Blonde on the Spot Read online

  BLONDE ON THE SPOT

  By Hank Janson

  First published in United Kingdom 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

  Cover design by David J Howe

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

  First published in England by S D Frances, June 1949

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

  This ebook 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 Blonde on the Spot, 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 amendments we have made to the original text have been to correct obvious lapses in spelling, grammar and punctuation – for instance, inserting question marks at the ends of questions in the many places where they were mistakenly omitted – and to remedy clear typesetting errors and inconsistencies – such as where the place called Ghost City was sometimes referred to instead as Ghost Town (in fact, the two names were used almost interchangeably in parts of the original, but we have chosen to standardise on the former).

  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

  Continuity played an important part in the Hank Janson saga. For the bulk of Hank’s adventures, he was a crime reporter with the Chicago Chronicle. Welcoming back fellow workers like his cigar-chomping boss, Chief Healey, and following his on-off romance with woman’s page editor, Sheila Lang, were fun aspects of the stories.

  There are two particularly fine examples of this continuity. One occurs in Vengeance, where Hank visits a location he has previously written about in It’s Always Eve That Weeps (a novel that does not feature Hank as a character); the second is the ongoing storyline between Lilies For My Lovely and Blonde On The Spot.

  What makes this such an interesting follow-up is not simply the continuity of characters – it was neither the first nor the last time that a character would be with Hank at the end of one book and still be there at the beginning of the next. The real interest lies in how Hank’s relationship with his amour has developed between the two stories.

  Sally Taylor is the main focus of Hank’s attentions in Lilies For My Lovely. The two meet in Des Moines, where Sally is living for a few months with her uncle. Hank spies a pretty dame and – being an inveterate stalker of women – decides to follow her. When this attractive girl gets her heel caught in a grille in the sidewalk, he is on hand to help, which he does with all the usual Janson (lack of) finesse. Hank gets an eyeful of her legs (there are soft dimples in the backs of her knees) and her foot (dainty, beautifully formed), but manages to leave the heel behind when he wrenches her shoe out of the grate.

  Over the length of the day, Hank and Sally enjoy each other’s company, wisecracking with each other, having a flutter on the horses, going swimming, and generally having a whale of a time. Hank is shocked to hear the next day that Sally has died of heart failure – but he quickly convinces himself that no girl so full of vital, vibrant life and animal strength could die so suddenly.

  As the plot of Lilies unfolds, Hank is proved to be right: Sally’s ‘death’ is part of a kidnapping plot by her uncle and a rogue named Dr Spiller. Hank eventually catches up with them in Sally’s home town, Mason City, where he discovers Sally tied up in the basement of her house along with the kidnapped girl, June Miller. Sally is threatened with death by various ghastly methods, and eventually Hank rescues her from a hole dug in the basement, where she is buried up to the neck in quick-drying cement.

  Sally survives this horrific ordeal with surprisingly little psychological damage, and she and Hank enjoy a happy relationship. As Lilies For My Lovely comes to an end, they have been together for around nine weeks and are heading off in Hank’s car toward what should be a bright future.

  How wrong could Hank be? Three months later, as Blonde On The Spot opens, Hank tells his readers: ‘Beneath the outward veneer of fun and excitement, there was a strain of awkwardness.’ What he once saw as ‘a real pleasant smile’ has turned into a stubborn frown; Sally’s fascinating, animal litheness has lost its allure; the wisecracking banter has dried up. Small things begin to annoy Hank, building up a tension between the two until he snaps and Sally responds with stony silence.

  This is the situation in which Hank finds himself in the opening chapters of Blonde, the seventh full-length Hank Janson novel. On its origin publication, in June 1949, the cover, the most provocative so far, boasted ‘250,000 sale’ and showed a young blonde girl in a ragged blue dress tied to a chair.1 The dress is barely able to contain her bosom. Readers waiting for the book to live up to the promise of the cover would not be disappointed – Hank eventually ropes up three girls, although none in quite the manner that cover artist Reginald ‘Heade’ Webb depicted.

  The blonde – Blondie – is one of the subsidiary participants in a story that rather overflows with characters. Indeed, the book is possibly too chock-full of people and incidents for its own good. Author Stephen Frances was obviously growing more comfortable wearing the shoes of his lead character, although he still seems to have had a few problems squaring incidents that he wanted to appear in the story and relating how Hank should react to them. There was the frequent problem in the Hank Janson novels of violence against women. To give his readers the vicarious thrills that they were demanding, Hank had to be thrown into situations with young women whose morality was suspect. What better way to get Hank hot under the collar than to have him mixed up in a rough and tumble with three prostitutes? After all, it was their job to wear the kind of clothes that would arouse Hank and his readers and not feel embarrassed when they were somehow removed or torn off.

  But this was a series of novels available to anybody walking into a newsagent’s, and sex as a subject matter was not only
frowned upon by the authorities but also actively discouraged through prosecution of said newsagents, as well as of publishers and even, in extreme cases, of authors. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was available to only a tiny readership in the UK at that time, and then only when rare copies escaped the attention of customs officers. The authorized British edition published by Martin Secker in 1932 was heavily bowdlerized; Heinemann’s 1956 edition followed the same text. It was as late as 1960 before Penguin Books finally took a stand and published the unexpurgated text, prepared to defend the artistic merit of a book they knew would be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.

  This act of defiance was possible only thanks to Hank Janson, whose publisher and distributor were successfully prosecuted in 1954 over the publication of seven novels deemed to be obscene. The fall-out from the trial – in which a variety of other books were introduced by the defence to try to establish what was easily available and acceptable to modern readers – led to a change in the law, allowing artistic merit to be taken into consideration when judging novels that dealt with sex in a more candid way than some would like.2

  To give the readers what they wanted and keep himself out of prison, author Frances trod a very fine line with sex and violence. Writing in 1949, two years before the first major prosecution of a paperback publisher, Frances had already drawn a line for himself – and occasionally strayed over it. Hank would often state that he did not believe in violence towards women. He gives perhaps his definitive statement on this during a tussle with Elsa Crane in Honey, Take My Gun: ‘If she’d been a fella, I could have got in under her guard and lifted her clean off the ground with an uppercut. But you don’t treat dames that way – at least, I don’t.’ Yet in Chapter Ten of the book you are now holding, he has a slightly different attitude:

  I suddenly realised that I was nearly a goner. They had only to get my legs roped and I’d be a plaything for them to handle. If I didn’t get loose from this quickly …

  I saw it differently then. They were dames, and subconsciously I’d been treating them like dames. If I was gonna get out of this, I was gonna have to forget they were dames!

  I forgot they were dames! Somehow I managed to twist my head and open my mouth. And then I bit. I bit as hard as I knew how. I didn’t know or care what part of Helga it was that I bit, provided I got free.

  Jezus, what a howl that girl gave. She leaped up so suddenly, she almost took my teeth with her. That left my shoulders loose so I could strain upwards and clop Blondie under the chin.

  Hank squares this violence with himself by the simple justification that if he doesn’t do something, he’s going to get hurt. A human reaction, but hardly an ethical one, given his moral stance. Almost certainly, author Frances was trusting that his readers would remember that Hank is fighting with three prostitutes who have left their own morals behind and given up any rights to be treated like women.

  Violence toward women is not the only problem with Blonde On The Spot. In a book full of clichéd characters, the worst treatment is reserved for members of a Native American tribe. The setting for the book is Oklahoma City and a nearby ghost town called Ghost City. No doubt Frances was inspired by this setting to create a plot based around a conflict between cowboys and Indians. The local reservation is owned by the Choctaw tribe, originally based in central Mississippi when they met their first Europeans in the 16th Century. The leaders of the tribe signed a treaty in 1820 ceding their lands in exchange for land in Oklahoma. Many of the tribesmen refused to move West voluntarily. Most were forced to walk to their new land along what became known as the Trail of Tears in the bitter winter of 1831-32. A quarter of those who started out died from exposure and cholera on the trip, and the new land was not ready for the survivors when they arrived: food and medicine were short and a flood the following spring destroyed many of the crops they planted.

  Over 100 years later – the novel is set in modern (1949) Oklahoma – the Choctaw Indians as depicted by Frances are straight out of a B-movie. ‘Want’um squaw,’ growls one whiskey-fuelled redskin on the warpath, in pidgin English that would shame Tonto. ‘You give, then go. No kill.’

  In movie terms, the idea of a modern-day battle between cowboys and Indians would be called a set piece. Imagine what it would be like with Indians with bows and arrows and tomahawks attacking a car instead of a stagecoach. Whilst it may have sounded good when Frances pitched the idea to himself, the end results are embarrassingly bad. Jimmy Chark, part-Indian, is depicted as stoic and brave; but every other mention of Indians reverts to that peculiar Wild West of Hollywood. The chiefs of the tribal reservations swap furs for whiskey and, once they are fired up with white man’s firewater, the whole sorry mess degenerates into scenes of painted braves performing dances to the frenzied beat of tom-toms and riding into town to scalp’um white men.

  Not that Blonde On The Spot doesn’t have its good points. As mentioned above, Frances was growing more comfortable with the character he had created, and finding his voice as a writer. Hank’s background was being slowly sketched in: in Lilies, we get a hint that Hank has been a newspaperman when he says (of some photos): ‘Tell her that you know a fella that’d like to give these to his editor.’ In Blonde, the reference is more specific: ‘I began to tell her about myself, the things I’d done, the places I’d been to and how I was working my way leisurely across the States with money to burn in my pockets.’ When his friend Victor introduces Hank to a young reporter, it is as ‘a real reporter’: ‘He’s covered some of the toughest assignments New York can dish out.’

  The first trip Hank makes to Ghost City results in him playing the roulette wheel using a system that was developed by Frances’s friend Harry Whitby. The system – described in Whitby’s Science Of Gambling, which Frances had published in 1945 – worked only on a crooked table and relied on playing ‘corpse’ by backing small amounts on money against the play of bets, trusting the house to fix it so it would fleece the greater amounts. Frances had already described this system in his earlier, non-Janson novel One Man In His Time, and would later do so again in Frails Can Be So Tough (another Janson title available in Telos’s reissue series).

  Blonde on the Spot is also laced with the kind of sly, innuendo-filled humour that Hank’s readers appreciated:

  She said: ‘You’ve got pretty big teeth, aincher?’

  The car lurched, pressing us all over to one side. Helga was pressed against me like we were glued together.

  ‘Yeah, and you’ve got pretty big …’ I began, and then suddenly remembered that Sally was in front. She might not have liked the kinda crack I was gonna make.

  The novel’s ending, with its Indian uprising, the destruction of Ghost City and the murder and/or scalping of many white folks, makes barely a ripple with the police, but realism isn’t always the point of a Hank Janson novel. Janson fans would have been far more concerned with Hank’s dilemma of how to get three barely-dressed dames into a flat without arousing suspicions. Typically, the solution involves getting a fourth dame out of her dress.

  It might not be Pulitzer Prize-winning literature, but it sure helped shift copies off the shelves.

  Steve Holland,

  Colchester, July 2005

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s about five hundred miles from Des Moines to Oklahoma City, and you can drive the whole distance in twenty-four hours if you’re crazy to get there in a hurry.

  Me and Sally weren’t in a hurry. We took our time on the way, stopping at hotels when it suited us, sometimes camping, using the camping equipment I carried in the car, and sometimes stopping at roadhouses, sleeping in wooden chalets and walking and exploring the country by day.

  All told, it took us three months to make the trip from Des Moines to Oklahoma, and the way we travelled took us through Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas.

  Travelling those wide, macadam roads, passing through city after city, each with its quota of towering skyscrapers, its busy, bustling offices and factories, I found it har
d to believe that just a short seventy years earlier, Billy the Kid was riding the trail through this same country; that roaming Indian tribes lay in wait for unwary caravans; and that thousands of head of cattle were herded across dusty plains.

  The West is young, yet it is rich in its short history. Men have built cities from grasslands in the short span of a lifetime and fed those cities by rail, road and air. Those cities are as modern and as thriving as some cities in other parts of the world that have taken ten and more generations to grow to maturity.

  The men who first helped to build the West had vision and foresight, and their children have benefited. Travelling through Kansas, we passed some of the most wonderful farming country it is possible to even dream about. Folk in Kansas told us with a smile that they had grasshoppers as big as mules. Farmers told us they had farms so large that by the time the mortgage was concluded on the West side, the East side had become due. The folk there tell a folk story about a guy named Lem Blanchard. He climbed a stalk of grass one day. After he’d looked into the next county, he found the stalk was growing upwards faster than he could clamber down. He was finally shot by his neighbours as an act of kindness to save him from slow death by starvation. Others told us that the land is so fertile that when you sow a seed, you first poke a hole in the ground, then drop the seed in and step back quickly to avoid having your head knocked off.

  Yeah, Kansas is a rich, plentiful country, and some day, when I’ve made my pile, I’m gonna settle somewhere in Kansas.

  We crossed the border between Kansas and Oklahoma, riding a high, wide road lined with telegraph poles and electricity pylons. There was a lotta traffic on the road, huge trucks, fast cars and long distance coaches. When we shot across the border, a coupla speed cops gave us a disinterested glance.