Society Gets the Crime it Deserves

On "A Killing in Comics" by Max Allan Collins, and "Mrs. Bridge" by Evan S. Connell

I. Very Goddamn Personal

Author Read Before: Max Allan Collins
Book Previously Read: Seduction of the Innocent
Book Read: A Killing in Comics

I have a bit of an online history with Max Allan Collins, one I doubt he remembers, nor do I care for him to. Many years ago, you see, when film blogs were a thing, my friend Greg F., on his blog Cinema Styles, wrote a review of a small independent crime film. Checking Collins’s screen credits and matching it with the rough era of my life, I believe the film was The Last Lullaby, which is based on a short story by Collins. Well, in those days, among my circle of blogging friends, we would comment on each other’s posts, and on this review of Greg’s I mentioned that I was flipping through the graphic novel The Road to Perdition, which Collins had written and the film version of which had by then been a bit of a hit. And I said that, based on this maybe page of a half of a comic book I casually browsed through in the bookstore, this Max Allan Collins character doesn’t seem like much of a writer (to highlight what kind of a dick I was being, Greg, as I recall, liked The Last Lullaby; worse, maybe, is that I did, and still do, like the film The Road to Perdition). As sometimes happens on this miserable fucking internet we all hate, who should then show up in Greg’s comments but none other than Max Allan Collins himself, who wished to point out to me that, essentially, glancing at a comic book does not provide enough evidence to pass the kind of judgment I had just so confidently passed. I had no choice but to sincerely agree with him.

Some time later, on my own blog I wrote a review of Robert Aldrich’s film version of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly, it having recently been reissued on home video by Criterion. While checking what kind of action that review was getting, I saw that it had been linked to by, well look at that, Max Allan Collins, on his website. Collins is something of a Spillane acolyte — his documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, appears as an extra on the Criterion disc — and evidently keeps his eye out for Mickey Spillane News, at least that news which he is not generating himself. Anyhow, on his site he praised my review for its unusual approach to the picture (for the record, and if you must know, in the review I kicked back a little at the idea that what makes Kiss Me Deadly so compelling is that Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer is such an irredeemable bastard and sadist, and that by depicting him as such Aldrich is himself fighting back against authoritarianism and fascism as law enforcement, or something like that, and the reason I object to that is because sadist, though he may be, consider the threat Hammer is facing in that film, and then count how many people, besides him, are trying to do anything about it). Although “praised” might be a little strong. He mentioned it.

Then, for a long time, nothing happened, until one day the good folks at Hard Case Crime announced that they would be publishing a novel by Collins — and Hard Case, to this day, remains very much in the Max Allan Collins business, and why not, it’s a good fit — called Seduction of the Innocent. Being up on current events as I am, I knew that Seduction of the Innocent was also the title of a book, a kind of psychoanalytic warning to parents about the insidious danger to young minds posed by comic books, published in 1954 by a psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham. And indeed, Collins’s book was set in that world, a murder mystery unfolding in the midst of that historic cultural controversy. The plot was such that the novel promised a host of colorful characters who worked in or were connected somehow to the comic book and comic strip business. Throw a murder in there, and we’re reasonably close to those same waters I mentioned elsewhere that I liked to swim in: mysteries set in a very specific, and possibly nerdy, cultural environment, such as a horror convention in Nick Mamatas’s I Am Providence, or a science fiction convention in Isaac Asimov’s Murder at the ABA. It’s fun stuff, and I was eager to read Seduction of the Innocent — the Collins book, I mean, not the Wertham — and hopefully be further schooled by the author on the perils of rushing to judgment.

And I was, because I thought Seduction of the Innocent was terrific — fast and fun, hits about the same level of hardboiled as Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. Which is to say, a little bit, but, like the Wolfe novels, half its roots are planted in the world of Sherlock Holmes. In Holmes, as in Wolfe and the stories of Collins’s detective hero Jack Starr, you have the genius who is somewhat behind the scenes, and a more hand’s-on, action-oriented partner who narrates and does most of the legwork — in Doyle, Holmes is the genius, Watson is the more likely to fire his gun. In Stout, the corpulent Wolfe sits and eats and puzzles everything out, while the street smart Archie Goodwin goes out and collects the dots for Wolfe to connect. And, in Collins, Jack Starr is the Watson or Goodwin, and behind him is Maggie Starr, his stepmom, former stripper, now owner of a comic strip syndicate. Lots of colorful characters, as I said, and while not hardboiled in a tough-as-nails way (Rex Stout leans more in that direction), it does dispatch with its villain in a satisfyingly hardcore way. There’s nothing elaborate or particularly karmic about it, but it’s very coldly casual, it’s a real “fuck this guy” kind of villain death.

I came to learn, eventually, that Collins’s Seduction of the Innocent was the third in a trilogy of Jack and Maggie Starr comic book mysteries, each one’s plot stemming from a real bit of history from the Golden Age of American comics. In doing this project, I don’t intend, generally, to begin or continue novel series, but as most detective series don’t have much in the way of serial plot carryover, and so, when looking for something relatively fun, hopefully, to ease myself into a Christmas vacation, I have chosen the first book in the trilogy, A Killing in Comics, from 2007.

The real bit of comic book history Collins pulls from for his plot here is, perhaps, too obvious is the infamous hosing Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster experienced when they sold their original character, Superman, to the newly formed Detective Comics for a bag of taffy or whatever. In A Killing in Comics, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster are Harry Spiegel and Moe Shulman, Superman is Wonder Guy, and the man who is murdered is the publisher who hosted them, here named Donny Harrison, presumably drawn from Detective Comics co-founder Harry Donenfeld, who did not die after passing out chest first on a cake knife while dressed as his most famous comic book character, at an industry cocktail party, as Donny Harrison does here.

You can tell from the names that Collins isn’t terribly interested in hiding the real people his characters are stand-ins for — this novel, while not really overtly political, being roughly about labor injustice in the comic book industry, a Batman avatar is introduced, called Batwing, and instead of Bob Kane stealing all the credit from co-creator Bill Finger, as happened in real life with Batman, here Rod Krane has stolen all the credit from co-creator Will Hander, which I suppose is as likely a name as Bill Finger. Then again, Rod Krane is repeatedly described as being a handsome devil, and if you’ve ever seen a picture of Bob Kane, you’ll know this isn’t a straight one-to-one comparison.

As is often the case with murder mysteries, it’s the characters and conversations, and interrogations, and uncovering of secrets and motives and so on, that are the real draw. The solution — the “who” part of “whodunnit” — rarely strikes a chord, and it particularly doesn’t strike one in A Killing in Comics, though the reveal is done in an endearingly old-fashioned “let’s gather everyone at a dinner table and eliminate them as suspects one at a time” style. No, the real entertainment is to be found in Jack Starr’s many interactions with suspects and cops, from Donny Harrison’s mistress, Honey Daily (with whom Jack sleeps; Robert B. Parker has Spenser sleep with a suspect/interested party in The Godwulf Manuscript, the first novel in that series (one of only two I’ve read, so maybe Spenser is constantly fucking everybody); and I’m like come on fellas, I thought we were supposed to be professionals here. You’d never catch Marlowe doing something like that) or exasperated editor Sy Mortimer, or, the lifeblood of the genre, chauffeurs and henchmen.

Collins doesn’t always nail it. Jack Starr has long since quit drinking as the novel opens, and he repeatedly tells us that his preferred drink is a rum and Coke, minus the Coke. He says this so often that eventually he makes a joke about running it into the ground, but it has still been run into the ground. Starr also isn’t as good at one-on-one wisecracks as the best of them, though it was interesting to me that in an early interaction with the main cop on the case (named Captain Chandler, by the way), Starr keeps trying to be a wiseass, unaware that he’s wrong about everything, and the cop is right. You don’t see that often in detective fiction.

But Collins gets it at other times. The cold-blooded partner to Donny Harrison, Louis Cohn, is described by Starr this way:

His expression was blank, though the dark eyes conveyed a coldness matched by his tone; he had a smooth face, like a baby, or like an adult who’d managed not to feel much of anything in five decades plus.

And I liked this, in the middle of a scene where Starr is half-seducing, half-being seduced by Honey Daily, freshly single now that her boyfriend has been murdered (in fairness, Starr does wonder if he should be doing this):

Her baby blues, bearing a red filigree, found their way to my face. “Are you here to take advantage of me? Or to try and cheer me up?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it’ll cheer you up if I took advantage of you.”

She laughed, a little more than that rated, and it echoed in the space, giving the laughter bottom but not disguising the ragged edge of hysteria up top.

Starr is frequently deprecating his own jokes like that, and fair enough, he should. But I do like the voice (I even like winky bullshit like “Rolling my eyes for nobody’s benefit but yours…” “yours” in this case being the reader) and the excitement about the setting — New York City in the late 40s, and early 50s — that Collins so clearly feels when he writes these books. The beginning prologue is just a list of things about New York at the time that Collins thinks were really cool. It’s nostalgia for an era that Collins isn’t old enough to have been able to appreciate while it was happening. This is a hopeless nostalgia that I understand, and share, and know I can always turn to Collins when I want to indulge in it.

II. All Hollowed Out in the Back

Author Never Read: Evan S. Connell
Book Read: Mrs. Bridge

Less fun is Mrs. Bridge, the first novel by Evan S. Connell, from 1959. Having previously published short fiction, which had been collected in his first book, The Anatomy Lesson, Connell’s career truly began here. Connell’s unique bibliography spans some five decades, and encompasses several volumes of short fiction, many books of non-fiction, including Son of the Morning Star about Custer and Little Big Horn, and Deus Lo Volt!: A Chronicle of the Crusades, as well as six novels, one of which, Mr. Bridge, came out in 1969, ten years after the novel it’s a sequel to. What, was there market pressure? Like there can’t be just one Hunger Games, there needs to be several? Anyway, I didn’t read that one, and this is another blow, the second in a row, to my self-imposed “No Series/No Books With Sequels/No Sequels” rule.

Connell was 35 when Mrs. Bridge was published, which is a bit of a depressing thing to consider. That’s because the novel displays an understanding of the inherent pain of life, without, in this case, much in the way of the many leavening moments that make the thing worth the effort. The first line of the novel is “Her first name was India — she was never able to get used to it.” It’s so impossible a name to get to that not even Connell gets used to it, rarely using “India,” and referring to her throughout as Mrs. Bridge. The reader doesn’t spend much time at all with her in her single days: there’s maybe half a paragraph of the novel gone by when we meet Walter Bridge. But curiously, and not insignificantly, Walter Bridge’s introduction is preceded by this:

Now and then while she was growing up the idea came to her that she could get along very nicely without a husband, and to the distress of her mother and father, this idea prevailed for a number of years after education had been completed.

There is nothing passionate about the marriage that follows, or the lives involved in it. The marriage occurs, and the children it produces are produced, simply because that was the thing to do. One needn’t want to, but it must be understood that it would be shameful not to. In this sense, Mrs. Bridge is one of a million such novels, novels written during the era being depicted, and about the era after it’s long past. And I’m frankly tired of them, a little bit (I am also tired of the converse assumption that all Literary Fiction is like that, or is about professors humping their students). I mentioned my weariness regarding this kind of fiction in an earlier post, but it boils down to an exasperation with writers who deem certain forms of domestic life unbearable because they’re not to that writer’s specific taste.

But hopelessness, so my argument would proceed, is universal, at least in its temporary form (and more permanently for some), and as Connell charts Mrs. Bridge’s life, and a confusion about what she views as an emptiness in her life, begins to overwhelm her at times, it’s easy to see that Connell is drilling down to something more general that he is underlining with the specifics, relatable or otherwise, of Mrs. Bridge’s life. That’s why trying to make universal art is doomed, because you can’t do it by being universal, you can only do it by being specific. So later in the novel, when Mrs. Bridge, feeling distant from her children, which had by then increasingly become her line to any kind of life outside her own mind, her husband Walter working long hours and weekends constantly, thinks of her youngest daughter:

Ruth was incomprehensible to her and with every year she became more so, more secretive and turbulent, more cunning and inaccessible, more foreign. Where had she come from? How could she be Carolyn’s sister? Mrs. Bridge was deeply worried and found it more and before long she was unable to call her by any name except Ruth, though it sounded formal and distant and tended to magnify their separation. Are you mine? she sometimes thought. Is my daughter mine?

it seemed to me that I felt, or anyway understood, that separation. Connell made it possible for me to experience something I have not, and will not, experience.

There is a great deal of humor in Mrs. Bridge as well, though of an exceedingly dry sort, as when we’re told that Walter Bridge considers inviting a couple named the Van Metres to dinner after the Van Metres had invited them to be not a reciprocal act, but rather one of retaliation. Or when Mrs. Bridge, her intellect and curiosity being occasionally pricked, at a poetry reading regards local “lady poet” Mabel Ong, squinting at her notes through her own cigarettes smoke, as someone who “certainly looked capable of being a poet.” Or a page or two later, having been recommended some books by Mabel, she considers that she “had not heard of any of these books except one, and this one because the author had committed suicide, but she decided to read it anyway.”

There are a number of strange people who come through the lives of the Bridges. For example, there is the Leacocks, whose son Tarquin(!) butts heads with the Bridges youngest child, a son named Douglas. The Leacocks are a snooty, condescending collection of aggravating personalities who go around saying this like “We poor bloody Socialists never have a chance” and generally overwhelming Mrs. Bridge with their offensive nonsense:

As for the public educational system, well, [Lucienne Leacock] could not speak of it it without profanity, and at every word Mrs. Bridge inwardly flinched. Superior children, the same as Socialists, did not have a chance. The system was geared to bourgeois mediocrity. Tarquin, as anyone could guess, attended a private school and he was as voluble a critic of public education as his mother, despite the fact he had never been inside a public school…

…Furthermore, Tarquin smoked cigarettes and was allowed to stay up as late at night as he wanted to; yet he not an adult, he was a boy, a large, shambling fleshy boy with a flushed, freckled complexion and moist red lips the color of liver. His eyes were alert and glassy, yellowish-brown and luminous like the eyes of a dog, and very knowing; it was all Mrs. Bridge could do to look him straight in the eye, and, what was worse, she knew he was aware of this and relished it. He clearly enjoyed catching and holding her attention until she could hardly keep from shuddering.

Speaking of the Leacocks, they eventually drop off stage, after not too long, but they, and their fates, are eventually referred to. And those fates might seem outsized, for a book of the sort that Mrs. Bridge appears to be, which is a kitchen sink, boots on the ground kind of study in realism. But while it is that for long stretches, it also gets into pockets where it’s something else entirely. There’s the fate of the Leacocks, and there’s also the tower that Douglas builds in an empty lot, a tower comprised of bits of trash gathered over months, Mrs. Bridge’s disapproval of this signaling the first of many cracks in her relationship with Douglas. But a tower? Stranger still is the chapter depicting Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, eating in restaurant when a tornado hits. Everyone evacuates to the basement, except the Bridges, because Walter insists on finishing his steak.

The lights of the dining room looked extraordinarily bright because of the unnatural darkness outside. There was a curious stillness and the rain fell in waves. Mrs. Bridge, looking about, saw that except for her husband and herself everyone had left the dining room.

“Don’t you think we should go?” she asked.

He was chewing and unable to answer at the moment. He swallowed, wiped his lips with his napkin, took a drink of water, and began to butter a piece of cornbread. Finding that he did not have enough butter he began to frown. He liked butter very much and at home he got all he wanted, but whenever they are out he kept asking for more. Mrs. Bridge, who was on a diet, had already given him the butter from her plate, but this was not enough. Both of them looked around. There was not a waiter in sight.

“Well, I’ll steal some from the next table,” said Mrs. Bridge. “I don’t suppose anyone will mind.”

Mr. Bridge is an interesting figure, as you’d hope he’d be. Not simply the distant, militaristic father of the cliches, Walter Bridge’s late hours at work aren’t his excuse for cheating on his wife. He is faithful to her, and he loves her. He is an extravagant and joyful gift-giver, though his main problem as a husband is that he seems to believe that’s all he needs to be be. That, and a provider, which Walter Bridge is. And he’s a caring father, discouraging his children from fighting with others, bonding — mysteriously, to Mrs. Bridge — with his eldest daughter, as Douglas and Ruth themselves Bond — again, mysteriously to their mother, leaving her feeling still more like an outsider.

But as Mr. Bridge isn’t some stereotypical ogre, nor is Mrs. Bridge a saint — her racial attitudes are, let’s say, common for the day. So are Walter’s, for that matter. And Connell, for his part, doesn’t seem to want to go out of his way to ennoble any particular group. Which is the power of a book like Mrs. Bridge: the good ones are a true snapshot of another time, the closest to time travel we’ll ever get — reading the great fiction of the past gets us much closer than watching the films ever will.

Mrs. Bridge ends on a note that initially took me aback, as I thought Connell was implying something was going to happen after the book ended that seemed a bit… extreme. But then I realized that no, he hadn’t set it up properly if that’s what he was going for. Instead, I saw that he was ending with a too-pat metaphor, one not needed as the entire novel up to that point had been illustrating this very concept. But that’s okay, because just a page or two before Connell had already broken my heart: “Mrs. Bridges wished she had taken more snapshots.”

Yes, well. Me too.

* * * * *

This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, 2025. For more details about this project, please read this post.