“I love you, too, Gorman.”
He poked a thumb at a chest ensconced in a pale green sweater polka-dotted with vague foodstains and strained to the point of looking threadbare over the protruding belly; one of the collars of the paisley shirt beneath the sweater poked out like a knife, the other was tucked in. For a guy worth half a million easy, he was hardly a page out of GQ.
“Anytime you want a piece of me, say the word, asshole. We can step outside now, if you like.”
“All right,” I said.
He just stood there behind his table with a nervous, fallen expression, trying to figure out what to do since I’d called his bluff.
Then he grinned, lamely. “You’d fall for anything, Mallory. You’re that big a sucker.”
“Oh. I get it. You were just kidding. You don’t want to go outside and beat me up.”
“I got better things to do.”
“Like swindle people?” I said.
He bristled. “That’s a serious accusation, asshole. You… you better be able to back that up.”
I looked at Kathy, whose presence Gorman hadn’t yet acknowledged despite her being the editor of one of his publications, and said, “You want to hear why the king of Publisher’s Row, here, doesn’t like me?”
Caught between me and her boss, Kathy just looked blank, managing to swallow once, but not to say anything.
I went ahead: “There was an old mystery writer named Raoul Wheeler. He wasn’t the greatest mystery writer in the world, but he did a series of short stories back in the ’40s about a character who was the forerunner of James Bond. Erik Flayr, a secret service man who battled larger-than-life villains.”
Kathy was nodding; she’d heard of Wheeler and his creation.
Despite her knowing most of this, I wanted to say it all; some people were gathering, and not all of them knew the Raoul Wheeler story.
“Wheeler was one of those writers like Carroll John Daly who are historically important, mentioned in all the reference books and such, but who didn’t really make it. The Flayr character had a brief period of popularity in the pulps, and Columbia Pictures even made a serial about him; but that was it for Wheeler-his moment of glory. Then came the James Bond boom in the ’60s and some of the mystery-fiction historians remembered Wheeler’s work and started dropping his name. But none of Wheeler’s Eric Flayr stuff got brought back in print, during the Bond boom, because Wheeler had never done Flayr novels, just short stories, and publishers of paperbacks like to do novels, not short-story collections….”
The rest of Gorman’s face was gradually turning to the same shade of red as his nose.
“Wheeler finished out his career writing soft-core porn and confession-magazine stuff, never amounting to much… but he had a certain pride in Eric Flayr. He lived in Clinton, Iowa, Wheeler did, near me. I heard he was living there and I drove up to meet him. He lived in a two-room flat and he was ill-dying of cancer, in fact. A frail little man with a mustache. Skinny. But he was a nice old guy, with lots of stories about people he met in the pulp days-Hammett, Chandler, Daly, Fred Nebel, Frank Gruber, all those guys-and he had a complete collection of the Thrilling Detective Adventure pulps with his Eric Flayr stories in them. One afternoon, he gave them to me. A gift. A legacy.”
Gorman began talking to his flunky, that teenaged kid with acne on his neck and a plaid shirt. Pretending to ignore me, and the small crowd that was gathering.
“I was an innocent back then-this was maybe six years ago. All I knew about Gregg Gorman was that he was reprinting rare, important mystery fiction, for the hard-core mystery fan market. So I wrote him a letter. Told him I had a complete run of the Flayr stories. Suggested collecting them into a book. Gorman called me-he came on a little strong, but I figured that was just the difference between Chicago and Port City, Iowa. What did I care if he was obnoxious, as long as he published a collection of Wheeler’s stories-which he said he intended doing. In fact, he’d had the idea before I even came to him, but had been stopped by the rarity of this particular pulp-even top collectors like Blackbeard and Pronzini didn’t have a complete run of Thrilling Detective Adventures between them! So he was very grateful.”
Gorman quit pretending not to be paying attention and tried to stare me down.
“We met in Chicago and worked out a deaclass="underline" I would provide him with photocopies of all the stories-they numbered forty-some in all-and he agreed to pay Wheeler an advance of a thousand dollars per book… he planned a series of four Eric Flayr collections. And while four thousand dollars isn’t the moon, it would mean a lot to Wheeler, both financially and in terms of building his self-esteem by showing him that something he’d written had enough lasting value to generate a few bucks for him, at this late stage of the game. Also, Gorman agreed to put my name on the cover as editor of the series, use introductions by me, and pay me a hundred dollars per book. This meant quite a bit to me at the time, because I hadn’t published anything more than a few short stories in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, and I could use the exposure.”
“Get out of here,” Gorman said. “You’re blocking my table-I wanna do some business here!”
“The punchline is predictable. Gorman looked into the copyright on the Thrilling Detective Adventure material and found it had lapsed; this made the Eric Flayr stories public domain. He used the photocopied material I provided to put the books together, and paid neither Wheeler nor myself a cent.”
Gorman said, “You didn’t have a contract, asshole.”
I pointed a finger at him. “Call me that once more.”
He sneered at me, but didn’t say anything.
“Wheeler died before the first of the books came out,” I told her-and the little crowd. “And Gorman here built his publishing empire on it.”
“Empire,” Gorman snorted. “I’m just a small-businessman, a cottage industry, and a fan who likes mysteries. Who besides me woulda printed that old hack’s garbage? I gave him some posterity, schmuck. You’re just cryin’ ’cause I didn’t put your name on the covers.”
I said nothing.
The crowd began to disperse-a crowd of people shaking their heads.
“Thanks, jerk,” he said. “I oughta sue you for defamation of character.”
“You’ll have to come up with some character, first,” I said.
Besides-these fans wouldn’t boycott Gorman; even I bought Gorman’s books, though I did so through another dealer, so as not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was getting my money. For all his faults, Gorman was one of a handful of publishers putting out books of rare material the fans sorely wanted; and he was the publisher who had resurrected the Eric Flayr tales from their unjust oblivion. He was also the first American publisher in over a decade to give Roscoe Kane’s work the light of day….
“I want to talk to you about Roscoe Kane,” I said.
“Screw you,” he said.
“I have to admit I’m glad to hear you’ll be doing Roscoe’s final few Garson books.”
“First in the U.S. to do it,” he said smugly.
“Maybe with the publicity Roscoe’s death’ll generate, you’ll have a valuable piece of property in those books.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just an observation.”
“Get outta here, Mallory! Just get the hell away.” He looked at Kathy. “You’re not with him, are you?”
Kathy, stunned by the behavior of both of us, managed only to nod.