from the desk. Then he went on pretending to read something in a manila file folder. I said, “Welcome back, Charlie,” in an effort to prompt him but he ignored it and I decided to play his silly game so I dropped my raincoat across a chair and squeezed into one of the tubular steel armchairs and perused the photos on the wall, waiting him out.
The room was stale with Myerson’s illegal Havana smoke; it was a room that obviously was unnerving to youngsters like Leonard Ross because among Myerson’s varied and indeterminate functions was that of hatchet man. Any audience with him might turn out to be one’s last: fall into disfavor with him and one could have a can tied to one’s tail at any time, Civil Service or no Civil Service; and as junior staff, Ross had no illusions about his right to tenure. I had none myself: I was there solely at Myerson’s sufferance, but that was something else — he could fire me any time he chose to but he was never going to choose to because he needed me too much and he knew it.
His rudeness meant nothing; that was what passed for amiability with Myerson. I gave Ross a glance and switched it meaningfully toward a chair and finally Ross sat down, perching uneasily on the edge of it.
The view from Myerson’s window isn’t terribly impressive. An enormous parking lot and, beyond it, a hedgerow of half-wilted trees. Here and there you can see the tops of the high-rises around Langley.
Finally he closed the file and looked at me. “You’re late.”
“Would you care for a note from my mother explaining my tardiness?”
“Your sarcasms seldom amuse me.”
“Then don’t provoke them.” pattern over Dulles.”
“You are,” he said, “preposterously fat.”
“And you are a master of the non sequitur.”
“You disgust me, do you know that?” He turned to young Ross. “He disgusts me. Doesn’t he disgust you?”
Ross made embarrassed gestures and I said, “Don’t put the kid on the spot. What’s on?”
Myerson wasn’t in a particularly savage mood, obviously, because he gave up trying to goad me with no more prompting than that. He tapped the manila folder with a fingertip. “We’ve got a signal from Arbuckle.”
“Where’s Arbuckle?”
“East Africa. You really ought to try to keep up on the postings in your own department.”
Ross explained to me, “Arbuckle’s in Dar-es-Salaam.”
“Thank you.”
Ross’s impatience burst its confines and he turned to Myerson: “What’s the flap, then?”
Myerson made a face. “It distresses me, Ross, that you’re the only drone in this department who doesn’t realize that words like ‘flap’ became obsolete sometime before you were born.”
I said, “If you’re through amusing yourself maybe you could answer the young man’s question.”
Myerson squinted at me; after a moment he decided not to be affronted. “As you may know, affairs in Tanzania remain sensitive. Especially since the Uganda affair. The balance is precarious — a sort of three-sided teeter-totter: ourselves, the Soviets and the Chinese. It would require only a slight upheaval to tip the bal—”
“Can’t you spare us the tiresome diplomatic summaries and get down to it?”
Myerson coolly opened the file, selected a photograph and held it up on display. “Recognize the woman?”
To Ross I suppose it was only a badly focused black-and-white of a thin woman with attractive and vaguely Oriental features, age indeterminate. But I knew her well enough. “Marie Lapautre.”
“Indeed.”
Ross leaned forward for a closer look. I imagine it may have been the first time he’d ever seen a likeness of the dragon lady, whose reputation in our world was something like that of John Wesley Hardin in the days of the gunslingers.