Allan Guthrie's interview with James McKimmey (pictured) continues...

JM: I did see combat in Germany during World War II. I was in the 102nd Infantry Division. But I was very lucky. I was in Headquarters Company of the 405th Regiment, but not in the I & R platoon, which saw a lot of action. And in time, because I’d had some college in my background and seemed a logical choice to the captain of my company, I was sent back to Division Headquarters as an assistant clerk. So we were always well behind those forward rifle companies. For what action I was involved in I did receive two campaign battle stars, the Combat Infantryman Badge and the Bronze Star. I don’t believe I earned any of those medals nearly as much as so many of my compadres did, back then. But you notice that I list all of them, which is what happens when you reach 80. You tend to glorify as time goes on.

But I don’t mean to say that I glorify war in any manner. These days I often hear people who have never been near battle shout that we should immediately go to war to solve an international situation and shout that anybody who disagrees with them is a traitor. So, in effect, they are accusing me of being a traitor, and my response to that is to say, simply enough – stick it.

JM: Oddly, I don’t remember very much about the reception and the writing of either Cornered or Squeeze Play. I do remember how it went with Run If You’re Guilty because it was my first hardcover. I always sent two copies of chapters and outline of a projected novel to my agent. One went to Cosmopolitan for a go-ahead on the eventual sale of first U.S. serial rights, the other package went to the book publisher, which had usually been Dell, for paperback publication. I got a go-ahead from Cosmo. But this time my agent tried a hardcover house, Lippincott, for the books rights. He got a contract there, and I got a letter from the Lippincott editor who’d bought it.

The letter was entirely patronizing, telling me that because I knew only how to write paperbacks, she would, as I completed the book, guide me along the path to successful hardcover publication. Here again came some John D. MacDonald influence in that he believed without a fraction of doubt that a book was a book was a book, no matter hard or soft cover. I had come to the same belief.  So, being relatively young and feeling I was beginning to own the world of book-writing and not yet hewing to the rule of putting away smoking letters to be reviewed in the calm of the next day, I fired off a letter to the Lippincott editor.

I told her (a) that my paperbacks had gotten three times what she was paying for this book and (b) that Cosmo was getting the serial rights for five times what she was paying and (c) paperback publication in the past had been my choice, not the result of an inability to write for hardcover publication.

Of course, it was a rude, arrogant, nasty letter I never should have written to an old long-established hardcover mystery editor. But her attitude did represent much of the editorial view of paperbacks at that time. Nevertheless, the contract had already been signed and so Lippincott obviously published the final version of the completed novel. But my agent told me that the editor there promised him that she would never buy another book from me. She didn’t.

For you now, Al, to tell me that this book is one of three of the best crime novels written in the Sixties puts a special joy in my heart. And I thank you for that.

I hadn’t read any of these books for perhaps at least 40 years. But because of your interest, I read Squeeze Play a few weeks ago. I’m reading Cornered. I’ll read Run If You’re Guilty after that.

JM: How it felt to read Squeeze Play was as though someone else had written the novel. And, of course, that’s true. When you were forty years younger, you were a different man. And the way that man forty years younger than I wrote when he wrote Squeeze Play was an interesting discovery.

This older man found faults, of course, mentally rewriting this or that as I read. But basically I was pleased with what I found, in a book written by this younger man. One of my praises for any piece of writing is that it’s professionally written. And to my surprise and pleasure, I found Squeeze Play to be that, both in construction and word-handling. That probably sounds very egotistical, but I’m not saying it out of ego. I tried to analyze my reaction and it goes this way:

When I wrote Squeeze Play, I’d been writing for about 13 years. When I was attending the University of San Francisco, I wrote a column for the college’s newspaper, The Foghorn, and I also wrote a column for the San Mateo Times. In addition, while I was still in college, I’d started writing and publishing short fiction. I continued writing short stories after college. And then, before I set out on Squeeze Play, I’d written and had published six other crime novels, along with a trail of rejections slips for other things that had not succeeded to signal my course for exactly what it had been – writing and failing and succeeding and writing and failing and succeeding, on and on in that fashion.

And along with that had been a lot of study about how other writers had done it. I studied those other writers’ work. I read everything I could find written by those same writers about how they’d done what they had done.

And I think, there, is the inherent value of Noir Originals – spotlighting writers in the fashion you’re spotlighting Jason Starr and me. Right now I’m reading your coverage of Jason. We don’t write in the same style. We don’t work in the same way. We have enormously different backgrounds. I’m from a small town in Nebraska. Jason is a born New Yorker. We produce entirely different products, albeit in the same overall category of Noir.

But what I did and what Jason did too, was study, study, study. What we also did was write, write, write. And what both of us did as well was fail, fail, fail. Out of all of that has come whatever success we’ve individually had. If learning about how it went for us can help other, newer writers out there, then Noir Originals is worth its weight in literary gold.

On the subject of editors, I had a great deal of revising requested on the first novel Dell bought, The Perfect Victim. After that, there was less and less of it from Dell as I wrote succeeding books. There was no input from Cosmo.  But what was difficult there was cutting the length of the books by more than half. That wasn’t involved, of course, in two stories Cosmo published as novels, And Then She Was Dead and Kill Him Again because they were written directly for Cosmo at that magazine’s length

JM: It wasn’t a deliberate homage to John D. I wouldn’t have done that. The problem is that I don’t remember whose title that was, although Cosmo used more of my titles than anyone else. I don’t believe Dell used a single one of my titles. I think it was Cornered that I originally called The Red Snow. For quite some time I saved every letter I got from an editor, and I saved every copy of the letters I wrote to them. But with the years and moving from place to place, all of that has gone the way of so many things out of one’s past. Just the other day I was looking in a mirror, trying to find some small hint of what was there fifty years ago. I couldn’t find it.

JM: Riot At Willow Creek was my original title for The Perfect Victim. That’s the only other one I remember.

AG: While we’re still on the subject of Dell, what were the initial print runs?

JM: 200,000.

JM: I can’t imagine a more perceptive reader than you, Al. You’re finding things I’ve never considered. JC for Jack Cummings for Jesus Christ. Christ the first syllable of Christenson. I think it proves the theory that your subconscious can produce what is, essentially, what you really mean.

I recall very clearly what I was trying to do with the policeman, Jack Cummings. As a crime writer I’d naturally done a lot of investigation into law officers. And I’d come to the conclusion that quite often the difference between a talented law officer and a talented criminal is a hairline. I don’t mean to indicate that I have the slightest disrespect for law officers. I have the highest respect for them.

What I mean is that I strongly believe that it’s the same kind of individual that can represent either law enforcer or lawbreaker. How many people have got the guts to rob a bank? How many people have got the guts to apprehend the bank robber? In the case of Jack Cummings, his Godlike (or JC-like) attitude about bringing a hood to justice was what separated him from being a hood himself. But in the end he crossed that line and became a killer. I remember an old fiction rule that if you want to write messages, use Western Union. But I suppose I was guilty in Blue Mascara Tears of suggesting some sort of message about law enforcement. But again, I didn’t do it with any disrespect for the law. Take away all law from any metropolis for 24 hours, and you would have hell on earth.

I can’t analyze Otis Christenson as easily. A Circle In The Water was simply an attempt to prove to myself that I could write a so-called serious novel. Having started out to be an architect, having worked as a draftsman along the way, I felt I could see through Otis’s eyes. But he was mainly a product of that same subconscious. Writing that novel, I wasn’t restrained to some of the rules that exist when you write the crime novel. Or at least that’s how I felt then. I now feel very strongly that a suspense novel can be taken as seriously as a serious novel if it is written well enough – Joe Gores and I agree solidly on that.

Circle was primarily my attempt then to prove that I could write that kind of novel. I think a lot of us have had that desire. Philip Dick wanted all of his writing life to prove that he was a "quality" writer, not just a science-fiction writer. His science fiction sold well, his quality writing didn’t. Well, take that "just a science-fiction writer" out of it. As it turned out, he proved that all along he was a high-level quality writer who happened to write science fiction.

I was glad I wrote A Circle In The Water when I wrote it. But I had very little agreement about that at the time. My agent tried very hard to discourage me from writing it. I wrote it anyway and he sold it anyway. I was in Los Angeles when it was published. William Morrow bought time on an L.A. television station that had a program devoted to presenting new books. So I went on TV to promote the book. Afterward, making phone calls from my hotel room, I discovered that there wasn’t a copy of that book in any bookstore in the greater Los Angeles area. Now, Al, you are saying that the book, word for word, is perhaps my best work. That means a great deal to me. So thanks. And I’m still glad I wrote it!

JM: You’re right that promotion/publicity is huge part of a contemporary writer’s job. That wasn’t the case in the Sixties. In that general time frame it was pretty much up to the writer in most cases. Some used promotion extremely well. A classic example was Helen Gurley Brown. She started her publicity blitz on that same Los Angeles TV program I mentioned, developed a best seller and then became editor of Cosmopolitan. While I was waiting to go on that L.A. show, I had a nice conversation with Richard Armour, also a guest that day. He was probably the most popular poet of the era, and he did a lot of self-promotion, so that as a poet he was well known.

In science-fiction, the conventions served well as promotions. I remember getting Christmas cards from Poul and Karen Anderson relating their travels during the previous years, as Poul, a highly popular s-f writer, was a featured convention speaker around the world. Bradbury did a lot of that.

I did a little, speaking to high-school classes and such things as that. I even agreed to teach a couple of writing classes at the local college. But I pulled my wife into it. She stood and officiated, I sat and answered questions. I much preferred sitting down in front of my typewriter and writing to standing up in front of an audience and speaking. I recall one Northern California Regional Mystery Writers of America meeting when I was living on the San Francisco Peninsula. I was pressed tightly into a corner by Tony Boucher, Lee Offord and Miriam Allen DeFord and informed that I was going to be the next Regional Vice President of that organization. It was voted upon and passed.

In the following days, I thought about standing up in front of that group at every monthly meeting to follow for the next year. And I said to my wife, "We’ve been talking a lot about moving up to Lake Tahoe, haven’t we?"

She said, "I guess so. Why?"

I said, "Let’s do it."

"When?"

"Right now."

So we did. And the MWA chapter found someone else to officiate at the following meetings. I’ve lived here at Tahoe ever since. I’ve really loved it. It’s been the only place for me. And so for anyone to infer that the only reason I ever moved up here in the first place was to get out of standing up and officiating at the monthly Northern California Regional MWA meetings for a year is just downright silly.

It is, in fact, positively ridiculous.

You understand that, Al.

Don’t you?

JM: Raymond Chandler was the first novelist in this field to catch my interest. I discovered him at sea in the year 1944. A large Swedish luxury liner had been converted to a troop carrier during World War II. It was on this vessel, heading toward France, that I found a paperback in the ship’s library written by Mr. Chandler. I would find a place on our deck sit down and read what was a brand-new experience for me. I loved what this writer was doing. I still remember reading a chapter or two and then going up and watching the prow slice through the dark water of the North Atlantic with high white spray flying out to either side, thinking about what I’d read, and then returning to the book.

I think that kind of remained in my subconscious as time went along. I read more Chandler. I read the writer who reputedly influenced Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. I read Ross MacDonald, who was reputedly influenced by Chandler. To bring it up to date, I read Joe Gores, who I think is the best writer writing today.

I admire all of those.

But it was really music, jazz specifically, that led me into writing. And I have my heroes there too.

I started playing the clarinet when I was eleven years old. I played third chair, third clarinet in a band when I was in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and I also played in a clarinet quartet that went to a regional music contest and scored a "Good," with the judges. After moving to Omaha and attending Omaha Central High School, I played in the band and, when I was a senior, again went to one of those regional music contests. By this time I was in a clarinet quartet that got a "Highly Superior" at the music contest, and I was playing first chair first clarinet in the band. I rented a saxophone and tried to play two or three dance gigs in town.

But the fact was that I wasn’t naturally good as a musician; it was simply that I practised a lot. I was far too shy to be an effective soloist even if I had been a better musician.

So I didn’t become an architect as my original intended profession. I didn’t become a jazz musician either. I became a writer because that’s what I could naturally do best.

But it was the love of music that created the most influence on my writing. I knew you had to practice in order to improve as a writer. So I did a lot of that, writing for newspapers, smaller magazines, anything. It was something that came out of the musical experience – if you want to create a great jazz solo on the piano, you’d better learn how to play the piano. Going back to Joe Gores, what he did to be a writer after he’d graduated from Notre Dame was follow an instructor’s advice, locked himself up in a room, and wrote, wrote, wrote, the kind of woodshedding that led him into being the successful writer he is today.

Music remains my strong influence right down to today. I’ve had the fortune to be able to meet and talk to some of the best jazz musicians ever to live, Count Basie, Johnny Hodges, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. I would still like to improve my writing style so that it would more nearly match the deceptive simplicity of Count Basie’s piano. I would still like to have the superb tone of Johnny Hodges’ alto saxophone. I would still like to have the driving force of Lockjaw’s tenor saxophone.

Years ago I would have been hesitant to reveal the above comparisons for public consumption. I was afraid that it might sound a bit weird. But then I heard an acceptance speech delivered by one of this globe’s very best actors, Jack Nicholson, when he accepted one of his Oscars. Among others, he thanked Miles Davis for his success. For non-jazz readers, Miles Davis, a trumpeter, composer and all-round innovator, represented one of the largest talents ever to participate in the jazz world. Making absolutely no other comparisons to the monster talent owned by Mr. Nicholson, I think I understand what he meant by thanking Miles. It was the trumpet sound Miles developed, I’m certain, and it was also how Miles developed not only his individual sound, but the sound of the jazz groups he led, gotten by studying artistic accomplishments outside the jazz world such as the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre or the dancing of the Ballet Africaine.

I’ve hardly pretended to such lofty artistic heights as that. But I still find myself thinking in musical terms when it comes to writing. In these latter years, I’ve been collaborating with my wife, Starr, who did her woodshedding as a newspaper journalist and writing a nonfiction book recently published. One of those collaborations is a short story appearing in this issue of Noir Originals. We’ve written nonfiction pieces that have been published. We wrote a play that has not yet been produced but, from reactions so far received from some of best theatrical houses in the country, it still has that potential. I’ve never found myself in a collaboration that has worked, in the past. This time it’s working. It’s not only the talent of Starr, which is heavy. It’s also the way I’m viewing it now. In my head, we’re the same as a musical team. I write the first chorus. Starr writes the second. Then we polish the entire melody to the final manuscript, retaining the best of what each of us can contribute. And what we get, hopefully, is a song worth hearing.

I’ve never before admitted this to anyone. But you are, Al, getting me to talk at length and at great intimacy. I should imagine, by now, that you’d highly welcome a one-sentence answer to one of your questions.

I’ll try but I won’t promise.

JM: As I stated early in this interview, I wasn’t really aware that I was writing anything in the crime/mystery genre. I just kind of slipped into it. As I said, ‘I didn’t go there on purpose, I just naturally happened to get there.’ Now, this many questions later, I realize that what I said then reminds me of an old jazz story. This young fellow with a trumpet asked for a job with a dance band and was asked if he’d had any formal training on his instrument. His answer: "Not enough to hurt nothing."

I’m not foolishly proud that I didn’t know more about writing mysteries than I did when I was starting out. It was just that I had majored in American literature in college. I wrote my final thesis on William Saroyan. And I just wasn’t as much influenced by a really good whodunnit as I was by The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, although I realize now that you would have a hard time detecting that any of my early novels had been influenced by that famous piece of literature. But when I was attending college in San Francisco, I even tracked down where Mr. Saroyan lived and, although I never had the privilege of meeting him, I used to drive past his house and think, "Someday, by God, I would like to go and do likewise."

Well, Saroyan, like Bradbury, is not to be successfully imitated. I’m just trying to say that I became more and more aware of the mystery genre as I wrote it and read it, with the consequent result that I think I was trying harder to obtain a better mystery than simply presenting a good story. And so, looking back, I think now that the best results in what I was trying to do were achieved with the earlier novels simply because they were composed more naturally for my particular bent as a writer. Having finally reread both Squeeze Play and The Man With The Gloved Hand, I definitely feel that Squeeze Play is the better book.

I don’t know. Well, okay. Suppose your final question reduces to this: Did you study the mystery story before you began writing it?

I suppose my answer would have to be, "Not enough to hurt nothing."

JM: 1: I was a junior at the University of San Francisco. One of my classes was creative writing taught by a lay instructor. Another was Shakespeare taught by a Jesuit priest who was also the head of the English Department.

An assignment for the creative-writing class was to write a short story.

And so I went home and wrote my first short story which I entitled The Greatest Modern Author In The World, which, of course, was what I intended to be. The main character was a fellow to whom I gave the wonderful name of Miniver Cheevy. In the story, it was Miniver who wanted to be that greatest modern author, but the poor fellow couldn’t find anything to write about. I sent him past great story situations, one after another, and he never saw the possibilities. At the end, he still knew that one day he would be that greatest author if only he ever ran across a good idea. It was satire, of course. I turned the story in to the instructor, certain that I’d written a good short story.

Grading was on the ABC system. I got the story back with a C minus.

C minus for a first short story is a high point in a career?

Don’t touch that dial.

I’d found a "little" magazine, The American Pen, that was going to publish a special issue written by college students only. Payment would be copies of the issue. But it would mean getting published. And so when I’d turned my short story in to the creative-writing instructor, I’d also sent a copy to the magazine.

Hey! The magazine accepted the story. I wanted to tell the instructor, but somehow I couldn’t. There’s a one-finger salute quite popular today. If it had been then, I might have delivered that at least.

But something even better happened. The Jesuit teaching Shakespeare who was head of the English Department shook my hand one morning and explained that he’d been sent a copy of the magazine containing my story. He congratulated me profusely and said he’d given the magazine to the creative-writing instructor, who never later mentioned it but gave me nothing but A pluses for everything I turned in from that point forward.

2. Along the writing way, in the early Seventies, I was doing some nonfiction in addition to the novels and short stories. And because I’d always loved photography, I decided to add that to my creative efforts. I’d driven through the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania earlier and tried a query about them with both Good Housekeeping and Motorhome Life. I got an assignment from both.

Hot damn, I went out and bought a bush jacket, packed my camera gear, drove from my home in Lake Tahoe to Reno, got on a United flight to New York City and checked into the Royalton Hotel on West 44th. The next morning I took a bus to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, rented a car and photographed that area for most of the day. Took a bus back to Manhattan, flew United back to Reno, drove home to Tahoe.

Look at me, a genuine writer-photographer adventurer. I wrote articles for both magazines. Both were purchased. Motorhome Life gave a full spread to my color photography. I thought that it didn’t get better than that.

It happened once in my career. But it happened.

3. Another fine time also involved New York City. I went there during an Edgar week, also in the Seventies, when the Mystery Writers of America held their annual awards banquet. I wasn’t nominated for anything, that year or any other year, but it’s a time when writers and editors closely or remotely associated with crime writing gather in Manhattan.

Again, I checked into the Royalton, The Man With The Gloved Hand having just been completed. I started the week out by having lunch with Bruce Cassiday, fiction editor of Argosy Magazine. I’d been selling short stories to Bruce, now he wanted to hear about the new novel. I thumbnailed it vocally, and he said, "We’ll buy the first serial rights." Done. Sold. A nice way to start the week.

I next had lunch with Lee Wright, the Random House mystery editor who’d bought the book version. Lee was a delight and a hell of an editor, and she took me to one of the best restaurants in town for that lunch.

Next was Ernie Hutter, editor of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Ernie bought a lot of the kind of fiction I truly liked writing. He’d arranged for a couple of other mystery writers who appeared regularly in his magazine to join us, and we had a splendid lunch together.

The Awards Dinner on a Friday night was a glittery affair indeed. I sat at the Random House table. And somebody had arranged for me to pick up the runner-up award for a writer who couldn’t attend. The award was named, I was announced as the one picking up the award, and all I had to do was stand up and go grab the damned scroll and listen to the applause. I loved it. I didn’t mind that it wasn’t my scroll because in that event I would have had to have given a speech to that large assembly.

The following day, I was invited to yet another lunch, this one with Naome and Bob Lewis at their apartment at East 96th Street. Naome was Fiction Editor at Good Housekeeping, Bob was a literary agent and also a great jazz clarinetist who’d played with one of jazz’s giants, Jack Teagarten. The Lewises had two of the most charming little girls ever invented.

So there we were, having a drink, Naome leaving now and then to check on lunch as her daughters made cookies just for the visiting writer, me. Bob broke out his clarinet and delivered some of the best sounds I’ve heard from that instrument. The food was great. Those little girls stuffed cookies into my pockets as I was leaving so that I would have a snack later on.

I flew back to Nevada the next morning, exhausted and entirely happy with the whole experience.

4. There have been other high points in my career. But the one I’ve saved for last is by far the very best of them all, this, what I’m doing with you, Al.

It is a rare and wonderful thing for me, now, at age 80, to look back over all that represents what I’ve done as a writer these past many years. And it’s a wonderful thing to know that not only you but other writers, the younger ones, the new ones, the really good ones writing the crime fiction of today, will be contributing to this coming issue of your fine magazine.

I’m so delighted to have been chosen by you for this recognition, so delighted to have become a friend of yours as well as a friend of that wonderful wife of yours, Donna.

What you are doing counts most with me over all of the good things that have come my way as a writer.

This, now, this minute, is when it really doesn’t get better, with Starr beside me, my wife, the love of my life.