Today, November 2, 2016, would be Ed Gorman’s 75th birthday and it has been dubbed as Ed Gorman Day around the blogospere. I struggled with what, if anything, to post. I settled on this essay I wrote as an introduction for Stark House's edition of Ed's fine private eye novels The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers.
When I asked Ed earlier this year if he would mind my reprinting it here, he told me - and this made my day, week, month, year - “This is a major piece for me.” It is a major piece for me, too.
Happy birthday Ed.
Ed Gorman is an unheralded writer of uncommon
ability. He is a writer with a conscience—his characters reflect the world and
he has an uncanny ability to make them sympathetic—but he is also an immensely
entertaining storyteller. Mr. Gorman’s work has ranged wide, but he is
particularly good at the first person detective story and two of his best are
collected in this omnibus: The Autumn
Dead and The Night Remembers.
In 1985 Ed Gorman,
in his second published novel, introduced his first private detective, Jack
Dwyer. Dwyer is a former cop who got the acting bug after being cast in a local
public safety commercial. He started acting lessons, quit his job, applied for
his private investigator’s license, and took a security job to keep the wolves
away. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels and The Autumn Dead is the fourth.
The
Autumn Dead
is the definitive Jack Dwyer novel. It fulfills the potential and promise of
both Dwyer as a character and Ed Gorman as a writer. It is a richly detailed detective
novel strong on story and scored with a thought provoking working class
commentary. Jack Dwyer is the principal instigator of the novel’s action, but
he is also a spectator of the melancholy and hard world he inhabits. He is not
a saint, and is unable to right many, if any, wrongs, but he notices the
humanity around him. More importantly, he understands humanity in all its
beauty, frailty and brutality. In an early scene from The Autumn Dead, Dwyer describes a housing development built in the
1950’s.
“They’d built the houses in the mid-fifties and though
they weren’t much bigger than garages, the contractors had been smart enough to
paint them in pastels—yellow and lime and pink and puce, the colors of
impossible flowers, the colors of high hard national hope—and they were where
you strived to live in 1956 if you worked in a factory and wanted the good life
promised by the Democrats and practiced by the Republicans.”
It is a neighborhood forgotten by time and
left to crumble and tarnish new generations with a hard scrabble existence. It
is a place where dreams die, girls become hard and old before they reach
maturity, and a place where the lowest rung of humanity struggles to survive. In
the novel this hopelessness and poverty is juxtaposed with the comparatively well
off. The professional classes and the
downright wealthy. Dwyer is unable to claim membership in either class—he was
raised in one and has never been able to fully gain access to the other. The conflict
of class is personified by an old classmate and friend named Karen Lane.
Karen seemingly escaped her childhood
poverty, but she gave herself away in the attempt. She is described much like
Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly. She is a woman-girl desperately trying to erase
her own bitter world with her sex, and while her surroundings changed, for a
time at least, she was never able to completely overcome the poverty of her
childhood. A passage describing Karen’s borrowed room in the home of a friend
captures the rub between the dream of something more and reality.
“The clothes—fawns and pinks and soft blues and
yellows, silk and linen and organza and lame and velvet—did not belong in the
chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation
here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.”
There is a bitter melancholy in much of Ed
Gorman’s work and The Autumn Dead is
no different. It is a narrative of loss and disappointment; the loss of time,
the slow crawl to death, and the disappointment of failure.
“‘You know what his problem is?’
“‘What?’
“‘He isn’t a boy anymore.’”
In 1991, Ed Gorman introduced his second
private eye, Jack Walsh, in The Night Remembers.
Jack appeared in only one novel, and while he would have made a wonderful
serial character, his story is seemingly complete in a single volume. Jack is
62, a World War II veteran who fought at Salerno, a retired cop—Linn County
Sheriff’s Department headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and a live-in manager
of a rundown apartment building in a decaying neighborhood. Jack operates a one
man private investigation shop, smokes six cigarettes a day and has an on again
off again relationship with a woman nearly half his age named Faith Hallahan.
Faith is a major player in both the novel
and Jack’s life. She is the mother of an 18-month old boy named Hoyt—she claims
Jack is the father—and Faith is nearly certain she has breast cancer. Faith,
like many of Mr. Gorman’s female characters, has a gentle sadness, an almost
broken quality, about her. She is described with an intimate fondness.
“[R]egal, imposing, and, even at times such as these,
a little arrogant. The hell of it is—for her sake anyway—she’d had one of those
terrible childhoods that robbed her of any self-confidence her looks might have
given her. ‘I’m only beautiful on the outside,’ she’s fond of saying in her
dramatic way.”
Amazingly Jack takes Faith’s indecision
about their relationship in stride. He truly loves Faith and Hoyt. There are
several tender scenes between the three, which develops a visceral intimacy.
Jack has an indistinct role in Faith’s life. He is a mixture of father, priest
and lover, which summarily describes his outsider role in society.
Jack’s personal strife is a backdrop to
the mystery, but it is an important and rewarding element because it focuses an
understanding of his viewpoint, and it is Jack’s view of the world that
shimmers in the narrative. It is offhand references to real world people like
Lyndon LaRouche, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter—“…Carter I never could stand.
Maybe it was that psychotic smile.”—and the sympathetic brush Mr. Gorman paints
his characters with that pushes the novel beyond. He is particularly good at
capturing a mood, a sorrow, an ill, in a few simple, sparse sentences.
“The little girl watched me as I started down the
stairs. She looked sadder than any child her age ever should.”
In another scene, a rambling bigot who
justifies his hate with religion, is described with a keen sense of understanding—or
maybe pity—without allowing for credibility or justification of the hate.
“In his plaid work shirt and baggy jeans and house
slippers, he looked like the sort of melancholy psychotic you saw roaming the
halls of state mental institutions just after electroshock treatment, the pain
and sorrow only briefly dulled by riding the lightning.”
Jack, like Dwyer, is an observer of a
world he doesn’t quite understand, but a world he has a wistful empathy for. A
world filled with desperate, scared people behaving in ugly and malicious ways,
but allowances are nearly always provided. Small understandings, if not always
completely satisfactory, are conveyed in the narrative explaining the ugliness.
“She enjoyed making you despise her. I suppose she
hoped that somebody would despise her almost as much as she despised
herself.”
The
Night Remembers
and The Autumn Dead are similar—first
person narrative with a sentimental, intelligent, and watchman-like protagonist—but
beneath the surface both are very different novels. The Night Remembers is a wistful, sentimental novel filled with
betrayal and an exhausted weariness while The
Autumn Dead is very near angry. The novels are both dark, but there is humor.
Jack Dwyer is a self-deprecating wise-ass. There is a Jim Rockford moment in The Autumn Dead when a bartender wants five
dollars to tell Dwyer where he can find a man.
“‘It worth five bucks to you?’
“‘That’s only in the movies. Just call Chuck.’
“‘I need some grease to do it because I got to walk
all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom is on the blink.’”
Jack Walsh is less smart-alecky than Dwyer,
but the humor pops up unexpectedly—the reference to Jimmy Carter’s “psychotic
smile” and an exchange between Walsh and the owner of the building he manages.
A man he refers to as “young Mr. Banister.” His description of Banister is one
of the highlights.
“He was approximately thirty-five with a short earnest
haircut, black earnest horn-rim glasses, an earnest white button-down shirt, an
earnest blue five-button cardigan sweater, and a pair of earnest chinos that
complemented his very earnest black and white saddle shoes. It was the wrong
sissy touch, those shoes on a man his age, and told me more than I wanted to
know about young Mr. Banister.”
Jack Walsh also
appeared in the 1990 short story “Friends,” but he was disguised under the name
Parnell. The primary backup players were there—Faith and Hoyt—and the story is worth
finding. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels, New, Improved Murder (1985), Murder in the Wings (1986), Murder Straight Up (1986), The Autumn Dead (1987), and A Cry of Shadows (1990), and three short stories, “Failed Prayers”
(1987), “The Reason Why” (1988), which is the basis of The Autumn Dead, and “Eye of the Beholder” (1996).
