The Comic Book Killer. Richard A. Lupoff

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY RICHARD A. LUPOFF

      The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle & His Incredible Aether Flyer (with Steve Stiles)

      Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales

      Lisa Kane: A Novel of Werewolves

      Sacred Locomotive Flies

      Sword of the Demon

      The Lindsey & Plum Detective Series

      1. The Comic Book Killer

      2. The Classic Car Killer

      3. The Bessie Blue Killer

      4. The Sepia Siren Killer

      5. The Cover Girl Killer

      6. The Silver Chariot Killer

      7. The Radio Red Killer

      8. The Emerald Cat Killer

      9. One Murder at a Time: The Casebook of Lindsey & Plum

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1988, 2012 by Richard A. Lupoff

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For

      Pat Lupoff

      Henry Morrison

      Donna Rankin

      Noreen Shaw

      May Wuthrich

      INTRODUCTION, by Joe Gores

      With The Comic Book Killer, Nebula and Hugo nominated science fiction and fantasy writer Dick Lupoff moves from science fiction to the mystery for the first time. At first glance this may seem surprising, since Lupoff has said he finds mystery and science fiction mutually exclusive, likening them to “oil and water” with a basic philosophical conflict between them. He calls science fiction an essentially radical literature “subversive of society,” while he finds the mystery “essentially supportive of society and basically conservative in its attitude.”

      But the mystery and science fiction have always had a symbiotic attraction for each other. Most science fiction writers have tried or at least contemplated the mystery during their professional lives—and vice versa.

      I have written in the future tense, stories which tend to be much darker and more bitter than my mystery stories. Because to me, the difference between the two fields is artistic, not in such terms as “radical” and “conservative.”

      There are obviously conservative science fiction novels— Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Just as obviously, there are radical mysteries. Hammett himself was no supporter of the status quo. Richard Stark’s entire oeuvre, as well as novels such as Andrew Vachss’ Flood and Shaun Herron’s The Whore Mother suggest, without making any particular point of it, that it would be just as well if the whole bloody social structure should come crashing down. James Ellroy’s Suicide Hill really is depicting our society in the midst of such a suicidal self-destruction.

      The difference between mystery and science fiction is not intellectual, but it is profound. Also simple to articulate.

      The mystery says, This is.

      Science fiction says, What if?

      The mystery is realistic.

      Science fiction is speculative.

      The strength of the mystery is this moment—this brick, this street, this strand of hair, unique to this person and this place at this precise instant never to be repeated.

      The strength of science fiction is in speculating a world, a “what if” reality subject not so much to the laws of nature as to the laws of the creator’s mind.

      Unfortunately both fields, by the very term genre, have suffered at the critics’ hands.

      * * * *

      A few months ago I was guest of honor at a day-long mystery conference sponsored by the library association of a mid-size California city. The head of the city library system introduced me thus: “I give you mystery-writer Joe Gores—of course I don’t read that sort of thing myself, but. . .”

      His unconscious condescension brought home to me once again and forever the job that critics and academicians have done on what they decided long ago in their wisdom to call genre fiction. “Light reading,” “Summer fare,” “Escapist literature,” “A Tub of Thrillers,” “Trash reading”—we’ve seen them all a hundred times in the book review section of our Sunday newspaper. The categorists reduce us to second-class citizenship and ship us steerage — “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?”

      Thus Dashiell Hammett—whose early stories undoubtedly helped Hemingway learn how to write —is “merely” a mystery writer while Hemingway is literature. Yet The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key stand up against The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms under any accepted literary criteria one might choose.

      Indeed, Hemingway’s entire writing career could be said to deal in the psychological and literal vocabulary of Hammett’s tough-guy. To Have and Have Not is unabashedly a suspense novel, ending with that utterly hard-boiled sentiment, “A man alone ain’t got no bloody f—ing chance” (f—ing courtesy the publishing practices of the day). What is Papa’s famous “grace under pressure” except the Stoicism of Hammett’s hard-boiled, almost Existential hero?

      The mystery is not a field you can stoop to conquer. A good journeyman mystery is a hell of a lot harder to write than a good journeyman “mainstream” novel. Thus that other Nobel Prize-winner, William Faulkner, who loved the mystery and tried his hand at it with a collection of short stories called Knight’s Gambit, wrote a series of tales that were not very good mysteries and not very good stories, either.

      Dostoievski wrote at least one genuine thriller which, because Raskolnikov spoke Russian, is known to be literature. But Crime and Punishment is also a thriller. Much more than a thriller perhaps, a wonderful and effective thriller to be sure, but a thriller for all that.

      Shakespeare had a marvelously criminous mind, and in Hamlet and Macbeth wrote a brace of hard-line murder mysteries. Genre stories if you will. The critics of his day had that same disdain for the common clay as their fellows today; during the half-century or so following Shakespeare’s death, Oxford’s Bodleian Library refused shelf-room to his plays on the grounds that they were popular trash, not enduring literature.

      So what is a mystery? How does a genre encompass Ludlum and Dostoievski, Shakespeare and Christie, Hemingway and Hammett and Faulkner? Hard-boiled, cosies, international intrigue, noires, formal mysteries, procedurals, locked rooms, espionage thrillers? What element in a book can link something as brilliantly real and solid as Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park with something as maddeningly insubstantial as Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and still be called “mystery”?

      Suspense?

      Hardly. All novels deal in suspense. Something happens which affects someone we care about—thus keeping us in suspense—or we will end up not reading the novel.

      Conflict?

      All novels deal in conflict, too. Not always in open, bloody. physical conflict as is often the case in the mystery, but always in conflict—the clash of human wills, the confrontation of philosophies, the facing of one’s inner demons.

      Violence?

      Not violence either. Consider the body count in The Iliad, then read a mystery like Don Westlake’s Help, I am Being Held Prisoner. His imprisoned hero’s only crime is a fondness for harmless practical jokes that go awry through no fault of his. What, except in antic dress and with a certain added element, is Westlake’s novel but Maupassant’s “A String of Pearls”?

      The added element? A crime.

      Strip everything else away from the mystery, and what