The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

 

The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

 

 

 

Also by Ross Thomas

The Cold War Swap

The Seersucker Whipsaw

Cast a Yellow Shadow

The Singapore Wink

The Backup Men

The Porkchoppers

If You Can't Be Good

The Money Harvest

Yellow-Dog Contract

Chinaman's Chance

The Eighth Dwarf

The Mordida Man

Missionary Stew

Briarpatch

Out on the Rim

The Fourth Durango

Twilight at Mac's Place

Voodoo, Ltd.

Ah, Treachery!

 

 

 

Ross Thomas

 

 

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE.
Copyright © 1970 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction © 2003 by Tony Hiss. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Ross, 1926–1995.

 The fools in town are on our side / Ross Thomas.—1st St. Martin's
Minotaur ed.

    p.   cm.

ISBN 0-312-31582-1

1. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3570.H58F66    2003
813′.54—dc21

2002191953

First published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., in 1971

 

 D 1 0  9  8  7  6  5

Introduction

by Tony Hiss

 

It feels strangely out of sequence to be reintroducing Ross Thomas to American audiences since only eight years ago, at his death, he was a revered and enduring master among thriller writers.

Back in the mid-1990s, when cell phones were big and rare and used only for emergencies, all twenty-five of Thomas's books, which had been appearing almost annually between 1969 and 1994, were in print, and selling well; then-President of the United States Bill Clinton told reporters, “I love Ross Thomas"; and for almost two decades new titles by this two-time Edgar Award winner had been pounced on by critics eager to praise: “The arrival of a new Ross Thomas mystery is an event combining elements of both Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras, creating alternative fits of solemn praise and uncontrollable glee.”

Still, the world has moved on, and so many new bad things have happened since 1995 that the Cold War years Thomas chronicled so brilliantly and mockingly have started to seem far tamer than they were. As “orphans of the Cold War"—Thomas's own phrase, in an interview he gave during the last year of his life—his books have been slipping out of print, even though, as Thomas was quick to point out, “fraud and double-dealing for political or personal advantage are age-old themes that will not become extinct.” He could have added that
great writing is great writing, and that Dickens's novels weren't remaindered just because people had stopped fighting the Crimean War.

The flip side of this country's increasingly dysfunctional short-term memory loss is a chance to “rediscover” a writer whose light still shines brightly. Thomas, like Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler, was able to distill the postwar disillusionment of an entire generation of Americans. For Twain it was the wretched excesses of the Gilded Age after the Civil War, while Chandler got to write about staying honest during the Great Depression sandwiched in between World Wars I and II. Thomas came on the scene after America controlled half the world— and lost half its soul.

Generational links are often only symbolic (the title of
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
, for instance, was adapted from
Huckleberry Finn)
but, according to Thomas, Raymond Chandler once helped save his life. In a short piece Thomas wrote for the
Washington Post
Sunday “Book World” section in 1984 that has somehow been retrieved by a small German Web site—www.crime-corner.de/autoren-rossthomas. html (so far, the only Web site dedicated to Thomas's writings)—he remembered that, “One hour and thirty-five minutes before we were to land on the beach of an island in the Philippines called Cebu, the first scout handed me something called
Farewell My Lovely
by someone called Raymond Chandler. It was January of 1945, and 1 was eighteen.”

This, by the way, is a typical, even a classic Ross Thomas lead: laconic, spare, and fully accelerated from the outset; anchored in time and space and yet seen from afar; unsentimental, but so passionately interested in the possibilities that the next moment may bring some thing new, that he's willing to give any character, even himself, the benefit of the doubt. (He was famous for not knowing how a book would turn out when he sat down to write it.)

“The title,” Thomas's Chandler story continued, “sounded as if it could have been thought up by the American equivalent of Agatha Christie, whose works to this day I cannot read. Imagine my surprise,
as Dame Agatha might say, when I opened it to discover Philip Marlowe over on that mixed Central Avenue block in east Los Angeles. I lost the half-read Marlowe book on the beach just after the first scout was killed. I took over the dead man's job, and spent 109 days on the line wondering who Velma really was. In the midst of the heat and the fear and the dying, I decided I needed to be Philip Marlowe safely back in Los Angeles in that palmy year of 1940—in a time that would never change. It was a harmless enough notion that probably kept me sane.”

There is a biting, bracing wind blowing through Thomas's books, sometimes at gale force, sometimes only stirring at the curtains, a kind of healing bleakness. (He was planting a clue to this bedrock quality, I've always thought, in the one pseudonym he chose for himself: Oliver Bleeck.) The underlying tonic in Thomas's books—his lesson plan for transcending the intolerable—isn't pushed forward, and many readers may find themselves content in simply taking pleasure from his immense storytelling gifts, which dazzle all the more because they are so seemingly tossed-off (the hard work, carefully concealed, was in fact continuous; as Thomas once confessed to an interviewer, “I rewrite virtually everything, even notes to the guy who delivers the bottled water”).

The Fools in Town
showcases all his talents and hard-won effortlessness. As a scene-setter, Thomas instantly conjured richly detailed milieus on every continent (well, not Antarctica); the relentlessly drawn, full-scale portrait in this book of a corrupt Southern city almost creates a new genre—that of “investigative storyteller.” There were his endlessly inventive, eel-twisty plots; his flawlessly cadenced, movie-sharp dialogue; and the strengths and clevernesses of the complex, devious, hard-pressed, often disgraced, and frequently arrestingly named characters that he hurtles into nonstop action. (If you've ever wished for a book never to end,
The Fools in Town
comes close, with enough interlocking plots to stockpile a newly formed small country through its first ten years of literary production; the various adventures
of Lucifer C. Dye, Gorman Smalldane, and Homer Necessary take more than thirty-five years to play themselves out.)

A tour de force to end all tours de force—an Eiffel tour de force. Yet at the core of the book is something else again, since, for those who want to think about it, it raises, and offers an answer to, an unexpected question: What can you hope to find when you have only yourself to fall back on? An indelible scene near the beginning of the book describes the brutal Japanese bombing of Shanghai in August 1937, and according to that German Web site, it was written only after Thomas had scoured one hundred obscure memoirs of the incident, mostly by retired European civil servants. The picture he leaves you with is of a four-year-old American boy (Dye) clinging to the severed hand and wrist of his father, still with its wristwatch. Thomas is telling us to look always, at the same time, both at and beyond the immediate. The suggestion resonates in the body of another character, Homer Necessary, a hard-bitten ex-police chief, who has one brown eye, one blue eye.

All in all, an enormously rewarding, complicated book, that can be read for its exuberance or its sobriety. Either way, it lingers in the mind and soul. As reintroducers love to say, you're in for a real treat.

Welcome to Bleeck House.

 

Hain't we got all the fools in town
on our side? And ain't that a big
enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain,
Huckleberry Finn

The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

 

 

The debriefing took ten days in a sealed-off suite in the old section of the Army's
Letterman General Hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco and when it was finished, so was my career—if it could be called that.

They were polite enough throughout, perhaps even a bit embarrassed, providing that they felt anything at all, which I doubted, and the embarrassment may have prompted their unusual generosity when it came to the matter of severance pay. It amounted to twenty thousand dollars and, as Carmingler kept saying, it was all tax-free so that really ran it up to the equivalent of twenty-eight or even thirty thousand.

It was Carmingler himself who handed me the new passport along with the certified check drawn on something called the Brookhaven Corporation. He did it quickly, without comment, much in the same manner as he would shoot a crippled horse—a favorite perhaps, and when it was done, that last official act, he even unbent enough to pick up the phone and call a cab. I was almost sure it was the first time he had ever called a cab for anyone other than himself.

“It shouldn't take long,” he said.

“I'll wait outside.”

“No need for that.”

“I think there is.”

Carmingler produced his dubious look. He managed that by sticking
out his lower lip and frowning at the same time. He would use the same expression even if someone were to tell him it had stopped raining. “There's really no reason to—”

I interrupted. “We're through, aren't we? The loose ends are neatly tied off. The crumbs are all brushed away. It's over.” I liked to mix metaphors around Carmingler. It bothered him.

He nodded slowly, produced his pipe, and began to stuff it with that special mixture of his which he got from some tobacco shop in New York. I could never remember the shop's name although he had mentioned it often enough. He kept on nodding while he filled his pipe. “Well, I wouldn't put it quite that way.”

“No,” I said, “you wouldn't. But I would and that's why I'll wait outside.”

Carmingler, who loved horses if he loved anything, which again was doubtful, rose and walked around his desk to where I stood. He must have been forty or even forty-two then, all elbows and knee joints and what I had long felt was a carefully practiced, coltish kind of awkwardness. The flaming hair that stopped just short of being true madder scarlet half-framed his long narrow face, which I think he secretly wanted to resemble a horse. It looked more like a mule. A stubborn one. He held out his hand.

“Good luck to you.”

Sweet Christ, I thought, the firm handshake of sad parting. “By God, I appreciate that, Carmingler,” I said, giving his hand a brief, hard grasp. “You don't know how much I appreciate it.”

“No need for sarcasm,” he said stiffly. “No call for that at all.”

“Not for that or for anything else,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Sure,” I said and picked up the new plastic suitcase that failed utterly in its attempt to resemble cordovan. I turned, went through a door, down a hall, and out onto the semicircular drive where a pair of chained-down mortars that had been made in 1859 by some Boston firm called C.A. & Co. guarded the flagpole and the entrance to Letterman General Hospital, established 1898, just in time for the war with Spain. In the distance, there was Russian Hill to look at.