I knew Bruce Elliott's
work, because he is one of the writers who filled in for Walter
Gibson on The Shadow, when Gibson needed to slow down from the two
novels per month schedule of being Maxwell Grant. Like Gibson,
Elliott was a magician, and apart from the Shadow his published
fiction is anything but prolific. His Shadow novels are relatively
easy to spot, especially the ones that concentrate more on Lamont
Cranston as a character, and less on the caped avenger himself--
there are three in which The Shadow doesn't even appear. So in my
mind he was a footnote, and there was nothing to prepare me for the
impact of One Is A Lonely Number, a pulp paperback written a
few years after his adventures with The Shadow.
One Is A Lonely
Number is published now by Stark House alongside Elliott Chaze's
better-known and regarded Black Wings Has My Angel, which I
wrote about in my previous post. It is sort of an all-Elliott pulp
bonanza. One Is A Lonely Number was originally published in
1952 by Lion Books, reprinted in Justice Magazine in 1956 as The
Cocktail Jungle, and then in 1961 by Tower Books as A Woman.
If that spinning array of titles confuses you, that's the fate of
stuff pounded out for quick cheap publication—Lion was a good step
down from Gold Medal, who published Black Wings, and you can
see some of the difference right away.
Elliott's prose isn't
as penetrating as Chaze's, he hasn't set up situations and characters
as carefully to reflect the action. No one is going to call One Is
A Lonely Number astonishingly well-written' the way Barry Gifford
described Black Wings. But I'd argue that Elliott's novel is,
if anything, even more down and dirty, and the gritty flatness of the
prose works even better to keep up the frantic downhill pace of the
story.
Larry Camonille is on
the run after a jailbreak in Illinois, and determined not to make the
same mistakes that get his fellow escapees caught. He's operating on
only one lung, the kind of defect that stands, in a Hemingway kind of
way, for a flaw in his character, but he's doing just fine until he's
picked up hitching by Vera Pool, and set up with a job at the Welcome
Inn somewhere in Ohio. He's working with a teenager named Benny,
who's got a girlfriend, Jan, who's got everyone's eye at the Welcome
Inn. But she has an eye for Larry.
When you're a popular
guy in this kind of noir, it's usually because someone wants
something from you. And Vera Pool has a mother in law who's standing
in the way of her happiness with the estate left her by her late
husband. She's offering Larry five, then ten thousand dollars to kill
her. But Larry has an eye for a set-up. He also has an eye for Jan,
and Jan figures out who he is. But she doesn't want anything except
to run away with Larry. And have him collect her inheritance for her,
an inheritance which is being bled away from her by a crooked lawyer
and his greedy wife. And she can't touch it herself, because she's
only 14.
As the blurb on the
front of the original paperback says: 'An escaped con seeks refuge-- finds jail bait!'
The small Ohio town is
so corrupt and steamy it could be set in the deep south, and the pull
of sexual attraction with Jan might have been written by James M
Cain. Obviously, 1952's pulp fictions don't share our sensitivity to
sex with underaged women, but even so, you know that it cannot end
happily. And Elliott throws in a few twists, along with the almost
requisite moment when the careful and smart Camonille makes one
stupid mistake, with unforeseen but inevitable consequences.
Where this falls short
of Black Wings is that Chaze's novel has two characters, on a
relatively equal footing, and Chaze writes each of them with a
distinct fatalism. Here the story is Larry's, and the escape he seeks
he gets, but not the way he planned. This is a surprising, and
surprisingly powerful pulpy read, and Stark House's double is a
remarkable read.
One Is A Lonely
Number by Bruce Elliott (b/w Black Wings Has My Angel)
Stark House 2012,
$19.95 ISBN 9781933586434
