MY NAME IS CHUCK Thorndike. My name is Mike Cantrell. My name is Buck Williams. My name is Pat Slaughter. And, God help us, my name is Brick Wall.
All pseudonyms, of course. My real name is Jannie Shean. But I am the author of hard-boiled mystery-suspense thrillers, and Aldo Binder, “the man” at Binder Publications, is convinced that since men are the big buyers of this genre, the author’s name should also be male. And not only male, but ruggedly, toughly, two-fistedly masculine.
“Like Mickey Spillane,” he told me.
“Like Raymond Chandler?” I said. “Like Dashiell Hammett?”
But I was so anxious to sell my first novel that I agreed to be Chuck Thorndike. Then, when I got in the swing of things and began turning out four potboilers a year, along came Mike, Buck, Pat, and Brick.
I make no claim to creating literature, but I do strive for intelligent entertainment. My books are tightly plotted, with the required dollops of sex and violence, and they have found a faithful readership. I have had two movie sales, and last year I grossed almost a hundred thousand dollars. As Brick Wall might say, “That ain’t potato pancakes, sweetheart.”
I’m lucky and I know it. For every novelist able to support himself on his earnings, there are a hundred who must earn bread teaching Creative Writing in New Hampshire girls’ schools, writing ad copy on Madison Avenue, or slicing pastrami in an Orchard Street deli. Probably I made it because I found a formula I enjoyed writing and a lot of people enjoyed reading. Not that it’s a formula original with me. It’s called the Big Caper, and involves looting a bank vault, a kidnapping, hijacking an airliner, a raid on an armored truck—something large enough to require a gang of four to a dozen bad guys.
The first third of a Big Caper thriller is spent gathering the personnel: delineating their strengths, weaknesses, and their relationships to each other; and planning the caper.
The second third of the novel describes the actual commission of the crime. In the final third, the whole thing falls apart through bad luck, clever police work, or from the personality defects, failure of brain or nerve, and antagonisms of the gang members. They are not the master criminals they fancied themselves. Justice triumphs.
How many Big Caper novels have you read? A dozen? A hundred? I hope some of them were mine. Or, rather, Chuck’s, Mike’s, Buck’s, Pat’s, or Brick’s.
Together, we turned out books like link sausage, until, about six months ago, it all began to come apart like … well, like a Big Caper. The final sales on Mike Cantrell’s latest, Mayhem on Mother’s Day, were down, way down. And the bookstores were returning unsold stacks of Pat Slaughter’s Massacre on Division Street.
Worse, I had recently turned in Chuck Thorndike’s new opus, Murder for Breakfast, and after three weeks of chilling silence from my publishers, Aldo Binder’s secretary called Sol Faber to set up an appointment with the great man himself. I fancied I heard, faintly, the sounds of a guillotine. Creak of pulley. Rasp of rope. Whistle of blade’s descent. Chonk!