crime

The Ex- Files: Ex-Wife, Ex-Husband, Ex-Mistress, Ex-Racketeer, etc.

Lobby card for The Divorcee, the 1930 film adaptation of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife
Lobby card for The Divorcee, the 1930 film adaptation of Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (1930).

As part of my current project of digging into the source texts of Hollywood Pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, I spent much of February exploring the rabbit-hole of the brief-lived phenomenon of books inspired by (or simply exploiting) the success and notoriety of Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel, Ex-Wife. Recently reissued by Faber (UK) and McNally (US) and featured in the title of Marsha Gordon’s biography of Parrott, Becoming the Ex-Wife, Ex-Wife is no longer a neglected book. But what most readers don’t know — even Gordon mentions it only in passing — is the extent to which Ex-Wife led to a whole series of Ex-titled books, most of them drawing upon or taking off from Parrott’s book.

To set this overview in context, I have to take say a little bit about Parrott and her bestseller.

Cover of the first US edition of Ex-Wife.
Cover of the first US edition of Ex-Wife.

• Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott
New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1929
When Ex-Wife first appeared, it was considered such a volatile mixture of sex, drink, and changing morals that its publishers kept its author’s name off the first five printings and initially marketed it as nonfiction. Even after Ursula Parrott, then a prolific writer of magazine short stories, was credited on the dust jacket, it was claimed to be her autobiography. By then, it had been declared unfit for circulation by the venerable Watch and Ward Society of Parrott’s hometown of Boston — which only speeded up the rate at which copies flew out of bookstores.

“My husband left me four years ago,” declares Pat, the narrator. “Why — I don’t precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he.” Though divorce was still considered something of a social embarrassment (I had a distant cousin who never told her husband of 60 years that her parents had divorced in 1915), what was most shocking to readers was this blasé attitude of the two parties involved. Decades before the term “open marriage” was coined, the practice of flexible fidelity had become so prevalent, or perceived to be, that publishers and Hollywood studios felt obliged to both cover and condemn it. (See Party Husband (book and movie) or Illicit (movie).)

Ex-Wife shows that flexible fidelity required a far more flexibility than many Americans were capable of. Pat and Peter marry, spend time in Europe, maintain busy work and social lives, and everything seems grand for a time. Well, aside from Pat’s pregnancy: “No baby, at least no baby for years and years,” Peter cautions her. “You are too young and nice-looking, and I don’t want you to be hurt.” Meaning he doesn’t want to have a wife who’s less than ideal arm candy. Or the financial and emotional responsibility for two other lives. When Peter has a casual affair, he expects Pats to take it, well, casually. When Pat responds in kind, though, Peter recoils: “I always thought you were the cleanest person in the world.” Open marriage quickly turns into open conflict. “I’ll teach you to go through my pockets for money or anything, you bitch,” says Peter, and strikes Pat across the mouth. Yet neither admits to feelings of jealousy because jealousy “was too outrageously old-fashioned.”

Although not strictly autobiographical, Ex-Wife has numerous parallels with Ursula Parrott’s own story and her first marriage to reporter Lindesay Parrott. Both Parrott and Pat cheated and were cheated on, lubricated their lives with too much Prohibition alcohol, enjoyed the financial independence of working, and resented the uneven distribution of practical and emotional responsibilities between wife and man. Pat echoes a sentiment frequently voiced by Parrott: “Freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.”

Though Pat soon adapts to life after marriage (her diary fills with entries like, “Dinner — Richard”; “C. L. C. — the Ritz — 7:15”; “Dominic — to dine at the Cecelia”), she never quite settles into the role of the gay divorcée. Indeed, Ex-Wife is as much an artifact of 17th century Boston Puritanism as of the Roaring Twenties. Adultery was then still the most common basis for divorce and though Pat doesn’t have to wear a red “A”, she still carries around a label of ostracism: “You’re an ex-wife,” her friend Lucia tells her, “because it is the most important thing to know about you … explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you.”

As Parrott portrays it, life as an ex-wife is less carefree than nihilistic. “While I was married,” Pat writes, “I saved money and made plans for the next fifty years and so on. Afterward, I did not make plans for the month after next. It seemed such a waste of time.” After years of socializing, brief affairs, and a cast of a thousand escorts, Pat surrenders her freedom for the security of marriage to Nathaniel, a dullish but reliable man who celebrates her “obvious wholesomeness.” It’s not a case so much of living happily ever after as living comfortably ever after. Pat has had her flings and Nathaniel is clearly too unimaginative to even contemplate one.

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting much of an illicit thrill from reading Ex-Wife, but it was, if briefly, considered the hottest book one could buy over the counter. Ex-Wife was scooped up by MGM and filmed with MGM executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, in the lead. Though it won Shearer a Best Actress Oscar, The Divorcee resembles Ex-Wife only in the sense that the shards on the floor resemble a vase before it was knocked off a table. We’re 57 minutes into an 84-minute film before Jerry (Pat) tells Ted (Peter) about her infidelity. And unlike Ex-Wife, the two remarry and live happily ever after.

The success of book and film led to a predictable response from publishers: “Can we have another one like it?” Parrott herself quickly spun off Strangers May Kiss (1930), another story about years of a sophisticated and loose relationship that culminates in traditional marriage. It, too, was instantly transformed into a vehicle for Norma Shearer (under the same title and with slightly more fidelity to the original). But in New York, the call for “More!” rang out and was soon answered.

Cover of Ex-Husband
Cover of first (and only) US edition of Ex-Husband (1929).
• Ex-Husband, by Anonymous
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929
The first to follow was Ex-Husband, published anonymously but attributed in rumors to various authors, including Parrott’s real ex-husband and the poet and critic Joseph Auslander. Of all the Ex-titled books, it was not only the most clearly imitative of Parrott’s book but also by far the best. Although certainly written in haste, it operates at a level of originality far above that of mere parody.

“My wife left me four years ago, maybe five,” relates the narrator, Wilfred Mallard. Time is not the only thing Wilfred is a little vague on. Indeed, Wilfred often reminded me of another great comic autobiographer, Augustus Carp. Like Carp, he thinks so highly of himself that everyone else in his world is merely a passing shadow. Wilfred feels he has made not only the supreme but also the most logical sacrifice in allowing his able wife Roberta, to go out and work while he remains at home. He’s happy to be the weaker sex in their relationship:

I wanted to subordinate my life to hers, to devote myself utterly to her service, to be the one who would cry, “Upidee, Upida,” as she struggled up the hilly path, and “Excelsior!” as she reached the top.

Not that this means he takes on any domestic duties, unless these include showering frequently. Wilfred takes a lot of showers in this book, each followed by long sessions of admiring his “smooth bronzed skin, like a Greek god, long eyelashes, supple shapely calves, and silky hair” in front of a mirror. So consumed with himself is Wilfred that he struggles to comprehend when Roberta stands at the door, suitcases packed, ready to leave for the last time:

“Good-by and good luck!”
She could not possibly mean it. She must be joking.
“Don’t joke about that, Roberta dear,” I said. “It hurts me too much even to think about it. Will you be home early?”

Like Parrott’s Pat, Wilfred finds refuge with a sympathetic friend. Ivan, however, wants to extend him more than just sympathy. Ivan comes in while Wilfred is bathing: “O, but I haven’t scrubbed your back yet.” Wilfred declines his offer (“I hate having my body touched unless by a woman, who touches it in holy passion,” he confides to the reader). Ivan is crushed. “He looked hurt, as though I had struck him with a whip.”

Having a narcissist as narrator gives the author of Ex-Husband the opportunity to play on some of Parrott’s worst tendencies. Pat in Ex-Wife is constantly giving the reader a fashion show:

The dress slipped on. Black marocain with a deep white collar and exaggerated cuffs, cut petalwise. Black satin opera pumps… I did not like satin shoes much, but these made my feet look so narrow. An almost brimless black milan hat, with a gold arrow embroidered athwart the front. Pearls — no, the flat gold necklace.

Wilfred is a peacock of the highest order:

I had dressed with especial care that morning. Suede shoes were topped with soft velvety mouse-colored spats covering pin striped silk socks in black and white like the shimmer of cobwebs against a dark sky. At the last minute I had decided against my soft, light gray suit vest, and had worn a silk brocade instead. Soft gray shirt, tie to match. Gray Borsolino hat. Gray gloves. I love grays. I looked in the long cheval glass and decided that I was not offensive, not offensive at all.

Like Parrott, Ex-Husband’s author plays “artfully” with music. Parrott has a chapter in which Pat’s thoughts are interwoven with lines from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Wilfred and a friend debate the meaning of life while listening to the strains of “Andante Strenuosa” by that Viennese master, Meiselmenig. Where Parrott very occasionally drops a name, Wilfred spews them out:

We mingled with them informally. William Seabrook, red-faced and thumb-ringed; Theodore Dreiser, the American tragedy; George Jean Nathan, a choir boy at a prize fight; Joseph Auslander, Adolphe Menjou talking with Edgar Allan Poe on Fifth Avenue; … Rebecca West, looking Spanish, spoiled, and spent; Horace Liveright, a cut-steel shoe buckle; Edna Millay, looking as though she had lost a buck in the snow ; Ursula Parrott, the little girl reporter of the dementia Peacox case1…

1 Parrott reported on the June 1929 murder trial of Earl Peacox for the New York Evening Journal.

This goes on for another page and a half, and it’s just one of several name-dropping orgies.

As entertainment, Ex-Husband edges out Ex-Wife in my book. While Parrott’s book is undoubtedly an accurate representation of the quandary of women trying to balance the pulls of career, marriage, societal expectations, and (let’s face it) enjoying themselves, Pat (and Parrott herself) always seems haunted by the specter of Puritanical judgments. Wilfred, on the other hand, is too blissfully oblivious to worry about anything but finding another woman to take care of him. Which he does, in Harriet, who has the decided advantage over Roberta of being independently wealth and hence capable of supporting him without the distraction of a career. It certainly seems a happier match than that of Pat and Nathaniel, which Parrott never quite portrays as anything more than a compromise.

Cover of Ex-Mistress.
• Ex-Mistress, by Anonymous (Dora Macy)
New York: Brentano’s, 1930
With Ex-Mistress, the direct influence of Parrott’s book begins quickly to fade. The shadow of The Scarlet Letter, on the other hand, falls starkly across this novel’s opening chapter. “I am not a bad woman. I am not a prostitute,” she announces at the start. Dora Macy (one of the mysteries of this book is the author’s decision to name her narrator after one of her pseudonyms) is a virginal sixteen-year-old in a small Southern town seduced by the handsome son of the town’s banker. Things go too far on a Sunday picnic. Dora finds herself with child; the banker’s son and her family reject her, so she hops a train to New York.

Dora proves a proficient survivor. She gets a job, finds a trustworthy friend and guide to the ways of the big city, and even manages to gain admission to a benign home for unwed mothers when her time comes. Giving up the child for adoption, she emerges with a single overriding goal: security. Security, that is, within the constraint that her history makes her unfit for marriage in the eyes of “decent people.” So she has to rely on the one commodity of value on the market: “My body belonged to myself…. It was mine — the only thing I had. The only thing in the world that belonged to me.”

Dora pursues two paths to security. While slowly ascending the career ladder through retail jobs from shopgirl to manager to shop owner and eventually, a chain of cosmetics salons, she acquires a sequence of sugar daddies. Restaurant dinners, clothes, and occasional items of jewelry at first, then an apartment, and finally, a penthouse complete with grand piano and gym. A Chinese businessman is followed by an author, a doctor, and a banker. Abortion as birth control is dealt with casually. Dora’s friend Marion, a Broadway star, has one done after a show on Saturday night and is back and dancing in the spotlight on Monday.

As an author, Dora Macy is more craftswoman than artist. Her prose carries the story along in coach class and most of her characters are equally functional. Occasionally, though, an observation slips out that suggests far closer study of people. A sister who counsels her after she gives up her child has a mind “like a room that never had the windows opened.” A landlady is “The kind of a woman who put on her glasses to answer the phone.”

And she understands well the skills required to attract and keep a man interested in maintaining a long-term mistress. On a first evening out, Dora wears:

White satin (which is always good for a first impression), and a huge white ostrich fan. But not a single piece of jewelry. Never wear jewelry when you first consider a new love; it leaves him nothing to adorn. Later, of course, you wear his jewelry, and nothing else but.

A mistress has to manage a delicate and ever-evolving balance between tantalizing and satisfying the man keeping her. He has no legal constraint preventing him from abandoning his mistress and at most the risk of of blackmail if he does. Men, Dora decides, need three women: a mother, a wife, and a mistress, and the successful mistress must juggle all three roles over the course of a relationship. When her sugariest daddy, a banker, dies and she considers her situation at the age of 37, however, Dora opts for marriage to Earl, a middle-aged bachelor with deep pockets and a shallow mind: “He took an enormously long time to say anything, and when it was said it really didn’t amount to much.”

Dora Macy was the pen name of Grace Perkins, a one-time Broadway actress who married the writer and editor Fulton Oursler in 1925 and became a successful writer herself. Ex-Mistress was her third novel, and like Parrott’s, it was picked up by by Hollywood (Warner Brothers) and made into My Past (1931), starring Bebe Daniels. Both the novel and the movie were followed in short order: Macy’s Night Nurse, which drew upon dozens of interviews with registered nurses in New York, was also filmed by Warner Brothers, retaining the book’s title. Night Nurse is considered a classic Pre-Code film, with a stellar performance by Barbara Stanwyck and unveiled references to adultery, child abuse, bootlegging, kidnapping, and drug addiction.

Cover of Ex-“It”.
• Ex-“It”, by Anonymous (Edward Dean Sullivan)
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930
One assumes that Grosset and Dunlap approached Edward Dean Sullivan (or vice-versa) about whipping out a quick parody of Ex-Wife. Instead of going the route of Ex-Husband, though, he reached way back to 1927 and another then-hot commodity, It, which made both author Elinor Glyn and star of the film adaptation, “It” (with quotation marks), Clara Bow, household names.

Ex-“It” is the somewhat amusing autobiography of Fanny Hill, a girl who “works” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) her way up to wealth and fame. At the time Ex-“It” was published, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was very much considered obscene and unsaleable over the counter any place in America, so it’s doubtful that many readers saw the parallels between Cleland’s character and Sullivan’s.

Somewhat amusing in part because, like most published jokes, it goes on too long, but mostly because of the howling sexism: “At four years of age I could say ‘Pees dimmy dat,’ which is all any gal with good teeth and a shape need say up to thirty.” On the other hand, there are a few apt observations. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a little dog that’s “just a nervous breakdown with a leg at each corner.” Overall, though, file this one under “Forgettable.”

Cover of Ex-Judge.
• Ex-Judge, by Anonymous
New York: Brentano’s, 1930
Ex-Judge has no relationship with Ex-Wife aside from its title. Unlike the rest of Ex-Wife’s ilk, it’s a third-person narrative and clearly a novel submitted to Brentano’s with a different title. In the context of the Seabury investigations of New York City police and judicial corruption, Ex-Judge is an overlooked artifact, a fictionalized account (Tammany Hall becomes Tammanela) of a mediocre political machine functionary elevated to the bench with the task of acquitting friends and convicting enemies. It does give an convincing insider’s view of how the gears of Tammany’s machine fit together, but as a novel, it’s a bit too much like a building that’s never had its scaffolding removed.

Cover of Ex-Racketeer.
• Ex-Racketeer, by Anonymous
New York: Rudolph Field, 1930
Ex-Racketeer is a gangster’s soliloquy of just 83 pages, an express journey through American organized crime from 1918 to 1930. Eugene Caxton is a mob soldier hiding out from Turk, a boss he’s ripped off. While counting time, he picks up the pen and courtesy paper in his hotel room’s desk and begins to write a memoir.

Like James Cagney’s character, Tom Powers, in The Public Enemy, Eugene gets started doing petty jobs as a teenager and works his way up through the ranks. With the start of Prohibition, his mob adds bootlegging to its existing menu of “Narcotics, White Slavery, Robbery, and Strike-Breaking,” and Eugene offers his opinion of the risks and benefits of each. He regrets, though, that Hollywood has “spoiled” most mobsters: “Made them too self-conscious… They all try to live like the subject of a Ben Hecht scenario.” And he offers a prediction we sadly can see being realized in America today: “What this nation needs is not a good five cent cigar, but a definite, exclusive, authoritative, and formally acknowledged aristocracy … we’ll come to it yet.”

Not to spoil the plot, such as it is, but it should be no surprise that things do not end well for Eugene.

Ex-Baby (no dust jacket survives).
• Ex-Baby, by Anonymous (Aben Kandel)
New York: Covici-Friede, 1930
Anyone who paid good money for a copy of Ex-Baby (as I did) got robbed. Just 55 pages long with 18-plus point type, it’s an average humor column packaged like a novella. And the joke is paper-thin. This is the narrative of a four-year-old boy (an ex-baby, get it?) with the voice and sensibility of a twenty-something wiseguy: “On a good night, I’d have pa, ma, grandma, Uncle Timiny, the neighbor, the maid, and maybe a cousin or two all doing little tricks to get me to eat my spinach. Gee, it was great.” Ha-ha, hee-hee.
Cover of Ex-Book.
• Ex-Book, by William Henry Hanemann
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930
Ex-Book is the slightest of the lot, just 14 pages, really just a brochure included with copies of Hanemann’s The Facts of Life, a collection of comic pieces also published by Farrar & Rinehart. On the other hand, its one joke is carried off far better than Ex-Baby’s. “I am lying, face down, in a strange wire basket,” the narrator relates. It’s a manuscript, dropped off with an editor by its author. “I’m sick and tired of you,” declares the author. “I know every comma, every paragraph, every turn and twist and clever phase … and God, Cookie, how you bore me.” An amusing slalom though the publication process.

Though Ursula Parrott cranked out 18 more books before her life and career crashed and burned in the mid-1940s, none of them inspired a wave of imitators like Ex-Wife’s. I highly recommend anyone interested in Parrott’s rackety life read Marsha Gordon’s biography.

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock (1962)

Cover of The Little White God by Edwin Brock

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Edwin Brock only wrote one novel.

In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.

Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?

First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.

Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.

Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.

Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.

This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.

After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.

His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.

This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.

In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.

The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.

‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.

The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.

The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:

Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.

And later:

On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.

“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.

But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:

It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.

But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.

Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.

To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.

Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.

But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.

Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.

What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:

Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”

(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)

The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.

Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.

Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.

The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.

Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.

Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock
London: Hutchinson, 1962

Crime Pays Royalties: the Autobiographies of Thieves

The exploits of George Manolesco, "Prince of Thieves," from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905

Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.

Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):

Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”

[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]

The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade

The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,

“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.

Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.

A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:

The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.

W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood

In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:

We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.

Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.

Cover of I was a Bandit, the Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.

Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:

Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.

Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.

There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.

What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).

The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.

What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.

Highly recommended. A real joy to read.

Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth

Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:

In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.

Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:

There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.

“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.

Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney

In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.

Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.

In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.

In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,

Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.

The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.

The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.

Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.

Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.

The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:

Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!

Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Andrew Keith Munro
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro

Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.

Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”

Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton and Edward Linn
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn

The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.

As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)

The Big Wheel, by Mark Benney (1940)

Cover of The Big Wheel by Mark Benney

I have been on a streak of novels that tug insistently at the reluctant Freudian in me. Dinah Brooke’s The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert was, by the author’s admission, an act of reparation for her own father’s failures as a husband, businessman, and father. I’m working my way through the small oeuvre of Richard Rumbold, who spent much of his life engaged in a civil war with his father and other proxy father figures.

Even without context, Mark Benney’s novel The Big Wheel (1940) is full of dangling psychological threads that cry out for a good tugging. At the core of the novel is the strange relationship between the narrator, a former burglar named Harry Carne, and an ambition and hyperactive young journalist named Eric Felton. The two men meet when, hoping to make a little money after his release from Holloway prison, Harry tries to sell a few articles to Eric’s newspaper. Eric becomes fascinated with Harry and soon invites him to take a spare room in his flat and start working as Eric’s assistant, a job that mostly involves churning out articles under Eric’s name.

Eric’s concept of journalism seems to have been developed from years of reading the stuff that filled the back pages of London papers:

Journalism was a constant exercise in selecting from a grim, mechanised world its trivial accidents and hazards, and refocussing them until all else was blotted out of the world picture. It kept him in a ferment of small surface excitements, and it was these, communicated into his writing, that made him a good journalist. If a film-star had chosen an Amerindian for her fourth husband, if a cow was born in Wilshire with reindeer horns, the fact would keep Eric in continuous bubbling enthusiasm for hours.

Like Harry, Eric has come up from the tenements, self-taught, full of rough edges, and prone to the allure of bright, shiny objects — and people. “Eric liked to view himself as a patron of genius,” Harry observes, but the geniuses Eric was attracted to tended to be eccentrics: “Anyone who dyed his hair green, or wore shorts in winter, or expounded cosmic themes in an unintelligible gibberish, stood a fair chance of being entertained by Eric.”

Just how Eric affords to be so generous is a bit of a mystery until Harry meets Phoebe, a woman with murky connections who, he gathers, is both Eric’s lover and patroness. Harry’s first sight of Phoebe is as she emerges from Eric’s bedroom one morning, and his description of her dressing is almost bilious in its hatred toward older women:

She seemed to have none of the normal woman’s feelings of pudicity, and no awareness even of her grotesque appearance. She made no attempt at concealment as she divested herself of coat and nightgown before stepping into her undergarments. She moulded herself into tight corsets with apparently no sense of the obscenity of the kneading motions whereby she subdued her flesh. Busily she drew on her stockings, and fastened her suspenders, chattering brightly all the while about her darling Eric and her pleasure that he had at last found a friend who was at once a wide boy and a nice boy. [A “wide boy,” in British slang, refers to a man who lives by wheeling and dealing, often criminal.]

Harry learns that it’s Phoebe who’s paying for Eric’s flat. When Harry asks just what he does for her in return, Eric is vague: “Oh, odd things. Just ideas like the wheel and that club you saw.”

“The wheel” is the big wheel of the title, a large Ferris wheel, part of a small amusement park set up on a vacant lot in East London. The Ferris wheel is equipped with enclosed cars just big enough for two people to sit in comfortably. Eric’s “idea” was to run the wheel very slowly, allowing couples just enough time and privacy to enjoy each other’s company in ways that London offered few clean and cheap alternatives for.

This is just one of Phoebe’s ventures. She is a rising star in the London underworld, an entrepreneur busy expanding her little empire into horseracing betting and penny casinos in Brighton. She has her hooks into the police, with a growing roster of bent cops, as Harry discovers when he gets on Phoebe’s wrong side. As affectionate as she seems toward Eric, he knows Phoebe wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus.

He knows this because she’s already done it to her own son. Jim, an ex-boxer who works as the “Big Wheel’s” bouncer, has done a stint in prison himself, as he tells Harry:

“Wodger get done for?” he asked sympathetically.
“Screwing,” I said.
“The berks!” he said feelingly, and added: “I done a carpet at the Ville.”
“What for?” I asked.
“V’lent assault,” he said. “But somebody mixed it for me. I never done it, they mixed it for me. Found me fingerprint on a broken bottle what somebody’d been glassed wiv; en said I done it. But I never! Me, I don’t use glasses.”

What Jim doesn’t know is that his mother had arranged for his prints to be put on the bottle by one of her crooked cops. She was taking revenge for some wrong the generally harmless palooka had done.

This is just one reason why Harry hates Phoebe, though. Another is that she’s a little too much like his own mother, who, it’s clear, was both a prostitute and a minor operator. Harry sees his criminal record in patently Freudian terms: “Always the fundamental object of my burglaries had been to win my way back to acceptance by the Phoebes — to force their respect, to share their expansive, explosive life.”

The dynamics among the men in the book is equally rich in nuances, whether intended or not. “I’m not a pansy!” Eric protests at one point, but his actions suggest this is not a black-and-white situation. The language that Benney uses at points is difficult to read today as simply poetic:

With a rueful movement of his lips, he [Eric] reached across the table and touched my hand; it was the gesture of one willing to forgive, but unable to forget. “That’s all right,” he said sepulchrally. “You two [Harry and a woman] go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Then he drank off a glass of beaujolais at a gulp and took up the bottle to re-fill.

When Harry contemplates taking up with Margaret, the woman in the above scene, his language is equally open to analysis: “Living with her, I should always be her dependent, a hungry mouth at her paps, a leech on her arteries.”

The characters in The Big Wheel are too unstable for anyone to expect a happy ending. It takes far too long, however, and Benney introduces too many unnecessary detours before this house of cards collapses. Like other novels from this period I’ve read, The Big Wheel seems to cry out for an editor with a sharp pair of scissors. I get the impression that for every Max Perkins and Edward Garnett, there were a hundred other editors who gave their authors’ manuscripts a quick glance for spelling errors and passed them along for typesetting.

But there are also wonderful bits of writing scattered throughout these pages. A cheap cafe in the early morning before the breakfast rush: “Charwomen wash the corpse of time killed, and downstairs, in the lavatories, one’s footsteps echo hollowly as in a marble mausoleum.” [OK, perhaps hollowly needs to go back to the thesaurus it came from.] Convincing details of life in poverty: a neighbor asks for change for the gas meter; when Harry notices he has two ha’pennies in his hand, the man explains that he’s keeping them to put on his mother’s eyes when she dies. It’s also a rich source for your vocabulary, one cited numerous times in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld: berk (slattern); nark (rat); on the rory (down and out); straighten (to bribe).

Record of Henry Degras' third prison sentence.
Record of Henry Degras’ third prison sentence, 1932-1933.

Benney’s account of the London underworld in The Big Wheel seems almost sociological in its detail, it’s understandable, for formal sociological research would be his ultimate destination. Born Henry Charles in the East End in 1910, he grew up in the world of The Big Wheel. His mother was a prostitute. He was taken up by a small-time stage performer and adopted the man’s last name of Degras. It was as Henry Degras that he served three sentences in prison, the last, for fraud, at Wandsworth.

Cover of US paperback edition of Low Company
Cover of US paperback edition of Low Company.

After his release in mid-1933, he was befriended by the publisher Peter Davies, who encouraged him to take up writing. The result, an autobiography titled Low Company, was published in 1936. By then, he’d married for the first time, to a woman named Phyllis Benney. Given his real criminal record, Davies recommended Degras take up a pseudonym, and he chose the name of his wife’s late brother: Mark Benney.

Peter Davies advertisement for Low Company.
Peter Davies ad for Low Company.

Low Company was an immediate success. George Orwell, one of the toughest critics when it came to working class literature of the time, called it “one of the best lumpenproletarian books of our time.” The book was so well done, Newsweek informed its readers, that “the publishers feel impelled to swear it isn’t a literary hoax.” Every major paper and magazine gave it enthusiastic reviews, and Peter Davies encouraged his protégé to try his hand at fiction as well.

His first attempt, The Scapegoat Dances (1938), got mixed reviews. James Agate felt that Benney had “acquired a style of which any writer ought to be thoroughly ashamed.” But even the poorest reviews held out hopes for better. The next year, he put his writing skills at the service of one of his underworld acquaintances, producing What Rough Beast? A Biographical Fantasia on the Life of Professor J. R. Neave, Otherwise Known as Iron Foot Jack Neave. Neave was a “wide boy” well known around Soho, who, as Matt Houlbrook puts it in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005), operated at various times as “strongman, club manager, antique dealer, con artist, and street phrenologist.”

The Big Wheel (1940) was considered a big improvement over Benney’s first novel. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, Orwell wrote,

It is about the London sub-world, the dreadful civilization of pin-tables, cheap night clubs and furnished single rooms, where sport, crime, prostitution, mendicancy and journalism all overlap…. Its distinctive mark is its acceptance of the lumpenproletarian outlook, its assumption that the world of narks, pimps, eightpenny kips, punchdrunk boxers and rival race-gangs is as eternal as the pyramids.

V. S. Pritchett called Benney “the highbrow of the lower depths and the only novelist we have who really knows the Soho underworld” and estimated that the novel’s strongest points were “wit, a restless, over-excited mind, a bottomless pessimism, and a wonderful ear for the dialogue of his people.” Frank Swinnerton, who often found other novelists wanting in comparison to himself, offered begrudging praise: “Mr. Benney can be tiresome, but he is interestingly tiresome, and his people and their seamy streets are real.”

Swinnerton’s comment offers a clue to where Benney’s real interests lay. If the most successful elements of The Big Wheel are its details of London underworld life, it’s because Benney was, fundamentally, more interested in being a recorder than a creator. In 1939, he married Jane Tabrisky, a graduate of the London School of Economics who’d worked earlier for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. When the war broke out, he attempted to enlist but was rejected for medical reasons. He then went to work at an airplane factory, an experience he turned into his third and last novel, Over to Bombers (1943).

After the war, he was able to get a civil service job as an Industrial Relations Officer with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. The Ministry sent him to report on conditions at coal mines around Durham in the northeast of England, which led to his 1946 book, Charity Main: A Coalfield Chronicle. Following this, he decided to undertake a study of conditions in British prisons and sought advice from Mark Abrams, who was pioneering techniques in polling and surveys. Gaol Delivery, published in 1948, led to further social science work and, ultimately, to an invitation to teach sociology in the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago.

Mark Benney at Shimer College, 1962.
Mark Benney at Shimer College, 1962.

Though he was the only member of the Chicago faculty with no college education whatsoever, Benney thrived in the university environment. As he later wrote, “I think that if I had known in 1950 that such a course as Social Science 2 was being offered anywhere in the world I would have strained all my resources to take it. It was ironical that I found myself now in 1951 both taking and teaching it.” Benney went on to work with David Riesman, whom he later referred to as his “champion.”

In 1959, Benney took a job on the faculty of Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The small school, small town atmosphere of Shimer didn’t suit Benney, who was by then on his third marriage and still retained a few habits from his underworld upbringing. He left after a few unhappy years that he documented in his last book, a memoir of his “reformed” life after Low Company, titled Almost a Gentleman (1966). His last years were spent as a researcher for hire for government and academic institutions. He died in Clearwater, Florida in 1973.

The Big Wheel, by Mark Benney
London: Peter Davies, 1940

The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by C. G. L. Du Cann

youngpersonsguidetocrimeLast month, I posted an item on The Toady’s Handbook by William Murrell, a satirical D. I. Y. guide on how to succeed through concerted obsequiousness. Murrell’s book was part of a trilogy of sly little self-help books published by Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin back in 1929. Of remaining two, Charles Duff’s A Handbook on Hanging was rescued a few years ago as a New York Review Classic. The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann, however, shares a common state of neglect with Murrell’s book.

The three books take a contrarian view of their subjects. Murrell argues, quite convincingly, that toadying is not only an effective way to gain a secure and influential place, but the only sane way to approach life as a member of society. Duff disparages those who would abolish hanging as cruel and offers a defense of its merits as both deterrent and art-form. And Du Cann holds that “the real truth is that crime is a highly respectable, semi-skilled, sheltered occupation,” one “reasonably accessible to the ambitious” and to be commended to the young.

A barrister and member of Gray’s Inn, Du Cann clearly took an impish delight in his tongue-in-cheek argument. Perhaps a little too much–for the book quickly veers down a side street and Du Cann spends most of the work skewering the ways and players of the British system of justice rather than noting the advantages of a life of crime. One gets the sense that the profession Du Cann referred to in his expansive subtitle is that of the law, not crime.
crimesubtitle
In fact, one of the primary advantages to becoming a criminal, according to the book, is that prison isn’t such a bad place to end up if you do get caught. That’s a little like recommending a restaurants by saying, “If you do get food poisoning, it won’t be too bad.” Du Cann does score a point, however, in noting that, for older men without fortune or family–at least in the England before the time of social welfare–prison offered a safer and healthier alternative to anything else life could offer.

Aside from this Swiftian advocacy of life in prison, however, the main pleasures of The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime are the epigrams Du Cann tosses in as asides to his mocking commentary. “When a respectable Englishman is convinced that there is nothing more to be done he always writes to the Times. It is the last gesture of despair and disillusionment,” he observes in the midst of a discussion of whether all or just almost all persons brought before court are guilty. (Du Cann sides with the “all guilty” camp).

He also offers, at the end, his own variant on Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

  • ACCUSED (THE). Indispensable raw material of the industry. Often manufactured by the industry itself.
  • HEARING IN COURT. A talking match. Hence the name.
  • SEX-OFFENDER. A male.

Of the three books in Richards & Toulmin’s set, Du Cann’s has aged most poorly in terms of subject and is least suitable for export. Occasionally, though, a still-relevant observation leaps off the page:

Expert Witnesses are often highly-paid, and they are expected to be (and are) entirely unscrupulous. It is true that Expert Witnesses are more frequently employed in civil than criminal proceedings, but the world of crime has a great use for them in deciphering hand-writing, detecting poisoning, and the like. The expert witness is not (as his name seems to say) an expert in giving testimony (that is called a policeman) but a man who considers himself, and is put forward as being, an authority on the matter upon which he testifies. He speaks to opinions, not to facts, but of course he tries to make the Court accept his opinions as facts.

Although only a slight jest, The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime remains entertaining today on the merits of Du Cann’s amusing and self-deprecating commentary. Du Cann wrote at least a dozen other books, but most of them appear to have been taken up as escapes from the duties of his life as a working lawyer. He seems to have been quite adept at adapting his arguments to his clients and subjects–how else can you explain the same man writing Getting the Most Out of Life and Will You Rise From The Dead? An Enquiry Into the Evidence of Resurrection?

The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by C. G. L. Du Cann
London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin at the Cayme Press, 1929

My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson by George Thompson

If you’re in the mood for some cheap–heck, free–lowbrow reading, I can recommend George Thompson’s brief autobiography, My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson, which you can find at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Thompson offers up a double murder plus suicide, blackmail, robbery, gambling, teenage drunkenness, prostitution, child abuse, and adultery–and that’s just in the first three chapters.

George Thompson’s name won’t be found in too many histories of American literature. That’s because his claim to fame was as perhaps our country’s first great writers of trash. Thompson wrote dozens, maybe hundreds of works with such titles as Venus in Boston, The Gay Girls of New-York, The Mysteries of Bond Street, Adventures of a Sofa, and The Amorous Adventures of Lola Montes, which were as popular and pandering in their day as, say, “Jersey Shore” or “Date My Ex” are today. As David S. Reynolds puts it in an entry on “Sensational Fiction”, “Among the kinds of sexual activity Thompson depicts are adultery, miscegenation, group sex, incest, child sex, and gay sex.” These books were sold by publishers advertising “Rich, Rare and Racy Reading,” and sold for 25 or 50 cents–equivalent to $50 to $100 today, if Internet inflation calculators are reliable.

No surprise, then, that he lays the melodrama on thick when it comes to telling his own life’s story. He runs away from home after knocking his uncle down a staircase and quickly meets up with one Jack Slack, a thief and swell barely older than him, who proceeds to introduce Thompson to beer and champagne. Before the night is over, they’ve met up with a prostitute and fallen into a card game. “What wonder is it that I became a reckless, dissipated individual, careless of myself, my interests, my fame and fortune?,” Thompson reflects.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

He gets a job working as a printer’s apprentice, but the work is, of course, merely the pretext for introducing us into the tangled affairs of the printer and his wife, both of whom are cheating on the other. This soon leads to one of the book’s many dramatic climaxes, as the enraged husband offers the wife one final choice:

With these words, Romaine cocked his pistol and approached his wife, saying, in a low, savage tone that evinced the desperate purpose of his heart—

“Take your choice, madam; do you prefer to die by lead or by steel?”

The miserable woman threw herself upon her knees, exclaiming—

“Mercy, husband—mercy! Do not kill me, for I am not prepared to die!”

“You call me husband now—you, who have so long refused to receive me as a husband. Come—I am impatient to shed your blood, and that of your paramour. Breathe a short prayer to Heaven, for mercy and forgiveness, and then resign your body to death and your soul to eternity!”

So saying the desperate and half-crazy man raised on high the glittering knife. Poor Mrs. Romaine uttered a shriek, and, before she could repeat it, the knife descended with the swiftness of lightning, and penetrated her heart. Her blood spouted all over her white dress, and she sank down at the murderer’s feet, a lifeless corpse!

Now that experience would have been enough for a lifetime for most folks, but it’s just the beginning in Thompson’s case.

Eventually, after a detour into acting, a jail break, a few dozen romantic entanglements and enough other scandals that one soon gives up keeping track, Thompson decides to head to the peace and civility of Brahmin Boston. Oddly, however, for a man who made his fortune on telling other people’s secrets, Thompson took great offense at the prying nature of Bostonians:

A stranger goes among them, and forthwith inquisitive whispers concerning him begin to float about like feathers in the air. “Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? What’s his business? Has he got any money? (Great emphasis is laid on this question.) Is he married, or single? What are his habits? Is he a temperance man? Does he smoke—does he drink—does he chew? Does he go to meeting on Sundays? What religious denomination does he belong to? What are his politics? Does he use profane language? What time does he go to bed—and what time does he get up? Wonder what he had for dinner to-day?” &c., &c., &c.

Thompson spends just one year in Boston before heading back to the fleshpots of New York, which is where the book comes to an end. Not, however, before he has a chance to swear that “not one single word of fiction or exaggeration has been introduced into these pages.”

And I am Marie of Roumania.

My Life; or The Adventures of George Thompson, Being the Autobiography of an Author
Boston: Federhen, 1854