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  SKIRTS BRING ME SORROW

  SKIRTS BRING ME SORROW

  By Hank Janson

  This edition first published in England in 2003 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, LL19 9SJ

  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 © 2003 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

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

  First published in England by New Fiction Press, December 1951

  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, modes of expression and, significantly, morals of the 1940s and 1950s.

  We have therefore endeavoured to make Skirts Bring Me Sorrow, and all our other Hank Janson reissues, as faithful to the original edition as possible. Unlike some other publishers who, when reissuing vintage fiction, have been known to make editorial changes to remove aspects that might offend present-day sensibilities, we have left the original narrative absolutely intact. So if, in the original edition, Hank made, say, a casually sexist remark about women – as he does on occasion in Skirts Bring Me Sorrow – then that is what you will read in the Telos edition as well.

  That’s just the kinda guy Hank was.

  Which brings us to a point about language. 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 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 – we have, for instance, added question marks in the not-infrequent cases where they were omitted from the ends of questions in the original – and to remedy clear typesetting errors. So in the Telos edition of Skirts Bring Me Sorrow, the character Daisy Bell Logan’s husband retains the name Dwight throughout the sequence in which she features, whereas in the original he suddenly became Walt.

  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. If anyone has any further information that they could provide in this regard, however, we would be very grateful to receive it.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘That’s the sixty-four dollar question,’ says Hank Janson towards the end of his latest adventure. Hank has played detective throughout the story and, in the finest crime novel tradition, we now reach the drawing room finale, about to discover the name of the murderer, the motive and the final twist in the tale.

  However, fans of Hank Janson will know instantly that any novel in which he appears is going to be nothing like the cosy, traditional murder mystery; the long-legged redhead on the cover and the title Skirts Bring Me Sorrow might also clue you in that there’s unlikely to be any mention of a body in the vicarage library.

  Despite this, Skirts is still about as close as the Janson series gets to an old-fashioned whodunit – minus the fancy poisons and the olde worlde village atmosphere. Instead, you get a corpse in a train carriage, a corpse with two bullet holes through the face and a lot of terse writing, breathless dialogue and hard-boiled action. ‘I had to kinda peel her off me. Her pointed nails seared across my back, tore skin through my thin shirt. A piece of my lip went with her, and as I gripped her bare shoulders, holding her away, she was panting uncontrollably.’

  The style of Hank’s novels was popularised in the UK by Peter Cheyney, although Cheyney wasn’t the first writer to cotton on to American hard boiled writing. Even before Prohibition-era gangsters became headline news – in British newspapers as well as American – the hard boiled novel was already well established in the UK. American writers Charles Booth and Carroll John Daly had had titles appearing since 1927, with classics of the genre not far behind. Little Caesar by W R Burnett and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett both appeared in 1929. American pulp magazines were available cheaply in the 1920s and 1930s. They included Black Mask, on which Daly, Hammett and, later, Raymond Chandler were reinventing the crime novel – giving murder back to those who committed it, to paraphrase Chandler’s famous definition of the hard boiled school.

  Gangs and gangbusters had long ago invaded Britain, in The Gang Smasher by Hugh Clevely (1928) and When The Gunmen Came by John Hunter (1930), although both themes were thrust into the public eye by the immensely popular Edgar Wallace in his play On The Spot (1930; novel 1931) and in When The Gangs Came To London, which was serialised in Answers in early 1932 and appeared shortly afterwards in hard covers.

  Hank Janson may have been part of an already-established tradition in the UK, but he established his own brand of hard-hitting dialogue and uncompromising action almost from the moment his first novel appeared in 1948. The vocabulary for tough American-style novels was available through books, magazines and on the streets, picked up during the war when thousands of American troops were ‘over paid, over sexed, and over here.’ Even an all-American catch phrase like ‘the sixty-four dollar question’ would have been widely known. This was the top prize offered in the American radio show Take It Or Leave It (1941-48) and was quickly adopted in everyday language which Hank’s author, Stephen Frances, would have picked up from books. (Just one example of its appearance is in Ellery Queen’s The Origin Of Evil, published in the UK in July 1951, shortly before Skirts was written.)

  The ‘sixty-four dollar question’ asked of writers has always been: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

  I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Stephen Frances got some of the ideas for Skirts Bring Me Sorrow from Raymond Chandler. It’s not revealing too much, nor will it spoil your enjoyment, to say that chapter two of Skirts is the Hank Janson version of the opening chapter of The Big Sleep, and one or two elements of the plot are suspiciously close to events in Farewell, My Lovely – the blackmail drop in chapters eight and nine is a variation on Philip Marlowe’s trip to Purissima Canyon with Marriott to recover a jade necklace in Chandler’s novel, and the central idea of the search for information on the long-missing David Fletcher might even have been inspired by Moose Malloy’s attempts to find Velma after eight years in prison.

  The arrival of Hank at the Fletcher mansion is a good example of the ‘what if’ way that Frances developed his stories; in this case, what if Marlowe had succumbed to Carmen Sternwood’s advances and allowed their encounter to g
o a little further. You’ll probably remember Carmen better from the movie version of The Big Sleep, where Martha Vickers plays Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac younger sister. ‘You’re cute,’ Carmen giggles as she deliberately falls into Humphrey Bogart’s arms; a sentiment echoed by Sandra Fletcher in Skirts Bring Me Sorrow.

  Frances was not able to match Chandler’s poetical use of language, and instead offers the story in Hank Janson’s voice, not Marlowe’s. In Hank’s world, female skin is creamy, breasts are erect and even the simple act of taking or lighting a cigarette involves hair brushing against a cheek or the touch of a bare shoulder. Dialogue is gritted out or spoken in low, husky tones. The language would probably have appalled Chandler, who sweated every line.

  Chandler’s influence on the course of British gangster fiction was beginning to grow by the time Skirts Bring Me Sorrow appeared. Although Hamish Hamilton had published Chandler’s debut novel in 1939, Chandler’s work did not become widespread until July 1948, when The Big Sleep was issued by Penguin in paperback, a month after Janson’s debut novel, This Woman Is Death, appeared.

  Although educated at Dulwich College and later stationed in England during the Great War, Chandler did not return until September 1952. By that time, Penguin had published four of his novels (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window; and The Lady In The Lake) and a collection (Trouble Is My Business) with cumulative sales of about half a million. Hank Janson had, meanwhile, roared ahead: although the cover for Skirts Bring Me Sorrow advertised Janson’s ‘million sale’, cumulative sales were by this point actually around two-and-a-half million. Chandler, staying at the Connaught Hotel, sarcastically noted in a letter to Paul Brooks: ‘I thought England was broke but the whole damn city is crawling with Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Daimlers and expensive blondes.’

  Frances (whose income from Janson briefly allowed him to drive a Daimler Coupe) had moved to Spain by the time of Chandler’s visit, far away from the influence of other writers, which allowed Hank to develop in unique ways.

  Influences aside, there’s no mistaking Skirts as anything but pure Hank Janson. Hank himself is the backbone of the novel, the newshound with a flair for grabbing headline stories. Not that Hank is a superman in a trenchcoat and fedora; he’s vulnerable, and it’s not unknown for him to put his foot in it, as he does with poor Jenny Finton1 , an embarrassment I won’t spoil by revealing it here.

  Hank, of course, is useless when faced with the wiles of any woman. His lust is transparent (‘Something sure is on my mind,’ I agreed pointedly, and now I wasn’t looking at her face, I was looking at her slim legs. ‘That’s always on your mind! Day and night.’) which makes him easily manipulated. ‘I’m a mere male. Nobody can cope with the brilliant cunning and the subtlety of a dame. It’s useless to try,’ he says. With Sandra Fletcher, a delicious femme fatale, Hank can only resort to violence to cope. To Hank, it was just another in a long line of encounters with fragrant nymphomaniacs; to Frances, who knew precisely what his audience wanted, it was a chance to do the scene without missing the opportunity (as Chandler had) to get Hank hot under the collar.

  Continuity fans will enjoy the reintroduction of steely-eyed Detective-Inspector Sharp, Janson’s bête noire. (The story of their original run-in was never told, but involved a murder case that Janson solved while Sharp had an innocent man behind bars), and Sharp’s polar opposite, Detective-Inspector Blunt.2

  Regular readers will recognise in David Fletcher a typical Janson victim, the innocent man hunted and hounded down, and the delightful background characters that Frances populated his novels with; in this case the oddball personalities to be found in backwater Balm Creek: the well-rounded sheriff, the barefooted old-timer rocking what remains of his life away outside the saloon. In moments like these, Frances shows how good a writer he had become. Dry humour, passion and action blend seamlessly. Murder at the vicarage was never like this.

  Steve Holland

  Colchester, July 2003

  CHAPTER ONE

  Every day approximately a hundred thousand folk arrive in Chicago on early-morning trains. That’s a lotta people. It needs swift and efficient organisation to absorb such a mass of work people as they flood from the station, overflow the subways and buses and infiltrate throughout the city.

  Yet every day of the working week that human flood is carefully controlled, guided into tributaries and back-waters smoothly and skilfully.

  Nearly every day, that is!

  But every so often just one little thing goes wrong. Then, within a few minutes, everything is brought to a standstill; there are traffic jams extending for miles; thousands of folks late for work; sweating, red-faced cops shouting angry orders; the feet of a transportless multitude pounding the concrete sidewalks like an invading army.

  Yeah, it requires just one little thing to go wrong. Like a guy threatening to jump from a skyscraper while fire-engines and a gaping crowd block the street beneath. Or maybe a broken coupling on a subway train, or a coupla jammed subway turnstiles. It could be a dame falling from a train and breaking her leg, or a suicide who’s taken a dive beneath train wheels.

  This morning it was a strike.

  The Chief said: ‘Get down there, Hank. Find out what’s biting them revolutionaries. Maybe they’re starting a new five-year plan.’

  ‘There’s been strikes before,’ I protested. ‘What’s so special about this?’

  He growled impatiently. ‘A ten per cent wage increase last week, a ten per cent cut in working hours! They’re not due to start agitating again for at least a coupla months. Must be something special.’

  ‘Maybe they just feel tired.’

  ‘Get over there, Hank,’ he growled. ‘Find out what’s cooking.’

  There’s a ‘PRESS ‘ notice stenciled on my windscreen. It helped a little. I got within half a mile of the station before I stuck with traffic solid in front of me and a solid wedge of cars behind as far as the eye could see. It was hell-a-poppin, drivers resting elbows on their horns, work-folk scurrying along the pavements, scrambling over the bonnets of the cars when they crossed the roads. A perspiring, red-faced dame who acted like she’d get the sack if she was late again, handed me a breathless, ‘Excuse me,’ opened the door of my car.

  ‘I ain’t going no place, lady,’ I began .

  She was merely taking a short-cut. My car was the short-cut. She climbed straight through, opened the door the far side, climbed out and edged her way further along the lane of traffic until she found another accommodating car.

  You have to be patient to be a driver in Chicago. It looked like this morning drivers would have to be extra patient. Now was a wonderful business opening for an enterprising guy with a portable wrapped-lunch service. I figured some of those drivers were gonna be pretty hungry by tea-time.

  I left my car unlocked with the ignition key in position. Abandoning a car like that was sure to earn me a police ticket. But a news story was more important than a motoring offence. I only hoped the guy who eventually shifted it would treat it gently.

  I found more trouble. Everyone was coming away from the station. I was going upstream against a tide of humanity, and just how strong such a tide can be you can understand if you know how unpleasant some employers can be when staff are late.

  I arrived at the station sweating like a horse, my jacket pocket torn and two buttons missing so my coat gaped open. It was a strike right enough. The pickets were on the gate, letting folk out but refusing them admittance.

  I edged up alongside a burly guy with a white armband, tried to edge past him.

  ‘Hold it, Mac,’ he growled.

  I flashed my Press card.

  He glowered. ‘What about it?’

  ‘The Press go everywhere,’ I said.

  He looked me up and down slowly. Five other guys wearing armbands moved in on us. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, looked as impenetrable as a brick wall. The burly guy said: ‘You in the union, Mac?’

  ‘Would I have
a Press card if I wasn’t?’

  He scowled darkly. ‘What’s your sympathies, Mac? Some of you fellas give us a raw write-up on occasions.’

  ‘I’m an anarchist,’ I told him. ‘Ask anyone. I can grow a six-inch beard in two days and stab with both hands simultaneously. I recite aloud two pages of Das Kapital every night before bed and won’t eat my morning wheat-flakes if there isn’t a red label on the packet. Would you like to see my cloak and bomb?’

  He screwed up his nose so it pulled his thin lips away from his teeth. ‘A smarty, huh?’

  You have to use psychology when you want a story. I’m not a politician, I’m a reporter. I’m not interested in opinions; I’m interested in facts. There’s right and wrong about almost everything. Usually the right and the wrong are on both sides at the same time. I didn’t want to yell for one team and bawl out the other.

  The pickets would have given me the facts there and then. But those facts might have been distorted. I’d have got copy, but it might have been one-sided. I could have gone to the company and heard opposing points of view. I didn’t want that either. I wanted to get inside the station, check the facts for myself.

  I used psychology. When a guy won’t string along with you, change your tactics. I knew without asking that they weren’t gonna let me in, not the way things were.

  I said softly: ‘What are you guys so scared of anyway ?’

  ‘Scared!’ scoffed the burly guy. He chuckled, glanced at the others to make sure they were chuckling too. Then he leaned forward heavily, tried to jab a hole in my chest with his forefinger. ‘There ain’t nuthin’ scares us, Bud.’

  ‘Nothing except maybe the truth,’ I sneered.

  He didn’t like that. He rocked back on his heels and he wasn’t smiling any more. His scowl was as black as thunder. ‘How would you like a poke on the snitch,’ he asked thoughtfully.