A guide to the crime novels of James Mckimmey

by Allan Guthrie

THE PERFECT VICTIM (Dell, 1958)

James McKimmey’s first novel is in many ways the quintessential one. Travelling salesman Al Jackson arrives in the small town of Willow Creek and before he’s had time to blink (well, just enough time to get drunk, to be precise) he’s locked up in jail for the rape and murder of the town’s top teenage attraction, Grace Amons. Thus McKimmey sets out his stall. Not a murder mystery, then. Well, it wasn’t the stranger, you see. He was framed. McKimmey backtracks to the events leading up to Grace’s death and we see how and why it happened through the eyes of young student Roger Cook and his university buddy, Buggie Alstair.

It’s quickly apparent that Buggie is a manipulative psychopath who wouldn’t be out of place in a Jim Thompson novel. He’s one of McKimmey’s great characters (inspired by a character played by renowned film director Mark Rydell). His every action is for personal gain and his reaction to his friend’s successful sexual encounter foreshadows the cold-blooded machinations which follow.

This is a tremendous first novel, twice optioned for film. It was originally printed in Cosmopolitan under McKimmey’s title of choice, Riot At Willow Creek. Of all his novels, this is the one remembered most fondly by the author.

 

WINNER TAKE ALL (Dell, 1959)

Imagine this: one minute you’re lying on your bed having a gentle snooze, when suddenly there’s a knock at the door. Annoyed, knowing it can’t be anything important since you don’t know anyone in this town, you open your front door and see yourself standing on the other side of the threshold. Shaken, and a not a little stirred, you hear yourself speak. "Fascinating, isn’t it?"

So opens Winner Take All, McKimmey’s light-hearted tale of twins, one evil and one, well, not so evil. Mark Steele is the hero of the novel, a novel which, unusually for McKimmey, is written in first person. Mark’s encounter with his new-found twin brother, Thomas Byrd, leads our hero gently into trouble as Byrd asks for a favour. The favour leads to serious problems with the mob and soon Mark is running for his life and Thomas has disappeared off the face of the earth.

The question of identity is paramount throughout. Mark adopts his brother’s persona, his brother adopts Mark’s. When Mark tries to reclaim his real identity, he finds it has become almost impossible to do so. In short, he cannot prove who he is. An identity crisis like this is the very substance of noir. But McKimmey doesn’t stray into this territory, preferring to lead Mark out of his black hole, a triumph of logic over emotion.

This is a novel that's written with dollops of obvious enthusiasm. McKimmey wrote the entire novel in ten straight days and it fairly resonates with energy as a result. It has some caper-plot elements, along with a degree of screwball humour resulting in some highly amusing scenes. A bedroom scene involving the generously proportioned Miss Tyling is hilarious. Her robe slips, "producing a rather gigantic falling out effect." As she chases our hero she is described as "all flying robe and natural accessories."

The writing is so enjoyable that the reader happily accepts the occasional plot element that would otherwise require a certain amount of suspended disbelief.

 

THE SATYR (Monarch, 1960)

John Boswell, the Paramount story editor I mentioned, renewed the movie option on my paperbacks after Joe Goldberg dropped out.  He flew up here to show me the treatment he'd made of The Satyr, which he was putting on the market, a very polished, suave, tongue-in-cheek sort of fellow.  Coincidentally, he was at Biarritz when I was, although we didn't know it then.  And I asked him why he'd picked The Satyr as the first of the books to get a treatment, and he said, "Because it's a dirty book, Jim."

Well, there you go. There’s Hollywood for you.

James McKimmey (in an email to Allan Guthrie, 22nd May 2003)

And how times have changed! Sadly, this novel (which is not in the least bit dirty, really, Mr Boswell) has never been filmed. Written from start to finish in seventeen days, The Satyr explores family relationships and the effect an antagonist can have on them. Charlie and Lois's already clearly strained marital relations are stretched to breaking point when their innocent daughter, Ann, brings her fiancée, Joe, home to stay. Joe’s agenda unfolds quickly and tensions escalate with typical McKimmey brio.

Joe Stephen, the Satyr of the title, is a sociopath. An attractive young man, driven by lust and greed, he is similar to Vin Packer’s Adam Blessing or Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and, like those wonderfully immoral protagonists, he is prepared to do anything to get what he wants, regardless of the consequences.

This novel is very much dialogue-driven, and plot is subservient to character. Unusual, but highly effective and very nicely written.

 

CORNERED! (Dell, 1960)

The sleepy town of Arrow Junction is rudely awakened when gunman Billy Quirter arrives in town. He shoots up a gas station on the edge of town, leaving behind a couple of corpses. Quirter’s half brother, Tony Fearon, is on death row and has placed a bounty on the woman whose testimony sealed his fate and now that Quirter has tracked her to Arrow Junction, Ann Burley’s about to have a bad day.

Ann left her past behind her and is now married to Ted, a local farmer. He’s a child in a man’s body, suffering from an oedipus complex and a (doubtlessly linked) fear of sex. Through the novel Anne becomes increasingly aware of Ted’s problems as he grows ever more jealous, his jealousy eventually throwing her into the arms of Dr Stewart. Oh, and guess what? The doctor’s about to have a bad day, too.

In fact, it’s a bad day for many of Arrow Junction’s locals, and for others, like Gloria and Sam Dickens, who are just passing through. Just their luck to end up in Bob Saywell’s general store when Billy Quirter arrives, wounded, with a couple of hostages.

The story is told from several viewpoints. McKimmey shifts seamlessly from one point of view to another. As in Run If You’re Guilty he focuses on various couples to drive the story forward, as well as provide tension, backstory, characterisation and emotional transition.

Cornered! was the first McKimmey I read. The action-packed opening, the oppressive small town atmosphere, the convincingly drawn abnormal psychology of Quirter and Burley, the masterful scenes in the grocery store where the main cast are held hostage, all combined to blow me away.

 

THE WRONG ONES (Dell, 1961)

Ed McBain was the somewhat unexpected inspiration behind this 1961 Dell novel. Having read some of his 87th precinct series, McKimmey discovered that McBain had developed his ‘authentic’ police background as the result of using a handbook for cops. McKimmey though it seemed like a good challenge, so he found an official handbook for the juvenile-court system in San Francisco, and used that to provide the technical information for The Wrong Ones.

The Wrong Ones, unusually for a McKimmey novel, is a murder mystery. A psychologist who works with young offenders is shot. Much of the action takes place the day before the shooting (using a technique not dissimilar to The Perfect Victim), and we are introduced one after another to a diverse array of likely suspects. The psychologist, Allan Decker, is a womaniser and cad, and there is no shortage of people with a motive for killing him. The protagonist, Joe Burnett, is a probation officer who worked with the victim and knows many of the suspects – those he doesn’t know, he soon discovers.

Once again McKimmey’s skill lies in exploring his characters’ psyches in the kind of depth unusual in most paperback original novels of the era. In particular, the relationship between the teenager Wanda Mitchell and her downtrodden mother is fascinatingly hostile – at one point Mrs Mitchell tells Joe that she knows her daughter better than anyone and she’s definitely capable of murder. Nice. Also, McKimmey eloquently writes from the point of view of Big Mac Perkins, a black youth gangleader who is beaten up with a rubber hose by a sadistic policeman and attacked with a knife by a vicious white youth, and yet, throughout, maintains his dignity.

 

24 HOURS TO KILL (Dell, 1961)

When I was re-reading these novels for this piece, 24 Hours To Kill came as the biggest surprise. I remembered it fondly enough from first time round. A good read. Well-written. But, really, not much more than that.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. A highly respected editor I know believes that this is McKimmey’s best novel. Having re-read it, I can see why he might think so.

24 Hours To Kill is the story of a small town isolated by a huge flood. Into town (before the bridge is swept away) come Jack Kelty (a murderer in transit), his official entourage (a county sheriff and a police inspector), a high profile journalist sniffing out a good story, and Kelty’s unofficial entourage, a gang of troublemaking youths proclaiming loyalty to Kelty.

When events conspire to oust the appointed officials, local teacher (and erstwhile delinquent) Steve Michaels is put in charge. There then ensues a battle to keep Kelty’s young, armed adherents at bay and keep the lid on escalating internecine struggles. Of course, there’s no chance of that.

Once again, McKimmey combines marvellous storytelling with characters you feel for. Even his secondary characters evoke deep emotions. Roy Hawkins is a particularly fine example and his grief-stricken actions stay with you for a long, long time. The slightly old-fashioned relationship between Steve and Sue is nicely offset by the more adventurous Gretchen’s galavanting. Overall, the atmosphere is kept constantly tense by having the threat of physical danger looming over almost everyone.

A real good one.

 

THE LONG RIDE (Dell, 1961)

The Long Ride follows a diverse group as they travel in a station wagon from Loma City, Wyoming to San Francisco. In the car is Harry Wells, who robbed the Midwest Federal Trust Bank in Loma City, lost the money and saw his partner shot in the getaway; Allan Garwith, who found the money (and is suspected of having done so by Wells); and undercover FBI agent John Benson (who suspects both Wells and Garwith). To keep them honest, these three have four female travelling companions.

The plot unfolds in a largely predictable but nonetheless highly entertaining manner and the claustrophobia of the car journey is guaranteed to create tension. The characterisation is once again excellent, although there are too many characters for them all to be as fully rounded as, say, Squeeze Play. Two stand out, though. Garwith is one of McKimmey’s most bitter characters. A real piece of work. Newly wed to a woman he despises, his inevitable self-destruction is foreshadowed throughout the book. It is no coincidence that his missing arm is the result of an amputation following a self-inflicted shooting accident after a robbery goes wrong. To increase his bitterness, the amputation was initiated by his malicious lover – the suggestion is that it may not have been necessary to remove his limb.

And Harry Wells is terrifying. An ex-army sergeant, he’s determinedly obsessive and has no qualms about killing someone. The scene in which he repeatedly attempts to repair his broken Zippo lighter is one of the most memorable in all of McKimmey’s work.

 

SQUEEZE PLAY (Dell, 1962)

The strongest candidate for the coveted title of McKimmey’s best work, the plot centres around a scam to swindle a casino out of some serious money by using a couple of unwitting customers as patsies. Of course, events don’t go according to plan for the conman and his lady partner in crime (do they ever?).

The novel begins with Jack Wade narrating what he recalls of the events that led up to him being on the run from the police for the murder of his wife, Binny, a superb opening that drags the reader into the action.

Whilst a lot of the plot is driven by dialogue (a favourite McKimmey technique long before George V. Higgins made it famous), the characters also reveal themselves in internal monologues that are as full of conflict as their external lives.

Where Squeeze Play differs from some of McKimmey’s other novels, is in the care he takes with characterisation. The hero’s wife is one of the author’s finest and most sympathetically drawn characters. The opening of chapter eight is a terrific piece of writing (click here to read it).

This novel also includes one of the great lessons in creating memorable bad guys. The moral of the story: make him mean and quirky. McKimmey’s villain hears tell of mountain lions being hunted in the locale. Armed with a shotgun, he set out to bag a mountain lion and ends up shooting a cat. A domestic cat. And he shoots it not just once, but several times. Of course, some people might find that endearing…

 

RUN IF YOU’RE GUILTY (Lippencott, 1963)

The set-up in this novel reminded me of the template for a modern horror movie. Take a bunch of people, isolate them, and send in a crazed killer. As a result, this novel crackles with the kind of tension movie makers dream about. I already discuss it (at some length!) elsewhere, so here’s a quick synopsis from the cover of the 1964 Boardman edition.

Joe’s Cabins, hugging the curve of a mountain lake in northern California, attract a strange miscellany of travellers for the night. An artistic young couple in search of Henry Miller; a wily Texan and his well-stacked bride heading up the Coast looking for a profitable setup; a decidedly well-off San Franciscan and his attractive, unhappy companion. Joe Beacon, a former rancher who has little use for the tourists who frequent his cabins, manages to tolerate them by anticipating the arrival of his step-son and the boy’s wife, due the same day.

But neither Joe, nor any of his eight guests foresees the bizarre mischance (or is it?) which will destroy two of them and involve the rest in isolated intimacy and desperate danger.

Run If You’re Guilty is a novel of sophisticated and sustained suspense, where revelations of human nature grip the reader as tightly as does the gamble for life in Joe Beacon’s valley.

 

A CIRCLE IN THE WATER (William Morrow, 1965)

Not a crime novel, but what the heck. Word for word, I’d say it was McKimmey’s best-written novel, and as such, it deserves a mention. 

Architect Otis Christenson, prompted by his ambitious wife, Lucy, endeavours to seize an opportunity to purchase Bellow Woods from a dying friend. Lucy’s attempts to help result in the very definitely less than helpful arrival of Otis’s old friend Frank Pattell. Frank’s now resident in New York, and his main investor is Al Sachi, a prominent underworld figure.

When Otis’s current investors hear of Pattelli’s interest they back out of the deal, leaving Otis with Frank as his only hope. Thing don’t work out as expected, and Otis is forced to confront a part of himself that normally remains hidden.

This is a beautifully written, dramatic tale. It also contains this gem on the craft of writing:

...if you know any kind of war, from any viewpoint, you have a feeling for it, so you know when somebody is lying. I’ve read some stories about war by other writers, and I knew they hadn’t been in any kind of war and that they were lying. They always do something you wouldn’t do in a war. Or they write too broadly, even when they use the generals’ viewpoint. I mean, they don’t pick up on anything specific and work on that. And that’s all you can do, I think. If I were a writer, which I’m not. And if I weren’t writing from the generals’ viewpoint. It’s the specific things you remember out of the whole mire and mess.

 

BLUE MASCARA TEARS (Ballantine, 1965)

In Blue Mascara Tears McKimmey introduces Inspector Jack Cummings, one of his most interesting characters. Cummings is obsessed with Knocko Cutter, the hood running the rackets in town. Cummings is on a crusade to bring Knocko down, but the job is made extremely difficult by the fact that Knocko has protection at the highest level.

Cummings is a philosopher. Accordingly, this novel, written primarily from his point of view, is more reflective than many of the author’s other novels. Cummings is complex and psychologically deep enough to allow this – his stubborn, intensely emotional crusade leads to a psychic dysfunction, in which Cummings compares himself to Christ and ponders his own crucifixion.

There’s a lot of dialogue-driven plot, often reminiscent of James M. Cain in it’s lack of speech attribution. It’s intense (very much the obsessive Cummings’s story) and unsettling. Parts are very dark:

Bernie was working on her. Towel against her mouth. He had me get her razor, hold it out to her. She was in the tub. She took it. Cut her own wrists.

A degree of melodrama (Abner’s Kill him! Kill him!) and the occasional bit of overblown writing (Mandell jammed the car forward, swinging it fast out the curving hospital drive. The streets were darkly shiny) are all that stop this from being the standout McKimmey novel it might otherwise have been. It still comes very highly recommended.

 

NEVER BE CAUGHT (Boardman, 1966)

This isn't a novel either, although you might want to try telling that to Cosmopolitan. This excellent UK-published book is a collection of three magazine novelettes: Never Be Caught (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine), And Then She Was Dead (Cosmopolitan) and Kiss Him Again (Cosmopolitan).

Never Be Caught: a young man on the run finds his past catching up with him. He persuades his young lover to flee with him and a manhunt ensues. This is a great chase story with a strong sense of place and some complex dynamics between the boy and his father. Billy is one of those morally lacking protagonists McKimmey does so well – his selfishness leads to all sorts of people being hurt, including the girl he claims to love.

And Then She Was Dead: A young man attends the wedding of an old fiancée, only to discover on his arrival that she is dead. Pretty sad, huh? Well, the poor guy’s emotions are thrown into even more of a tumult when he discovers that the dead lady is not his once-beloved.

Kill Him Again: This is the stand-out of the three. Presumed dead, Patrick Reed returns, very much alive, from Vietnam and disturbs the dynamics within his avaricious family. When a murder is committed, Patrick finds his life becomes a living nightmare – with memories of his experiences in Vietnam reenacted nightly. The tension in this short novel is extraordinary. There are traces of Titus Andronicus in the manner in which Patrick’s fractured mind is manipulated. Gripping stuff.

 

THE HOT FIRE (Dell, 1968)

Paul Carter returns to La Cruz, the small town where previously he was involved in an incident that led to the crippling of Clay Jacobus. Carter claims he was defending the honour of young strumpet Juny Seymour. He is not believed by the locals, since Juny denies anything took place and, in any case, no one believes Clay capable of such an act.

Paul is not in town long before he becomes the subject of both physical and verbal abuse. And when Clay’s bar is set alight, Paul becomes the number one suspect.

As usual, McKimmey shines when getting into his character’s backstory. None more so than Juny’s father. There's a brilliant passage that shows McKimmey at his darkest. You can read the extract here.

This is another rare McKimmey mystery novel. It’s not Paul, so who is the arsonist-murderer? Like several of his other novels, McKimmey manipulates a large cast of characters, frequently using couples to expedite the telling of the story. Their various relationships are nicely wound up and the conclusion is very satisfying.

 

THE MAN WITH THE GLOVED HAND (Random House, 1972)

Imagine this: a serial killer novel written by Hammett. McKimmey returns to the stranger-in-a-small-town theme that launched his career with Dell. This time the stranger is Packy Hopper, a professional travel columnist. He arrives in the sleepy hamlet of Hangtree, Nevada just in time to discover the butchered body of a young man sprawled across the open toilet of a local garage. Being a stranger in town without an alibi, Hopper is immediately suspected of the killing. More deadly stabbings ensue, the killer sending notes to the local paper, making threats as to when he’s about to kill next and then ensuring those threats are not empty.

This is a serial killer novel written as a thriller, a technique later employed by Thomas Harris in Silence Of The Lambs. McKimmey’s novel is short and written in precise, clean prose. Hopper’s character is distant and unsettling and the reader often wonders whether Hopper is the killer – the opening scene does nothing to prohibit such thoughts. The Hammett technique of showing the action, rather than commenting on it or describing thoughts and feelings, is highly effective, lending a coldness to the already hardboiled character of Hopper.

I wanted so much to have a book published by Random House and had been introduced to their mystery editor, Lee Wright.  I would write so much and send it to her.  She would come back, talking about the ultimate skills of Dashiel Hammett.  This went on for two or three tries, and I kept reading Hammett.  I finally got into the style you read, and she loved it.  Very perceptive on your part.  It was about that time that Marty and I got a big camper truck and toured the country, giving me that background for Packy Hopper.  But as I was planning the book and started wearing the one glove, Marty talked me out of it.

James McKimmey (in an email to Allan Guthrie, 12th June 2003)

 

THAT'S IT FOLKS

James McKimmey is a great writer and I hope you'll pick up at least one of his books. If you like him, let me know. I'd love to hear from you.
Contact Allan

Copyright© 2004 Allan Guthrie

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