You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up, page 1
“If you prefer sweetness and light; you' horrid.”
You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up
Black Lizard Books
Berkeley · 1986
Text Copyright © 1938 by Richard Hallas (Eric M. Knight). Copyright renewed by Ruth (Jere) Knight. Reprinted by arrangement with Jere Knight, Betty Noyes Knight, Winifred Knight Mewborn, and Jennie Knight Morre c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction copyright © 1980 by David Feinberg.
This first Black Lizard Books edition published 1986.
You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up is a Black Lizard Book published by Creative Arts Book Company. For information contact: Creative Arts, 833 Bancroft Way, Berkeley,
California 94710.
Typography by QuadraType.
ISBN 0-88739-006-4
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 86-70458
Manufactured in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
by David Feinberg
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938) by Richard Hallas (Eric Knight) has had a paradoxical history. It remains one of the most celebrated hardboiled novels ever written but, because it has been out of print for almost 40 years, not many people interested in the genre have had an opportunity to read it. To some extent then, its reputation exists independent of its strengths or weaknesses as a novel and one of the genuine pleasures that comes from rereading this book is the confirmation of how very good it really is. The past decade has seen a major reevaluation of tough guy fiction and a happy byproduct of the belated critical appreciation has been the fact that many of the novels under discussion are back in print. The works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain have always been available but now some of the lesser known novels, Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us (1934), Paul Cain's Fast One (1933), Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), have been republished. But of all the good, hardboiled novels of the 1930s probab ly the one most difficult to ob tain has been this novel by Eric Knight. If it is possible for a published work to be "lost" then, surely, until now, that has been the fate of You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up.
The book, originally published in 1938, was a moderate critical and commercial success. More important, there was something about the book's quirky power, something odd and dislocating, that seemed to demand attention. Critics, whether they liked the novel or not , took notice of it. This is the only crime novel that Eric Knight ever wrote; the only time in all his work that he employed the traditional tough guy style of writing. Such was the novel's impact, however, that Knight was forced to take his lumps, along with other, more popular, writers in Edmund Wilson's famous essay "The Boys in the Back Room." Wilson didn't like this book (he didn't like the work of Hammett or Cain either) but he didn't condescend to it and his perceptive criticisms were echoed by a number of other writers. You Play Black and the Red Comes Up, he wrote, "is a clever pastiche of Cain which is mainly as two-dimensional as a movie." The word "pastiche," implying satire, is the crux of the matter; in certain respects the power of this book worked against it. Some critics don't consider it a novel at all—they read it as a burlesque of the whole hard- boiled genre. J. Fenwick, in the New York Herald Tribune (1938) wrote, "... this book is a phoney, but it is a pretty slick job." In the anthology, Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (1968) You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is referred to as an "imitation." There are a number of reasons some critics remain wary of this work but the most important seems to be that the author of this archetype of the American crime novel of the 1930s was not an American at all. Wrote Wilson: "It is indicative of the degree to which this kind of writing has finally become formularized that it should have been possible for a visiting Englishman—the real author is Eric Knight—to tell a story in the Hemingway-Cain vernacular almost without a slip."
The "visiting Englishman" was born in Menston, Yorkshire in 1897, and emigrated to the United States while still in his teens. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and served in the Canadian Army during World War I. Following the war he worked for several newspapers in Philadelphia . He moved to Holly wood in 1932, wrote a number of film scripts, then returned to Pennsylvania to continue his writing career. In 1942, Knight was given a commission as a major in the United States Army, serv ing in the film unit of the Spe cial Services section. He was killed, while on his way to North Africa, on January 15,1943, in the crash of a U.S. military transport plane in the jungle of Surinam, in northern South America. In addition to You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, his best known works include Las sie, Come Home (1940), the prototype for the TV series, a novella, The Flying Yorkshireman (1938), and a bestselling novel, This Above All (1941), which deals with life in Lon don during the blitz. He wrote several other novels, but these, his most popular books, serve to indicate his versatility as a writer: The Flying Yorkshireman is a fantasy about a man who has mastered the art of unaided flight; This Above All, despite its su bject matter, is basically a ro mance; and, of course, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, a classic "American" hardboiled novel.
So finally we come to the book itself. There are so many disparate plot elements in You Play Black and the Red Comes Up that to describe them all would make the novel seem like an anthology: through tough guy fiction with gun and camera. Anyone familiar with the genre is sure to recognize one or two old favorites. There is a protagonist (known only as Dick) cut off from his past with little hope for the future. He hops a freight train and ends up in Los Angeles, where he runs into some tough customers. ("A thousand and one nights [on] the screwy Pacific Coast," Edmund Wilson complained.) Dick commits a crime, plans another, and is finally arrested for something he didn't do. There is also a film director, Quentin Genter, of uncertain sexuality, who tries to have Dick killed and then becomes his pal. There are two floozies, one of whom is an out-and-out psychopath and the other of whom isn't very nice, either. (She does possess, however, the stamina of Rasputin.) There's a "good" girl with whom Dick falls in love. Her name is Sheila and she is, in her own sweet way, as loopy as the film director. There's a tart or two; various and sundry Hollywood folk who are, to put it kindly, eccentric; crooked cops; a shyster lawyer; and a muscular lifeguard who has no uncertainty about Genter's sexuality. There are three homicides, a robbery, a suicide, several illicit love affairs, a gambling den, and a spectacular murder trial. Finally, there is a wicked send-up of Upton Sinclair's EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign for Governor in 1934 and a scene in a meeting hall-cum- temple that manages to polish off not only Mr. Sinclair but Aimee Semple McPherson as well. As Tolstoy is supposed to have said of War and Peace: the only thing missing from this book is a yacht race.
A novel with this sort of plotline is obviously going to slide into melodrama every now and then. What is remarkable about You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is how rarely this happens. There is much about the story that is familiar but Knight, speeding things up, slowing them down, emphasizing first the humorous and then the tough and gritty, always keeps the reader guessing. Take, for example, the character of Quentin Genter—Dick's guide through the underside of Hollywood society. Dick quickly comes to understand that Los Angeles is "different" than any place he's ever been. "I kept thinking that the goofier the plan the more quickly people seem to fall for it in California" (p. 41). A bit later, while attending the religious rites of a wacky political cult, Dick describes the entranced audience: "I thought sure people would jump up and give [the] horselaugh out loud, but they all applauded and never cracked a smile. These people were so slaphappy they couldn't have told the difference between Thursday and a fan dancer" (p. 65).
Dick may have his suspicions but it takes Genter to give him the lowdown on what the situation really is:
You see, I’ll tell you a secret. No one is sane here. No one is sane and nothing is real. And you know what it is? . . .It's the climate—something in the air. You can bring men from other parts of the world who are sane. And you know what happens? At the very moment they cross those mountains . . . they go mad. Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California, they go insane. Everyone does. They still think they're sane, but they're not. Everyone in this blasted State is raving mad. (p. 44)
Attitudes like this have become de rigueur in novels about California but it is worth noting that Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (1939), published a year after this book, portrays an attitude towards Hollywood not dissimilar to that of You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. Raymond Chandler's Hollywood satire, The Little Sister (1949), was published a decade after that. This is not to say that Knight was exploring virgin territory but there was, at the time this book was written, some life in the old cliches yet. Similarly, the jaded, alcoholic film director, a man so corrupted by his work that he sees life itself as a movie set, has also become a kind of literary "stick figure." He is, to this type of novel, what the bitter, cynical private dick is to the detective genre. Yet Knight, miraculously, makes Genter come alive. Genter remains a character of such good-natured mendacity that he is never reduced to mere stereotype.
The key, I think, to Eric Knight's success is that he maintains a firm and knowing control over the admittedly gaudy elements of his story; the pacing is terrific and technically the novel is a virtual tour de force. There is, however, another factor which makes reading this book so enjoyable. Char les Barr,
David Feinberg New York City
Chapter One
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
When I came down off the midnight shift I saw there wasn't any light in the restaurant window, And that was how I knew Lois had left me.
I knew it sure, just likel knew there'd be that note on the pillow.
When I read it I didn't smash anything, I just closed up the house and went up the hill to the restaurant again. I kept hoping that there'd be a light in the window and that everything would be all right again; but there wasn't.
It was all dark inside and when I looked through the window I could see from the streetlight that there was a wiping cloth on the counter where she had flung it. She hadn't bothered to clean up before she left.
I kept thinking she might have cleaned up, at least, even though it didn't matter. It was a good little place. Inside I had fixed it all up with signs like: We Don't know Where Mom Is But We Have Pop on Ice and If Your Wife Can't Cook Keep Her for a Pet and Eat Here, and things like that.
Outside I'd painted the front in blue and yellow squares like a checkerboard so that the truck drivers on the way down to Dallas would always remember it, and I'had a big swing-sign out that said: Dick's Place, Lois's Cooking, and I'd figured some day I'd get a neon light on it.
After a while I went on down the hill again. I didn't go in the restaurant. I knew it was no good; because I knew what had happened. I didn't think it out. It was just like something made me know as sure as if I'd been there and seen it all.
Lois must have quit the minute I'd gone to work that afternoon and she'd taken the two hundred and thirty dollars we'd saved out of the little safe. Then she'd dressed
Dickie in his best clothes and left me the note on the pillow and had hopped the 5:18 for the Coast.
I knew she'd gone there. Lois always was crazy for Hollywood. She had cousins in Los Angeles. I knew that was where she'd gone. Even though she said in her note I'd never find her, I knew I would. Her note said that she was leaving me because of my nagging and cruelty and because I never did want her to have any fun, so she was taking Dickie where he could grow up in some place better than this lousy Oklahoma mining town and I'd never find them because they were going far away. But I knew she'd gone to Hollywood because she was crazy to get in the pictures. I went down to the tracks and waited there in the dark and when the 3:20 westbound freight came through I hopped it. I got up on top of a box car and lay there, looking back. You could see the glow of the smelters a long way off, maybe fifteen miles.
I lay there, and it was cold, but I couldn't think about it. The way I felt I didn't care if school kept or not. That's the way I felt.
That night I came so near to freezing that when the freight stopped to water at Apache Gap round sun-up and I started to get down, I was so stiff with cold I couldn't hold onto the iron rungs and I dropped about ten feet smack on my can. A fellow said:
"Ola, que cosa?"
“Nada," I said.
This Mex and I went down the line to a box car that was open. There was a bunch of floaters inside who were all heading for California because there was a man there going to be elected Governor who would take all the money away from the millionaires and give fifty dollars a week to every man without a job. They were kicking because the train was slow. They wanted to be out there in time.
When we got rolling again we just sat there with the car door open watching the flat country go by and listening to the train clicking over the ties. There was an old bum in a corner who was groaning. I asked what was wrong with him.
"He can't take it," a fellow said. Then he yelled at the old man, "Pipe down, lousy!"
"I'm hungry," the old man said, sitting up. He looked dirty as a goal.
"Well, for crissakes, you don't mean to tell me!" the fellow said. He said it mocking, in a high voice, like a daffodil.
"He's been like that for two days," the guy said.
"Well, we'll all eat when we get to California."
They all started off like a bunch of clucks at a sewing circle, talking about what they'd do with the first fifty dollars this Governor would give them. Then I lit a cigarette, and they all stopped talking and crowded round me like I was a drunken sailor in a hookshop, so I passed out all I had.
That afternoon we stopped by a little jerk burg and I hopped off and bought twelve cans of beans for a dollar. When I got back and shared them round they raised hell with me for being a dummy and not getting a can-opener. But one man had a strong knife and we all punched the cans open; only when it came to the old man they pretended they'd lost the knife. He got so mad he cried and tried banging the can open. They kept pretending they'd lost the knife for a couple of hours before they let him have it. About dark we stopped at a switch and a bum came running up and said there were two girls in another car. They all went hopping out and running down the track for a chain ride, all except the Mex and the colored boy. The old man went, too, but just as we started up he came running back and said the others wouldn't let him in on account of he was too Old.
That left just four of us in the car, the Mex, the colored boy, the old man, and me. We each picked a corner of the car and went to sleep. Once in a while the old man started moaning again, although he'd had his can of beans. I'd keep waking up and hearing him, but after a while he got to sleep too.
The next day we hit the range country, and it got hot; It was a hot country: nothing but cactus on the ranges and the stock was poor and thin, standing out in the heat. At one place I saw some cowhands with a blowtorch, burning the spines off the cactus so the cattle could eat it, but the stock seemed too far gone from the drought to care about eating any more. But I thought that was a clever stunt about the cactus. It was all right—if the stock would eat it.
That was sure a dry country—hot and dry, and we were dying for a drink. But there wasn't anything we could do about it but wait and hope we'd stop near a water tower.
