Accused Read online

  ACCUSED

  ACCUSED

  HANK JANSON

  First published in England in 2004 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 © 2004 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

  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, October 1952

  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 Accused, 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 – 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.

  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

  Accused was one of seven Hank Janson novels found to be obscene fifty years ago at the Old Bailey, and both your publishers and I, your humble host, hasten to point out that in reissuing this work, we do not wish to see our readers depraved or corrupted, nor to contribute to the general slide downwards of literature into an abyss. If you think you might be susceptible to harmful and baleful influences, or feel that the old standards of morals that you have known have slipped away, leaving you and your children a miserable inheritance, this is not the book for you.

  If, on the other hand, you want to enjoy a little gem of crime noir, read on.

  The Old Bailey obscenity trial involved seven novels, their publisher and their distributor. It was, to put it bluntly, a show trial. The genre of paperback gangster fiction that had sprung up over the previous decade in the wake of such best sellers as No Orchids For Miss Blandish and the novels of Peter Cheyney, was on trial. In 1956, a Select Committee formed to investigate the Obscene Publications Bill, then before Parliament, noted that the marked increase in the number of destruction orders issued against books was mainly attributable to the increase in the number of ‘cheap paper-backed novels dealing with sordid subjects.’ The Director of Public Prosecutions had, since 1951, compiled a list of books against which destruction orders had been successfully issued. Updated annually and distributed to Chief Constables throughout England and Wales, the list grew dramatically over a period of only three years until it covered hundreds of novels and magazines; a third list compiled by customs officers was later appended. Very few of these books were legally ‘obscene’, since that had to be tested in court before a jury. A destruction order issued by a magistrate could be challenged, but the vast majority of cases involved a handful of books picked up at a local newsagents. The owners, weighing up the cost of a few books against the cost of a court case, invariably let the destruction order proceed, and the books were burned.

  Yet the publishing of these ‘sordid’ books continued, and, increasingly, it was the publishers who were put in the dock. Fines ranging from £5 to over £1,000 seemed to be having no impact; as the net widened, books that had been on open sale for years suddenly found themselves added to the DPP’s lists, with no indication that they were not recently published. In August 1953, one case against a bookseller involved no fewer than fifteen Hank Janson titles. A few days later, Reginald Carter, Hank’s publisher, and Julius Reiter, his distributor, were questioned by Scotland Yard.

  The case came to trial at the Old Bailey in January 1954, and was held before the Recorder of London, an ancient and honoured position created in the 13th Century for a permanent full-time advisor to the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen on questions of law. In 1954, the appointee was Gerald Dodson, a man of strong religious convictions and equally strong views formed over a forty-year career at the bar. Dodson chose to hear the trial of seven ‘obscene libels’ (‘libels’ here meaning, literally, little books) himself, and there can be little doubt that he had formed his opinion of them before a word of evidence was spoken in court. Dodson’s response when the defence counsel requested more time for the jury to read all seven of the charged books was to say that an hour and three-quarters was enough. ‘I have glanced through these books myself, and I am quite well able to form an opinion, with no difficulty at all,’ he told R C Moore. Gerald Howard QC pointed out that it had taken the prosecuting counsel the same amount of time to read extracts from the books, and Dodson was eventually persuaded to allow the jury more time to read the books as a whole.

  Howard and his fellow QC, Christmas Humphreys, knew from past experience of obscenity cases that much of the court’s time would be taken up with extracts, and that the litany of stray and out of context paragraphs would blur in the minds of the jury, one image following hot upon another as the prosecution hammered home the point that these were not just ‘dirty’ books but ‘obscene’ books that had the potential to deprave and corrupt readers who were open to such influences.

  The defence knew that, of the seven, Accused would be the novel on which the case was won or lost and, ahead of the trial, had offered a deal to the prosecution. If the case concentrated on that one novel and it was found to be obscene, they would plead guilty to the other six counts. The deal was rejected.

  As predicted, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the counsel for the prosecution, concentrated heavily on Accused when he opened the case, highlighting what he felt were the most obscene passages with a running commentary of events as they unfolded in the novel. To give a brief example, Griffith-Jones quoted:

  I knew we were crazy. But I also knew nothing was going to stop it happening. It was inevitable, something that had to happen, like a car going downhill with no brakes and no means of stopping until it hit bottom.

  ‘It appears in a
moment, of course, what is inevitable,’ added Griffith-Jones. ‘If you have read all the book up to now, it is perfectly clear that the only thing that is inevitable is the sexual intercourse that is about to take place.’

  At another point in the case, Griffith-Jones described a scene where ‘Freidman puts his naked wife over his knees and with a knife is going, apparently, to slit her private parts, and threatens to castrate the young man as soon as he is finished.’ What Freidman actually says is, ‘I’m gonna teach you both a lesson you’ll never forget.’ And a few lines later:

  ‘I’m gonna teach you,’ he snarled. ‘I’m gonna learn both of you. You’re gonna have a lesson you’ll never forget. A permanent reminder you won’t be able to stop thinking about the next time you start tom-catting.’

  No mention of castration, only the vague threat that it would be a ‘permanent reminder.’

  Here and elsewhere, Griffith-Jones was bringing his own interpretation to the novel, as all readers do. Stephen Frances, Hank’s creator and author, knew he was writing ‘hot’ stories, but felt that he had never strayed over the line into obscenity. ‘My stuff was done by innuendo,’ he told one reporter, many years later. ‘One minute a man and a woman were sitting side by side. You’d read a whole page and get the impression of physical contact, but you couldn’t pin it down.’ 1

  With this reissue of the much-maligned Accused, I hope it will become more obvious to readers that the spin given to the text by Griffith-Jones was an interpretation rather than a straight description. You can find a full transcript of the prosecution evidence, taken from the trial notes, in The Trials Of Hank Janson, also available from Telos Publishing Ltd, so it does not need to be repeated here.

  Instead, now that we’ve taken a look at the aftermath, it’s interesting to look at the origins of Accused. Frances was a prolific writer, churning out sixty-five novels in four and a half years, of which Accused was the sixty-third. In March 1952, Reginald Carter began installing a rotary press at his new print works in Friern Barnet and registered the company Arc Press Ltd. At the same time, he took over the defunct Comyns Ltd, and when the new press came on line, launched a slate of new gangster fiction titles. Frances wrote two of the first four titles to get the new series off to a roaring start, Lovely But Deadly and Beauty Found A Grave, both as Dave Steel. To cope with this sudden increase in his schedule, Frances began working with Geoffrey Pardoe who, two years earlier, had collaborated with Frances on a series of gangster novels for Scion Ltd under the pen name Duke Linton. The working method was for Pardoe to supply a first draft or an extensive synopsis, which Frances would then use as a basis, ‘slashing and editing’ what was already there until he had a story that he dictated in the same way as he dictated the Hank Janson novels at his home in Spain.

  And Frances did not limit this working relationship to the Dave Steel byline: Pardoe was also partly responsible for outlining a number of Hank Janson yarns. Following the January 1954 obscenity trial, which resulted in Carter and Reiter being sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, Frances returned to England to stand trial himself. When the case opened in February 1955, the prosecution hoped to prove, through a comparison of styles, that the seven ‘obscene’ books were by the same author who, during an interview with a Scotland Yard officer, had admitted to writing two earlier titles. Frances pleaded not guilty, and claimed that he had not written a Hank Janson novel since moving to Spain.

  The prosecution also tried a second tactic, and obtained payment records from Janson’s publisher, New Fiction Press. The company had been driven into liquidation by the £2,000 fine imposed by the Recorder during the earlier trial, and investigators going through the records held by the liquidators discovered cheque stubs made out to Pardoe for various sums, including one for £20 which Pardoe was paid for his outline for Accused. The case against Frances consequently collapsed.

  Whether or not Frances knew that the outline for Accused was also a reasonably faithful outline for James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is open to debate. It seems almost impossible to believe that Frances was unaware of Cain’s novel, which had originally been published in New York in 1934 and quickly crossed the Atlantic. Jonathan Cape published their first edition in May 1934, and the title had gone through eight impressions by 1942. A year earlier, it had been chosen as the first title to appear under the Guild Books paperback imprint produced by the British Publishers Guild. The movie adaptation, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, was released in the UK in 1946 with an ‘A’ (for adult) certificate. The book was famous, the film a classic.

  Cain’s influence on crime fiction was colossal, and, I’ve always thought, highly influential on the Hank Janson novels. Unlike the traditional hard-boiled stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, Cain preferred to concentrate on the people who committed crimes, rather than the people who solved them. Where the hard-boiled hero may operate outside the law, he also has his own strict moral codes. Cain’s characters have no such codes. They answer only the call of lust and greed. In his two greatest novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, he also introduces a femme fatale, the prize sought by the narrator. Cain’s women are as wicked and as manipulative as they are beautiful.

  In the majority of the Hank Janson novels, the narrator is none other than Hank himself, and the stories are told through his eyes and emotions. In one sense, this worked to Frances’s disadvantage, since Hank, despite his vulnerabilities and flaws, was never allowed to be immoral or weak. He could fall for temptation, but always had to pull back. He could not become a truly tragic figure.

  In the novels that didn’t feature Janson as a character, this was not the case. There is a tension in these novels above and beyond the regular Janson series, simply because the characters can be weak; they can give in to their obsessions; and the outcome is never certain. The opening paragraphs of Accused will tell you immediately that the ending of the story is going to be anything but happy.

  Farran, the narrator, is a weak, tragic character, on the run through unfortunate circumstances. At the diner where he holes up, he has no room of his own, sits at the feet of his master and sleeps on the floor. His life is dominated by Freidman, although Friedman himself is not physically commanding and described as ‘maybe forty-five, running to fat, with grey hairs freely sprinkling the sides of his temples … his arms were thick and fleshy, his skin white and clammy.’ Yet Farran’s misfortune puts Freidman in a position of power, which he exploits mercilessly and sadistically.

  In this, Farran shares a bond with Freidman’s wife, because she, too, is trapped in her own circle of hell in the diner’s kitchen: ‘The coffee and soup were simmering, sending drifting vapour clouds up towards the ceiling. The sun was beating down on the iron roof, baking the air inside, turning it into an unbearable inferno.’ Freidman’s wife suffers the torments of the damned, both in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Frances further dehumanises her by the simple but effective device of never naming her.

  The plot of Accused unfolds quickly and is told in heat-soaked flashbacks intercut with snatches from the grim, uncompromising present, as if the book was edited for MTV. Obsession and passion and tragedy are played out in the bleached white of a desert, and escaping the burning sun only leads to another circle of hell.

  Of the 253 original novels that appeared under the Hank Janson byline, this is one of the best. Because it was judged to be obscene, it has not been in print for over fifty years, so it gives me particular pleasure to say:

  Welcome to Henry Farran’s nightmare.

  Steve Holland

  Colchester, February 2004

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a heavy iron door, and it clanged echoingly as it swung open. Their shadows, thrown against the wall by the dim light, loomed immense, cautious and watchful.

  There were three of them: two in uniform, and a third man I hadn’t seen before. He was heavily built, merging into fatness, and the fleshiness of his face beneath the grey fe
dora was emphasised by the heavy shadows thrown by that single, dim roof light.

  Apprehensively, I swung my feet off the bunk, slid along it until my shoulders pressed against the wall. That was as far as I could get from them.

  The fat guy stared at me for a long while, said nothing. The two uniformed guys stood shoulder to shoulder behind him, watched expressionlessly.

  I felt sick inside, instinctively raised my hands to protect my face, and the clink of the steel chain that linked my hands together made me feel even sicker.

  That fat guy kept on staring at me. It was like he was trying to beat me with his eyes. And as he stared, he fumbled in his pocket for a toothpick, carefully gouged a fragment of food from between his back teeth, spat it out thoughtfully.

  He spat it at me. I felt it on my forehead, and it was like the brand of red hot iron. But I was learning sense. I lifted my hands to my bruised face, wiped my sleeve across my forehead, suppressed the spark of hopeless anger inside me.

  ‘You’re coming with us, Farran,’ he said, and his voice was soft and oily.

  I felt faint, felt the chill sweat trickling between my shoulders. ‘Where?’ I croaked. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You know where,’ he growled smoothly. ‘But today you’ve got me for company.’

  I didn’t want it to happen again, but I couldn’t stop it. The whimper kinda leaked out of my mouth from deep down inside me. ‘No.’ I pleaded. ‘Not again. Not again!’

  He chuckled. A long, low chuckle that went on like it was never gonna stop. It was evil, malicious and threatening, completely devoid of humour.