***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

 

…Yes, still he disturbed her sleep that week, made her a little cuckoo at work and around the house if you asked anyone within fifty feet of her. Was made more cuckoo when she talked to that  non- observant Irish Catholic tyrant father about his opinion (theoretically, of course) of southerners, American southerners, Protestants, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the British kind, and Marines (she did not add the “love them and leave them” kind). His response was horrific. Yes, he had opinions of all three categories, none good, and not just none good. He sensed what she was getting at (her mother had vaguely posed the question to him earlier in the week) and said in no uncertain terms that he would not, his word, abide, an ignorant, uneducated (this before she even knew her Marine’s lack of formal education), whiskey-drinking (despite his rages her father  was a tee-totaller having survived a drunken besotted father), redneck southern Protestant (or northern Protestant for that matter) ne’er –do-well Marine, or any other military man from that part of the country in his house. End of conversation, forever.               

Still she thought of him, wondered whether he would be at the dance that week. Maybe he had shipped out, maybe he was off with some pretty young thing (although those fierce brown eyes when he spoke to her should have told her otherwise). In any case she was going to make her case, despite her father (or who knows maybe because of the old tyrant) and despite her qualms about his intentions. So come that Friday she prepared herself, put on her best party dress (which had first served as her graduation dress but with the war efforts eating up textiles at a prodigious rate serious dresses were not be had), make herself up special with a little rouge and some ruby red lipstick and, and, put on nylons, nylons, even more than special dresses not to be had then. Her best come hither soldier boy look.

And you know that he was there, the Sheik was there that night all in dress blues, as she walked in while Jimmy Mack and the Pack back again warmed up on Til The End Of Time. She did not know where it would all lead but when he asked her after they had danced a couple of numbers if maybe they could go down to Hullsville Beach and talk instead of staying for the dance she said yes…        

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator- In The Time Of Red Wind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler 

Those who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City (just below Los Angeles) private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way everybody except a few lady friends called him when he became famous out on the coast) and his contemporaries in the private detection business like Philo Vance, Nick Charles (okay, okay Nora too), Sam Arch, Miles Sparrow, know that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories at his request to the journalist Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a friend of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who in turn related them to me over several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full responsibility for what follows.        

*******

This is the way Michael Philip Marlin told the story one night, one windy late 1950s night, an October 1958 night to be exact, a night that spoke of some impending red winds coming and reminded him of another 1930s foul red wind night, a night to remember…

Old sailors, old tars who have roamed all the seas, seven at last count, but especially the China seas, who have been in every port from Singapore to Seattle, been in every port gin mill from London to Lapland, every high and low whorehouse from New York to the Netherlands, and every greasy- spoon from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon claim that the red wind, a California wind coming from the land means nothing but trouble, trouble with a big T.

Of course those old seaman assume all their troubles are land-bound but that is a separate question. Their take is this, and maybe they are right, that those red winds, the winds coming out of some Santa Ana enclave make people jittery, claim that the red wind, a blood red wind coming from the land not that blue- pink goodnight ocean sky wind make them nervous, make them ready to do each and every thing right up to murder if need be, that they would not dream of doing in calmer times. Make Walter Mitty-types feisty ready to give hell and brimstone class- war to their bosses (in their dreams anyway), make docile children rise up like Cain slayed Abel (and create mother pick-up messes worthy of such titanic struggles), make sweet mother home-makers reach for some rolling pin to level a miscreant, fill- in- the- blank. Make a woman practice with her trigger finger maybe at that same fill-in-the-blank. Just in case.

Michael Philip Marlin, the tough old gumshoe, the seedy, has-been private eye, the shamus, down on his luck for a moment at the time   found reason to believe those old seadogs were on to something when the winds, the red winds, no question, blew across the city of angels, disrupted the old time Los Angeles night, his night, one October week back in 1939, back before the war made the whole town crazy with or without winds. That ill-wind, that hell wind seemingly from the bowels of the earth made the citizenry of the city of angels, L.A. town, do screwy foul things right up to and including murder.

Yes Marlin the private investigator who was the talk of the town back in 1933 when he single-handedly solved, no, resolved what everybody in Los Angeles, Hollywood at least, called the Galton case, the big kidnapping/ransom case involving the big time producer Jack Galton’s teenage daughter. Marlin had clamped down, clamped down hard, on Manny Huber and his gang’s scam of doing such random kidnappings, grabbing the dough (sometimes splitting it with the so-called victims in those cases where he or she was in the scam for whatever reason, usually just the dough), and then blowing town for a while. Of course the victim, or rather the victim’s family paid up, paid up big to keep that scandal out of the public eye, that hard fact of being suckered by some two-bit hoods stuff.

Jack Galton was made of tougher stuff, didn’t know how to fold, grabbed Marlin when he was in his prime and Marlin wrapped the case  up fast by putting the squeeze on one of  Huber’s gang and getting the daughter back unharmed, although dazed and drugged, and no ransom paid. That ended that scam in the Hollywood hills for good. But it also opened, courtesy of a grateful Jack Galton, a streak of starlets at Marlin’s beck and call, including a young Fiona Fallon, later the great femme fatale actress, and plenty of soft touch private eye work for a couple of years until Jack’s luck ran out like it often did in Hollywood  and his operations folded. After that Marlin had been living on cheap street, a small job here and there, not enough to keep up the old office downtown, now he was down on the low-rent end of Wiltshire in the Shell Building with the failed dentists, blustery insurance scammers and seedy repo- men. Same situation with his apartment now down on the low end of Bunker Hill, down with rooming house winos and jetsam coming from the east to paradise. And that was how things stood that night when the red winds came, came and dusted everything and everybody with the mal suerte …                    

Hell, when Marlin thought about it later, who would have thought that going out for a few cold ones, a few brews, maybe a quick shot of low- shelf whiskey to keep the devils away, all to take the dust off the night at a newly opened corner bar in the neighborhood, Shorty’s, across the street from the place where Marlin called home would lead to murder. He had sat there that night minding his own business nursing his second beer, listening to the sad-eyed tunes coming from the radio in back of the bartender/owner Shorty (who else) when this saggy middle- aged guy named Warden came in, came in looking for a dame.

No, not some bar girl or some street tart like you might think, the place was too new to have drawn those types or guys who were looking for those types either which was the same thing, and besides Shorty hadn’t paid the cops dime one to cater to that trade.  Warden was looking for,   from his close description of her clothing, her make-up and her demeanor an upscale, uptown woman, a banker’s or politician’s trophy wife from the sound of it. Warden’s description had Marlin thinking thoughts of a dame looking like something out of Vanity Fair and smelling, well, smelling of sandalwood if anybody was asking, just a faint whiff of sandalwood like it is supposed to be applied.

This Warden asked Shorty and then Marlin if they had seen such a twist (his term). They answered no, although Marlin wished just then that he had. And new bar or old, tarts or ladies, for his efforts, for coming out of the red wind night howling outside, old brother Warden was waylaid and shot point blank by a dizzy guy who like Marlin was also nursing a few drinks at one of the tables. That guy, a saggy guy just like Walden, fled using the cover of the dust kicked up by the red winds to get away clean. That scene made no sense under normal circumstances but in the blood red night something was breezing ill. 

Naturally, after the police, the cops, in the person of one hard-nosed Homicide Detective Smiley Walsh who had no love for private dicks as he called them, especially Marlin since he had gotten his nose bent out of shape in the Gilbert murder case by him, finished rumbling him up, finished giving him the third- degree, practically calling him the perpetrator, or in cahoots with the hard guy, our boy Marlin was up for anything that would shed light on what the hell had happened before his very eyes. See, not only did that dizzy lambster plug Warden but he wanted to put two between the eyes of one Michael Philip Marlin (and the newly minted bar owner, Shorty, too) to erase any witnesses to his dastardly deed. Except this, Marlin, for professional pride, and rightly so, took umbrage at that notion that he could be rubbed out for drinking a friendly beer in his own damn neighborhood.

He, moreover, was taken with the intriguing idea that some femme, some femme with that essence of sandalwood surrounding her was out in the red wind night. Maybe needing help, maybe needing windmill-chasing help, maybe needed some comfort between the sheets if it came to that. It was that kind of night, and he had those kinds of feelings. And so our boy when he had a chance to think about it, about Warden’s whole damn existence, figured out it didn’t make sense that a loser, a born-loser from that minute look at him that Marlowe had was keeping social company with some guy’s uptown trophy wife. And so our boy traced Warden’s movements back from his entry into the barroom, back to his car, back to his apartment, and finally coming up with some clover, back to her.     

[Just for the record that barroom killing was nothing but a settling of old scores by a guy, Detroit Red, who believed, and believed correctly as it turned out that Warden had dropped a dime on him back East. A dime which sent him to Sing -Sing for a nickel on an armed robbery rap and his fate is of no further interest to us.]

This was the way it went down. This Warden was nothing but a grifter, a ex-con with expensive habits, a dope thing, a nose candy jones bad habit. Inhaling more cocaine than he was selling, always a bad mix. He had landed in jail on some lightweight drug charge up in Oregon and did some time with Richard Baxter, yes, the Richard Baxter who controlled the whole political machine on the sunny slumming angels streets of the town. No move, no contract, hell, maybe no breathe was taken without Baxter’s okay, and Baxter’s cut. This Baxter, obviously did not want that hard jailbird fact known around town, among many other little things that he wanted kept secret.

Warden’s grift though was to get to Baxter through his wife Lola, the woman of the sandalwood night. A real looker, with a little class unlike some of the tramps Baxter had previously cavorted with. Baxter had picked her up on the rebound after her true love bit the dust down Mexico way flying stuff in and out, and it took no imagination to figure out what any gringo was flying in and out of Mexico in those days, or now for that matter. That pilot love had been working off and on for Baxter as well until Baxter got wise to his old- time flame relationship with Lola so wonder if you want to about the nature of that plane crash. No one, no one over the age of seven, would put it past Baxter. Warden, a resourceful sort in a crude way, in order to make a strong selling point stole a certain pearl necklace of hers to grab some quick dough to feed his habit. In any case the pay-off to Warden was dough, big dough, for the pearl necklace that this fly boy had given Lola as sign of undying devotion. And to keep that information out of the hands of the jealous domineering Baxter. So Lola was the woman Warden was looking to meet at the bar to make the exchange before he died in a hail of bullets.         

Lola, still without her necklace after the aborted meet with Warden, then hired Marlin to retrieve the item and keep it on the hush after he had tracked her down as the upscale woman Warden was to meet. The tracing was simpler than Marlin thought it would be since Warden had rented a room at the formerly regal Hotel Alhambra now gone to seed over on Spruce where he knew the house detective who, for a fiver, let him into Warden’s room. There he found enough information about his mystery woman to connect the dots. He phoned her, arranged for a meet, and that was that. That was that once he got a look at her, all exotic and shimmery there was no other way to put it, with that vague sandalwood scent hovering around the in the air and that ignited, or better re-ignited, his silky sheets thoughts although once she made him aware of the Baxter connection he backed off, backed off a bit. At least until he found the necklace.  

Naturally Marlin’s code of honor, his get the job done honor, required that he adhere to that bargain. Just as naturally though he found the necklace. A dopester like Warden keeps things simple, had to once he was on the nod, once he crossed over the line or he was finished, and then usually found face down in some dark back alley or along some forsaken riverbed. So Marlin retraced those Warden steps again, and again back to the Alhambra. This time to check with the desk clerk to see if Warden had any mail or messages. After passing another fiver to the clerk he got the contents of the mailbox where he found a message from Johnny Shine, a dope dealer well known to Marlin and the L.A. police, to Warden. He shot over to Central Avenue to Johnny’s hang-out, Spike’s Pool Hall, where after a little rough stuff, not much, dopers aren’t built that way, and a couple of threats about coppers, he obtained an envelope Johnny was holding for Warden. That envelop contained a key to a locker box down at the Greyhound Bus Depot from which Marlin grabbed the necklace.

After its return to her Marlin got his little off-hand romance with the lovely lonely, ethereal Lola.  Seems that the life of a trophy wife, Baxter’s trophy wife, was pretty boring and pretty lonely, especially since Lola was pining away for that old pilot love and so many an afternoon for the next few weeks they had their clandestine affair, had their moment together. Lola told Marlin one afternoon about Baxter’s strangely asexual habits and so he, mistakenly as it turned out, pulled his guard down a little, didn’t keep the affair as clandestine as it should have been. Baxter, who had his tentacles everywhere in his domain found out about Lola and the pearls, the potential expose of his jail-bird time, and her little tryst with Marlin and was determined to do something about the matter.

Men like Richard Baxter do not get where they wind up without walking over a pile of corpses and so he confronted Lola and Marlin in her bedroom one night, maddened, gun in hand. Somehow Lola diverted Baxter’s attention long enough to let Marlin to take a shot at him, a fatal shot, taking a couple of slugs herself in the melee. She died in Marlin’s arms clutching that necklace. As for the necklace itself which that old time fly- boy love told Lola had been worth big dough Marlin found out it was glass, worthless. Yes, Marlin mused later back at Short’s after the dust had settled and he ordered a drink, scotch, to toast his brave Lola love, those navies were right, those dry red winds meant nothing but trouble, trouble with a big T.     

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

 

…Well not quite that was that. The “not quite that was that” referring to the weekly USO morale-building dance held in Hullsville the week before where she eyed him, he eyed her, and she “decided” while he was good-looking, especially in his Marine uniform, that she would pass on this heartbreaker. We pick up the story from there. The very next Friday night, a night she had for some reason not volunteered to do refreshment service, she Agnes, Dorothy, and a couple of other young women from the office pool found their way to that weekly USO dance. And guess who was there in his dress blues doing a double-take when she came into the ballroom lobby (she had not been sure at first that it was a double-take but when he looked her way again a second later she knew). Of course that look did not make him stop his world, his pretty young thing he was talking to world. And did not stop him from taking that pretty young thing out on to the dance floor when that week’s cover band, Dick Glover and The Rovers, played the upbeat Andrews Sister’s tune Rum and Coca-Cola while they danced. She was glad, mostly glad, that she had not succumbed to his charms the previous week.

Then the “not quite that was that ” started as a few dances later he swayed his wiry frame over to her and her crowd to say “hi” and to ask her for a dance (as “their song, ” or what would become their song, If I Didn’t Care, came on). She said yes, and so they danced, danced a couple of dances in a row. Then the rules of the USO dance for hostesses to mix closed in on them and another soldier requested a dance.  Later at intermission he again spoke to her, asked her once again if he could wait for her at the end of the dance. Again she said no. Same thing when he asked her for a date. No. He couldn’t figure her out, couldn’t figure why she seemed to reject him out of hand when he sensed she liked him.

What he did not know, could not know then was that besides her feeling that he was strictly a “love them and leave them” guy, that Sheik designation whatever his story to the contrary told it all, and that she should not succumb to his charms there was another reason. After mentioning him to her mother, mentioning that he was from the south, her mother warned her off. Reason: Tyrant father, tyrant Irish Catholic father (although barely observant) would raise holy hell, would go crazy if she brought some redneck Protestant around. And so whatever she felt, they would be doomed before they started. Still he…                   

***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Treasure Of Monte Christo 

         

DVD Review

 From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 Treasure of Monte Christo, starring Glenn Langan, directed by William Berke, 1949       

 

Not all film noir is created equal and not down among the second string B-film noir either. Recently I reviewed another William Berke- directed noir, Roaring City, which had a passable, if slightly implausible, plot- line centered on framing on private detective Dennis O’Brien for half the murders committed in the city by the bay, Frisco town, in the early 1950s. The effort under review, Treasure of Monte Christo does not measure up to even that low-bar standard because from the start it is extremely hard to do what you have to do with all suspense films, good or bad, suspend disbelief. Here is why I couldn’t.     

  

The main character, Dante, as he later found out, was a descendant of the famed Count of Monte Christo and of his substantial fortune which was at that point in the late 1940s hidden somewhere, somewhere deep in Frisco town. Dante, a sea-faring man by trade, was set up as he went on R&R in that golden bridge town. The set-up was the old blonde honey trap with a twist. The blonde honey pretending to be under some duress from parties unknown but in pursuit, wrangled Dante into marrying her as protection against those unknown evil forces. Yes, it was either the blonde hair, the shape, or that sandalwood perfume but our boy bought into this scheme, bought in hook, line, and sinker.

As it turned out the whole scheme was being engineered by a crooked two-bit has-been lawyer, Brodie, a guy with an office down in some beaten down office building filled with repo-men, failed dentists, and other con men. He sees this treasure hunt as the way out of cheap street. The Brodie-inspired set-up is beautiful-he framed Dante for the murder of his lawyer partner (who had the knowledge about Dante and the treasure) and then “defended” Dante in court. Naturally that defense did not meet the minimum standard for zealous advocacy for a client and Dante was ready to walk for the big-step-off at the Q (San Quentin).

But see this Dante was truly a relative of that long ago swash-buckling count because he was not going to fry for something he did not do. He escaped while in custody on the way to Q, traced the frame-up back to Brodie and along with the forces of law and order who do not want to see yet another miscarriage of justice gave Brodie his just desserts. Oh, and that blond honey trap whom our man Dante was “married to.” Well she changed sides, provided information about the set-up, and the now- in- the- money Dante and she sailed off into the sunset. See what I mean about not all B-noirs being equal.  

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…

…some guys, some guys like him, just though they were God’s gift to women. Maybe it was the wavy black hair and fierce brown eyes in a blue-eyed world, maybe it was the swaggering wiry figure behind the walk, maybe it was the soft-edged curlicue wisp of a southern drawl when he spoke, maybe it was the Marine dress blues set off against the Pacific island-hopping tan earned from the blistering sun but he had the girls turning their heads as he entered the USO dance that night. Some of the guys in the barracks, half-kidding, had named him the Sheik out of envy or out of respect for his full-blown prowess with the women, the cold  yankee women who helped people the weekly dances. Dances held each Friday night after the week’s work was done at the Hullsville Naval Depot (and hence the Marine contingent presence).

The idea of the dance, simplicity itself when one thought about it,   was to keep up the morale of those like him, like the Sheik and his comrades stationed at Hullsville and other local military installations, who had returned from hard island-hopping battle, those whose numbers had been called, and those ready to board the troop transports being built just up the road at the Centerville Shipyard. And that morale was kept up best, as it has been since man first started fighting his fellow man for good reasons or bad, by enlisting the aid of all the eligible young women around the Depot and those who worked in the civilian office buildings across the road. And that was how the “Sheik” met her, met his match.

Funny she had noticed him, like every other girl in the room had, when he walked in from her position behind the refreshment table which she had volunteered to cover on the sign-up sheet the week before. Then she had been distracted by the needs of a customer and had dismissed him from her mind as just another “love them and leave them” Marine looking to cash in on his war hero status among the man-starved females on the ballroom floor.  And he gave no indication, not so much as a glance, as he slid across the floor with Agnes, Gladys, Doris, Martha, from work and some other good-looking girl whom she did not know but who was dressed to the nines, that he was interested in her.

But as soon as Jimmy Mack and The Pack, the local cover band performing that night, finished up the first set after playing I’ll Get By to close the set and took an intermission break he appeared right behind her out of the blue. And began without as much as a hello, except to call out her name, to start what turned out to be his courting while she was busy serving donuts and coffee to the gathering crowds in front of her. (It was not until later, much later, that she realized how clever he had been to make his play at that time and in that way  when she could not abandon her duties and where to leave would require her to try to go around him. She thought as well that with that look in his fierce brown eyes she had as much chance of getting by him that night as an enemy soldier did out on some isolated desolate Pacific atoll.)

She secretly thrilled to his soft southern drawl as he told her that one of his dance partners, Agnes, he thought, had told him her name and he had asked whether she was going with a fellow.  No, and so here he was the Sheik at her beck and call. (That sheik thing had nothing to do with being a lady’s man, as least that is what he told her then, but was taken from the name of a group of good old boys that he played music with up and down the Ohio River before the war who named themselves the Kentucky Shieks after the fashion down south in the 1930s for groups playing old time country and mountain music.) So she talked to him, or rather he laid out his case, while she poured coffee and yessed him to death, until she could hear Jimmy and the guys warming up for the final set. He asked her if it was alright for him to wait for her after the dance. She said no. He asked for a date. She said no. No way, as much as she wanted to leave her family house and get married to get away from her tyrant father, was she going to allow herself to fall into the clutches of this good-looking, soft- spoken “love them and leave them” Marine. And that was that …

***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Roaring City

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Roaring City, starring Huge Beaumont, directed by William Berke, 1951       

 

Not every Frisco private detective got the high profile, potentially lucrative cases a shamus like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade got chasing skirts, fists and bullets, and some damn bird, a bird who turned out to be the stuff of dreams. Some operatives like our gumshoe Dennis O’Brien in the film under review, Roaring City, got the leavings, the stuff Spade (and even the late Miles Archer, his partner) left for the amateurs and part-timers. Yes, O’Brien was trying to make his coffee and cakes on the side by renting out boats in the Frisco Bay day when he got a couple of calls, a couple of cases, for cheap dough, a couple of skirt chases and plenty of fists in the face for his efforts. Let me tell you about them.    

First off our boy grabs a couple of hundred buck (well only a hundred since the rest was supposed to be paid on completion, a completion that never occurred once the client turned up dead, very dead) for a case he really wanted no part of but the rent was due, he was bored, or some other reason known only to him.  The client; a local boxing promoter who just for that cheap dough wanted O’Brien to place some bets with the bookies against his “champ.” 

 

Now nobody over the age of twelve believes that the pugilistic arts are anything but rigged but it was pretty raw for a guy to bet against his own man so openly (it seemed everybody in the Bay Area knew what was going down-except the cops). And naturally the promoter got his just rewards in the end for sullying the name of the game. Of course, as well, a twist was in the way working for a low-down bookie looking to make a big score. No dice. But along the way to “no dice” O’Brien suffers multiple fists, murders done (with him as the fall guy to take the rap), and an off-hand kiss or too from that twist (don’t worry our boy unlike Sam Spade will not go through hoops for a dame, no way, although he can handle that kissing part just fine). No question though this is one key-hole peeper who earned his damn one- hundred dollars.

So does our shop-worn private eye learn anything from that cheapjack experience.  No.  Next up O’Brien tangles with a scheme hatched up by a couple of femmes, Irma and her step-daughter Sylvia, for cheap dough (a measly one-hundred bucks). Tangles up too with fists, bullets and piled up bodies. But what can a guy, any guy and not just low-rent private detectives, expect when he tangles with femmes. The idea was that O’Brien was paid to be “married” to Sylvia to avoid retribution from an old gangster lover who was now back in the country after being on the lam for a while. Said Sylvia had fallen in love with another guy named Fallon and she doesn’t want him hurt.

 

Of course that is just the cock and bull cover story. The real deal was if that gangster lover went to his final reward before the femme then she got to cash in thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that he has stashed away (yeah, I know, tip money today and not really much then either-no enough to get three guys killed over). That is where the second femme Irma came in and gummed up the works. She was just a greedy little hustler who killed Fallon, the lover that O’Brien was standing in for. In reaction Sylvia killed her gangster lover and his gunsel thinking they did Fallon in. Yes a mess, no question. And the fall guy all set to take the frame. Well, you know who. But you also know he is not ready for any big step-off just because of some daft scheme by some chiseling femmes and so he walked away clean after delivering the ladies to their just step-off rewards. Leaving O’Brien, well leaving O’Brien wishing like hell that Sam’s Brigit had showed up at his door looking for a jewel-encrusted bird.

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin-Trouble Is Still My Business –Introduction To The Stories     

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler 

I have been on something of a Philip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from the 1930s and 1940s in trying to think about the work of the well-known private detective-Michael Philip Marlin. Many of Marlin’s attributes parallel those of Marlowe’s so it was beneficial to run through those novels that feature the hard- drinking, bonded whiskey-neat drinking, not that Hollywood dry martini sissy stuff, hat-wearing, rakishly tilted to hide those roving eyes when he wants them hidden, tough guy, tough enough no to be afraid to throw a punch or take one, take a slug or fire one, windmill-chasing especially if that structure has a foxy woman hanging off one of the blades, seen-it-all, acres of dope, rivers of booze, seven kinds of sex, maybe more, that would make the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra  blush, every day average day corruption and murder, murder in all shapes and sizes, none pretty private detective.

Those novels ranging from The Big Sleep to Payback (seven in all) also pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town. A time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its high and low life without a map. That had been Marlin’s time and place as well. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, his forever chasing after some rough justice in this wicked old world, his fly-by-the-seat-of-the pants code of honor that sometimes went awry on him, usually when helping a dame (twist, frail frill, chick, femme whatever they were called in your neighborhood), a dame in trouble usually but not always, always playing by his own rules though, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.  

What a lot of people didn't know, including if you can believe this, Raymond Chandler, since he passed away in 1959 before he could have heard the news when it became public was that Michael Philip Marlin got married, married to Fiona Fallon, one of his flames from a caper back in the late 1940s, secretly married, well, not secretly so much as quietly since any wife of his would be in some danger from bad guys (or maybe an irate ex-flame) if that knowledge was widely available on those steamy Southern California streets. And that marriage produced a child, a male child, Tyrone, born in 1946, whom Marlin took on his knee when he was young and told stories to about old Los Angeles and the characters that ran amok there.  Marlin passed away in 1976 having retired from the gumshoe business some years before. Shortly thereafter Tyrone started his own private eye business which he named the Tyrone Agency not trading in on his father’s famous name for obvious reasons.

Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a free-lance journalist out there in the west and a friend of my old friend Peter Paul Markin, had to do some business with Tyrone in the early 1980s, which he handled well, and they struck up something of a friendship, meeting every once in a while over drinks, whiskey, high-shelf bonded whiskey –neat, no that sissy Hollywood dry martini stuff, and he would tell Joshua stories that his father had told him about the old days in wild LA. He also told Joshua about some of his own closed cases where some of what his father had spoken of to him helped him crack more than one case.

Joshua conveyed many of those same stories to Markin over many a flask at their favorite watering hole in Boston, Rick’s, who subsequently told many of them to me. I suggested to Markin that I might like to relate those stories to a wider audience. At first Tyrone bucked a little when Joshua made the suggestion since many of the old stories had already been published. Tyrone then suggested that if I changed up the stories enough and kept his father’s name out of it that it might work, work legally and work to keep the Michael Philip Marlin code of honor before a new reading public. Through negotiation Tyrone finally relented on the use of his father’s name since that would draw the audience I was interested in reaching. The stories below, in no particular order, are the result of those discussions between Tyrone and Joshua - with kudos to Raymond Chandler, and, well, Philip Marlowe too.