Maybe Kane’s tirade would stop here; his mind was wandering tonight. And his eyes had finally wandered to the waitress, albeit in a clinical way; for a writer of sexy novels, Kane seemed for the most part uninterested.
But Murtz said, “What do you mean, ‘your situation’?”
Kane stood. The bar wasn’t crowded, but there were people there. Some of them were mystery writers and knew Kane. Some were civilians. All of them were invited to Kane’s curtain speech.
“I,” he said, in his hoarse, commanding baritone, “was blacklisted! Me. The tenth mostly widely translated author in the world. Me. The best-selling writer of paperback originals in history. Forty million paperbacks. That’s just America, kiddies. Forty goddamn million! And they cheated me from word go. They did their own accounting. And I sued them. Sued them! For a million dollars. Melvin Belli, God bless him, got every cent and court costs, and I did something every writer in America dreams of… I beat the system! I beat the publisher! I won. I won. I won.”
He stood and waited, as if expecting applause. Appalled is more like it. Pete Christian was trying to think of something to say, and poor Tim Culver was obviously wishing he were on another planet. Kane sat back down and the bar-room murmur and clink of glasses returned mercifully quickly.
“Only I lost,” he admitted. “No publisher in America would touch me. I wrote five Gat Garsons that were never published in the United States. They were published overseas….”
“Yes,” Murtz said, nodding, all of this news to him (not the million-dollar lawsuit, which was famous, among writers at least: but the blacklisting of Roscoe Kane). “I have those, in British editions. I always wondered why…”
“They’re published in sixty-five countries, young man,” Kane snapped, “but not here. Not in my own hometown, the old U.S. of A. Not a single one of my books is in print. Nobody wants me here, ain’t it funny? The blacklisting bastards!”
“That’s nuts!” Murtz said. “No publisher is stupid enough to turn down a sure thing! Even if you did take your publisher for a million, some other publisher would’ve grabbed the Gat Garson series.”
“So one would think,” Kane said, hoisting his Scotch.
Murtz, though a professional writer and a good one, was thinking like a fan: later, he’d probably, on reflection, figure it out. The heyday of Roscoe Kane was 1950 through 1960. Even then, his phenomenal sales figures had begun to show a downward slant. By the early ’60s, and the James Bond spy boom, Kane was out of step; he was still turning out his tough, tongue-in-cheek private eye stories, with no discernible difference between his 1965 style and his 1950. It was in ’66 that he went to court, charging the publishers with doctoring the ledgers to deny him his rightful royalties, and the million-dollar lawsuit took several years, during which time Kane did no writing.
By 1970, when he began approaching new publishers with his Gat Garson series, he was sadly out of step, out of date. He had never written a novel that wasn’t a Gat Garson story, and as unique and genuine as his talent was, it was a narrow talent, apparently suited only for the sort of tough detective story he’d begun turning out in the 1940s, when he broke in by writing for the renowned pulp magazine, Black Mask.
Had Kane not alienated himself from the publishing world by airing its dirty laundry in public, had he not a reputation for (literally) punching editors in the mouth (he broke a hapless copy editor’s arm for inserting too many commas into one of his leanly written manuscripts), had he been a normal, non-wavemaking, sane writer, he-and Gat Garson-might have found a new home in the publishing world. His sales figures alone would’ve been impressive enough to get him a contract with some smaller company looking for a name, even if that name belonged to a guy who made derbies in a world that was wearing sweatbands.
But if Roscoe Kane had been a normal, sane writer, he wouldn’t have been Roscoe Kane; he wouldn’t have had the stuff to create a figure like Gat Garson, who had spawned twenty-five novels, a radio show, a couple of bad movies and an equally bad TV show, but who (Gat, we’re talking about) was a genuine popular culture figure that most folks on the street would even now recognize by name. In Europe, Gat was as well known as Lemmy Caution, and the general European taste for private eyes kept Roscoe Kane in print and even in vogue.
Kane’s continuing success in Europe-and his dwindling million-had kept him alive. He was on his third wife now (and his tenth Scotch tonight), and was a cantankerous self-pitying old bastard whose private eye books I read as a kid had made me want to write mysteries when I grew up, and so he was my hero. Still.
And he was standing again.
“The sons of bitches blacklisted me!” he shouted, waving his hands, though not spilling his drink-a trick few of even the most serious drinkers can pull off. “Let’s drink a toast to ’em!”
A hushed pall overtook the bar, like the room was one great big cake that fell, and we were the unlucky ingredients. We were all caught in his grip. Lunatics have that power, you know. Any time they want the floor, they can have it; sometimes they use a gun, but more often just obnoxious behavior.
Because there is something irresistible about a lunatic in full swing; somebody out of control who can control all those about him.
“Let’s drink a toast to ’em!” He held his glass high. “Let’s toast the American publishing industry! The sons of bitches who keep me off the paperback racks!”
He stood there with drink held high, and everybody in the place knew that he would stand there like that till hell froze over or they toasted with him. Some time passed, and it got chillier. But eventually we all toasted with him, and the poor old bastard sat down. The party was over.
“I think I better get some shuteye,” he said softly, with a weary, suddenly lucid expression that people sometimes get shortly after behaving like lunatics, realizing what they’ve just done.
“I’ll walk up with you,” I said.
“Thanks, kid,” he said.
The other men at the table rose and gave him the respectful and friendly goodnights he would’ve deserved if he hadn’t gone over the edge the way he had; these men, like me, loved this sad old guy, and he could’ve hung naked from the ceiling shooting rubberbands at barmaids and we would’ve found a way to ignore it, or at least forgive it.
I guided him by the arm-it felt bony, the flesh on it slack. Was this small, shrunken man the guy who’d posed, a la Spillane, in a muscle shirt, wearing a.38, on the back cover of his paperbacks? Sadly, it was. A long, long time ago. We got on an elevator. A wealthy-looking couple stared at Kane disgustedly and I gave ’em back my best withering glance. And I’ve got a pretty good withering glance to give, when I’ve a mind to.
We were on Kane’s floor, the seventh, and were heading down the corridor to 714, when he said, “I didn’t mean what I said.”
“You’ll have to be more specific, Mr. Kane,” I said. “You said a lot of things tonight.”
“There you go with that ‘Mr. Kane’ crap again! I’ve known you for ten years, Mallory. We ’changed probably a hundred letters. You were to my place half a dozen times. And always ‘Mr. Kane.’ I hate that!”
But he didn’t hate it.
We were at his room.
“What I didn’t mean was that thing about no mystery writers since Hammett being worth reading,” he said. “Chandler’s worth reading.”
That was generous of him.
“Do you have your room key, Mr. Kane?”
“In my pocket,” he said, getting it. “The Mick’s worth reading, too, but don’t tell ’im I said so. And John D. And Culver’s good.”