“Well, we can sure use the cash, Sal, but what the hell do you want to do with the photograph?”
“I don’t know, Jim,” said Sal, as she watched the blue smoke coiling to the ceiling. “Frame it, maybe.”
“You already have, baby.”
Jim’s laugh was suddenly cut short by a sharp voice from the other end of the room.
“Stick ’em up, and be quick about it.”
Jim whirled to the sound. Sal sprang like a tigress from the couch on which she had been reclining. The door had opened quietly and the open space framed Ike Benson.
Quietly he came into the room, a thirty-eight held steadily in front of him. Behind him came a man in uniform. Benson passed the automatic carefully to the copper.
“Keep ’em covered, Reilly,” he instructed, as he approached the man and woman across the room.
From Jim’s raised hand he snatched the long envelope, and was about to tear it open when something happened. The girl, regardless of the gat that was leveled in her direction, leaped suddenly forward and grabbed the letter. Immediately she flung her arms above her head again, but there was a sneer of enjoyment on her lips.
“I’ve still got you beaten, Ike,” she said in a hard voice. “This is my mail, and I guess you ain’t got no right to open it! Now if you still feel that you want to take me down to court, O.K. with me. But this letter gets there unopened.”
“O.K. with me, too,” said Benson, quietly, as he drew a gat from Jim’s shoulder holster and snapped a bracelet over his wrist.
“You better hold off on the cuffs a minute, Ike,” said the girl, “till you hear what I have to say. I told you if Jim and me go, we go with the letter unopened. But I’ve a hunch that we’re not going, because I don’t think you’d care much about listenin’ to the judge’s loud laugh when he opens the envelope and finds — what? See the point, cutie? A picture of one of our best plainclothesmen in a bathing suit in the same envelope with the stolen money. And the judge might not be so keen about the photo as you had an idea little Sal was last night.”
“Headquarters knows all about that little play,” said Benson, and there was a broad grin on his lips. “And I don’t mind tellin’ you that I got hell for it, too. The chief said something kind o’ sarcastic about a bird in the hand. But I took a long chance. I knew right away when I caught this bird with the dough” — indicating Jim — “that you were in on it, too, lady. I knew then who you were waitin’ for in the roadster. And I guess the chief will change his tune when I walk in with the haul this morning.”
Benson reached up and carelessly snapped the other bracelet around the girl’s wrist.
“And you said something last night, lady,” continued the detective, “that just about fits this case. Maybe I don’t remember your exact words, but what I mean is. ‘All crooks are so damn dumb.’ ”
The Author & Journalist, July 1930
When is a detective story not a detective story?
When, of course, it is something else again. As, for example, a mystery story, or an adventure story, or a horror story, or a ghost or weird story, or — special emphasis on this, if you please — a gangster story.
The gangster story, more than any other, is now masquerading as a detective story. As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the sort; but, so closely are the two related, it is sometimes difficult to tell one from the other.
Of late there has been a big boom in this type of story. They are appearing with increasing frequency in my manuscript mail. Magazines which ostensibly are devoted to detective fiction and nothing else are featuring them more and more. Other magazines are publishing them exclusively. Even the slick-paper periodicals and the book publishers are flirting with them coyly.
Whether this popularity is due to the nationwide fame of our jolly gangsters, or to editorial demand, or to a mistaken idea that such stories are detective fiction, is beside the point. The point is that the stories are being written by writers everywhere, and hence deserve our attention.
Because of this — and also because Mr. Hawkins suggested it — I am going to address myself in this chapter to an examination of the gangster story.
I believe I have read as many gangster stories, good and bad, as the next man. Every day I am deluged with them. I have bought what I considered the best of the lot (and at this moment am overstocked) and sent the rest back.
And those that went back outnumbered the others in the ratio of 200 to one.
Why do gangster stories go back home? For the same reasons, precisely, that earn a round-trip ticket for detective stories. In the first place, the writers obviously have no story to tell. A score of typewritten sheets, filled with what purports to be the argot of the underworld and a half-dozen assorted killings, do not make a story. Yet that is the substance of these manuscripts.
The gangster story, like its cousin, the detective story, must have a plot if it’s to see the light of printer’s ink; and the plot should be worked out just as carefully. Merely to describe how the gangs of “Scar” Rongetti and “Hophead” Zookus settled their feud amid the blazing of automatics and machine guns, and how the police rushed in, when the fireworks were over, and sent the wounded to the hospital, the dead to the morgue, and the living to the station, isn’t going to persuade an editor to order a check. Before you write your story, make sure that you have a story to write. Analyze its plot, if any. If the plot doesn’t stand up, throw it away and try another.
While you’re at it, see if you can give it an original twist. These gangster stories, though something new in literature, have already become terribly standardized, just as have the detective stories — and, for that matter, everything else, from automobiles to radio sets.
So remarkably alike are most gangster stories that if you read, at random, a dozen or so in my manuscript mail you would think that one person wrote them all. All have the same lack of plot, the same impossible slang, the same style and action, and the same beginning and end.
This applies, of course, to those stories that are palpably hopeless, that are rejected after a cursory reading. But the same thing is true, in a lesser degree, of those that get into print. Here, too, we find standardization — stories cut from the same pattern and built from a common formula.
For some inexplicable reason, the writers seem afraid to strike out in a new direction and explore fresh fields. And it seems to me they are overlooking an opportunity of tremendous importance. They concern themselves only with the superficial and refuse to look deeper.
Gang murder — putting men on the spot and bumping them off — is not the really significant thing. The significant thing is this: A handful of illiterate hoodlums, who can scarcely speak the language of our country, have obtained a stranglehold on our great cities, have accumulated vast fortunes, have shown open contempt for both federal and state laws, and have been quite unmolested, while doing so, by any of the constituted authorities.
They have nothing to fear, apparently, from state or federal government. They fear only each other. The so-called “‘big shots,” such as AI Capone, may (and do) commit any crime, from murder down, knowing very well that nothing will be done to them, unless it’s done by some rival gangster. Their bootlegging activities involve contraband liquor by the trainload and their income runs into millions — and not one of them, so far as I’ve observed, has ever served an hour in jail for it. (But try to peddle a pint of gin, and see how far you will get!)