The Trials And Tribulation Of “Miss Judy Garland” (AKA Timmy Riley)-With The Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon Film Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” In Mind    

By Bart Webber

Timmy Riley, the youngest brother of the legendary high school and college football player Thunder Riley who led North Adamsville High School to the state division championship his senior year (1961), and also a fairly good football player, a tackle, in his own right a bunch of years ago told me that when he saw very masculine male star actor Tony Curtis and less masculine (maybe gay he thought at the time based more on his pretty face than any facts he knew then) star actor Jack Lemmon cross-dressing in the classic Billy Wilder film Some Like It Hot he began to feel free, discreetly free, to do the same. To go to his mother or one of three sisters’ closets and try some silky items on. As far as Marilyn Monroe who would become a darling of the cross-dresser and transvestite (now transsexual or some such term) sets (they are different) and behind number one queen Judy Garland would be the most popular character on the drag queen circuit left him cold. Nada.         

Now today that whole scene might seem archaic, seem old school and old-fashioned but let me tell you that was not the case back in the day. During the early 1960s one Timmy Riley, whatever his very secret identity, was a charter member of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre, read working poor, section of North Adamsville. Said corner boys I am ashamed to admit today thought nothing of “fag”- baiting each other, always testing for signs of anything less than whatever passed for the rules of manly behavior in those sullen days (and mostly poor boys long way from “home” weekend nights).

Moreover, we would fag-bait others who showed any sign of the feminine. Would and am very ashamed on this one go down to Provincetown, usually, no, always drunk looking to fag-bait, and beat up the real gays we knew populated that town. And the leader of the pack at who knows at what emotional expense, the secret cross-dresser and closet gay guy of his mother and sister’s silky goods was one Timmy Riley corner boy in good standing, Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. That would not always be the case since after high school maybe a little later, I had lost contact with him for a while when I was away at college and in the military in the late 1960s, when being openly gay was starting to be somewhat accepted he made the cardinal mistake of telling his pious Roman Catholic parents and a few others of his real sexual identity. You could not do that that then in the Acre and certainly not to pious parents. The heat got so bad, the backlash so rough he had to flee town and would eventually wind up in gay-friendly San Francisco. (His parents never were reconciled with Timmy’s decisions, especially to go to Frisco and become a leader in the drag queen community, not exactly the same as the gay community, but definitely not Roman Catholic-stamped and all parties remained estranged until his parent’s deaths.)

Like I said I lost contact with Timmy for a while until I ran into Allan Jackson, another corner boy, at a class reunion who told me that he had been in contact with Timmy for a while. More than that really Timmy in Frisco did what he always wanted to do to express himself ever since that long ago film film exploded in his face. He would go to work in a “drag queen” circuit club in North Beach as Miss Judy Garland complete with songbook. Eventually and this is where Allan comes in big time Timmy would manage then buy with Allan’s financial help the then notorious but now merely world tourist attraction KitKat Club in North Beach. And the number two fag-baiter back in the day behind one Timmy Riley-yes- one Allan Jackson. Go figure.

I would eventually get out to Frisco and see Timmy, oops, Miss Judy Garland, and cut up old torches. That is when he told me about the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon fantasies that drove him crazy all through high school. I cried, or maybe we cried a tear at the time for old times’ sake. Recently on another trip out to Frisco I stayed at one of Timmy’s (you know who I mean) condos and one night he came over after work and asked if I would like to see Some Like It Hot which I had either never seen or had seen only parts of. I said sure. I had to laugh along with Timmy as he gave a total critique of what was wrong with the cross-dresser pair from their dippy hats to their silly shoes. Had to laugh as Timmy gave an equally powerful critique of the basic premise of the film that cross-dressing and such was okay as long as you returned to real manhood when the coast was clear. Meaning once the bad guys who caused the need for feminine disguise were wasted and everybody could revert to homogeneity. Except guys, gay guys like Timmy, like Miss Judy Garland had to suppress their harmless desires at who knows what costs. Amen.   

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- Road Song Blues-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- Road Song Blues-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

***********

Road Song Blues-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

“What your all-time favorite road album, Sam?” asked his old friend Ralph Morris as they were driving to Washington for the nth time in order to place their warm bodies on the line once again for some progressive cause, this time the struggle against escalating war in the Middle East by the Obama administration. They had been doing such anti-war duty since they had “met” each back on May Day 1971 when they, Sam a very activist anti-warrior and Ralph a returned Vietnam veteran who had turned on a war that he had fought, among the thousands arrested for trying to “shut down the government if it would not shut down the war” (the Vietnam War then for those too young or those who have forgotten). By the way while it might have been the nth time they had driven down to D.C. on these missions of mercy that was not always the way they had got there. In their youths they were as likely to have thumbed from either Boston, Sam’s base in those days, or Albany, Ralph’s base picking up rides from others heading that way for the same purposes or friendly truckers looking for somebody, anybody to talk to at seventy miles an hour having been on the road probably sixteen straight and going stir crazy. 

In any case Sam and Ralph making sure they cleared the vicious Connecticut State Police on U.S. 95 or else they could expect, at the least, some serious hassles. Maybe they had taken the dreaded Greyhound bus with its eight million stops and the inevitable winding up beside (a) some scatter-brained mother who let her child run wild on her lap and who then exploded into your space as well, (b) some severely over-weight snoring behemoth, male or female, (c), some lonely-heart girl who you could tell if you had given any thought at all to talking to her had some serious mental health issues or she would be sitting in some “boss” car with some max daddy and not travelling alone on some forlorn public transportation. Maybe worse riding down with a busload of activists aboard a “movement” rented bus and the other denizens wanted to stay up all night talking politics, not bad in itself, but talk politics like they just invented the profession and wanted to fill your empty vessel with every arcane fact they had gleaned from the latest alternative newspapers or from Professor so-and-so in some introductory political science class. Hell, the Marxists were the worst, some obvious products of the leafy suburbs and elite colleges always talking about the class struggle and working people which is exactly the roots that both men had come from and so knew from day one of their respective existences exactly what the class struggle was even if they could not have named the phenomenon as such back then.

Ralph reminded Sam that a couple of times they had gone “bourgeois,” (Sam’s expression since he actually did hang with some radicals and reds in Cambridge in the early 1970s when he was at his wits end about how to stop the “fucking,” also his word, Vietnam War before he met Ralph) when Sam had latched onto a Mayfair swell daughter from Radcliffe who insisted they all fly down to National Airport on Poppa’s credit card (“Poppa” her term of endearment). Her argument-they by flying rather than travelling the roads for ten hours up and then ten hours back would save time for other things, movement things of course since she was one of those leafy suburbs radicals that Sam was fatally attracted to at the time. Like then they didn’t have anything but time since they were that minute “full-time” activists. 

But this early Saturday morning spring day Sam and Ralph were as they had the majority of times after the big gold rush of the 1960s uprising ebbed into nothing driving in a car, this time Sam’s, down to D.C.  A call had come out from the National Anti-War Network headquartered in that town for all peace-loving groups and individuals to make their voices heard against the very most recent escalation of the war situation in the Middle East, in Iraq, with the announcement by the Obama administration that the government was upping the ante on the number of “advisors,” read troops on the ground being sent in. The ostensible reason given by the administration was to help, once again, to stem the panic of the Baghdad government over the constitutional inability of its own armed forces to not flee the minute an enemy cannon (or maybe any cannon) was heard in the distance. The enemy de jus now a nasty Islamic fundamentalist outfit called ISIS, and called about seven variations of that designation including the “self-proclaimed Islamic State” depending on which news source you got your news from.

The funny part, at least Sam when he mentioned the “self-proclaimed” moniker that the newscasters were using ever since ISIS starting coming out of the hills of Syria and Iraq like bats out of hell, to Ralph back in the summer of 2014, was that they actually controlled enough land in the area to be de facto rulers of those regions. To be the Islamic State they claimed to control. Nobody then could claim they were not a state, except maybe the government in Baghdad whose writ barely extended beyond the city limits. Ralph thought that was ironic as well, especially since the regime in Baghdad was barely even holding the city itself at that point.    

That gives the “why” of why they were on the road that early morning. Hell the sun had not even come up and Ralph had not even had time to grab a cup of coffee when Sam drove up to his house in Troy where he had been born and grew up, raised a family and all of that. Sam had stayed with a cousin whom he had not seen in a while that Friday night in Albany and they agreed to get an early start for the long ride south. The “why” of the question though needs a little further explanation. Both men had  been immersed in the music of their generation, the generation Sam, the more literary of the two, had called the Generation of ’68, in recognition that that seminal year was decisive in many ways, not all good, for the fate of a small but significant segment of their generation. Of course that musical bonding meant for both of them the classic rock of their coming of age in the mid-1950s. The time of Elvis, Carl, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Wanda, Jerry Lee and a whole cast of lesser names and one-note johnnies and janies. For Ralph it had also meant a small appreciation of the blues, mostly Chicago blues of the Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, James Cotton strand and for Sam a very big appreciation of the folk music minute of the early 1960s. Folk, a genre that Ralph sneered at every time Sam, or anybody mentioned the word, or the times on trips like this when he hoped to high heaven that Sam would not go on and on about some folkie road songs when he had asked the question.

But coffee, or no coffee, as Ralph (who during the first stretch of the drive was the “co-pilot” and therefore in charge of the musical selections and the CDs in the car’s CD system) the question was on the floor. Was on the floor like it had been ever since they started driving down to D.C. some forty plus years before. It had become something like the rituals kids go through counting numbers of various states’ license plates on the road, or kinds of automobiles, or kinds of signs, you know to pass the time away. Although for Sam and Ralph it had more meaning since at any given point in their relationship the answer might have varied.      

Here are some examples. About ten years before, 2004,2005, when they were travelling down to protest the then “early” phase, another one of those escalations during the Bush administration of the now seemingly never-ending war in Iraq, Ralph had been in a second coming of Elvis phase. Somehow through YouTube or some Internet site he had heard Elvis’ One Night Of Sin and had flipped out(the original more sexually suggestive song not, One Night With You, the one released to the panicky parents public worried about the dreaded unnamed “s” word creeping up on their Jimmys and Marys). See while he was a child of the rock and roll 1950s he didn’t like Elvis or his music for the very simple reason that every girl in Troy (and probably America, if not the world) would have nothing to do with (a) guys who did not slick their hair back, (b) guys who could not swivel their hips, and, (c) who did not have Elvis’ patented sneer for them to take off his face. So it was personal (and Ralph was not alone as Sam mentioned one time about a schoolboy friend his, Bart Webber, who felt the same way at the time). But once Ralph heard that song he went out to Tower Records and got every Sun Recording Studio CD he could find (Sun, the recording studio of early Elvis, Elvis when he was lean and hungry and probably wore that sneer in earnest). So that trip was filled with Elvis, Elvis, Elvis all the way down including such classics as That’s Alright, Mama, Jailhouse Rock, and his version of Shake, Rattle and Roll. That turned out to be okay since Sam liked him too after not paying attention to his early music since about 1958, or whenever Elvis stopped being lean and hungry and started recording nondescript songs and ugly strictly for the dough movies.  So you know what Ralph’s answer would have been during his Elvis sighting.          

What had not been alright was during the first Gulf War (the one Bush I got heated about when Iraq went into Kuwait of all places) Sam had gotten back into a folk thing which Ralph though he had gotten over. Apparently Sam had, between marriages, he had been married and divorced twice (as had Ralph), gone on a “date” with some woman he met in a Harvard Square bar and she had wanted to go to the Club Passim (the then and current incarnation of the old Club 47 which spawned Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, The Jim Kweskin Jug Band and a million other one song folkies) to see, Jesus, to see Dave Von Ronk (Ralph’s expression). He had dated that woman, Leslie, for several months so he/they would cut up old touches about that folk minute of the 1960s. As a result when it was time to head to Washington in the early winter of 1991 Sam told Ralph that he had been saving the three CD set of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music he had just purchased (at a steep price for that was the early days of CDs and such “exotic” staples cost aficionados) for the trip down.  For those who do not know that compilation has over eighty songs from the hills and hollows, down in Appalachia and places like that.

Ralph, an ex-Vietnam War soldier who had served eighteen months and as a result had turned drastically and dramatically against that war, and the American government’s endless wars ever since, was ready to lose his pacifistic feelings, ready to take up the gun again which he hadn’t shouldered since late 1969, as Sam told him that bit of news. And he, Ralph, would have to as co-pilot place the bloody things in the bloody CD player. That one is best left forgotten.             

Not to be forgotten though was the time when they went down to D.C. to protest Ronald Reagan’s merciless support for the Contras down in El Salvador (and Nicaragua when the American military spotlight hit that small nation) in the mid-1980s. Ralph had “re-discovered” the Doors a rock group which had provided the background music for a million midnight parties when the booze and drugs were being freely passed around. Sam was more than happy to have Ralph place those tapes in the tape-deck and blast away Light My Fire, L.A. Woman, The End, Spanish Caravan. And you know the time flew on that trip for some reason which need not detain us here.  

So you get the picture of the substance behind the “why” of Ralph’s question. And you might have also guessed although Ralph is not a lawyer by profession (he ran a high-skill electrical shop before he retired recently turning over the day to day operations to his son) that he had an answer to the question he was asking Sam on that trip. Just the week before he had been listening to WXKE, a country, a progressive country radio station according to Ralph when Sam asked about the kind of music played by the station, when he heard some lonesome cowboy voice singing a song called Colorado Girl. He liked it right away, liked it a lot and so waited for the DJ (a guy who called himself Sleepy LaGrange) to announce the song title and singer. Turned out to be a guy by the name of Townes Van Zandt, a guy who had had a disturbed life down in Texas and places like that and had died back in the mid-1990s from a heart attack probably brought on by heavy drug use but who had written a ton of songs that many other singers had covered. Ralph admitted (as did Sam) that he had never heard of the guy before. But he was the guy who wrote Pancho and Lefty that Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and a bunch of other singers had covered and which both men knew about. But Ralph was intrigued enough to go on YouTube and find out what else he had written. There was a ton of stuff on the site by him (or covers by others). Some very good, most kind of lonesome prairie dog sad, mostly with a very close call with reality. But Ralph was hooked. He did not have time to run over to Albany to the last remaining brick and mortar record store in the area to get some CDs for the road so he went on line to Amazon and downloaded a bunch on his iPod and so you know Ralph’s answer to his own question.     

As Sam stops at a truck stop diner off of U.S. 87 South so Ralph could get that desperate cup of coffee he needed to keep him awake for the next several hours they were listening to Van Zandt’s If I Needed You. The road ahead is long so we will have to wait for Sam’s answer…

When Private Detectives, Shamuses, Gumshoes, Key-Hole Peepers Stepped Up In Class-“The New P.I.” Circa 1950s-Ross MacDonald’s “The Ivory Grin” (1952)-A Book Review

When Private Detectives, Shamuses, Gumshoes, Key-Hole Peepers Stepped Up In Class-“The New P.I.” Circa 1950s-Ross MacDonald’s “The Ivory Grin” (1952)-A Book Review

Book Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Ivory Grin, by Ross MacDonald, 1952

Well the battle lines are finally drawn, the dirty underbelly of this cutthroat business can see the light of day. Sam Lowell, who used to be the official senior film critic in the days when Allan Jackson, recently returned as a contributing editor or some such make-shift title pressed upon Greg Green by the Editorial Board conveniently headed by on Sam Lowell, ran the show, was the site manager which meant that he doled out the assignments to friend and foe alike, has laid down the gauntlet or whatever you call it when you are challenged to a no holds barred unto death duel. It seems Sam, as my good friend and mentor Seth Garth, warned me would happen, has finally blown his gasket, has in his words “had enough.” Had enough of being challenged on his “cred,” his term, on the issue of his expertise in the film noir world. Has taken umbrage, my term, on my continual reference to his so-called definitive tome on the genre The Life And Times Of Film Noir:1940-1960 as so much eyewash, so “retro” and out of date and geared to the hoary Dashiell Hammett- Raymond Chandler-Phillip Larkin trio who allegedly took the, Sam’s expression, “parlor pink amateur detective” and made him, and it was solely hims in that world of blood and guts hard-nosed avenging angels with angles seeking rough-edged justice in this wicked old world.

Yawn. Yawn to threadbare theory and yawn, double yawn to a nine hundred, maybe I had better write the number in numerical form so you too can have your eyes boggled 900, paged volume which by my estimation could have been done in say three hundred pages. The use of the word estimation no accident since try as I might I lost interest about the time I got to 1953 when he dribbled on and on about one Mike Hammer and how despite his ardent anti-communism and bull in a china shop manner was a hard-boiled lady’s man of a detective in the mold of  Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, Hammett’s Sam Spade (notably absent was his Nick and Nora Charles except by indirection), and Larkin’s Jack Logan.

A reviewer, a conscientious reviewer, can only be expected to take so much, take a volume loaded with plenty of book and film reviews allegedly written by Mr. Lowell in his salad days which formed the bulk of the work so he essentially double-dipped getting paid, I hear, by the word from Jackson and getting whatever royalties from the pricey in those days twenty-five dollars from the book publisher Wainwright Press. (I would be remiss, would be taken to task, and continually chuckle and continue to write every chance I get as well if I didn’t mention Seth Garth’s reaction when I asked him if he had read all 900 plus pages of Sam’s volume. Seth, who has known Sam since Hector was a pup, Seth’s expression, gave me his patented Seth smirk and said are you kidding nobody, not even Sam could read that thing, a real snorer was the way he put. Seth also insinuated what is now common knowledge around here on the question of authorship of his reviews that Sam surely had not written the whole thing himself given his skirt-chasing drunken revels in those days and that Seth had written half or at least gave lots of input into the project.]

I have made it clear for a while now, at least since I got my own by-line, thanks Seth, after surviving about six different onslaughts from Sam on noir and young Will Bradley on Marvel Comic so-called heroes, that I intend to be the diva for the 21^st film noir world. Sam balked at that idea when I first presented it in print-and Seth said go for it. What has Sam really in a lather is that after he finished his tome he never updated the damn thing so that all the neo-noir, all the films that came after those based on his work are sealed with seven seals to him. Like any good reviewer I saw my spot, my place in the vacant landscape and I am going to make my mark. I have decided to deal with an expose of Sam’s omissions and neglect (like as I mentioned given short shrift to Nick and Nora Charles despite almost two hundred pages on Hammett’s Spade and fifty alone on his early nameless Continental Op in Red Harvest) by starting with a classic writer, film adapter, who Sam gave short shrift to since his career spanned well past the 1960s benchmark, Ross MacDonald (Ken Millar real name). Sam barely mentions him, barely mentions his central private detective Lew Archer although Lew had all of the balls of Marlowe and Spade and about twenty times more psychological insight in what drove up against the wall “perps” over the edge.       

Properly speaking Lew Archer, at least in this first book, The Ivory Grin, that I picked at random out of the twenty-plus books in the Archer series, despite the his short height, or at least that is what is known about his physical stature moves away from the really bull by the horns, knock heads and let God separate out the guilty from the innocent at his leisure, skirt-chasing of Spade-Marlowe-Logan trio much touted by Sam as the epitome of the post-parlor pink detective world. Those guys except when they actually wrap up a case, beating the public coppers with a gong while they are still scratching their heads, to take down some cruddy criminals best gotten off the streets leave me cold, could have better gone back to key-hole peeping before say Chandler, for example, let them handle cold cases, got them out of the threadbare offices waiting around sucking up low-rent whiskey from the bottom desk drawer. Archer used his wits and deductive powers to bring a little rough justice to the world, what Seth, citing a guy from his youth named the Scribe, called this wicked old world.

I am sure, well maybe not sure but I hope, when Sam, or whoever he has read other’s reviews and write his reviews these days finally realizes that his balloon has been burst he will drag up some escapade of Marlowe’s saving an old dowager with wild daughters some grief or Spade busting up a stuff of dreams con or Logan outwitting the dragon king by stealth to counter my contentions about Mr. Archer. Let him do his best. Meanwhile Lew, short or tall, chain-smoker or dope head, drunk or sober will by guile and indirection solves his mysteries without bang-bang and sucker punches every two pages. Here is how he figured out what happened to Charles Singleton when he went slumming among the plebes and got nothing but that ivory grin in the end for his troubles.

Yes, that is the Charles Singleton of the very, very Singleton family that came over with John and Priscilla on the merry Mayflower who made a name for himself in World War II as a pilot, a lady’s man in full uniform and a guy who after the war knew how to turn a dollar-if he had to. But see Charles, and maybe it was that too much inter-breeding among too close cousins which destroyed many old-line families, had a kinky side, liked to go down in the mud with whores, or as the term was used then maybe now too loose women of no known address. As long as they were Helen of Troy beautiful and willing to succumb to his kinky side, to the wild side. That is what tripped him up in the end, what caused Lew to lose some sleep because Charles picked up some tramp, some round-heeled beauty with no vocabulary but who gave good head (unspoken but assumed in 1950s dime store detective literature) in some gin mill out in California when he was stationed in the Air Force and winning fistfuls of medals.

This woman, let’s give her a name beyond her “profession,” Alicia was nothing but a mantrap, was nowhere but from hunger grabbing onto whatever safe harbor she could grab onto. Problem, very big problem, whatever her feelings for Charles and all was that she had been a second level gangster’s moll back in the Midwest, a nice nest but dangerous especially if somebody else takes something from a gangster-then bang-bang and no questions asked. Oh, another little problem she was married out West, out in the California valley to a Walter Mitty-type doctor who was running a low-rent medical practice which was not giving dear Alicia the kind of life she had expected. The long and short of it was Alicia had three guys on her string.

That would be the undoing of one Charles Singleton, he of mansions and Mayflowers, once her gangster man who was getting a bit screwy came West and found out she was shacking up with a Mayfair swell. Bang-bang poor Charles. That was where Lew came in first as a replacement for a corrupt private detective looking for the main chance by Charles’ blue-haired mother and subsequently by one of those too closely related female cousins who was in love with her flyer boy. Mission: find out where the hell Charles had disappeared to. To pose the question was to give the answer. Along the way a young black woman who was trying to help Alicia got murdered as did that self-serving private eye. In all three murders and a few twists and turns.

Here is where human nature as it has evolved thus far gets a big workout.  Everybody and their sister were trying to cover up the fact that our gangster with a screw loose had shot and killed Charles. The helpful black woman, the gangster’s ill-disposed sister, Alicia who in desperation brought the seemingly mortally wounded Charles to hubby doctor’s clinic to see if he could survive.  He didn’t but not due to that gangster fusillade. Old Walter Mitty doc loved his Alicia, wanted to protect her in his own way. Yeah, Doc blew his Hippocratic Oath and did bleeding from all pores Charles in. Moreover, to cover his tracks he dissected the guy and left him a skeleton in a closet where nobody but Lew could figure out what happened. Nice work Lew and the public coppers are still scratching their heads having been out-classed by a new breed of private eye.