We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday

We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday …he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch might have made him, well, just plain), yes, warts and all he (and thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon daughters, or so it seemed), all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips,jesus.), all keep the races split, let them, the blacks (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out ofChi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so muchas a lining up his beliefs with his walk the walk talk. So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison (hell, no, he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria), or a righteous son of Captain John Brown, late of Kansas and Harpers Ferry (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate), but to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over, sounds familiar) and were able to touch up a picture or two he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds. And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown proud to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, break down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. More like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good. …and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all. Workers Vanguard No. 1015

11 January 2013

Civil War, Not Compromise, Smashed Slavery

Lincoln

A Review by Jacob Zorn

Lincoln—Steven Spielberg’s new movie based on a screenplay by Tony Kushner—begins with a battle scene that highlights the bravery of black soldiers, some 200,000 of whom fought in the Civil War. Two of them are seen talking to President Lincoln and criticizing the Union Army’s racist policies, paying blacks less than whites and preventing them from advancing to officers. One of the soldiers wonders whether blacks will have the vote in a hundred years. This sequence hints at the crucial role played by black soldiers in the armed struggle that broke the slave power in the South, but the film then entirely switches gears.

The movie’s plot reduces the abolition of slavery to so many parliamentary maneuvers by the wise and clever Lincoln to get the House of Representatives in early 1865 to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery. In the process, it distorts the significance of the Amendment and the role of the abolitionists, who were the main force, then and for decades before, pushing for an end to slavery.

To its credit, Lincoln is forthright that the Civil War was about slavery and does depict Lincoln, with all his contradictions and strengths, as devoted to not just winning the war but smashing the Southern slavocracy. The movie is based in part on a chapter in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005). While other historians—particularly James McPherson, who wrote the classic Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), and Eric Foner—present a deeper understanding of the social and political forces at work in the Civil War, Goodwin’s book underscores Lincoln’s political genius and canny leadership in leading the North to victory.

The opening scene is done in a manner to wrongly suggest that racial oppression is a relic of the past long since overcome. The not-too-thinly-disguised goal of the movie is to laud President Obama and to underline how he, supposedly like Lincoln, should seek “bipartisan” compromises with adversaries. By extension, his left critics are expected to give the president a break. When interviewed on NPR, Kushner gushed about what a great president Barack Obama is and what a “blessing” it was to see “the Obama years through a Lincoln lens.” Kushner then rhapsodized about the virtues of compromise and horse trading. This message was not lost on most of the bourgeois commentary on the film—as shown in the L.A. Times (28 November 2012) headline: “Gov. Jerry Brown Could Learn a Lesson From ‘Lincoln’.”

Lincoln is not without entertainment value, with its excellent acting by Daniel Day-Lewis (as Lincoln) and Tommy Lee Jones (as Pennsylvania Republican Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens). If the only problem of the movie was simply the narrow focus of its plot, it could be partly alleviated by watching it in conjunction with the superb movie Glory. An inspiring portrayal of the black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th regiment, Glory gives a sense of what was required for Union victory in a way that Lincoln does not.

But the main weakness of Lincoln is that in trying to show the Lincoln years through the Obama lens the movie distorts history. Barack Obama is Commander-in-Chief of a capitalist system long into its imperialist epoch of decay. The Civil War was the last great progressive act of the American bourgeoisie. To further the consolidation of industrial capitalism, when the exploitation of free labor represented an historical advance, the North was compelled to destroy the system of chattel slavery in the South. Today racist U.S. imperialism continues to carry out what has been more than a century of pillage and war across the globe, brutally exploiting labor at home and abroad while qualitatively arresting wider social and economic development. The American capitalist rulers are the main enemy of the world’s working people and oppressed.

It will serve some good if Lincoln piques interest in the Civil War among its viewers. But it must be understood that the movie obscures the fact that only a social revolution could have uprooted slavery, smashing everything that stood in its way. By the same token, it will take a socialist revolution by the proletariat and its allies to eradicate capitalist wage slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment, which had its origins in a petition campaign by anti-slavery women suffragettes in early 1864, states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment codified the end of slavery. Lincoln’s insistence that his generals fight to crush the opposing Confederate armies, and not his search for “bipartisanship,” paved the way for the passage of the Amendment.

In July 1862, as slaves were fleeing Southern plantations and seeking freedom behind Union Army lines, Congress authorized the “confiscation”—i.e., emancipation—of Confederates’ slaves. In January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had drafted the previous September. It declared that slaves in Confederate-controlled areas “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the Proclamation, the war openly became a social revolution to emancipate an oppressed class, the chattel slaves, and destroy an oppressor class, the slave masters. The Emancipation Proclamation also sanctioned the recruitment of black soldiers, such as those Lincoln visited in the first scene of the movie.

The revolutionary aspect of the war was resisted by many Northerners, especially those in the Democratic Party, which was the party that ran the slave South. These Northern Democrats—the so-called “Copperheads”—were antiwar and opposed abolition. In the movie, their main spokesman is Democratic Congressman Fernando Wood, a former mayor of New York City. The clash of the two parties came to a head in the election of 1864, when the Democrats ran General George B. McClellan—whom Lincoln had fired as the commanding general of the Union Army because he refused to fight to win the war. Meanwhile, with Ulysses S. Grant in charge, the tide of the war had begun to decisively turn, and the Union Army was on an offensive through the South.

In the election, the Democrats’ slogan was “The Constitution As It Is and the Union As It Was.” In other words, end the war and keep slavery. McClellan was decisively defeated, winning only New Jersey and the border states Delaware and Kentucky. Lincoln’s victory signaled support for continuing the war until the slavocracy was defeated, with the Republicans gaining enough seats in Congress to guarantee passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

From Lincoln’s perspective, the question was not whether slavery would be abolished, but whether the Amendment would be passed by the outgoing Congress in early 1865 or the incoming Congress later that spring. This consideration was not trivial. Rather than wait for the new Republican-dominated Congress to be convened, Lincoln wanted it to pass with some Democratic support. To do so would be a show of national support for abolition and would undercut the Copperheads, making it impossible to conclude peace on any basis except abolition.

The movie shows in detail how Lincoln—mainly acting through his secretary of state, William H. Seward—manipulated, cajoled, flattered and bribed various Democrats to support the Amendment. In the end, he obtained enough support from “lame duck” Democratic Congressmen to get it passed. Rather than the culmination of the Civil War, the drama in Congress represented a sideshow—albeit an important one—to the abolition of slavery. Eric Foner stressed in a letter to the New York Times (26 November 2012) about the movie: “Even as the House debated, [Union general] Sherman’s army was marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the House of Representatives.”

The viewer would not know from the movie that to become law, amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. When this happened in December 1865, it was because the North had militarily defeated the Confederacy. Among the states that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment were several in the South. James McPherson captured the real lesson of its adoption when he wrote: “Without the Civil War there would have been no confiscation act, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Thirteenth Amendment (not to mention the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth), certainly no self-emancipation, and almost certainly no end of slavery for several more decades at least” (Drawn with the Sword, 1997).

The Abolitionists and Radical Republicans

Radical abolitionism, the first interracial political movement in the United States, had pointed out decades before the Civil War that the slave system could not be reformed but had to be destroyed. At the time, mainstream politicians either essentially ignored slavery (the Whig Party) or supported it (the Democratic Party). For their bravery, the abolitionists were attacked, denounced and belittled.

The more farsighted elements of the capitalist class in the North eventually coalesced into the Republican Party. At the time of the 1860 presidential election, the Republican Party was not an abolitionist party, and Lincoln, its candidate, wanted only to limit slavery from expanding into the West. But both the slavocracy and Republicans understood that if slavery were prevented from expanding, it could not survive, in large part because its agricultural methods demanded ever more virgin soil. Lincoln’s victory prompted the Southern states to secede, provoking the Civil War. From its outset, the abolitionists understood that slavery was the central issue. Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass insisted that it was futile to “separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government.” He declared: “War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”

This was underlined by Karl Marx, who from London agitated among British workers in support of the North. In “The Civil War in the United States” (October 1861), Marx stressed: “The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” Criticizing Lincoln’s early wavering on emancipation, Marx declared, “Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation of the slaves.”

In the early stages of the war, Lincoln was fearful of the reaction of the four pro-Union slave border states as well as the Copperheads. The abolitionists and Radicals pushed Lincoln to grasp the need to smash slavery in order to win the war. Thaddeus Stevens declared: “It is plain that nothing approaching the present policy will subdue the rebels.”

In our article “Honor Abraham Lincoln!” (WV No. 938, 5 June 2009), which elaborates on the evolution of his views on race over the course of the Civil War, we stated:

“The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies.... Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution.”

It is hard to say to whom the movie does more injustice, Lincoln or the abolitionists. Lincoln is turned into some Obama-style centrist, and the abolitionists into well-meaning people who couldn’t get the job done. Kushner in his interview with NPR condemned “impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people” as one of the main obstacles Obama faces today. In other words, like Obama, Lincoln’s virtue was that he knew that the way to get what is important is to give as well as take.

One of the most egregious aspects of the film is the lack of even a mention of Frederick Douglass, a powerful advocate for abolition and black rights. It was Douglass who not only urged Lincoln to recruit black troops, but advocated that they be treated fairly and paid the same as whites. Douglass had met and argued with Lincoln on a number of occasions, including at the reception after his second inaugural address, as Goodwin relates in the chapter of her book on the Thirteenth Amendment.

The one abolitionist who factors prominently in the movie is Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens has long been vilified, like many Radicals, as a vindictive fanatic who was likely mad. By portraying Stevens sympathetically, the movie hopefully will spur people to learn more about him and the other radical abolitionists.

Yet the film deals with Stevens one-sidedly. At one point in the movie, during a private conversation, Lincoln lectured Stevens that if matters had been left to the Radicals, emancipation would have failed: “But if I’d listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the Confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do, in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.”

There is a grain of truth to this since Lincoln the politician was mindful of public opinion and tried not to put himself too far ahead of it. But it leaves out how instrumental abolitionists like Stevens were in the fight against slavery. As Stevens’ biographer put it, “Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate led the struggle against widespread apathy and fear, pushing through Congress the limited emancipation measures that prepared the nation for general emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment” (Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, 1959).

A telling example of how the movie tries to fit the abolition of slavery into the mold of compromise and bipartisanship is the dramatic tension over what Stevens would say in the House debate over the Thirteenth Amendment. Stevens was known for his saber-sharp sarcasm. In the movie, Ohio Congressman James Ashley—who sponsored the Amendment—begs Stevens to “compromise” in his advocacy of racial equality, “or you risk it all.” The movie then shows Stevens arguing with Fernando Wood on January 27, i.e., shortly before the final vote. In response to Wood’s badgering, Stevens states that he did not believe everybody was equal, but only should be treated equally before the law.

The drama of the scene is false, concocted in order to bolster the movie’s message of political conciliation. In fact, it was over three weeks before the voting when Stevens said that he advocated only “equality before the laws,” and he did so in response to Ohio Representative Samuel Cox, a Democrat who ended up voting for the Amendment. In any case, Stevens’ supposed “compromise”—civil rights for black people—was not only far ahead of most other politicians but also ahead of the actual Thirteenth Amendment.

Reconstruction

Several times in the movie, Lincoln declares that he was focused only on the task at hand—winning the war and abolishing slavery. He tells Stevens that he refuses to discuss Reconstruction after the war: “We shall oppose one another in the course of time. Now we’re working together.” Fair enough: one cannot fault a movie about Lincoln for not delving into what happened after the president’s assassination. But the movie’s refusal to even touch on what happened after the war serves a purpose. To do so would expose the folly of moderation and compromise with the pro-slavery forces.

After Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from the mountains of Tennessee, assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s death, remnants of the defeated Confederacy made it clear that, while their military defeat had forced them to accept the end of slavery, they had no intention of accepting black people as genuinely free. Southern states sent former Confederates to Congress and passed “black codes” that all but re-enslaved blacks. Meanwhile, Johnson carried out a policy of conciliating the South and was openly disdainful of black people.

Combating Johnson’s equivocal Reconstruction policy, Stevens and other Radical Republicans carried out what became known as Radical Reconstruction. Refusing to allow the Southern representatives to sit in Congress, they passed laws—overriding Johnson’s repeated vetoes—that protected the rights of former slaves, extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and politically disenfranchised the former slaveowners. The Union Army was stationed in the South to enforce these laws. Meanwhile, black people were asserting their basic rights by voting, standing for office and building schools. Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period in American history, bringing advances for poor whites, such as public education, as well.

Among the Radicals in Congress, Stevens pushed to extend Reconstruction the furthest. He advocated black suffrage, disenfranchising former Confederates and, most radical of all, seizing the former slaveholders’ plantations and redistributing them to the freedmen. In the movie, Stevens articulates this vision, telling Lincoln: “We’ll build up a land down there of free men and free women and free children and freedom.” Since Johnson tried to subvert Reconstruction at every step, Stevens helped spearhead the drive to impeach him, which failed by one vote in Spring 1868.

One of Stevens’ last acts was to campaign for the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. That Amendment extended the rights of citizenship to everybody born in the United States, regardless of race. While Lincoln implies that it was with the Thirteenth Amendment that Stevens compromised, it was in fact over the Fourteenth. He had pushed to give black men the right to vote, but the Amendment instead reduced the number of representatives for states that denied blacks the right to vote. Stevens told Congress that he was going to vote for it “because I live among men and not among angels.” Only in 1870, with the Fifteenth Amendment, did black men gain the right to vote.

As we wrote in our 1966 document “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League”): “Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the suppression of the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common interests.” In other words, even though a section of the bourgeoisie pushed to deepen Reconstruction, as a whole the ruling class had no such interest.

For Reconstruction to have succeeded would have required what Stevens advocated: breaking up the large landed estates and actually giving blacks “40 acres and a mule.” But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists formed an alliance with the remnants of the slavocracy in order to exploit Southern resources and the freedmen. Particularly following the Paris Commune of 1871, when the proletariat seized power for two months in the city, the American bourgeoisie saw expropriation and redistribution of private property in the land as a potential threat to themselves.

After the election of 1876, the last federal troops were recalled from the South as part of a compromise between the Republicans and the Democrats. Black freedmen and poor white sharecroppers didn’t have the social weight to defend their gains. With the racist Democrats returned to power in the South, they steadily stripped away the rights that black people had won. By the end of the century, the Southern states had disenfranchised black people and instituted formal Jim Crow segregation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would be dead letters until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The defeat of Reconstruction was a betrayal of the promise of black equality. To this day, the Civil War remains unfinished business, with black people making up an oppressed race-color caste. They form an integral part of American society but at the same time are overwhelmingly segregated at its bottom. Although the Democrats are no longer the pro-slavery party they once were, they are no less foes of black liberation today, administering along with the Republicans the capitalist system in its death agony. The tasks of the Civil War can be finished only by smashing American capitalism through socialist revolution. 

The Set-Up-With Crime Novel Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

The Set-Up-With Crime Novel Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

By Zack James

Alexander Slater had always been ever since he was a kid, maybe ten or eleven if not before, a big fan of hard-boiled detective novels and films based on those novels by guys like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Rich O’Connor, Sid Stein, and Lanny Drew. Had spent many a Riverdale hometown Saturday afternoon in the late 1950s in the faded run-down, gum-strewn on the floor, cobwebs in the balcony seats, toilet in the men’s room a relic of plumbing around the time of the original Cranes who made their fortunes providing such hard-wear to the growing population in need of indoor plumbing and whose castle overlooked Crane’s Beach up north of Riverdale about seventy-five miles away, old-fashioned popcorn cooker which always, always provided burnt kernels at the bottom of the box Majestic Theater on Mooney Street just off of the downtown shopping area watching re-runs  of the classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Lady In The Lake, The whole Thin Man series, The Last Kiss, Girl Hunt, and The Lost Ones. That downtown area also beginning to fade as the stores, Doc’s Drugstore, the 5&10, Morley’s Clothing store, Sam’s Furniture store and the like    that used to cater to the town’s needs moved out to the strip malls or all-purpose malls out on Route One a few miles from downtown.

Of course as a kid all Alexander cared about, along with his regular crew of Saturday matinee double-feature companions, Skip James, Jack Callahan, Johnny Rizzo, Five-Fingers Murphy, Frank Jackman and sometimes before his family moved out of town so his father could take a job in the emerging computer industry at Honeywell about forty miles away along Route 128, was that they had enough money to cover the admission (trying as boys universally would then, probably still do, to get the under twelve reduced admission price long after they had entered their teens), were being “grounded” for some silly home or school infraction , and, maybe, just maybe, that for once the popcorn although always with burnt offerings was not stale. So Alexander had through the marvels of cinematic technology and the printed page been able to form a very distinct idea about what a private detective should be like, what he looked like and how he handled himself in the rough spots.       

That ideal was probably epitomized by Sam Slade in The Maltese Falcon on the screen (the 1940s one that made Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, famous not the two earlier ones which he had never seen until a few years ago via Netflix he had ordered the pair online and was seriously disappointed in those efforts, as was his wife Mary who while not nearly as much a fan of the private detective did love the Bogie version of the Falcon) and in some short stories done by Hammett by scrambling through a few libraries and second-hand bookstores looking for compilations. In a word a guy and it was always guys then still was a lot now although he had read a few interesting female detective stories, working class guys, tough, tough enough to by sheer will and pluck to outsmart his well-organized criminal opponents, hard-boiled no question, no sap for anybody even women which every guys knows is easy enough to become when the skirts going swishing by, with a code, a beautiful code of honor that he follows as best he can, maybe not to the letter but as best he can in the spirit, hard-drinking which somehow focused the senses whenever the bottle in the lower desk draw came out, and a rough and ready sense of justice, of tilting after windmills for the good of the cause.

And there that image stayed for a fairly long time until Alexander went out into the world of work after high school. He had taken shop classes in school, printing shop and so immediately after high school he had taken a full-time job with Mister Calder, the best commercial printer in town, whom he worked for after school and on weekends in high school. In due course after a few years in the dreaded Army in Vietnam which took a certain toll on him when he came back to the “real” world, a few years “finding himself” through dope, rock and roll, and following the hitchhike road that many guys of his generation took for a while when Mister Calder retired he took over the shop located in the first floor of the Tappan Building on Lancaster Street right off of downtown (in the opposite direction from the now long gone old Majestic if you were familiar with Riverdale back in the 1970s or earlier).   

At one time, back in the 1940s, early 1950s, the eight story Tappan Building was what they would call today the anchor of the downtown business section. Was the pride of Riverdale what with prosperous small law firms, a few doctors’ offices when doctors had their own private practices more, a couple of dentists, a few reputable insurance companies, nothing big, no Fortune 500 firms but substantial, solid professional. As those firms and professionals drifted out to the strip malls or were eaten up by larger firms elsewhere the once glorious Tappan Building began a long decline into “seen better days.” The owners kind of gave up on the place, not keeping it up with leaking faucets in the restrooms, un-waxed public area floors, unreliable elevators, and the sanctified smell of decay that follows such downward spiraling enterprises. Alexander had taken over for Mister Calder well into the decline of the building but since the leasing arrangements with the owners provided for cheap terms and the fact that his printing business was not one in need of a “good front” he never felt the need to move, probably a wise move once the high tech moguls made self-printing for most occasions a worthwhile effort.

Alexander thus observed the decline of the Tappan Building first-hand as the type of businesses switched from prosperous professionals to shady characters. A couple of “repo” men, a few failed dentists whom you would not want within fifty feet of your mouth, maybe farther away, a couple of chiropractors, some no-name insurance firms, a notary public, a least a few guys who were running some kinds of scams out of their offices, and a detective agency. Fred Sims’ Detective Agency although all the years that he knew Fred he was the sole detective.      

Fred had been in the building since the mid-1960s but between Alexander’s military service and his wanderlust he did not meet Fred until he took over for Mister Calder. Once they met, met in Dolly’s Diner across the street from the Tappan, a place that is still there although Dolly’s granddaughter runs the place now and has changed it from a smoked-filled ham and eggs, coffee and crullers place to more healthful food and clean atmosphere for those who own the condos that had been created as a result of converting many of the old buildings, schools and churches in the area, they hit it off from the beginning although Fred was a good decade older than Alexander.

Fred, let’s be clear, was not, hear this, was not, and probably never would be Alexander’s image of a private detective build up from childhood (although in fairness to Fred he was the very first real P.I. he had run into). Short, bald, with unkempt side hairs sticking out of the baseball cap that he wore indoors and out, and almost never took off, an old Robert Hall’s, if you remember that name in men’s clothing from another age, shaggy sport’s jacket, one of three he owned and alternated, threadbare socks, turned at the heel shoes, black, and many days, many no client days, a fair amount of stubble on his face. His office on the fifth floor reflected that persona, no real “front.”  A hand-printed cardboard sign advertising his name and business on the front door, a small waiting room (which made Alexander laugh for all the years that he knew Fred he never saw anybody in that room), dust in the corners, a well beyond its prime coatrack of uncertain steadiness, a couple of mismatched chairs, a small end table with magazines describing the first Apollo landing in 1969, an office area with a snarled desk, unmatched chair, and a few, too few file cabinets if Fred was prosperous which he was not. Later when they were easier to figure out he did purchase a computer but otherwise over the years the place had, and would continue to have, that beleaguered downward spiral look.    

Alexander one time early on remarked, no, made the mistake and remarked, that Fred was no Bogie while they were sitting at the counter of Dolly’s having their coffee and. Apparently this kind of remark was Fred’s pet peeve because he commenced to rail against the popular notion of what a private detective looks like, what his office looks like, and the real cases that he handles. They are not the murder cases of cinematic and book renown, the public cops, detectives handle that, well or poorly, but in some then twenty years in the business he had never seen any private detective brought in to solve a murder and only once had heard that a very rich guy who had the dough to do so and was frustrated with the public coppers and their inability to solve the kidnapping/murder of his young daughter actually had a private detective savvy enough to solve the crime, after two years on the trail.                   

No the real work was bullshit stuff. Some barber from Gloversville whose wife ran off with a salesman and he wanted her back her, fast, maybe three days, and not too many expenses. Some “repo” work the average repo guys wouldn’t handle or wouldn’t be allowed by the insurance companies to handle. Back in the day a few Peeping Tom snooping around motels cases looking for adultery when the grounds for a civil divorce were harder to find. A lost dog or other pet once in a while if somebody was attached to the animal, although they usually found their ways home on their own or were never seen again. Looking for long lost relatives, usually fruitless since those relatives wanted to be lost from view. Maybe checking out a scam or two, flimflam stuff.

Definitely not looking for lost falcon statutes filled with riches and history with dead bodies and greedy people hovering around. Definitely not taking on some high-powered criminal gang when an old general with wild daughters one of whose husband is missing. Definitely not being employed by some man-mountain to find his long lost and wants to stay lost Velma. Definitely not trying to find some eccentric rich inventor guy whose thin shadow had disappeared in the mist and somebody liked that idea.                                 

 So that day Alexander got his comeuppance, got a first-hand real world view of what private investigation was all about. Thereafter Fred, when the met for their coffee and at Dolly’s or sometimes when Alexander after work would go up to Fred’s office for a shot of whiskey from that bottle he kept in the bottom drawer of that snarled desk (and one of the few commonalities between real and film detectives) Fred would tell him stories about his previous cases, or cases that he had heard about from other P.I.s around the area when they ran into each other at some meeting or on a spree. Except the one time when Alexander became a moving part in a case that Fred would wind up getting involved in before the coppers stepped in. 

One day a guy, an ordinary looking guy, about thirty, fairly well-dressed, a sports coat and tie, trimmed hair and short beard, not from around Riverdale but with a New England accent, probably Maine, came into Alexander’s print shop looking for a customized job, a small job but in those days as people were self-printing more extensively the small jobs were drying up (fortunately the big commercial orders were still coming in at their normal pace). He wanted fifty copies of what he called a missing person’s poster, you know with photo of the person and description of last known place, who to contact and so on, done on the press and not the copy machine. No problem. Alexander handled the order while this young guy waited. 

A few weeks later the person who had come in with missing person photograph turned up dead, very dead along the bank of the Waban River. Not only very dead but very murdered from the bullet holes through his mangled soggy shirt. Chief Powers of the Riverdale Police came into Alexander’s print shop to find out what he knew about the situation since in the dead man’s back pocket there was a water-logged copy of the missing person poster that had a print shop mark on the right corner. Alexander told the Chief what he knew, said he wanted to help any way he could but the young guy was just a young guy and his description and demeanor would have fit a million young guys. As had the guy the sheriff was looking for. That pretty much ended Alexander’s involvement in the case, probably the case would go into those cold files that most murder cases go into if somebody doesn’t jump and confess with all hands open.

Or so he thought. A few weeks later a young woman, Lara Barstow was the name she gave him, came into Alexander’s printing shop with a shopworn copy of the poster he had created for the murdered young man, and asked to see the proprietor. Since he was that person he introduced himself and asked how he could help her (although he was a little suspicious that an average young good-looking woman like Lara would have any connection with the crime, or crimes associated with the young man for whom he had done the work or the young man on the poster). Lara soon cleared things up, “I have been to the police and they told me what happened to my brother Emmet, how he was found murdered out on the riverbank. They said that as far as they were concerned the case was still open but that they had no further leads to work on so that unless they got something that is probably where the case would stand.” [The police did not mention “cold case” file but Lara said she knew what they meant].

Lara then started to cry a bit and Alexander not knowing what to do offered his handkerchief and asked if he should call his wife to assist her in her time of troubles. Lara stiffened at that and told Alexander that she did not need that kind of help but that she was determined to find out who had killed her brother and asked if he had any ideas. Then Alexander, secretly thrilled as the prospect told her that on the fifth floor of the building that they were standing in his friend, Fred, a private detective, had his office and that maybe he could look into the matter. Lara said that she did not have any serious resources (her word), meaning money but that if Fred was able to do something to find the murderer and clear up a legal situation then she would be coming into some funds. Alexander thinking to himself that this was starting to be something out of the movies let that statement ride only saying, “Let’s see what Fred says,” and led her to the elevator and the fifth floor office. (On the way she did not comment on the urine smell in the foyer, the seedy dilapidated aspect of the elevator and its slowness, or the condition of the outside building windows, broken panes letting the weathers in, on the fifth floor as they left the elevator which made him a little wary since her whole demeanor was of some old-fashioned gentile upbringing but he figured she was desperate, concentrated on her task, or indifferent to such matters).

Fred, despite the seedy condition of his office, already commented on by Alexander and nothing had changed since the last time he had been up in the office for a few drinks so no further comment is necessary, was smooth affable charm itself when greeting and listening to Lara’s story. And listen he, they did for the story really did have a Hollywood feel to it.

“Emmet Barstow is, ah, was, my older brother, who had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was in prep school at Exeter Academy several years ago. I don’t know if I should tell you the nature of the trouble since it was a rather delicate matter.” Fred stopped her right there and said he needed to know everything, everything in this weak fact case, or he would not be able to help her. She continued, “Well, ah, see there was this other boy, this Prescott Devine, a pervert, you know, a homosexual, who tricked Emmet into having sex with him, having sex and taking photographs as it turned out.” [Fred and Alexander gave each other knowing eyes about what was to follow.] You know what happened next, Prescott forced my brother to continue with his wicked designs while in school and later asked for money to avoid a public scandal in our household. So Emmett paid, or rather my father paid before he died and after that Mr. Sidney, the lawyer who has handled our estate until we come of age paid.

"Then Prescott faded from view for a couple of years until several months ago after my father died he showed up at our door looking for more money. Emmett gave him what he could but somehow he got wind of my father dying and remembered that Emmett was to inherit a large sum of money upon his death, something he had told Prescott when he was in the throes of love at the beginning [said bitterly]. The terms of the will were that Emmett would inherit almost everything when he turned twenty-five as long as he was alive, and if he were not then I would inherit. But only inherit if there was no cloud over his death. That part had been added only a few months before my father’s death so he must have had a premonition of something happening.” She paused, then continued, “Emmett had been trying to find Prescott for a while after he had come to our house in order to tell him that he was no longer afraid of any scandal, that he would take his chances with society, our society which might be able to overlook what could be a youthful indiscretion, and maybe just a bout of loneliness. Somebody whom they went to school with told Emmett that Prescott was in this area living in Gloversville and that was why he had the posters made. He was going to distribute them around and the thousand dollars for information figured to draw somebody out who might know his whereabouts. That’s all I know until the police called to have me come and identify Emmett’s body. The police have kind of let it go to hell and I need your help.

Fred wise to the ways of the world although not used to dealing with upper middle class young women, as clients anyway except once he had a girlfriend from the leafy suburbs but the parents practically imprisoned her when they found out he did not have three names in his moniker, you know Ward Stewart Lawrence, stuff like that the Brahmins go for, told Lara he needed a one hundred dollar cash retainer before he could represent her in her time of sorrows. She opened her pocketbook, pulled out five Jacksons and they were in business.   

Fred said later that he sensed something was wrong from that moment, the moment she gave him the cash like she expected him to ask for cash rather than haggle over a check or something but Alexander said that was just Fred’s wishful thinking after the fact when the whole thing blew up in his face and the cops had to pull him out of the line of fire. To leave the reader in no suspense at this point Fred went out and did several days of investigation trying to locate the guy who told her brother that Prescott was in the area. He did locate him finally but the lad, a young man whom Fred using the old time expression was “light on his feet,” and fearful to say anything at all. Fred pressed the issue though and the kid (Fred did not use that word) folded. It seems the kid, Fred said he would not use his name in order to get the information he wanted, also fell under the spell of Prescott, had his pants down more than once over the “crush” he called it, and had done Prescott’s bidding telling Emmett that Prescott was in Gloversville. A couple of days late Fred traced Prescott to a bed and breakfast place outside Gloversville.

He figured that he would just go in and talk to Prescott but before he could enter the door to Prescott’s room there was a volley of gunfire aimed his way through the door. He got on the ground first and worked his way back to the kitchen where he called the cops, called the sheriff’s office because he was not sure Gloversville had its own police department. The sheriff came with a few deputies, and a few sharpshooters from the State Police SWAT team. After a couple of futile attempts at coaxing Prescott out they went in full blazes (Alexander said if anybody wanted to know the details of the firefight check with the Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office they would have all the details. After a few minutes the firing from Prescott’s room stopped. The cops went into room and recovered the body, recovered two bodies really, for the other body belonged to one Lara Barstow.

The way things figured out later piecing together everything found in Prescott’s room and later at Lara’ house what happened is when Prescott came to confront Emmett for dough at his house he somehow caught Lara’s eyes, gave her a tumble or two, maybe more. Whether he was just working the scam of a lifetime for a lowlife like him or he had some affection for Lara who knows. What is known from some legal papers found at Lara’s house is they formed a scheme to kill Emmett and have her inherit the family money (when she turned twenty-five as well a lawyer handling the trust before that time). Prescott must have known from that Exeter kid that Emmett was on his trail. They probably met somewhere and Prescott put a couple of nasty slugs in him and shipped him off down the Waban River and easy street. What fouled the whole thing up was the part about having to know the cause of Emmett’s death before the trust could even be touched in the future. The whole Lara tall tale story in Fred’s office was to see if they could find a fall guy, maybe some hobo or something. Not every criminal, smart or stupid always figures things out right but that was what it looked like.

Maybe Lara thought just hiring Fred would satisfy the terms of the trust. Who knows. But when Fred was able to find Prescott he, they panicked. And that was that. So Alexander forever after will be able to say he was part of solving a private detective-type crime. He was just glad, glad as hell that he had not accompanied Fred when he had asked him to go to Prescott’s room. He thought save that part for the movies.                       

The Set-Up-With Crime Novel Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

The Set-Up-With Crime Novel Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

By Zack James

Alexander Slater had always been ever since he was a kid, maybe ten or eleven if not before, a big fan of hard-boiled detective novels and films based on those novels by guys like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Rich O’Connor, Sid Stein, and Lanny Drew. Had spent many a Riverdale hometown Saturday afternoon in the late 1950s in the faded run-down, gum-strewn on the floor, cobwebs in the balcony seats, toilet in the men’s room a relic of plumbing around the time of the original Cranes who made their fortunes providing such hard-wear to the growing population in need of indoor plumbing and whose castle overlooked Crane’s Beach up north of Riverdale about seventy-five miles away, old-fashioned popcorn cooker which always, always provided burnt kernels at the bottom of the box Majestic Theater on Mooney Street just off of the downtown shopping area watching re-runs  of the classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Lady In The Lake, The whole Thin Man series, The Last Kiss, Girl Hunt, and The Lost Ones. That downtown area also beginning to fade as the stores, Doc’s Drugstore, the 5&10, Morley’s Clothing store, Sam’s Furniture store and the like    that used to cater to the town’s needs moved out to the strip malls or all-purpose malls out on Route One a few miles from downtown.

Of course as a kid all Alexander cared about, along with his regular crew of Saturday matinee double-feature companions, Skip James, Jack Callahan, Johnny Rizzo, Five-Fingers Murphy, Frank Jackman and sometimes before his family moved out of town so his father could take a job in the emerging computer industry at Honeywell about forty miles away along Route 128, was that they had enough money to cover the admission (trying as boys universally would then, probably still do, to get the under twelve reduced admission price long after they had entered their teens), were being “grounded” for some silly home or school infraction , and, maybe, just maybe, that for once the popcorn although always with burnt offerings was not stale. So Alexander had through the marvels of cinematic technology and the printed page been able to form a very distinct idea about what a private detective should be like, what he looked like and how he handled himself in the rough spots.       

That ideal was probably epitomized by Sam Slade in The Maltese Falcon on the screen (the 1940s one that made Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, famous not the two earlier ones which he had never seen until a few years ago via Netflix he had ordered the pair online and was seriously disappointed in those efforts, as was his wife Mary who while not nearly as much a fan of the private detective did love the Bogie version of the Falcon) and in some short stories done by Hammett by scrambling through a few libraries and second-hand bookstores looking for compilations. In a word a guy and it was always guys then still was a lot now although he had read a few interesting female detective stories, working class guys, tough, tough enough to by sheer will and pluck to outsmart his well-organized criminal opponents, hard-boiled no question, no sap for anybody even women which every guys knows is easy enough to become when the skirts going swishing by, with a code, a beautiful code of honor that he follows as best he can, maybe not to the letter but as best he can in the spirit, hard-drinking which somehow focused the senses whenever the bottle in the lower desk draw came out, and a rough and ready sense of justice, of tilting after windmills for the good of the cause.

And there that image stayed for a fairly long time until Alexander went out into the world of work after high school. He had taken shop classes in school, printing shop and so immediately after high school he had taken a full-time job with Mister Calder, the best commercial printer in town, whom he worked for after school and on weekends in high school. In due course after a few years in the dreaded Army in Vietnam which took a certain toll on him when he came back to the “real” world, a few years “finding himself” through dope, rock and roll, and following the hitchhike road that many guys of his generation took for a while when Mister Calder retired he took over the shop located in the first floor of the Tappan Building on Lancaster Street right off of downtown (in the opposite direction from the now long gone old Majestic if you were familiar with Riverdale back in the 1970s or earlier).   

At one time, back in the 1940s, early 1950s, the eight story Tappan Building was what they would call today the anchor of the downtown business section. Was the pride of Riverdale what with prosperous small law firms, a few doctors’ offices when doctors had their own private practices more, a couple of dentists, a few reputable insurance companies, nothing big, no Fortune 500 firms but substantial, solid professional. As those firms and professionals drifted out to the strip malls or were eaten up by larger firms elsewhere the once glorious Tappan Building began a long decline into “seen better days.” The owners kind of gave up on the place, not keeping it up with leaking faucets in the restrooms, un-waxed public area floors, unreliable elevators, and the sanctified smell of decay that follows such downward spiraling enterprises. Alexander had taken over for Mister Calder well into the decline of the building but since the leasing arrangements with the owners provided for cheap terms and the fact that his printing business was not one in need of a “good front” he never felt the need to move, probably a wise move once the high tech moguls made self-printing for most occasions a worthwhile effort.

Alexander thus observed the decline of the Tappan Building first-hand as the type of businesses switched from prosperous professionals to shady characters. A couple of “repo” men, a few failed dentists whom you would not want within fifty feet of your mouth, maybe farther away, a couple of chiropractors, some no-name insurance firms, a notary public, a least a few guys who were running some kinds of scams out of their offices, and a detective agency. Fred Sims’ Detective Agency although all the years that he knew Fred he was the sole detective.      

Fred had been in the building since the mid-1960s but between Alexander’s military service and his wanderlust he did not meet Fred until he took over for Mister Calder. Once they met, met in Dolly’s Diner across the street from the Tappan, a place that is still there although Dolly’s granddaughter runs the place now and has changed it from a smoked-filled ham and eggs, coffee and crullers place to more healthful food and clean atmosphere for those who own the condos that had been created as a result of converting many of the old buildings, schools and churches in the area, they hit it off from the beginning although Fred was a good decade older than Alexander.

Fred, let’s be clear, was not, hear this, was not, and probably never would be Alexander’s image of a private detective build up from childhood (although in fairness to Fred he was the very first real P.I. he had run into). Short, bald, with unkempt side hairs sticking out of the baseball cap that he wore indoors and out, and almost never took off, an old Robert Hall’s, if you remember that name in men’s clothing from another age, shaggy sport’s jacket, one of three he owned and alternated, threadbare socks, turned at the heel shoes, black, and many days, many no client days, a fair amount of stubble on his face. His office on the fifth floor reflected that persona, no real “front.”  A hand-printed cardboard sign advertising his name and business on the front door, a small waiting room (which made Alexander laugh for all the years that he knew Fred he never saw anybody in that room), dust in the corners, a well beyond its prime coatrack of uncertain steadiness, a couple of mismatched chairs, a small end table with magazines describing the first Apollo landing in 1969, an office area with a snarled desk, unmatched chair, and a few, too few file cabinets if Fred was prosperous which he was not. Later when they were easier to figure out he did purchase a computer but otherwise over the years the place had, and would continue to have, that beleaguered downward spiral look.    

Alexander one time early on remarked, no, made the mistake and remarked, that Fred was no Bogie while they were sitting at the counter of Dolly’s having their coffee and. Apparently this kind of remark was Fred’s pet peeve because he commenced to rail against the popular notion of what a private detective looks like, what his office looks like, and the real cases that he handles. They are not the murder cases of cinematic and book renown, the public cops, detectives handle that, well or poorly, but in some then twenty years in the business he had never seen any private detective brought in to solve a murder and only once had heard that a very rich guy who had the dough to do so and was frustrated with the public coppers and their inability to solve the kidnapping/murder of his young daughter actually had a private detective savvy enough to solve the crime, after two years on the trail.                   

No the real work was bullshit stuff. Some barber from Gloversville whose wife ran off with a salesman and he wanted her back her, fast, maybe three days, and not too many expenses. Some “repo” work the average repo guys wouldn’t handle or wouldn’t be allowed by the insurance companies to handle. Back in the day a few Peeping Tom snooping around motels cases looking for adultery when the grounds for a civil divorce were harder to find. A lost dog or other pet once in a while if somebody was attached to the animal, although they usually found their ways home on their own or were never seen again. Looking for long lost relatives, usually fruitless since those relatives wanted to be lost from view. Maybe checking out a scam or two, flimflam stuff.

Definitely not looking for lost falcon statutes filled with riches and history with dead bodies and greedy people hovering around. Definitely not taking on some high-powered criminal gang when an old general with wild daughters one of whose husband is missing. Definitely not being employed by some man-mountain to find his long lost and wants to stay lost Velma. Definitely not trying to find some eccentric rich inventor guy whose thin shadow had disappeared in the mist and somebody liked that idea.                                 

 So that day Alexander got his comeuppance, got a first-hand real world view of what private investigation was all about. Thereafter Fred, when the met for their coffee and at Dolly’s or sometimes when Alexander after work would go up to Fred’s office for a shot of whiskey from that bottle he kept in the bottom drawer of that snarled desk (and one of the few commonalities between real and film detectives) Fred would tell him stories about his previous cases, or cases that he had heard about from other P.I.s around the area when they ran into each other at some meeting or on a spree. Except the one time when Alexander became a moving part in a case that Fred would wind up getting involved in before the coppers stepped in. 

One day a guy, an ordinary looking guy, about thirty, fairly well-dressed, a sports coat and tie, trimmed hair and short beard, not from around Riverdale but with a New England accent, probably Maine, came into Alexander’s print shop looking for a customized job, a small job but in those days as people were self-printing more extensively the small jobs were drying up (fortunately the big commercial orders were still coming in at their normal pace). He wanted fifty copies of what he called a missing person’s poster, you know with photo of the person and description of last known place, who to contact and so on, done on the press and not the copy machine. No problem. Alexander handled the order while this young guy waited. 

A few weeks later the person who had come in with missing person photograph turned up dead, very dead along the bank of the Waban River. Not only very dead but very murdered from the bullet holes through his mangled soggy shirt. Chief Powers of the Riverdale Police came into Alexander’s print shop to find out what he knew about the situation since in the dead man’s back pocket there was a water-logged copy of the missing person poster that had a print shop mark on the right corner. Alexander told the Chief what he knew, said he wanted to help any way he could but the young guy was just a young guy and his description and demeanor would have fit a million young guys. As had the guy the sheriff was looking for. That pretty much ended Alexander’s involvement in the case, probably the case would go into those cold files that most murder cases go into if somebody doesn’t jump and confess with all hands open.

Or so he thought. A few weeks later a young woman, Lara Barstow was the name she gave him, came into Alexander’s printing shop with a shopworn copy of the poster he had created for the murdered young man, and asked to see the proprietor. Since he was that person he introduced himself and asked how he could help her (although he was a little suspicious that an average young good-looking woman like Lara would have any connection with the crime, or crimes associated with the young man for whom he had done the work or the young man on the poster). Lara soon cleared things up, “I have been to the police and they told me what happened to my brother Emmet, how he was found murdered out on the riverbank. They said that as far as they were concerned the case was still open but that they had no further leads to work on so that unless they got something that is probably where the case would stand.” [The police did not mention “cold case” file but Lara said she knew what they meant].

Lara then started to cry a bit and Alexander not knowing what to do offered his handkerchief and asked if he should call his wife to assist her in her time of troubles. Lara stiffened at that and told Alexander that she did not need that kind of help but that she was determined to find out who had killed her brother and asked if he had any ideas. Then Alexander, secretly thrilled as the prospect told her that on the fifth floor of the building that they were standing in his friend, Fred, a private detective, had his office and that maybe he could look into the matter. Lara said that she did not have any serious resources (her word), meaning money but that if Fred was able to do something to find the murderer and clear up a legal situation then she would be coming into some funds. Alexander thinking to himself that this was starting to be something out of the movies let that statement ride only saying, “Let’s see what Fred says,” and led her to the elevator and the fifth floor office. (On the way she did not comment on the urine smell in the foyer, the seedy dilapidated aspect of the elevator and its slowness, or the condition of the outside building windows, broken panes letting the weathers in, on the fifth floor as they left the elevator which made him a little wary since her whole demeanor was of some old-fashioned gentile upbringing but he figured she was desperate, concentrated on her task, or indifferent to such matters).

Fred, despite the seedy condition of his office, already commented on by Alexander and nothing had changed since the last time he had been up in the office for a few drinks so no further comment is necessary, was smooth affable charm itself when greeting and listening to Lara’s story. And listen he, they did for the story really did have a Hollywood feel to it.

“Emmet Barstow is, ah, was, my older brother, who had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was in prep school at Exeter Academy several years ago. I don’t know if I should tell you the nature of the trouble since it was a rather delicate matter.” Fred stopped her right there and said he needed to know everything, everything in this weak fact case, or he would not be able to help her. She continued, “Well, ah, see there was this other boy, this Prescott Devine, a pervert, you know, a homosexual, who tricked Emmet into having sex with him, having sex and taking photographs as it turned out.” [Fred and Alexander gave each other knowing eyes about what was to follow.] You know what happened next, Prescott forced my brother to continue with his wicked designs while in school and later asked for money to avoid a public scandal in our household. So Emmett paid, or rather my father paid before he died and after that Mr. Sidney, the lawyer who has handled our estate until we come of age paid.

"Then Prescott faded from view for a couple of years until several months ago after my father died he showed up at our door looking for more money. Emmett gave him what he could but somehow he got wind of my father dying and remembered that Emmett was to inherit a large sum of money upon his death, something he had told Prescott when he was in the throes of love at the beginning [said bitterly]. The terms of the will were that Emmett would inherit almost everything when he turned twenty-five as long as he was alive, and if he were not then I would inherit. But only inherit if there was no cloud over his death. That part had been added only a few months before my father’s death so he must have had a premonition of something happening.” She paused, then continued, “Emmett had been trying to find Prescott for a while after he had come to our house in order to tell him that he was no longer afraid of any scandal, that he would take his chances with society, our society which might be able to overlook what could be a youthful indiscretion, and maybe just a bout of loneliness. Somebody whom they went to school with told Emmett that Prescott was in this area living in Gloversville and that was why he had the posters made. He was going to distribute them around and the thousand dollars for information figured to draw somebody out who might know his whereabouts. That’s all I know until the police called to have me come and identify Emmett’s body. The police have kind of let it go to hell and I need your help.

Fred wise to the ways of the world although not used to dealing with upper middle class young women, as clients anyway except once he had a girlfriend from the leafy suburbs but the parents practically imprisoned her when they found out he did not have three names in his moniker, you know Ward Stewart Lawrence, stuff like that the Brahmins go for, told Lara he needed a one hundred dollar cash retainer before he could represent her in her time of sorrows. She opened her pocketbook, pulled out five Jacksons and they were in business.   

Fred said later that he sensed something was wrong from that moment, the moment she gave him the cash like she expected him to ask for cash rather than haggle over a check or something but Alexander said that was just Fred’s wishful thinking after the fact when the whole thing blew up in his face and the cops had to pull him out of the line of fire. To leave the reader in no suspense at this point Fred went out and did several days of investigation trying to locate the guy who told her brother that Prescott was in the area. He did locate him finally but the lad, a young man whom Fred using the old time expression was “light on his feet,” and fearful to say anything at all. Fred pressed the issue though and the kid (Fred did not use that word) folded. It seems the kid, Fred said he would not use his name in order to get the information he wanted, also fell under the spell of Prescott, had his pants down more than once over the “crush” he called it, and had done Prescott’s bidding telling Emmett that Prescott was in Gloversville. A couple of days late Fred traced Prescott to a bed and breakfast place outside Gloversville.

He figured that he would just go in and talk to Prescott but before he could enter the door to Prescott’s room there was a volley of gunfire aimed his way through the door. He got on the ground first and worked his way back to the kitchen where he called the cops, called the sheriff’s office because he was not sure Gloversville had its own police department. The sheriff came with a few deputies, and a few sharpshooters from the State Police SWAT team. After a couple of futile attempts at coaxing Prescott out they went in full blazes (Alexander said if anybody wanted to know the details of the firefight check with the Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office they would have all the details. After a few minutes the firing from Prescott’s room stopped. The cops went into room and recovered the body, recovered two bodies really, for the other body belonged to one Lara Barstow.

The way things figured out later piecing together everything found in Prescott’s room and later at Lara’ house what happened is when Prescott came to confront Emmett for dough at his house he somehow caught Lara’s eyes, gave her a tumble or two, maybe more. Whether he was just working the scam of a lifetime for a lowlife like him or he had some affection for Lara who knows. What is known from some legal papers found at Lara’s house is they formed a scheme to kill Emmett and have her inherit the family money (when she turned twenty-five as well a lawyer handling the trust before that time). Prescott must have known from that Exeter kid that Emmett was on his trail. They probably met somewhere and Prescott put a couple of nasty slugs in him and shipped him off down the Waban River and easy street. What fouled the whole thing up was the part about having to know the cause of Emmett’s death before the trust could even be touched in the future. The whole Lara tall tale story in Fred’s office was to see if they could find a fall guy, maybe some hobo or something. Not every criminal, smart or stupid always figures things out right but that was what it looked like.

Maybe Lara thought just hiring Fred would satisfy the terms of the trust. Who knows. But when Fred was able to find Prescott he, they panicked. And that was that. So Alexander forever after will be able to say he was part of solving a private detective-type crime. He was just glad, glad as hell that he had not accompanied Fred when he had asked him to go to Prescott’s room. He thought save that part for the movies.                       

Rock and Roll Will Never Die, Part One-Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s “Pirate Radio” ( )- A Film Review

Rock and Roll Will Never Die, Part One-Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s   “Pirate Radio”- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[Yes, I am now retired but I did so with the caveat that I would on occasion dredge up my tired brain and write a little something if it interested me. Current film critic in this space, my old friend and adversary from American Film Gazette days, Sandy Salmon has mentioned to me on many occasions that he had not been washed clean (my expression not his) by the high tide of rock and roll that was the common lynchpin of our generation. Moreover he did not “give a damn” (his expression) about rock and roll reflecting in my view that stiff upper lip upbringing that he went through in New York City which included huge doses of classic music. You know Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and the crew. The guys that the late rock and roll legend Chuck Berry gave notice to in his classic statement of the case for rock-Roll Over Beethoven- that some new sheriffs were in town.

The long and short of it was that I noticed that one of the films up for review was Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Pirate Radio which is nothing but a rather recent slice of life homage to the genre. Sandy was not going to review the film and so I have entered the lists to save this beauty of a tribute from statutory neglect. I might point out that another such effort, Jack Black’s School Of Rock was also slated for extinction and so I will review that one shortly as well. Sam Lowell] 

Pirate Radio, starring Philipp Seymour Hoffman, 2009

Probably all films are directed to the largest audience possible although they may be particularly targeted to a certain segment like I believe that the film under review Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Pirate Radio while entirely suitable for all audiences has special meaning for those of us who were washed clean by the that big wave of rock and roll that swept over us in our 1950s and early 1960 youths. I am not foolish enough at this late date in the 21^st century some sixty plus years after the genre first exploded onto the scene to tell anybody that rock and roll has had the staying power to ignite the two or so generations after the explosion but I will venture to say as I have in the headline to this review that one way or another rock and roll will never die. One hundred years from now, especially now that YouTube technology has insured preservation some shy, backward, alienated teenagers, tweens too, will be snapping their figured to Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven. And maybe watch this film to try and understand what it was like when men and women performed rock and roll for keeps. Will gravitate toward the film if for no other reason than the time capsule sound track will guide them to the source.

Here’s the play. If you can believe this back in the day, back in the early 1960s when rock had already passed its first bloom “the authorities” in this case the British authorities but it could have been any governmental agents, churchmen, school administrators, and above all parents in America (or any place on the planet where the category of “teenager” had currency) banned rock and roll from the state-run airwaves. Damn. Except some guys thought of an ingenious way to go around that prohibition by rigging up ships with radio studio equipment and related technologies and anchoring them out beyond the British legal jurisdiction, anchored them in international waters. The kids in the British Isles just like hear then could listen on their coveted transistor radios up in the privacy of their parents forbidden bedrooms. (Transistor radios by the way were the iPod /MP3s of their day.)           

      

One drawback was that the radio station crew had to stay on board and so the wacky crew and their antics and animosities headlined by Hoffman are given full play. That did not stop the furor to live and die by the motto “drugs, sex, and rock and roll (although the one female on board was a lesbian there was no shortage of mainland female listeners ready, willing and able to take the nearest boat out to join the crew. Various segments of the film deal with the sex lives, or non-sex lives of the larger than life looney tunes on board.   

Naturally this flaunting of the law, this thumb in the eye drove the governmental bureaucrats crazy, drove them to a white heat to get rid of the crew of crazies and degenerates who were corrupting the morals of the youth of the nation (this would be mild compared to what would go down later in that same decade). And in the end through treachery and convenient legislation they would prove victorious in their attempts to shut down the operations. Left the ship being highlighted out in the deep to flounder. But in the end the crew was saved by their audience, literally, coming out and rescuing them. Yeah, with an audience like that no wonder everybody believed, fervently believed that rock and roll would never die. Enough said.      

In Honor Of The Late Legendary Chuck Berry- The King Is Dead- Long Live The King- Elvis When He Was Elvis

*In Honor Of The Late Legendary Chuck Berry- The King Is Dead- Long Live The King- Elvis When He Was Elvis

CD compilation Review

Elvis; The King Of Rock And Roll, Five CD Set, BMG, 1992


I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but now when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, moves away from ballady show tunes, rhymey Tin Pan Alley tunes and, most importantly, any and all music that your parents might have approved of, even liked, or at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room hit post World War II America like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Well, as most of us know and believe, I hope anyway, the subject of this review, Elvis, is gone now. But it is hard to go back to the roots of rock and roll without paying much lip service to his musical influence, his showmanship, his energy when performance time came and he was in the mood to kick up some dust, and his sneerily-etched good looks. I will tell you that Jerry Lee Lewis was most of an influence on my early music tastes than Elvis. I also believe pound for pound that Jerry Lee had more energy on almost all days than Elvis could release in his early career. But on the one proverbial any given day, and this day is it and this massive CD compilation serves as proof, the king was the King.

Later Elvis, the Elvis of Las Vegas, except for severe aficionados, was almost entirely forgettable but in the early to mid-1950s, and maybe a little later, when he was still hungry and still wanted to fight to be king of rock he more than held his own. That is the time of this compilation and the Elvis time any serious rock aficionado, or historically-inclined rock fan wants to look at. This five CD set provides all the ammunition you will ever need for the why behind why he drove the girls wild in the 1950s, and the rest of us, just ordinary teen guys, crazy trying how to figure out to break his spell. It’s wasn’t pretty because no way we could win.

But enough of that. Elvis sneers, swivel hips and those long side-burns aside what in this compilation goes down in rock history. Please note that some of these songs that are outstanding examples of his early work are done in several versions here, some very well done others less so. “That’s Where The Heartbreak Begins” has a nice talking part. “Heartbreak Hotel”, of course, although the lyrics are hardly the stuff of teen romance. The Carl Perkins rockabilly classic, “Blue Suede Shoes”, which Elvis made his own. Other rockabilly classics like “That ‘s All Right” and “Good Rockin’ Tonight”. Some covers like Roy Orbison’s “I Got A Woman”. “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog”. Ballads like “Love Me Tender” and “True Love”. And so on. If you want Elvis, good bad, or indifferent this is a primer, no, a graduate course in Elvisology.

Note: I have not mentioned “One Night” above because I want to pay special to that song. On every variation in this set he smokes it. This song, more so that “Jailhouse Rock", “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Don’t Be Cruel” gets my nod as the epitome of Elvis rock, sneer, and swivel. This is one time that he is not mailing it in. Now I know, finally, why those young girls of my generation were swooning, getting all sweaty and more over the mere mention of Elvis’ name. On this one Jerry Lee takes a back seat, way back. Wow!

One Night - Elvis Presley

One night with you
Is what I'm now praying for
The things that we two could plan
Would make my dreams come true

Just call my name
And I'll be right by your side
I want your sweet helping hand
My loves too strong to hide

Always lived, very quiet life
I ain't never did no wrong
Now I know that life without you
Has been too lonely too long

One night with you
Is what I'm now praying for
The things that we two could plan
Would make my dreams come true

Always lived, very quiet life
I ain't never did no wrong
Now I know that life without you
Has been too lonely too long

One night with you
Is what I'm now praying for
The things that we two could plan
Would make my dreams come true