Lilies For My Lovely Read online

  LILIES FOR MY LOVELY

  HANK JANSON

  This edition first published in England in 2005 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, LL19 9SH

  www.telos.co.uk

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]

  This edition © 2013 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Introduction © 2005 Steve Holland

  Novel by Stephen D Frances

  Cover by Reginald Heade

  With thanks to Steve Holland

  www.hankjanson.co.uk

  Silhouette device by Philip Mendoza

  Cover design by David J Howe

  This edition prepared for publication by Stephen James Walker

  Internal design, typesetting and layout by David Brunt

  The Hank Janson name, logo and silhouette device are registered trademarks of Telos Publishing Ltd

  First published in England by S D Frances, May 1949

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The appeal of the Hank Janson books to a modern readership lies not only in the quality of the storytelling, which is as powerfully compelling today as it was when they were first published, but also in the fascinating insight they afford into the attitudes, customs and morals of the 1940s and 1950s. We have therefore endeavoured to make Lilies For My Lovely, and all our other Hank Janson reissues, as faithful to the original editions as possible. Unlike some other publishers, who when reissuing vintage fiction have been known edit it to remove aspects that might offend present-day sensibilities, we have left the original narrative absolutely intact.

  The original editions of these classic Hank Janson titles made quite frequent use of phonetic “Americanisms” such as “kinda”, “gotta”, “wanna” and so on. Again, we have left these unchanged in the Telos Publishing Ltd reissues, to give readers as genuine as possible a taste of what it was like to read these books when they first came out, even though such devices have since become sorta out of fashion.

  The only way in which we have amended the original text has been to correct obvious lapses in spelling, grammar and punctuation, and to remedy clear typesetting errors.

  Lastly, we should mention that we have made every effort to trace and acquire relevant copyrights in the various elements that make up this book. However, if anyone has any further information that they could provide in this regard, we would be very grateful to receive it.

  INTRODUCTION

  By the time Lilies For My Lovely was published in May 1949, the Hank Janson novels were beginning to show signs of their subsequent huge success. The cover – by regular artist Reginald “Heade” Webb – declared “200,000 sale” for the Janson novels, and that number was to leap by 50,000 a month over the coming months. That’s not far shy of 1,700 copies a day on average – far from Janson at his peak, when he was selling 4,000 copies a day, but an incredible figure nonetheless for a novice author. Eighteen months earlier, Hank’s creator, Stephen Daniel Frances, had been hoping against the odds to sell 40,000 copies a year if he was to earn a reasonable wage from his typewriter.

  Lilies was the sixth book in the Janson series, written in early 1949 soon after Frances returned from a driving holiday in Spain. He had planned to make his way down the eastern coast but had dropped into the seaside village of Rosas for lunch and ended up staying for weeks. Sunny, friendly and laid back, life in Rosas was in sharp contrast to that in post-war London, and Frances was enchanted. A businessman from Barcelona was in the process of converting his neglected summer residence, bombed-out during the Spanish Civil War, into a block of three flats a stone’s throw from the ocean. It was a chance that Frances could not let pass, and he offered to buy one.

  Now, back in England, he needed to secure his earnings, and the next few months were going to be incredibly busy. The problem of increasing his productivity was partly solved by the use of a dictation machine on which to “write” his novels. The wax discs were parcelled up and delivered to Hilder’s Secretarial Agency in Soho Street, where an 18-year-old typist by the name of Jean was tasked with turning Frances’s occasionally breathless vocalising into a typescript.1 Frances would then edit the manuscript until he was happy with the results.

  He still had to deal with typesetters, printers, paper suppliers and get his books to the distributors as well, but thanks to the Dictaphone he was able to write a novel in under a fortnight.

  It’s tempting to think of Lilies as Frances’s first post-Spain novel. The previous book in the Janson series, Smart Girls Don’t Talk, had ended with a bleakly pessimistic Hank walking through the streets of Alton, Michigan, having been falsely gaoled, embarked on a fruitless search for his missing girlfriend, Muriel, and identified the body of a young girl who chose suicide as a way out of the crushing poverty in which she was forced to live.

  Lilies For My Lovely begins in sharp contrast, with Janson cheerfully strolling down the sun-drenched streets of Des Moines (pronounced ‘De Moyne’), capital city of Iowa, on his way to meet a new girlfriend.

  Had Frances perhaps developed a new, sunnier mood? Unlikely. The story demanded that Hank start in high spirits so that he could be cruelly cut down within the space of seconds.

  Which brings us to the central mystery of the story: how could a girl so young, so vibrant as Sally Taylor, die from heart failure?

  Whilst there had been mysteries for Hank to solve in previous books, this was the first time a mystery had sustained the plot for so long, and the book is all the better for it, although nimble-minded readers will probably find themselves a couple of chapters ahead of Hank when it comes to unravelling the plot. It isn’t so much that Hank lacks mental agility than lack of space for Frances to complicate the plot. With only 36,000 or so words to play with, the story needs to unfold quickly and race toward its resolution at breakneck speed, and it’s very likely that the first person introduced who looks in the slightest bit shifty is going to be the bad guy of the piece.

  Pace of both storytelling and writing also means that there is a certain feeling of familiarity about the plot and characters. As in all Janson novels, the slickest way to get into a house is through the French windows (even run-down apartments have French windows for Hank to enter); Hank often finds himself tied up in a cellar with one or two good-looking girls who are about to be tortured; and arrogant, stuck-up heiresses will definitely be brought down a peg or two and shamed into changing their ways.

  Frances was learning quickly to produce the kinds of scenes that his readers liked, and developed this style of shorthand to move the plot forward quickly and allow space for other material. The Janson novels were not all plot and no substance; but rather than waste time having Hank traipse around looking for a way into a building, Frances would use the space to paint thumbnail sketches of his characters and their relationships. The relationship between Janson and Sally, for instance, is marked by quick-fire repartee in the style of William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man movies, and Frances skilfully prevents it from getting stale too quickly by having Hank come out with a remark too far at the appropriate moment.

  It is the strength of this relationship and Sally’s charm and humour that engages the reader, so that new
s of her death grows in impact until Hank can drop the bombshell: he does not believe that she really has died.

  Frances was becoming a master of creating instant characters-in-passing – a clerk is described as “a solemn-faced, pasty-skinned dame, with a long jaw that made her look something like a horse” – and descriptions that helped ground the stories in their settings. The plot of Lilies takes Hank from Des Moines to Mason City, both real cities in the state of Iowa. Des Moines is some 300 miles from Chicago – which was to become Hank’s base of operations once he was established as a crime reporter with the Chicago Chronicle – and 111 miles from Mason City (although the book gives a larger distance of “all of a hundred and fifty miles”). Frances, drawing most of his knowledge from tourist guides, made an interesting stab at describing the architectural splendour of the Des Moines State House, portrayed as a: “… kind of minor White House. A beautiful building erected to satisfy the vanity of the businessmen of Des Moines, and paid for by the sweat of the thousands of Iowa farmers who really made the State rich and prosperous.”

  The Statehouse (no gap) is indeed beautiful, with a high gold-gilded dome rising 275 feet above the 165-acre grounds in which it is set. Four smaller domes mark the corners of the towering building, which was built between 1871 and 1886 at a cost of over $2.8 million. Although it no longer dominates the skyline as it would have done in 1949, it remains a popular tourist attraction.

  By dropping statistics and having Hank comment on them, Frances was able to offer the occasional polemic, with most of his ire aimed at the conspicuous wealth of businessmen in Des Moines in contrast to the grinding poverty of others (for instance, one in eight people in Idaho don’t have a proper toilet). Doctors and morticians (or vultures, as Hank prefers to call one of them) are targets for withering cynicism, such as in this exchange between Hank and Dr Raylton:

  He said: “Sometimes there may be irregularities when a patient’s case is clear-cut.”

  “You mean Dr. Spiller slipped you a coupla hundred bucks!” I said.

  Not all of the locations described by Frances were real. Clork Junction – where Hank’s train is forced to stop when one of its passengers goes missing – does not exist, although there is a well-known Chicago railway intersection called Clark Junction, which might have inspired the name. Despite the inclusion of the occasional fictional town – such as Armidan City, mentioned late in the story – readers found Hank’s descriptions of America convincing.

  Another convincing passage in Lilies involves Hank’s terror at being buried alive in a coffin. Frances was always good at describing the horrors of being trapped or enclosed, and it is the kind of fear that comes naturally to all. You don’t have to suffer from claustrophobia to find the idea terrifying; a fact that has been exploited by filmmakers many times (Diamonds Are Forever, The Vanishing, Kill Bill Vol. 2, etc, etc). Frances had also written a similar scene not long before: if you are (un)fortunate enough to have read Get Me Headquarters, which he penned under the pseudonym Ace Capelli, you will know that he had the lead villain, Joe Keefe, escape from America to England in a packing crate – one of the few memorable scenes in an otherwise lousy book. It was written probably only a matter of weeks before Lilies, and there’s little doubt that Frances felt the idea was a strong one and decided to incorporate it, with changes, in his next Janson yarn. Here the scene is all the more disturbing because the story is told by Hank himself.

  Another disquieting moment comes with the tormenting of kidnap victim June Miller, who has been burned with a cigarette lighter on the bottom of her bare foot in order to make her sign a letter to her millionaire father; her kidnapper then threatens to cut off her ear… but eventually decides instead to cut off her hair.

  It was terrifying, frightening to see her. Her head seemed enormous, and the little irregular tufts of hair about a quarter of an inch in length that sprouted all over her head gave me a weird feeling that I was watching something dreadfully obscene… Somehow her face seemed to have changed and got out of proportion. Her eyebrows were just ugly exclamation marks drawing attention to the plainness of her features.

  In a later book – Honey, Take My Gun – Hank remembers his feelings about this form of torture and uses it to obtain information from a female member of a Penitents sect who simply accepts (and actively encourages) being beaten as a form of atonement.

  As usual, the treatment of women (and June Miller in particular) strikes the only dubious note in the whole book. Humiliation is one of Hank’s tools of trade for taking people down a peg, but he also persists in the notion that when faced with a petulant and contrary woman…

  There’s some dames that need slapping around. And the fella that does it is doing a them a favour. It might make all the difference in their life.

  Although this wisdom is limited to women who are “a pain in the neck”, it contrasts starkly with Hank’s oft-repeated opposition to violence towards women. By implication it seems that “slapping around” is considered nothing more than a form of punishment, although where precisely the line is drawn between acceptable punishment and out-and-out violence is never explained. These were different times, when casual domestic abuse was unlikely to be frowned upon by Hank’s primarily male readership.

  Lilies For My Lovely is a superior example of the First Series Janson novels, its faults outweighed by an exciting plot, one or two grandstand set pieces and an engaging relationship for Hank.

  It proved as popular as his other early novels: the first printing was probably 30,000 copies and a second edition followed within a few months. When New Fiction Press took over publishing the Janson novels, Lilies was at first reprinted minus the delightful (albeit generic) Heade cover – there are at least two versions labelled “6th edition” (mauve) and “7th edition” (red). In 1953, a “12th printing” was released with an alternate Heade cover showing a leggy blonde in stockings and high heels hitching up her flimsy night attire around her thigh. This alternate cover is thought to have been originally intended for the cover of Milady Took the Rap, which, when it was published in 1951, appeared with a plain red cover due to the intensive activities of the vice police at the time, who were gathering up dozens of Janson titles along with nudist magazines and other gangster yarns in an effort to crack down on obscene publications.

  Janson was to survive this crackdown – as he says to someone in Lilies: “I don’t die easy.” Which could almost be the title for another of Hank’s thrill-a-page adventures.

  Steve Holland

  Colchester, July 2005

  CHAPTER ONE

  The sun was hitting the sidewalk and bouncing back like an invisible heat-ray. I was wearing grey slacks and an open-neck twill shirt, and my jacket was on my arm. Yet I was so hot I felt burnt up, dried up and drained of energy.

  But it was a happy day. The bright sun made everything colourful, and even black paint glistened and shone. As for the white stone buildings; well, they reflected a thousand little stars for every square foot of wall-face.

  The streets were crowded. Businessmen wearing white ducks and panamas, carrying despatch cases in one hand and wiping the sweat from their brown faces with coloured bandanas, thronged the sidewalks. Brown-limbed girls, walking easily, looking ice-cool in short white skirts and linen blouses, added to the scenery more than somewhat. And everywhere there were tinted glasses for protecting the eyes from the sun’s glare. Dames wore them, fellas wore them, bus conductors wore them, and even the newsboy on the corner wore them. I felt almost nude not being able to sport a pair of dark glasses myself.

  This was the city of Des Moines, capital of Iowa, one of the greatest farming States in the whole of the United States.

  But there weren’t any corncobs growing on the concrete sidewalks, or fat Holstein cows grazing along the tarmac road. This was the City, the great City where smart little men with white ducks, panama hats, coloured bandanas and the inevitable sun-glasses, fiddled with papers, talked into telephones and made more dough in one day th
an a farmer could make in a month.

  And what did they telephone about?

  And what did those papers they fiddled with concern?

  You’ve got it. They concerned farm produce. And that gives you the story of Iowa in a nutshell. It’s a large State with only a small population. There are just over two million people in Iowa, and there’s forty square miles of good rich farming country per head of every man, woman and child in the State. Yet only one man in five has a telephone and, worse than that, in the vast American continent proud of its civilised advancement, in the State of Iowa, one man in eight hasn’t even got a proper toilet.

  Iowa is the richest agricultural State in the Union, yet it’s the same old story as you always hear. The men who do the work, scorch their backs in the fields beneath the burning sun, drive the harvesters and the combines, breed the finest pigs and cattle in the Union, those men, the workers, they get enough to live on, enough food, the rent, a rig-out of clothes from time to time, and maybe they have spare dough so they can come to town on the spree once in a while.

  But who are the guys that have the real dough? Who are the fellas that rent penthouses, drink champagne in nightclubs, wear expansive silk shirts, own racehorses and keep maybe two or three human fillies in apartments ?

  You can bet your boots it isn’t the farmers or farm workers!

  No siree!

  The guys who make the dough in Iowa are the smart guys. The fellas who don’t know what a harvester looks like, who’d get corns on their hands if they took up a pencil to write their own letters.

  When it comes to physical strength, well, they ain’t got much to commend them except maybe that they’ve been eating the best food and as much of it as they want and sometimes more than is good for them.