INTRODUCTION

The phrase “rough trade” used to refer to tough-looking types who engaged in violent gay sex. Later it began to take on other meanings, all of them pretty downscale: there’s a record label called Rough Trade, I understand, and an on-line gaming site, and a quick tour of Google will turn up various other uses of the term.

And now there’s a collection of Robert Silverberg’s early fiction that bears the name. Let me explain.

I’m not a particularly tough-looking type, I’m not gay, and I’ve never gone in for violent sex of the gay or straight or any other kind. Nor do the stories collected in this book have any gay characters, violent or otherwise. (Homosexuality was pretty much taboo in commercial fiction sixty years ago, when these stories were written. Now and then some sly writer would slip a carefully coded gay reference into an otherwise standard story and get it past an unwary editor, but that didn’t happen often.) I’ve put the “rough trade” label on this book simply because of the downscale nature of most of the people I was writing about—blackmailers, gamblers, mobsters, adulterers, burglars, rapists, juvenile delinquents, and other unsavory sorts—and because the magazines I was publishing them in were pretty rough jobs, too, shabby-looking little items that were printed on cheap pulp paper by an outfit in Holyoke, Massachusetts, that infamously specialized in being the lowest bidder for the publishers of pulp-fiction magazines. The stories in this book are crime stories that I did for a few of those pulp magazines, written while I was on holiday from my regular career as a writer of science-fiction.

I was never much of a crime-fiction reader. When I was a boy I was given a two-volume collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, the complete thing with the Holmes novels as well as all the short stories, and I read those over and over. But what interested me about them was not so much Holmes’ preternatural puzzle-solving abilities, though those were fascinating enough, but the quirky character of Holmes himself, and the Victorian background of the stories, the hansom carriages and the fog and old London itself. Then, too, I had a couple of Dashiell Hammett books—The Maltese Falcon and The Dain Curse—and also The Dutch Shoe Mystery, one of the myriad Ellery Queen paperbacks that Pocket Books was publishing back during the war years. And in my late teens I did read some of Georges Simenon’s short, intense novels—not the Maigret police tales, which I came to much later, but rather the novels of middle­class people pushed to the end of their tether and toppling into committing acts of violence. But that was about it. I was not innately a crime-story reader. I was a serious little boy, and I preferred to read serious stuff like The Iliad and The Arabian Nights and Ivanhoe. When I was about 10 I discovered Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and then H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and my reading took a science-fictional twist: Donald Wollheim’s two anthologies, The Pocket Book of Science-fiction and Four Great Novels of Science, and then the science-fiction magazines themselves.

Oh, the science-fiction magazines! How I loved those gaudy pulps! I would run to the newsstand and buy the latest issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories or Amazing Stories or Astounding Science-fiction and read it from cover to cover and back again, not comprehending everything I was reading, but loving it all. When I grow up, I told myself, I will write for these magazines.

Reader, that’s exactly what happened.

I wrote my first science-fiction story when I was about thirteen, and then wrote some more, and sent them to the editors of my favorite magazines, and by the time I was fifteen or so the editors were sending me encouraging letters, and within a few years they were sending checks. I was pretty much a full-time science-fiction writer by my third year of college, attending classes, more or less, by day, and then ducking into a telephone booth, changing into my superhero costume, and emerging as Captain Science-fiction to write stories half the night long. By the time I was nineteen I discovered that I could write quickly and efficiently and that the editors would buy whatever I wrote. I sold stories to the bottom rungs of pulp-adventure fiction magazines and to the more cerebral upper­level ones with equal facility. The adventure magazines usually paid a cent a word and the fancier ones three times as much, which meant that I turned out the pulp stuff just as fast as I could type, and did a little more revising for the stories aimed for top-bracket magazines like Galaxy and Astounding. A twenty-page story for Astounding would earn me $150, and half a century ago that was a lot of money, enough to pay for a month’s rent on a very fine Manhattan apartment.

In June of 1956 I got my college degree, I married my college girlfriend a couple of months later, and I set up shop that summer as a full-time writer. Thus writing became my job straight out of college. I had not wanted any other sort of employment, and I made no attempt to find one. But I was not going to be supported by indulgent parents, nor did I have a trust fund that some thoughtful ancestor had established for me. My livelihood would have to be generated by my typewriter. My wife had a decently paying job, yes, so I can’t say I was completely on my own, but we could hardly have lived on her earnings alone if my writing had failed to bring in an income. Rent had to be paid; furniture for our new apartment had to be bought; the pantry had to be stocked with food; whatever medical expenses we might have came out of our own checkbooks, not out of any medical insurance plan, since such things were rarities then, especially for self-employed writers. Telephone bills, electricity, the cost of typewriter ribbons and typing paper, a haircut now and then, movie tickets, restaurants, subway fares (even back then it was madness to own a car in Manhattan), the occasional new pair of shoes—well, writers have expenses just like everyone else. What they don’t have is regular paychecks.

What I had chosen for myself was the next-to-impossible task of earning my living as a full-time science-fiction writer in an era when only two American publishers were regularly issuing science-fiction novels and their total output was something like three or four titles a month, and an upheaval in magazine distribution had reduced the thirty or so science-fiction magazines of 1953 to a mere handful of wobbly survivors. All of the greatest writers in science-fiction, Alfred Bester, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, Fritz Leiber, and a host of others, were in their primes and competing for the few available slots in the magazines that remained. I was a precociously skilled craftsman, and my stories all found ready markets, but there just weren’t enough science­fiction markets to absorb what I wrote, and though the magazines I wrote for paid very well, I had to sell them plenty of stories to cover the expenses of my new adult life. I wrote plenty of stories, all right. I wrote quickly, very quickly indeed, sometimes three or four stories a week. But I saw at once that I would have to look outside science-fiction for much of my livelihood, because there simply weren’t enough magazines left to absorb my vast output of work.

So I wrote all sorts of other things. I wrote western stories, I wrote sports stories, I wrote vivid pseudo-fact articles about my adventures fighting giant crabs in the Caribbean or sinister Bedouins in the Sahara, and much, much more; a wildly varied output that amazes even me when I think about it now, sixty years later.

Coming straight out of college as I was, without any day job to see me through times of thin inspiration or editorial rejection and having no significant savings to draw on, there was no other option.

I didn’t want to dilute my energies by putting in eight hours at some mundane job and trying to write science-fiction in the evenings, as so many of my well-known colleagues did. I wanted to be a writer, not a public-relations man or a bookkeeper or a shoe salesman. But I wasn’t of the sort of temperament that encouraged me to starve for the sake of my art, either. I have never been much into asceticism. I loved science-fiction and yearned to write it as well as those of my predecessors whose work had given me such delight as a reader, but there was time to be an artist later, I reasoned: right now, if I wanted to make a go of it as a writer, I had to write whatever editors would be willing to pay me for. And so, by easy stages, I who had never read much crime fiction beyond Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade drifted into a secondary career as a writer of hard-boiled crime stories.

It was Harlan Ellison’s fault.

During my undergraduate years at Columbia, I was living in a ramshackle residence hotel on West 114th St., just across Broadway from the Columbia campus—$10 a week for a room with shared kitchen privileges. In the winter of 1954-55 another young would-be writer, a certain Harlan Ellison, came to New York from his Ohio home, phoned me to let me know he was in town, went up to Columbia to see me, and decided to rent a room in the 114th St. place also.

His writing career had not taken off quite as suddenly or as spectacularly as mine had, for I had had a big assist from yet another writer living in that building—Randall Garrett, who, like Harlan, had turned up suddenly in New York looking for a place to live.

Garrett took a room down the hall from me, and very quickly we fell into a busy and lucrative collaborative relationship. In the summer of 1955 he had taken me downtown to meet all the New York science­fiction editors, and I began selling stories to them with both hands, some written in collaboration with Garrett, some on my own.

Harlan had had a slower start; but by the early months of 1956 he, too, was off and running in the field. Just as I had been, he was an avid science-fiction reader who longed to have his own stories published in the magazines he had read in his teens, and very quickly that had begun to happen.

He had discovered, though, that he also had a knack for writing hard-boiled crime stories. Tales of juvenile-delinquent kid-gangs became a specialty of his. The big market for such stories, and for all sorts of other dark, tense stories of criminal activity, was Manhunt, a handsome magazine with two-color illustrations (a rarity in fiction magazines) and stories by the top names in the crime­fiction field, John D. MacDonald, Evan Hunter, Hal Ellson (not to be confused with Harlan Ellison, though he sometimes would be later on), Richard Prather, Bruno Fischer, and the like. Harlan immediately began submitting his work to Manhunt, and got everything back, sometimes only a day or two after he had sent it in. What he didn’t know, nor I, was that the powerful literary agent Scott Meredith represented most of the best crime-fiction writers and worked closely with Manhunt’s editors to supply the magazine with most of its material. Occasionally, very occasionally, they came up a story or two short for an issue and bought something from an outsider who had sent a story in cold. But it was hardly much of a market for newcomers like Harlan.

Manhunt had competitors, though—imitators, really—that published the same sort of stories, mostly Manhunt’s rejects.

They were cheaply printed, slipshod-looking magazines, and they paid much less than Manhunt, but at least they were willing to look at submissions from new writers who wrote the sort of thing they wanted to publish. In March or April of 1956 Harlan began selling to two such magazines—Trapped and Guilty. They paid a cent and a half per word, perhaps half what Manhunt did but still big money in those days. It was more than most of the science-fiction magazines we were selling to then would pay, and $75 for a 5000-word story that you could write in one morning was a considerable bonanza when your room rent was $10 a week. Harlan went downtown to visit their editor, one W.W. Scott, at his office near Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, and brought him a stack of crime stories that hadn’t made the grade at Manhunt. Bill Scott bought them all. He seemed willing to buy as many stories as Harlan could bring in.

Harlan knew that I was looking for new markets, since my output had swamped all the s-f magazines, and was kind enough to let me in on this bonanza. And so I started doing crime stories too. I read a few issues of Manhunt and a copy or two of Trapped or Guilty and quickly formed an idea of what needed to be done. These were not classic detective stories in which some analog of Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery and confronts the miscreant with the evidence of his guilt. The stories were grim, bleak things that concerned various low-life types, marginal characters of all kinds, and also perfectly ordinary people, not just gangsters or hit-men or gamblers, who found themselves pushed into crime by the circumstances of their lives—blackmail victims, or unhappily married husbands or wives who wanted to dispose of inconvenient spouses, or desperate sorts who unexpectedly found themselves forced into debt and ultimate bankruptcy. It was quite all right—usual, in fact—for the protagonist to meet a terrible end when some scheme of his proved to overreach his intentions. Scantily clad women, very well-endowed, were a standard feature. None of this, the bleak visions, the erotic descriptions, the downbeat endings, was warmly welcomed by the science-fiction magazines. So I had a chance to do something that was new and different for me, and to do quite a lot of it.

Crime fiction became a very selective sideline for me. Simenon was my model for a lot of the work: realistic stories about real­world people forced right to the edge, and then over it, by the circumstances of their lives. But Simenon had never written anything about the kid gangs of New York, so for stories of that sort I studied the work of Manhunt’s star authors, Hunter and Ellson and such. My records show the sale of “Get Out and Stay Out” to Guilty in June, 1956, right about the time I received my Columbia degree, and “Clinging Vine” to the companion magazine, Trapped, a couple of weeks later. And by the time those magazines disappeared from the newsstands in 1962 I had written something like a hundred crime stories, amounting to a goodly-sized life’s work all in themselves.

I continued to write science-fiction, of course. I suppose I believed that writing science-fiction was what I had been put on Earth to do, and an astonishing number of stories about robots, spaceships, time machines, and the like flowed from my white-hot typewriter in that busy time sixty years ago. But nearly every month I wrote a crime story or two—or three, or four, or five and took them downtown to turn them in at the office of W.W. Scott of Trapped and Guilty, along with my latest offerings for the science-fiction magazine, Super-Science-fiction, that Harlan had talked him into publishing as well.

Scott—“Scottie,” Harlan called him, though he preferred to be called “Bill”—was a short, cheerfully cantankerous old guy who would have fit right into a 1930s Hollywood movie about old-time newspapermen, which was what I think he had been before he drifted into magazine editing. His employer was a company called Crestwood Publishing Company, the main activity of which was producing slick men’s magazines with names like True Men and Man’s Life. Scottie was the one-man fiction-magazine department, with a tiny office of his own, a room just about big enough for a desk, a bookcase, and a shelf for holding recently submitted manuscripts. To us—and we both were barely past 21—he looked to be seventy or eighty years old, but probably he was 55 or thereabouts. His voice was a high­ pitched cackle; he had a full set of top and bottom dentures, which he didn’t always bother to wear; and I never saw him without his green eyeshade, which evidently he regarded as an essential part of the editorial costume.

Most of what he was publishing were weary old rejects that had been around for years—we saw the piles of dog-eared manuscripts on his desk, and he joked about their age—but here were two kids, eager as jackrabbits, who could turn out stories week in and week out that were at least as good as all that bottom-rung stuff, and usually better. He invited us to bring him as much material as we could manage to produce. It was like being handed the key to Fort Knox. Two cents a word for the science-fiction, a cent and a half for the crime stories, for all the stories we could write! I was quite willing to oblige. And when the Army gobbled Harlan up in 1957 for a two-year hitch, I valiantly filled the breach, writing not only my own quota of stories for Scottie but providing him with ones that Harlan was not currently able to supply.

I kept him well supplied—month after month, story after story. I wrote nearly a third of the 120 stories that Super Science published in the three years of its life: thirty-six of them. And I rarely let a month go by without writing two or three (or four or five) crime stories for Trapped and Guilty, also. Scottie bought everything I brought him, so that sometimes most of an issue was my work alone, running under such pseudonyms as “Eric Rodman”, “Ray McKenzie” (which he persisted in changing to “McKensie”), “Ed Chase”, “Dan Malcolm”, “Dirk Clinton”, “Mark Ryan”, “Alex Merriman”, “Richard F. Watson”, and “Charles D. Hammer”, as well as, now and then, my own name. Usually I had one or two in each issue, but the September, 1959 issue of Guilty had five of mine (Chase, Watson, McKensie, Hammer, and one as Silverberg) and the December, 1959 Trapped offered a jolly sextet (Rodman, Clinton, Ryan, Malcolm, Merriman, Hammer).

I found real joy in writing at such great velocity, working with flying fingers and sweaty forehead—a 20-page story in a morning, a 40-page novelette in one six-hour working day. One draft was enough to do the job. I had the youthful energy to do that, day in and day out, throughout the year. And I loved the cognate fun of knowing that I had made myself part of a pulp-writer tradition that went back through such early s-f favorites of mine as Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson and the rest to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Robert E. Howard, and the other famous high­volume writers of a pulp generation that had thrived before I was born.

I did, it must be said, learn a great deal about writing fiction from writing these stories: how to open a story in an interesting way and keep it moving, how to set a scene and sketch in a character (however roughly) without a lot of ponderous exposition, how to provide with a few quick touches a bit of color and inventiveness. And they allowed me to pay the bills regularly while I was getting ready to become the writer whose work brought me both critical praise and quite a decent income in the decades that followed.

My career in crime lasted only a few years, though. Fiction magazines of all sorts began to experience difficulties in 1958, after a great upheaval in the magazine-distribution industry, and by the spring of 1959 the jig was up for Super-Science-fiction.

Trapped and Guilty continued to stagger along for another couple of years, and I wrote plenty of stories for them, but by 1962 they were gone too. Their various shoddy competitors disappeared around the same time, and even Manhunt, the leader in the field, found itself in trouble by 1963, struggled on for another few years, and went out of business. I returned to my main line of work, science-fiction, though s-f publishing was doing poorly then also, so I drifted into various other things, such as writing a series of books on archaeological and historical themes that for a decade became my main occupation. I did expand some of my longer stories for Trapped and Guilty into paperback novels in the mid-1960s, but other than that I never ventured into the crime-fiction field again. (I did write a science-fiction story for Playboy, “The Dead Man’s Eyes,” in 1988 that was enough of a crime story to become a finalist for the Edgar award of the Mystery Writers of America. It would have been a neat trick for an s-f specialist like me to cop an Edgar, but someone else went home with the trophy that year.)

Writing these tales of dark deeds was fun while it lasted, though, and lucrative as well. And I’m pleased now to be able to dig these forgotten stories of sixty years ago out of hiding and give them new visibility in this new century. These are tough, dark stories about tough, dark people, and, re-reading them after six decades, I found myself often surprised at the ferocity and amorality of many of my own characters. I am, and always have been, a quiet and gentle sort, who has never committed any crime much more serious than jaywalking. My philosophy of life is well summed up by the titles of the two final stories in this collection: “It’s a Tough World” and “I Don’t Want No Trouble.” Editor Bill Scott was like that, too, only more so: a mild-mannered, almost invisible little man. Yet there I was, back in 1957 and thereabouts, writing reams of fiction for his magazines about the most scabrous of people, people living on the borderline of daily life who took extreme chances and got themselves into extreme trouble. Well, call it professionalism. I wrote the kind of fiction that the magazines I wanted to write for were publishing, and I must have been reasonably good at it, because Trapped and Guilty bought more of my work, over the years, than that of any other author. There are little bits of autobiography tucked away in a few of these stories, as I will indicate as I go along, but, generally speaking, these are stories about people I wouldn’t want as friends, doing things that I would never think of doing. That’s what the editor and his readers wanted; and that’s what I supplied, most copiously. And here is a selection of them, perhaps a fifth of the entire output, by way of bringing back to life a goodly sample of a special trove of work that I did in the earliest days of my career.

Robert Silverberg

September, 2015