Jacob laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Are you sure you didn’t serve in the Royal Navy?”
Elk touched his bow tie. The writer would come to recognize this gesture as a sign of discomfort, and anticipate an immediate change of tone, if not subject.
“Needless to say, we require writers who are willing to join us in our enterprise. The established ones are complacent, and what they write is far too sedate for this market. Come in.” Someone had knocked.
A middle-aged man in his shirtsleeves entered carrying a large portfolio bound in tattered black cloth. A cigarette wobbled on his lower lip and sparks from it—or its predecessors—had burned tiny holes in his checked shirt. His body was a perfect tube, the shoulders as narrow as the waist, and the cheekstrap bones of the skull under his skin stood out like umbrella staves.
His appearance was the first indication the rambling Victorian mansion contained more than just Elk, Alice, and the young man in the foyer.
“You wanted to see this the minute it came in.” The man untied the string on the portfolio and opened it, holding it in front of him like a sandwich board.
“Jack Holly, Skip Glaser. Skip’s our art director.”
Jacob nodded, Glaser having no free hand to shake. He couldn’t picture a man who looked less like a Skip.
“Welcome aboard.” The art director’s attention remained on Elk’s face.
Clipped to the edges of the portfolio was a flat-finish photographic print, apparently full size, of an oil painting, obviously intended for a paperback cover. Refreshingly, this one contained no women, in undress or otherwise. The man in the center was seen in full length, upside-down. His arms were splayed, one knee bent, and his mouth twisted into a rictus of terror. Behind him—beneath him, really—yawned rows of windows stacked one atop another, plummeting toward the sidewalk far below. He hung suspended, a dozen stories from death.
What struck Jacob was the sole of the man’s right shoe directly in the foreground, huge, disproportionate to the rest of his body: It seemed to stick out of the illustration in third-dimension, pleading for Jacob to seize it and haul him to safety.
“Splendid. Perhaps a bit more in the expression. He looks annoyed, as if he’s just dropped his pencil instead of twelve floors. What do you think, Jack?”
“Please call me Jacob.”
“As you wish; in private, of course. I’m genuinely interested in your opinion as an artist yourself.”
He tabled the business of the nom de plume for later. “He looks frightened enough. His predicament’s clear. Why telegraph it and insult the customer?”
“Just a bit more, I think. Thank you, Skip.”
The art director closed the portfolio and left.
Elk brushed imaginary ash from his sweater. “I understand your point of view, Jack—Jacob, pardon me. This isn’t the time for restraint. I want to make the person who sees that cover reach out automatically to catch him, the way early French cinema audiences leapt backwards when a train seemed to be thundering out of the screen into their laps.”
Once again Jacob adjusted his opinion of the publisher. He himself had wanted to do just that, save the poor wretch. It made the audience part of the drama.
Elk said, “We’re calling the book Smash Hit. Do you know Hank Stratton?”
“Not personally. I thought he was with Bannerman.”
“He was, until we told him we were starting with a print run of one hundred thousand. It will be the first paperback original featuring Lash Logan. We’re quite excited about it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. He hasn’t written it yet.”
“Then, how did you know—?”
“The illustration? That was Skip’s brainstorm. I’m confident Stratton will follow it up. It was good enough for Dickens. The Pickwick Papers started out as a collection of random watercolors by an artist who committed suicide. The story came later.”
He wanted to ask if the man killed himself before he read the book or after; but he was thinking of Stratton, not Dickens.
“I thought private eyes were dying with the pulps.”
“The pulps at their boldest never let the detective grapple with a naked woman, or strangle a pander to death with his bare hands.”
“Another pioneer.” This time he couldn’t hold back.
But the publisher seemed unperturbed. “When this one comes out, schoolboys across America will be reading it under the blankets with a flashlight. Eveready should pay us a dividend based on all those extra battery sales.”
“When I write about a brute and a sadist, he won’t be the hero.”
“It would never occur to me to ask you to violate your principles. Personally, I think Stratton’s cretinous, and his character’s a thumping fascist; but we need the sales. The market’s overcrowded with snoops in trench coats. The only reason he’s so popular is because he’s…” He trailed off, his grasp of American vernacular having failed him.
“Gimmicky.”
Elk beamed. “Precisely! A blatant imitation would fool no one. Even if it worked, the result would be a disaster, dividing the readership and harming sales. We must agree upon another path. That typewriter story you mentioned gave me an idea. Why not a series about an honorable thief?”
“I think Robin Hood beat you to it.”
“How rapidly you thought of him. He’s my namesake. Perhaps the fabulists who improved upon the scrofulous original expressed these same doubts. It wasn’t a new idea even at the time.
“But, no, that business of robbing the rich to give to the poor flies too close to Marxism for comfort. The HUAC isn’t a tiger we want to poke. Your character—what’s his name, by the way?”
“Herbert Jackdaw.” He remembered coming up with it on impulse, reversing his own initials.
Elk appeared to consider, then shook his head. “Some kind of raucous bird, named after President Hoover. That’s two strikes against it. We’ll find something better. Your character seeks redemption and reform. Why not take it a step further and have him go after his own former underworld brethren? Clandestinely, of course; the law must never know it has an ally in him. The fact that he’s wanted himself would add to the suspense. At all times he must look ahead and behind.”
“That’s the premise of The Creeper.”
“Radio-show hokum. We won’t bother about cloaks and masks and that rubbish; the comic books have already appropriated it. You must have a death wish in order to compete with them.”
“Didn’t you just say you wanted boys for your audience?”
“I said that’s who Stratton appeals to. Workingmen are the target, truck drivers and factory drones, those fellows you worked with under that contemptible foreman, who come home dragging their lunch pails and want nothing but a beer, a comfortable chair, and something to read that won’t challenge their intellects while they’re waiting for supper. Men you understand, having been one yourself.”
He wasn’t sure how to take that. Either Elk had no idea of the effect he had on people or he was smirking at him from behind a mask of innocence.
“What I want,” the publisher went on, “is a professional criminal in ordinary street dress, employing the same tactics to support the law he once used to circumvent it.”
The idea had appeal, but he wasn’t ready to cede the point. “That’s what you want. How do you know it’s what these workingmen you’re talking about want?”
“They don’t know, yet. It’s our job to tell them. You must trust me on that. It’s a publishing maxim, as old as movable type.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Please. While you do, I’d admire to read the story. Will you send it to me?”
“I threw it away. I’m not sure I kept the carbon.”
“Can you look?”
“The protagonist is nothing like the man you described. The story has problems of its own apart from that.”
“I’ll remember you said that, and withhold criticism.”
He was on the point of declaring he was sure he’d destroyed the carbon, but the beseeching expression on the Englishman’s frank features gave him pause. “I’ll see what I can do. One thing. How far along is that second printing of Chinese Checkers?”
“It’s in the chase now. Why?”
“I want to sponge out all that garbage about inherently wicked Asians. I fought side-by-side with some of them, and I can tell you they come in all packages, just like the rest of us.”
Elk kneaded the head of his stick. “That sounds extensive. We’ll have to charge you for any changes that come to more than ten percent the cost of production.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Fabulous. Let me see you out.”
As Jacob entered the outer office, Elk holding the door and leaning on his cane, Alice stopped chugging away at her typewriter to turn their way and smile, pushing her glasses up her nose. In the instant her eyes weren’t distorted by the thick lenses, all physical similarity to the young man in the foyer vanished. It struck Jacob she bore a closer resemblance to the blondes on most of the Blue Devil covers. He wondered if Elk was economizing by asking his secretary to double as a model. And he wondered how the body under the mannish suit compared to those of the near-naked women in all those shabby bedrooms. The impure thought made his cheeks burn.
“Here. No one leaves empty-handed.” Tucking the cane under one arm, Elk opened the glazed cabinet and began scooping books from inside. He shoved a stack of seven or eight into Jacob’s hands. “For your entertainment, but also for study. See what the others are doing.”
“I was under the impression you liked the way I write. If you expect me to change—”
“Good Lord, no! Montgomery didn’t stop being Montgomery when he studied Rommel’s strategy. And he certainly didn’t win El Alamein by using the same methods that worked in the Argonne wood. I want the author of Chinese Checkers. Blue Devil wants the postwar model.”
Jacob gained some insight in that moment. Whenever Robin Elk spoke of Blue Devil Books as if it were separate from himself, something vaguely unpleasant was in store.