I’ve been reading Harry Whittington since the Fifties. He was one of those paperback original writers who wrote powerful novels and stories about the working classes of various eras. And since I grew up in the working class I always felt that I was reading the work of a kindred spirit.
In his seminal portrait of Whittington for the double book of A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING and ANY WOMAN HE WANTED ‘TOUGH LUCK: The life and art of Harry Whittington” David Laurence Wilson gives us a man who never forgot the poverty and bitterness of his youth and whose fiction was enriched by it.
“After years of running a successful grocery store, Whittington’s parents declared bankruptcy in 1923. By 1930 his family had fallen into deep poverty. A series of events, beginning with the failure of a bank, left Whittington’s father without hope of finding work in Ocala.
Consequently, the Whittingtons moved to a farm about six miles outside town, where they possessed none of the skills to become successful farmers. Nor was there a market for their crops.
“We went steadily down,” Whittington wrote. “My last two years in high school became a nightmare of impossible things becoming steadily more impossible.
“In my senior year at high school our family had absolutely no money for anything. My shoes were three years old, and looked it. I was wearing patched castoffs from other branches of the family. There was no money for lunches at school.”
The bitterness I mentioned above can be found in many of Whittington’s protagonists whether they be in his crime novels, his westerns, his war novels or even his historicals.
And it can especially be found in ANY WOMAN HE WANTED.
As Wilson notes Mike Ballard, the angry and brutal lead in this novel first appeared in one of Whittington’s finest novels, BRUTE IN BRASS.
Apparently there was some thought about making Ballard a series character but ultimately the plan was dropped when his editor at Gold Medal rejected the follow-up novel.
In this second Mike Ballard novel we’re dealing with a cop who has been happy to go along with a city administration that is known for the kind of corruption that spread across the country, but especially in the South, after the Second World War.
He has made both a good living and a reputation for a man who is not to be crossed in any way. He also smashed the crime machine that dominated the city for years. Now he just goes along with the new crime machine.
He has also never managed to forget Carolyn Flynn, the gentle and beautiful woman who decided to marry the very upper class lawyer Tom who is, despite Ballard’s dislike of him, a brave and honest District Attorney out to break the new mob.
Carolyn tries to convince Ballard to help her husband. Their meeting is painful for Ballard—all the memories of love and betrayal and rage—but he does meet with Tom to talk things over. But despite Tom’s pleas—you broke one crime machine; help me with the new one—Ballard declines.
Then the crime machine murders Tom and Ballard, still reluctantly, goes after them, drawn by Carolyn’s sorrow and his own feelings for her.
This is a swift, angry, melancholy novel, another appearance of the Whittington protagonist described in Wilson’s fine piece.
The mystery here is why Gold Medal rejected it.
Ed Gorman
February 2014