In Crime As In Politics Follow The Money, Follow Very Closely And If You See Your Spot Grab And Grab Hard-Modern Crime Novelist (Meaning Not Chandler Or Hammett) Lem Kane’s Latest Thriller- “Cup Runneth Over” (2019)

By Rav Wilson

[These days the fetish for transparency is almost overwhelming as if you couldn’t make a statement about anything in the public prints unless you gave a detailed description about your relationship, or lack or relationship to the subject of your work. Here goes. I went to graduate school with Lem Kane the author under review back in the early 1990s and have stayed in regular contact with him since then although this will be the first review by me of one of his works.

I should also mention that one of the writers here, Seth Garth, has done many such book reviews on Lem’s work. Moreover Seth draws a small royalty on every book Lem sells since he is the one who gave Lem his signature statement in the mouth of his main protagonist, John David Nicolas -“ come on and play ball with the law or you will find your ass in stir” which finds its way somewhere in every Kane crime novel.

The odd thing is that the statement is not original with Seth but is an old saying, according to another old-timer who grew up with him, Sam Lowell, from when they were what they called themselves, corner boys, where they grew up as a negative sign. Some copper, some coffee and cakes copper once said to one of their number, one tough corner boy, that very statement and the guy laughed at him since he had already done a few nights in the hoosegow and said “what are you going to do throw me in jail, been there done that.” That became the gold standard for corner boy responses to coppers reflecting the very tight honor bound tradition in the neighborhood that you don’t snitch to the coppers from nothing, no way. RW]           

Lem Kane was quite a character, a holy goof in old Jack of Lowell speak, a guy who would have been  prophet back in the day when the world needed such to succor the day, looking for new types to fit a post-World War II world, a then modernist world, under the Merrimac parlance, when I knew him back in graduate school in in New York City in the 1990s. Shaggy hair, ruffled shirt not always the fashionable color of the day but maybe off purple or crimson stuff my mother used to grab at the local Bargain Center nothing but a precursor to Walmart’s, jeans or maybe chinos with freaking cuffs for God’s sake (a no-no even in the desperately poor neighborhood I grew up in), some kind of sneaker usually not a name brand who loved to hang out at Matty’s in the Village to get what he called “ a feel for the meshing masses, a feel for what makes them tick.” That part I understood although the clientele at Matty’s ran to suburban brats out on a haul or hot almost virgin chicks from the Long Island high schools slumming for a while at NYU waiting to go elsewhere to graduate school to get their own “meshing masses” gaff, since except maybe the garb tricks I was running that same gambit. But in those days I was confounded more than once when Lem told a group of us, more than once, that his fervent desire was to create a memorable private detective in the manner of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Burns, Lester Delray, maybe Dust MacDonald or Kenny Millar before Kenny’s shocking expose as nothing but a second-rate third rate repo man fucking up Lew Archer big time along the way. Although, as he too liked to point out, point out endlessly, given the new sensibilities not the hard-boiled fists flailing first let god sort it out later, slugs burping the air stuff cutting into god’s play that animated those classics.        

The “confounded” part by me was that Lem never wrote or presented in workshops, at least as far as I knew, any material that even closely related to the detective fiction that he has now become a best-seller author of and a subject of envy in some quarters by those who went the more plebian routes of journalism or traditional novelistic treatments. (Read” me, Jack Devine, Hoagy Lewis and Liam Leahy, all fellow grad students). Enter John David Nicolas, private detective out in the inevitable Southern California sweat holes of greed, avarice, maybe sloth too while we are on the trail of earthly sins but you will have to fill in the other four sin I have been too wasted of late to remember such stuff and with deadline hours away I am just writing as fast as I can and am willing on my own hook to let god sort the stuff later. Enter Nicolas in the seventeenth novel of which he is the main protagonist sparring with felonious, evil folk who need to be taken down a peg or two. (Jesus seventeen crime books since the 1990s and I haven’t even gotten pass the galleys of my first book, not a crime novel but a piece on what makes America tick these days which Lardner Press has paid me good advance money to produce.

This private dick John David (the name used most often although there are stretches where the three-name moniker gets a full workout which somebody should have red-penciled big time) lately, the last six crime novels as far as I can see, assisted on the psychological profile side by Doctor Alexis Newcome and while there is thus far no budding romance between the pair of singularly driven personalities, churning up evil and evil-doing they work well together even though most of their collective work is shifting and sifting through whatever archival data any given case throws at them. (By the way am I the only person old enough to be shocked to discover that this Alexis of no fixed sex through the first five books turned out to be a male found out only when somebody mentioned boxer shorts as his undergarment, opening up a whole different kind of era from the guys and dolls of my youthful reading where guys had a fistful of women and the women had a fistful of men and no cross-over stuff, not for public consumption anyway although everybody knows that deep in Hollywood and its environs whole gay and lesbian subcultures thrives with blinked eyes, especially if Lem goes all out and has them get married).     

This gun moll case, this gangsters from the past case really highlights that John David-Alexis collective work since this nail-biter beyond the expected horrendous crimes, and bang-bang quick murder is the least of them here, calls for many insights that a normal case would not require. Remember, or if you have not read a Kane crime novel, John David only takes cases that the public coppers, usually the Bay City or Long Branch cops but occasionally the LAPD when he is pissed off after they went on another rampage against some master-less black kid in a white neighborhood, have thrown their hands up at, have put into deep freeze cold storage. Best forgotten. This, let’s stick with the facts of the gun moll case, is a classic of the type the public coppers drop like a lead balloon after about two days work. Maybe three but that is just to file the paperwork and put the ice cubes on the damn thing.

This old dame, called Tammy by the staff but as usual in La La Land, Hollywood names are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper so don’t get too hung up on that score, the gun moll of some forgotten second-rate gangster, second behind Bugsy, Meyer, Jimmy The Turd, and the Viper from the 1930s is found dead in her swank Bel-Air hotel. (For the rubes the difference between a hotel and another gaga condo in seven figures is that staff services and meals figure in the bill). The public coppers, scratching their heads figured it simple, figured from her fragile body for her just falling down with old age and left it at that even though the name Theda Barrows was a well-known gun moll for Zeke Fallon back in the 1930s when LA really was the Wild West. Guy like Zeke who even second rate third rate P.I.s like Kenny Millar before the fall and Lew too knew as part of knowing the links to the past and what was still out there for the pickings if times got tough, were planning a heist a week, maybe more depending on available manpower and enough guys smart enough to jimmy doors and cut some wires. Good stuff too, jewels, art, whatever the market would bear, remember this was flashy Hollywood not the later Wharton School play. Guys like Zeke, what the hell half the time they grew up on the same abandoned city blocks sometimes cutting the coppers in, sometimes no. Here is the very smartest part every once in a while letting the owners, mainly Hollywood directors, producers, their wives, more likely their mistresses and concubines after being robbed in on the grab by splitting the insurance money to keep things quiet. Nice play.

Jenny Dale, something of a handmaiden, servant girl to this Theda (who knew her as Tammy) although actually employed by the hotel thought something was wrong even though Theda could have easily been just a regular fall down case of old age. After the cold storage play by the public coppers this Jenny who figured in Theda’s will and distributions contacted John David (who would bring in Doc Alexis later once he had enough evidence to see which ways the wind blew), signed a contract, gave him a nice retainer for his dailies and expenses and off he went. (I had to laugh one fifty a day, three day minimum and one hundred per for expenses or no go when I though about poor Phil Larkin toward the end back in the late 1940s trying to squeeze a Jackson and some car fare, maybe gas money, out of some frail looking for her lost sugar daddy, never found). Off he went after Jenny lured him in with two pieces of information, one some bruises on Theda’s neck and two, a few things were missing from Theda’s digs that Jenny had seen recently. Enough to put hound dog Nicolas in the trail.                         

Your usual cold case is maybe some unsolved murder of mayhem which nobody gave a fuck about except maybe the family after a few years. Maybe they grabbed some dough, enough to pursue the case a little, maybe that loss of kin gnawed at their souls when all they had was the monthly trip to Mount Calvary to shed some salty tears. Christ this Theda deal was going back almost three quarters of a century with the added weight on the shoulders that nobody would be around to give any serious info about why a kindly old lady who was some gangsters’ frill in her day was murdered, murdered most foul. Nicolas with a three-day retainer to start and what looked like plenty of dough coming darling Jenny’s way figured to milk this one dry, very dry and maybe he could get around to asking Alexis the big question if he played his cards right.  

But enough of side play because as it turned out between them, between John David and Alexis working very slowly they finally saw a pattern to where this thing was going. Finally saw that kindly Theda had a very checkered past almost as bad as Zeke’s who would wind up dying in prison but not before taking care of his sweetie. Digging that “taking care of his sweetie” card by Zeke made everything else almost fall into place by itself. See if a big-time crook, even a second-tier big time crook, wanted to take care of his sweetie (or whoever) then given the nature of the profession somebody else had to take the fall, somebody did not get their cut. Normally one would think that that just the cost of doing crooked business, a little sideways overhead and move on if the big guy had enough guns to keep things at the steady. Not this time. A guy, a Bay City copper as twisted and corrupt as any you find in the LAPD say which back in Wild West days was saying a lot, was the inside man on a serious jewelry heist back in the later 1930s where one of the items taken was something like the Hope diamond to give you an idea of what Zeke meant when he wanted to take care of Theda even though he was heading to the Q for silly tax evasion and would wind up very dead not long afterward.      

This inside man, Chester Davis had a serious grudge against Zeke when he came up on the short end of the stick and got no dough for his efforts, no dough and a couple of well-placed slugs to finish that branch of the story. Well, not quite, see old Chester had kids, and when nothing happened to aid in some revenge in that generation they turned over their unresolved hatreds to their kids, nice DNA right,  who almost by accident found out Theda had a ton of dough and more importantly that fat diamond worth a ton of dough. With very little planning except grabbing a dinky suite a few doors down to keep an eye on her movements Theda fell down, took the gaff and quickly if you think about it. But Chester’s grandkids, actually one sullen granddaughter had big dreams, had a very common big dream that the fewer ways the stash needed to be cut up the better, to have the whole thing for herself just like Zeke had set up Theda. One by one her confederates, a couple of lifers, or wannbe lifers who got caught in her sexual lair, what did Allan Jackson call it one time- “went to sleep the fishes,” then anybody like the hotel manager looking to get out from under a mountain of debt who was on the second layer and finally naturally Jenny had to fall although she was not part of the caper, she was going to have the whole deal, dough, stocks, bonds, jewelry the way Theda had worked things out. That granddaughter would fall down to a John David hard case bullet, fall down hard leaving Jenny in the clear as to title though.

Here is the funny thing Theda had lived too long and had about three or four dollars in hard cash to her name. The stocks and bonds were lightweight stuff that should have sold many moons before but to top things all off though that so-called Hope diamond gag was just that, glass which some smart financier or hedge fund operator had placed in public display back in the 1930s leaving the real stuff elsewhere (and probably grabbing the insurance dough with no questions asked when Walter Neff came to call about the account). So Jenny got a few thou, maybe a little more but not enough to pay John David more than that three days retainer and some gas money. Needless to say, smitten John David never asked Alexis for his hand. Lem went way out on  the edge on this one.