Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (97 page)

Weird Tales
became Howard’s principal outlet. The magazine, launched in 1923, was chronically underfunded, but it would publish many distinguished writers in its weird genre – notably H. P. Lovecraft. This ‘father of fantasy’ became a correspondent, literary adviser and patron of Howard’s. Collectively,
WT
contributors imagined a mythic universe, with superhuman heroes, and ‘pure’ violence expressed – principally – through the sword. Howard varied his product with two-fisted series heroes such as Solomon Kane, Sailor Steve Costigan, hitting his destined groove with King Kull, barbarian monarch, and the king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. These, however, were mere stepping stones to his monumental creation, Conan the Barbarian.

There is something indelibly juvenile about Howard’s fiction, and he himself never outgrew the wish-fulfilment and extravagant lusts of adolescence (naked maidens, stripped of their silks and narrowly evading the ravisher’s cruel thrust, feature prominently in his stories). An only child, he lived with his family – close above all to his mother – all his life. To keep his father happy he enrolled for a four-year course in book-keeping which he had no intention of making his career. By the early 1930s he was making good money, and could afford his own car. He had one, unconsummated, love affair, with a Cross Plains schoolteacher, Novalyne Price. Her late-life memoir of the unhappy episode is the basis of the excellent film on Howard,
The Whole Wide World
(1996), starring Vincent D’Onofrio as Howard and Renée Zellweger as Novalyne.

Conan came into the world in December 1932 – a child of Black Monday, 1929. Fantasies of omnipotence compensated, all too obviously, for the collective impotence inflicted on American manhood by Wall Street and rampant unemployment. The eugenic theories popular at the time – later prostituted by the Nazis – are distantly articulated in the mighty Cimmerian. Norman Spinrad, in 1972, published a witty alternative universe novel,
The Iron Dream
, in which Hitler emigrates to America and becomes a Sword and Sorcery author. What kind of German dictator, one wonders, would the author of Conan the Barbarian have been? Conan is first introduced as a stranger in a low-life Zamorian beer hall:

This person was as much out of place in that den as a gray wolf among mangy rats of the gutters. His cheap tunic could not conceal the hard, rangy lines of his
powerful frame, the broad heavy shoulders, the massive chest, lean waist, and heavy arms. His skin was brown from outland suns, his eyes blue and smoldering; a shock of tousled black hair crowned his broad forehead. From his girdle hung a sword in a worn leather scabbard.

Conan’s era is ‘the Hyborian Age’ before the rise of the so-called ‘great’ civilisations (‘civilisation corrupts’ is a theme in Howard’s fiction).

Howard’s hero was a huge success and he was attracting adulation at the time of his death. His suicide was precipitated by the breakdown of his love affair with Novalyne, the failure of magazines (pre-eminently the forever financially strapped
Weird Tales
) to pay up but – most of all – by his depressive temperament exacerbated by the terminally ill condition of his mother. As Howard’s leading critic, Rusty Burke, records:

On the morning of the 11th [June 1936], Robert asked the nurse attending Mrs. Howard if she thought his mother would ever regain consciousness, and was told she would not.

Robert Howard got up and walked into his room, where he typed a four-line couplet on the Underwood typewriter that had served him for ten years:

All fled, all done,

So lift me on the pyre.

The feast is over

And the lamps expire.

He then walked out of the house and got into his 1935 Chevy. The hired cook stated later that she saw him raise his hands in prayer. Was he praying or preparing the gun? She then heard a shot, and saw Robert slump over the steering wheel. He lingered eight agonising hours before dying from the wound to his head. His mother died the next day, never having regained consciousness. They were buried alongside each other. Since his death, Howard has achieved cult status and his creations – principally Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonya – have become industrial-scale franchises. It seems unfair, somehow, that he would never know.

All of us that started the game with a crooked cue …

Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He gives a vivid account of his first twenty years in the autobiographical
Bad Boy
(1953). Thompson’s father was a feckless legal accountant and erstwhile sheriff. While Jim was growing up, the family led an unsettled existence in Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska. Thompson was largely self-taught. While still at school, he worked as a cub journalist and – most formatively – as a bellhop in a Fort Worth hotel during Prohibition and the roaring twenties. Here it was he picked up his grittily disillusioned view of life: ‘Failure, it seemed, could only be offset by ability. The “sharp” received every consideration, the dull got nothing.’ Such ‘sharpness’ is the most valued commodity in Thompson’s grim world. A second formative influence was his encounter with a confidence trickster, Allie Ivers, who inspired the character of Roy Dillon in Thompson’s best known novel,
The Grifters
(1963).

At the age of eighteen Thompson came down with ‘a complete nervous collapse, pulmonary tuberculosis and delirium tremens’. On his recovery – and hotly pursued by Prohibition Officers – he took to the road.
Bad Boy
ends at this point with Thompson laughing ironically at his fate (‘I guess I just don’t know of anything else to do’).
Faute de mieux
Thompson went on to work as a journalist, but had continued problems with drink. His novel
The Alcoholics
(1953) ends with the hero, transparently Thompson himself, being checked into a sanatorium with little hope of his emerging a changed man. Nor did he. Thompson spent a short period at the University of Nebraska in 1929 and it was here that he began to write fiction. He married in 1931 and had three children – but he was an egregiously bad husband and father.

From 1936 to 1938 Thompson was involved with the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project. At this stage of his life he was radically left-wing. The Depression, as with James M. Cain, darkened and hardened his view of America. After publishing two straight hardback novels with a political message in the early 1940s – neither of which made the slightest mark – Thompson (now in California) took up work as a journalist with the
San Diego Journal
. He wrote his subsequent fiction principally for Lion Books, a downmarket firm. The relationship was cultivated by Arnold Hano, a senior editor at Lion in the early 1950s, who encouraged Thompson to write his blacker-than-
noir
crime novels.

Thompson’s fiction was marketed in paperback (with print runs as high as 200,000) as a short-life drugstore-stand product. Serious interest in Thompson as a genre genius began to generate in the 1980s. The quintessentially Thompsonesque
thriller is
The Killer Inside Me
(1952). Lou Ford, the hero-narrator is deputy sheriff in ‘Central City’, a small town in Texas. On the surface, Ford is a good old hometown boy, but inside he is consumed by what he calls ‘the sickness’, a need to murder. His doctor father discovered early on that his son was a psychopath, and sterilised him. The novel – narrated autobiographically with a chilling charm – begins with Lou becoming involved with a new whore in town, Joyce Lakeland. She is a masochist and enjoys Lou’s violence as foreplay. But he batters her to death (as he thinks), and sets up the son of a local businessman to pay for the crime. A string of other murders ensue: Lou strangles a suspect Greek boy, who thinks Lou is his only friend (making it look like suicide) and beats his fiancée Amy to a pulp, after a particularly satisfying love-making. The novel ends in a bloody shoot-out, and Lou’s conclusion that everyone starts the game with a crooked cue.

The Killer Inside Me
is, like Jack Finney’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, a prime example of 1950s, Cold War paranoia. You can trust no one – not even the smalltown lovable sheriff. Thompson’s novel also indicates the greater freedoms of pulp fiction at this period where sexual reference is concerned. While middle America was recoiling at the ‘frankness’, so-called, of novels like
Peyton Place
, Thompson could create scenes such as that in which Lou’s fiancée Amy, who has guessed during oral sex (by his ‘smell’) that he has earlier made love to Joyce, turns on him with: ‘You screwed her. You’ve been doing it all along. You’ve been putting her dirty insides inside of me, smearing me with her.’ Lou responds by beating her to death.

When Hano left Lion in 1954, and the imprint gave up paperback originals with the collapse of the ANC-based wholesaling system, the most creative phase of Thompson’s life came to an end. His career then took a new turn with a new patron. Stanley Kubrick was an admirer, and contracted Thompson to do the screenplays for
The Killing
(1956) and
Paths of Glory
(1957), an anti-war film, set in the First World War, which is more savagely radical than anything else the director did. Less gloriously, Thompson did script work for the TV series
Ironside
. His late and posthumous popularity was boosted by films made of his own work, notably the Steve McQueen-starring
The Getaway
and Stephen Frears’s Oscar-winning adaptation of
The Grifters
(1989). Women, whisky, and hard living had long done for Thompson who once told his wife Alberta (the woman who cannily managed his posthumous estate) that he would have to wait ten years after his death until he was famous. So it was.

Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore, the son of an English mother and a Chinese surgeon father. Mandarin was his first language. On the break-up of his parents’ marriage in 1919, he left Singapore with his mother, to be educated at public school in England. He qualifies – though no one has actually awarded him the title – as his adopted country’s first post-colonial novelist, or America’s, depending how you look at it.

Yin left King’s College, Cambridge, degreeless, in order to write. He had sold his first story while still in his teens. Xenophobia may have played a part in his abandoning university. The word ‘half-breed’ would haunt him and doubtless play into the ultra-occidental style of his most famous fictional character, Simon Templar. His father disowned him, as a ne’er-do-well. In 1926, Yin disowned his father, in a sense, by changing his name by deed poll to Leslie Charles Bowyer Charteris Ian. It was ostensibly a tribute to the founder of the Hellfire Club, Colonel Francis Charteris. Other accounts suggest the name was plucked from a telephone directory for its overt Englishness. Pseudonymy, masquerade and disguised identity would be central in Charteris’s later thrillers.

For a few years, Charteris ‘hoboed’ in classic thriller-writer apprentice-style. He picked up knowledge of the ‘real’ world – as a bartender, seaman, gold-prospector and professional bridge player. He lived in Paris for some time, toying with a career in art. The only extant filmed interview with him is conducted in fluent French. His debut novel
X Esquire
was published in 1927 and featured the first of his many ‘gentleman avenger’ heroes, who saves England from a dastardly plot to flood the country with lethal ciggies. It sold well. Simon Templar, the ‘Saint’, was introduced in Charteris’s third novel,
Meet the Tiger
(1928). A gentleman of means, in his early thirties, Templar is tall, dark, Savile Row-suited, ultra-English and impeccably looked after by his ‘man’ ’Orace. He was to remain unchangingly young for three decades.

Charteris’s career was boosted by his association with the Amalgamated Press’s weekly magazine,
The Thriller
, launched in 1929. In 1930, the Saint patented his haloed matchstick man as his calling card. Other stock ingredients, honed over the decades, were Templar’s Scotland Yard contact, Chief Inspector Teal, and his female accomplice, Patricia Holm, whom the Saint never quite gets around to marrying. Charteris himself made four marriages and was divorced three times. Encouraged by his American sales, he removed himself (and the Saint) to the US in 1932 and stayed there many years. There was lingering ‘yellow peril’ phobia (specifically the
vicious Chinese Exclusion Act) which denied him citizenship for ten years. He eventually got it – Americans loved him, even if America didn’t.
The Saint in New York
(1935) was hugely successful, especially after the 1938 film and its successors, starring the suave expatriate English actor, George Sanders. Were it not for his oriental features, Charteris was good-looking enough to have played the role himself.