For ages now I’ve been working my way through Margery Allingham’s Campion novels, alternating them with Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series, but now, just as I’m nearing the end of the Campions and getting up to date with the Laundry Files (Stross being happily alive and still banging them out — I had the pleasure of meeting him recently), I’ve discovered Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr series — the Burglar books.
(A blurb has described the Laundry Files as being like Len Deighton spy thrillers in the style of H.P. Lovecraft, which is close to accurate if you flip it around. Stross doesn’t much go in for gloomy Howard’s high-flown cosmic thesaurus-raiding, he’s more dry and sardonic, so the feel is more like a downbeat spy series that just happens to feature demons and elder gods. Harry Palmer Lovecraft, if you will.)
After the All You Can Eat Bookstore sadly closed — that business model was perhaps foredoomed — I was cheered by the appearance of the Edinburgh Community Bookstore just across the road from me. Not only is it a convenient and often economical source of reading material, it makes me feel I’m in Brooklyn. (When I stayed with a friend in the Red Hook area [as immortalized by Lovecraft in The Horror of Red Hook], The Community Bookstore was a valuable nearby resource.) A crime fiction bargain bin recently appeared outside TCB, and three of Block’s Burglar books flashed their spines at me.
But I only bought them because I’d picked up Telling Lies for Fun and Proft, a book by Block on the craft of writing (basically a collection of magazine articles) and I enjoyed his voice. My previous experience of him was reading a Cornell Woolrich book that he’d finished, and I didn’t care for what he did with it. I can’t think he could have been very satisfied with it.
But the Burglar books are great fun. I knew Block was a friend of the late Donald Westlake, and these are a similar kind of fun.
But here’s a little mystery. In the first book, the magnificently titled Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (and how could I, of all people, be expected to pass that one up?), a plot thread hangs upon a character who’s a minor movie actor. Block invents a plausible credit for the guy, MAN IN THE MIDDLE starring James Garner and Shan Wilson. It sounds convincing because there are a number of movies with that title, it’s never attached itself to anything really successful enough for it to become intellectual property. James Garner was never in a film of that name (though another Philip Marlowe, Robert Mitchum, was). I was curious about the name Shan Wilson though: there isn’t a movie star of that name, not even an obscure one.
Bernie Rhodenbarr didn’t have the benefit of the IMDb, since his first appearance in a novel came out in 1977. I can access it, though the site seems to be deteriorating before our eyes these days, like a staked vampire. Shan Wilson does exist, it seems, but had not been in a film at the time Block was writing. He has two credits, nineteen years apart. One is WINDING ROADS, where he or she is credited as “couple in park” — which seems unlikely on the face of it. One Molly Wilson is similarly credited — obviously each should be considered one half of couple in park. Since Shan and Molly likely are a real couple, sharing as they do a surname, investigating Molly might be useful, but she has no other credits.
I haven’t seen this movie. It was shot in Missouri. It seems quite possible that the Shan Wilson here is an entirely different person than the guy with the other credit, a mere IMDb Frankenstein job (for a while on the website, major director Michael Powell had a sound assisting credit on a short film made a decade after his death).
Shan’s other credit is as “spy in Oktoberfest” in HOPSCOTCH. Nice film. Not sure how it came to be released by Criterion. But it’s very enjoyable. Now, one aspect of HOPSCOTCH that’s been noted is that screenwriter Brian Garfield, a crime novelist himself, studded the dramatis personae with names that wink at his writer pals: so there’s a “Ludlum” and a “Follett,” for instance, “Parker Westlake,” a fairly blatant nod (or wink) to Donald Westlake, author of the Parker books (written under the pseudonym of Richard Stark). Westlake also scripted THE STEPFATHER from Garfield’s story idea.
So the name Shan Wilson, apart from appearing in his book, SEEMS indirectly connected to Block via Garfield and Westlake.
OK, I’ve gotten as far as I can with paperback and laptop. Now to get out my DVD of HOPSCOTCH and see if Shan Wilson looks like anybody… anybody like Block, Westlake or Garfield. If the scene was shot at the actual Oktoberfest, the likeliest candidate would be screenwriter Garfield.
Well, that’s confusing. There are actually four spies at Oktoberfest — at least. Two of them are feature players Walter Matthau and Herbert Lom. But then there’s another couple, male and female, and since “Shan” is a somewhat androgynous name in my view, I can’t say which is “spy in Oktoberfest.” Neither of these two dirty blonds looks like Garfield, or Westlake, or Block.
The mystery, if we can call it that, probably doesn’t have a particularly impressive solution. It could all just be a daft coincidence, like a real film called MAN IN THE MIDDLE and a fictional one both starring guys who played Marlowe. So I’m tempted to leave it dangling. Never trade an intriguing mystery for a boring solution.
shadowplay 