Four-­and-­Twenty Blackjacks

The minutes of the Oxford Union for 1920—a copy of which is, of course, readily available at everyone’s elbow—reveal that during its entire winter session that world-­famed discussion group and conventicle of pundits was sunk in a mood of almost suicidal despair. The honourable members, thitherto scornful of American eloquence, had become so alarmed at the rhetoric stemming from the Classical High School Debating Society in Providence, Rhode Island, that they were seriously considering mass hara-­kiri. “What is the sense of we tongue-­tied slobs beating our gums,” lamented one Balliol man, summing up the universal sentiment, “when these brilliant Yank speechifiers in faraway New England, every man jack of them a Cicero or Demosthenes, has made a chump out of us oratory-­wise?” His defeatism was well grounded; week after week, in a series of dazzling intramural debates, the Rhode Island striplings were exhibiting a fluency rivalling that of Edmund Burke and the elder Pitt on such varied topics as “Resolved: That the Philippines Be Given Their Independence,” “Resolved: That the End Justifies the Means,” and “Resolved: That the Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword.” It was a great natural phenomenon, as inexplicable as parthenogenesis or the strapless bra, and I still feel cocky that I should have presided over it as chairman of the society—well, chairman pro tem, which is almost the same thing. The descendants of Roger Williams don’t go in for lousy little distinctions.

The club met every Wednesday afternoon in a classroom that generations of adolescent males had endowed with the reek of a pony stable. It shied a few erasers about to insure a proper concentration of chalk dust in the lungs, and then, as an apéritif to the polemics, listened to an original paper read by one of the membership. Most of these treatises were on fairly cosmic themes; I myself contributed a philippic entitled “Science vs. Religion,” an indigestible hash of Robert Ingersoll and Haldeman-­Julius, in which I excoriated the Vatican and charged it, under pain of my displeasure, to mend its ways before our next meeting. Occasionally, somebody would alter the pattern and deliver an essay in lighter vein, on, say, “The Witchery of Jack Frost” or “Squeteague Fishing.”

Though parliamentary procedure was mother’s milk to me, and it was self-­evident that I was marked out for political leadership, an altogether fortuitous circumstance scotched my career. One afternoon, while refereeing a tedious forensic battle on the single tax, I somehow lost the thread and became absorbed in a book about a gentleman cracksman called The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, by Frank L. Packard. To this day, I cannot account for my psychological brownout; I assume it sprang from the heavy burden of administrative anxieties I was carrying. At any rate, enthralled with the melodrama, I did not discover that the meeting had adjourned until I found Mr. Bludyer, the principal, shaking me violently. He told me that various restoratives, among them my own gavel, had been tried on me without effect and that finally I had been cashiered. “I’d take up some pastime that doesn’t tax the intellect, like volleyball,” he suggested pointedly. That I went on to score notable gridiron successes and overnight became the idol of the school is unimportant. It was only when the B. M. C. Durfee High School, of Fall River, kayoed us on the issue “Resolved: That Cigarette Smoking Is Injurious to Our Youth” that my rueful colleagues realized the price they had paid for their inconstancy.

Quite recently, at Kaliski & Gabay’s auction parlors, I was whipsawed into buying Packard’s fable as part of a job lot of second-­hand books, and, faced with the dilemma of rereading it or being certified as a spendthrift incapable of handling his own funds, I chose the coward’s way. Before I could get into the story, though, I was sidetracked by the publisher’s advertisement in the flyleaves, a sample of the quaint propaganda used in 1917 to popularize the habit of reading. There was nothing like reading, affirmed the A. L. Burt Company, “for a hardworking man, after his daily toil, or in its intervals. It calls for no bodily exertion.” The statement may have been true of the four hundred titles that followed, but not of The Adventures of Jimmie Dale. Its previous owner had apparently read it while sipping mucilage, for whole episodes were gummed together in the most repulsive fashion. Between prying them apart with a fruit knife, geeing up the fragments, and retrieving the book from the wastebasket, into which it unaccountably kept sliding like a greased pig, I was almost as pooped as the time I whitewashed a three-­room henhouse singlehanded.

To anyone who has ever worked his way out of a boxwood maze, the plot of Packard’s novel offers no problem, but a supply of pine-­knot torches, pickaxes, and shredded paper are indispensable kit for the tyro reader. Each of the two central characters, for example—Jimmie Dale and Marie LaSalle—has three distinct identities. Jimmie is a young millionaire bachelor, an elusive safecracker known as the Gray Seal, and a derelict hophead called Larry the Bat; Marie, likewise rich and socially élite (though forced into hiding by malefactors who crave her money), poses sometimes as the Tocsin, a shadowy fingerwoman, and again as Silver Mag, a disreputable old crone. The lives of the pair—or, more precisely, the six—are forever being sought by scores of hoodlums, gunsels, informers, shyster lawyers, and crooked shamuses, so that they are constantly compelled to switch roles. The upshot is that you are never very positive who is assaulting whom; once or twice, I got the panicky impression that Jimmie’s alter egos were throttling each other. This imaginative twist, somewhat akin to the old vaudeville specialty of Desiretta, the Man Who Wrestles with Himself, proved erroneous when I checked up. It was just a couple of other felons.

Obeying the basic canon that romances about gentleman cracksmen begin in ultra-­exclusive clubs, The Adventures of Jimmie Dale begins in one called the St. James and omits no traditional touch. Herman Carruthers, crusading young editor of the News-­Argus, is dealing out the usual expository flapdoodle about the Gray Seal (“the kingpin of them all, the most puzzling, bewildering, delightful crook in the annals of crime”) to Jimmie, who is so bland, quizzical, and mocking that even the busboys must be aware he is the marauder himself. His blandness grows practically intolerable when Carruthers avers that the kingpin is dead, for, as he and any five-­year-­old criminologist know, the kingpin is merely dormant until society needs his philanthropic assist. The summons reaches Jimmie that very midnight, at his luxurious Riverside Drive mansion, in the form of a note from the mysterious feminine mastermind he has never seen, who directs all his exploits. With a curious, cryptic smile tingeing his lips, Jimmie opens his safe and removes exactly what you would expect: “It was not an ordinary belt; it was full of stout-­sewn, upright little pockets all the way around, and in the pockets grimly lay an array of fine, blued-­steel, highly tempered instruments—a compact, powerful burglar’s kit.” Half an hour later, an inconspicuous figure flits downtown via Washington Square. Except for the black silk mask, the slouch hat pulled well down over the eyes, and the automatic revolver and electric flashlight, nobody would ever suspect him of being a Raffles.

The actual caper Jimmie executes is too intricate and inconsequential to warrant recapitulating; briefly, by leaving his telltale Gray Seal on a rifled safe, he saves from prison a character who, in behalf of his ailing wife, has heisted his employer’s funds. A civic uproar ensues: “The Morning News-­Argus offered twenty-­five thousand dollars reward for the capture of the Gray Seal! Other papers immediately followed suit in varying amounts. The authorities, State and municipal, goaded to desperation, did likewise, and the five million men, women, and children of New York were automatically metamorphosed into embryonic sleuths. New York was aroused.” It seems odd that such a brouhaha should attend a misdemeanor approximately as monstrous as spitting in the subway, but, no doubt, Manhattan was more strait-­laced in that epoch. On the heels of the foregoing comes another sensation—the body of a stool pigeon with alleged evidence linking his murder to the Gray Seal. Our hero’s every sensibility is outraged: “Anger, merciless and unrestrained, surged over Jimmie Dale. . . . Even worse to Jimmie Dale’s artistic and sensitive temperament was the vilification, the holding up to loathing, contumely, and abhorrence of the name, the stainless name, of the Gray Seal. It was stainless! He had guarded it jealously—as a man guards the woman’s name he loves.” Eyes flashing like cut-­steel buckles, he retires to the slum hideout he calls the Sanctuary and revamps himself into Larry the Bat: “His fingers worked quickly—a little wax behind the ears, in the nostrils, under the upper lip, deftly placed—hands, wrists, neck, throat, and face received their quota of stain, applied with an artist’s touch—and then the spruce, muscular Jimmie Dale, transformed into a slouching, vicious-­featured denizen of the underworld, replaced the box under the flooring, pulled a slouch hat over his eyes, extinguished the gas, and went out.” By dint of certain devious researches, which I could not extricate from the glue, a venal police inspector is unmasked as the culprit and the Gray Seal absolved. If my calculations are correct, Jimmie in the first sixty pages of the action has enjoyed a grand total of eleven minutes sleep, considerably less than the most wide-­awake reader.

Stimulated to a healthy glow by these finger exercises, Jimmie now dashes off an ambitious four-­part fugue plangent with larceny and homicide. Under the pretense of glomming a diamond chaplet from the strongbox of a rascally broker, he recovers a note held by the Scrooge against a mining engineer he has fleeced, bilks a ring of counterfeiters blackmailing a sheep in their toils, robs a dealer of gems to obviate his being slaughtered by yeggs (a curious bit of preventive surgery), and exposes a knavish banker named Carling who has looted his own vaults and pinned the blame on an underling with a criminal record. In the last-­named coup, the accused has a winsome infant, enabling Packard to pull out the vox-­humana stop when Jimmie extorts the vital confession: “ ‘Carling,’ said Jimmie hoarsely, ‘I stood beside a little bed tonight and looked at a baby girl—a little baby girl with golden hair, who smiled as she slept. . . . Take this pen, or—this.’ The automatic lifted until the muzzle was on a line with Carling’s eyes.” Jimmie’s antisocial behavior, it goes without saying, never redounds to his personal advantage; he scrupulously returns all swag to its rightful owners and, even while bashing in whatever skulls deserve it, exudes the high moral purpose of his progenitor Robin Hood. True, he betrays a pallid romantic interest in the Maid Marian who animates him from behind the scenes, but nothing that would boil an egg. In the light of contemporary pulp fiction, one marvels that Packard spiced his famous goulash with so little sexual paprika. Perhaps it may be possible to sublimate the libido by twiddling the combination of a Herring-­Hall-­Marvin safe, or, on the other hand, perhaps the kid’s just a medical curiosity. Nobody could be that dedicated.

And yet he is, unless you discount the evidence of the next hundred pages. In rapid succession, he clears the reputation of a putative ruby thief, brings to book the architect of a payroll killing and his henchmen, and restores the stolen map of a gold mine to the widow and children of its legal claimant. There is a magnificent consistency about Packard’s minor figures; other writers may muck about with halftones and nuances, but his widows are all destitute and enfeebled and his villains are rotten to the core. A typical sample is the satanic attorney who conceived the payroll incident above: “Cunning, shrewd, crafty, conscienceless, cold-­blooded—that was Stangeist . . . the six-­foot muscular frame, that was invariably clothed in attire of the most fashionable cut; the thin lips with their oily, plausible smile, the straight black hair that straggled into pinpoint, little black eyes, the dark face with its high cheekbones, which, with the pronounced aquiline nose and the persistent rumor that he was a quarter caste, had led the underworld, prejudiced always in favor of a ‘monaker,’ to dub the man the ‘Indian Chief.’ ” A Choctaw version of Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle, you might say, and a real ripsnorter. The argot in which the crooks converse also has the same classical purity; vide that of the Weasel, an obscure cutpurse who stirs recollections of Happy Hooligan, of sainted memory: “Why, youse damned fool,” jeered the Weasel, “d’youse t’ink youse can get away wid dat? Say, take it from me, youse are a piker! Say, youse make me tired. Wot d’youse t’ink youse are? D’youse t’ink dis is a tee-­ayter, an’ dat youse are a cheap-­skate actor strollin’ acrost the stage?” Scant wonder, with such nostalgic Chimmie Fadden dialogue, that youse has to swallow repeatedly to exorcise de lump in de t’roat.

The machine-­gun tempo, to use a flabby designation, slackens momentarily for an interview in the dark between Jimmie and the Tocsin, his female control. His work is nearing completion, she whispers, and soon she can disclose herself with impunity. This, as the intuitive will guess, is the conventional literary strip tease, because in the next breath the deluge descends. The Crime Club—not the Doubleday fellows, but “the most powerful and pitiless organization of criminals the world has ever known”—pounces on the dapper thief. In a scary milieu replete with hydraulic walls, sliding laboratories, and a binful of putty noses and false whiskers, its minions vainly ply him with a truth drug to elicit word of the Tocsin’s whereabouts. No contusions result, except to the laws of English syntax, and Jimmie is let out to pasture. It would only court neuralgia to retrace the labyrinthine steps by which the author maneuvers him into the arms of his lady, now disguised as Silver Mag, the beggarwoman, but ultimately the lovebirds make contact and the lava spills over: “The warm, rich lips were yielding to his; he could feel that throb, the life in the young, lithe form against his own. She was his—his! The years, the past, all were swept away—and she was his at last—his for always. And there came a mighty sense of kingship upon him, as though all the world were at his feet, and virility, and a great, glad strength above all other men’s, and a song was in his soul, a song triumphant—for she was his!” In other words, she was his, Gott sei dank, and you have just burst into sobs of relief when the whole confounded business begins over again. Marie LaSalle, alias the Tocsin, alias Silver Mag, pours out a long, garbled histoire, the kernel of which is that the head of the Crime Club, posing as her uncle, seeks to kill her for her estate. Jimmie manages to worm a confession from him clinching his guilt; in the attendant melee, though, he is recognized as the Gray Seal, and a wrathful mob of vigilantes from the Tenderloin tracks him to the Sanctuary and puts it to the torch. The lovers providentially escape over the rooftops to continue their didos in The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale, Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue, and Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope, and blessed silence descends, broken only by the scratch of Packard’s pen endorsing his royalty checks.

I was in a Sixth Avenue bus, traffic-­bound in Herald Square, when I finished the last three chapters, and a natural impulse to break clean made me drop the book into the vacant seat before me. Moments later, a brace of speedy sixteen-­year-­olds in windbreakers emblazoned with side elevations of Jane Russell crash-­dived into the seat and buried themselves in comics. One of them suddenly detected the volume nestling against his spine. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “Someone lost a book.” “It ain’t a book. There’s no pictures in it,” his companion corrected. Together they laboriously spelled out the title and joined in a quick, incurious survey of the contents. “Ah, just a lot of slush,” observed the first, in disdain. “What kind of an old creep’d get a charge out of this stuff?” An old creep directly behind them turned blush-­pink, fastened his eyes on a Mojud stocking ad, and strove to retain his dignity. At Forty-­second Street, weary of their tiresome speculation and guffaws, he disembarked, not, however, without a shrivelling glance. If you ask me, popinjays like that, and all these young whippersnappers you meet nowadays, have no more character than a tin pie plate. Why, at their age I was already chairman of a world-­famed debating society.