The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin Read online

  THE COLLECTED ED GORMAN

  VOLUME 2

  THE MOVING COFFIN

  INTRODUCTION: A SHORT STORY ABOUT ED GORMAN

  Around twenty-five years ago, I received a phone call out of the blue from a stranger who said his name was Ed Gorman. I lived in Muscatine, Iowa, and he lived in nearby Cedar Rapids, and he was calling to tell me how much he liked my Quarry novels.

  At that point, I’d written four novels about my hitman character, and they were already well and truly out-of-print. While I’d had a surprising amount of fan mail for this unknown little series, I’d never had a phone call from anybody extolling them.

  And this Gorman was an extremely articulate, friendly but in no way pushy caller, who immediately seemed like an old and dear friend. I was extremely complimented to hear from an obviously intelligent human being who “got” what I was up to in those dark little mysteries.

  We spoke for quite a while—at least an hour—and were well into discussions of two mutual favorites among hardboiled authors, the (then) largely forgotten Jim Thompson, and the under-appreciated, much maligned Mickey Spillane. We were in the middle of all this when Ed suddenly said that he’d have to sign off—he had somewhere he needed to go, and right away.

  “Really? Where?” It was none of my business, of course, but it kind of popped out.

  “Ah, I’m gettin’ married this afternoon,” he said.

  Moments later I was staring at the phone, wondering what kind of demented fan decided to wait until an hour or so before his wedding to look an author up and express his longtime admiration.

  Demented or not (and we both qualified), that began a long friendship that continues to this day. For many years, we kept Ma Bell (and this reference dates us both) in business with long phone calls during which we made each other laugh and spoke endlessly of movies and books and politics and about our respective wonderful wives, wondering how a couple goofballs like us had managed to do something so right.

  The phone calls have tapered off in recent years, because we both need to spend our time writing more and talking about it less. But though our friendship has been reduced to sporadic e-mails, occasional phone calls and periodic dinners at the Red Lobster in Cedar Rapids, it is no less strong. I have a lot of friends in the writing game, but only a handful rival Ed in my heart, and my admiration.

  I played a significant role in his career. I say that unashamedly, and with pride, and I warn any future historians of mystery fiction who omit me from the Gorman story that my ghost will haunt them. When Ed called me, right before his wedding, he was a frustrated writer of short stories for literary magazines who wanted to crack more commercial markets. He had grown up on all the good stuff—the science fiction and mystery digest pulps, paperback original novels, B movies, comics, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll—and though few writers of his generation are better or more widely read, and while Ed Gorman could talk William Faulkner or Raymond Carver with the best of ‘em, he preferred to sing the praises of Charles Williams or Richard Stark. Or maybe Bill Faulkner’s brother John, who wrote Gold Medal paperbacks.

  What I contributed to Ed was a small but important tactic: he was already adept at writing short stories, but having problems getting a novel, any novel, finished. Now that Ed has become one of the small handful of novelists who are both prolific and terrific, the notion that Ed Gorman was having trouble getting a novel written seems absurd. But climbing the mountain of a novel-length narrative was intimidating to Ed, so I simply told him to view each chapter as a short story, and in about a month he had his first novel finished. Few writers have sold as quickly, or gotten established as quickly, as Ed.

  This Gorman is not without his quirks. Personable and life-of-the-party as he is on the phone, he is reluctant to go out in public. He hates crowds, does signings and lectures only at gunpoint, and for a long time people thought he didn’t exist—he was (I’m serious) thought by many to be a pseudonym of mine. After all, there couldn’t be two mystery writers in Iowa, right?

  (Oddly, we both married women who turned out to be first-rate mystery writers who not only live in Iowa, but in the respective Gorman and Collins domiciles.)

  I am proud to have Ed Gorman’s writing mistaken for mine— having him viewed for a time as the Ed McBain to my Evan Hunter was pretty cool, actually. And, for years, when I would tell people that I had, no kidding, really met Ed Gorman, multiple times, it all seemed to be part of my master plan to put this pen name across.

  Of course, this mistaken identity couldn’t last—Ed Gorman is too distinctive a writer, with a laconic, wry voice that is his alone, whether in first-or third-person. But it was fun while it lasted…

  Ed’s distinctive voice and style are an outgrowth of his interests. He is an endless resource of arcane information and informed opinion about popular storytelling in the 20th Century. That’s why I spent so many hours on the phone with him—we could do half an hour on why Rex Stout was, line for the line, the best wordsmith of all; forty-five minutes on why we both loved Hammett and Chandler but considered the former superior; or an hour on why certain highly regarded crime writers of our day were worthy of Emperor’s New Clothes awards. It’s Ed’s ability to analyze what works in the fiction he reads that has made him such a skillful writer himself.

  No writer of the late 20th and early 21st century has mastered so many genres—Ed is equally adept at mystery, crime, horror, science fiction and western. He is a screenwriter and a columnist. He respects and understands these genres and forms, much as he respects and understands his job as a professional storyteller.

  Now if I played a small but significant role in launching Ed’s career as a successful novelist, my presence here introducing a short story collection might seem inappropriate. But I have often said that Ed Gorman is our best living writer of crime and mystery short fiction, and what is sometimes described as “dark suspense.” I think Ed sometimes wonders if I might be giving him a left-handed compliment, saying in effect that he’s a better short story writer than novelist.

  That’s not my intention, though it’s true that there are more first-rate novelists around the mystery field than first-rate short story writers. If not a lost art, the short story is certainly an underpaid, little practiced one, with frustratingly few markets available. Ed, a short story writer at heart, has fought that market shortfall in two ways: first, he has written great short stories that virtually demand a market; and second, he’s become (partnered with his good friend Marty Greenberg) a leading editor of short-fiction anthologies. I have edited a few such anthologies myself, and Ed is always the first writer I invite (well, the second—I ask my wife Barbara, another born short story writer, first).

  And I do think writers are born novelists or born short story writers. I’m a born novelist—that longer, perhaps longer-winded form, is where I shine; I do pretty good short stories (not as good as Gorman) but I know where my strength lies. Ed Gorman is among the best crime novelists of his generation, easily. But he is unparalleled in the shorter form. The compressed, miniature tale is perfect for Ed’s combination of bruised idealism disguised as cynicism, his unflinching, seemingly dark view of humanity touched with compassion that reveals, between the well-crafted lines, the author’s heart breaking.

  Gorman, with his sad wise midwestern voice, is the Ray Bradbury of short crime fiction. I feel lucky to have been invited to greet the audience before the curtain goes up on these outstanding playlets— but I’m not as lucky as you are, for the performances you’re about to witness and enjoy.

  Max Allan Collins Muscatine,

  Iowa, November 2006

  FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT


  I suppose Chad thought I’d forgive him, the time he slept with my wife Tish, I mean. He had a kind of innocent quality about him. You never quite held him responsible for things. He’d inherited two things—a huge fortune and guileless good looks. No wonder people were always forgiving him.

  The spring it happened, I surprised him a little. I didn’t forgive him.

  It was much easier forgiving Tish. In the second year of our marriage, she’d forgiven me the nurse at the medical clinic where I work—the affair went on the better part of the winter—so I couldn’t get too pious about her going to bed with Chad.

  And the fact was, I almost couldn’t blame her. Our lives were pretty drab and we both knew it. Four years after graduating from college, we found ourselves living in the kind of middle-class housing development that we’d once laughed about, and working at jobs that meant nothing to us. We needed the security and the insurance. We clung to our mediocrity, fearful as supplicants. Instead of my dream of med school, I was a physician’s assistant; and instead of a TV anchor-woman, Tish settled for writing advertising copy for a small ad agency.

  Tish once joked that Chad was our “human TV.” And in a way, he was. We’d known him in college. We’d never been quite sure why he liked us. He spent his life working his way through half the pretty girls on campus. We used to sit with him in one of the student bars and listen to his travails with women. He fell in love easily. The trouble was, he never stayed in love. When a woman treated him badly, his love was almost suffocating. But once she was nice to him, he became bored. Sometimes he had two or three affairs a month. It really was like watching a TV saga with all the ups and downs that only lust can inspire.

  Best of all, he asked our advice. It was sort of interactive. He’d come to us with this problem— “Susan’s going to see her old boyfriend this weekend, and I’m not sure how to handle it—I mean, should I tell her I’m going to break up with her if she does?”—and we would give him suggestions, which he’d almost always use.

  That was the endearing thing about Chad: he had money and looks and poise but he had absolutely no self-confidence. That was our part of the bargain, giving him our wisdom. His part was to keep the great soap opera going—this one needing an abortion, that one starting to bore him, this one (this brand-new one) exciting him so much he just knew she was the woman he’d waited for all his life. So it went, and we could vanquish our griefs and disappointments in it all. No time for fretting over mediocrity when Chad was out there bedding every beauty in sight.

  He had his breakdown the summer of our graduation. We went to see him constantly. His parents were both dead and he was not fond of his sister, so we became his stand-in family. Or at least that was how his shrink treated us, anyway. Told us all about Chad’s depression, his electroshock treatments, his almost total dependence on how we told him to conduct his life. He spent nine weeks in the sanitarium, lost fifteen pounds, and practically leapt on us every time we went up to see him. Since I had gotten a job that summer, I couldn’t visit him as often as Tish could. She went every day. When he got out of the hospital, he rented an apartment next door to ours and had dinner with us every night. He spent more time at our place than his, even during the day, with Tish.

  Then he decided to see the world. We got letters and faxes from China, Samoa, Paris, Zurich and London asking our advice on how he should handle this or that woman. Chad Atwater had taken the show on the road, as it were. Tish seemed curiously despondent, and no matter what I did or said, she didn’t seem to have much interest.

  That was when I drifted into my two affairs. I’ve had some men tell me that cheating on their wives only makes their own bed all the more exciting. Not me. I didn’t want to touch Tish. There were days I didn’t even want to see her.

  Then, five years later, Chad came back to our little Midwestern city, bought himself a condo out along the river, and settled back into our lives.

  Human TV was once again on the air.

  The first two women that spring didn’t represent any particular obstacles for Chad, and as such were pretty dull. What I’m saying is that Chad knew how to handle them without much advice from us.

  Andrea, our favorite of the two, was a high school English teacher with a fetching smile and the somewhat aggravating habit of apologizing for practically every word she said. It was a month before they went to bed—I think she probably sensed that once they began having sex regularly, he’d start looking around for the next one—and ultimately she began using us to plead with him on her behalf. She would make him the perfect wife, she asked us to tell him. She was a nurturer, she said; a nurturer; and that’s what he needed, nurturing. We advised against her, of course, when we were alone with him, I mean. Nice as she was, she wasn’t any fun, not for him, not for us. Human TV required better story lines than hers.

  Heather was a bitch but she was entertaining. She was faithless as our Chad himself, at least at first, and it was she who first played the Leonard Cohen song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” for us. Cohen tells a story of a somewhat mysterious man who enters the life of a husband and wife and proceeds to tie them up in psychic knots. The narrator of the song, who obviously suspects that his wife had an affair with the man, asks him to come back, along with his famous blue raincoat, because their lives, despite all the pain, just aren’t the same without him.

  Heather cunningly saw that the song was a reasonable parallel of our situation with Chad. She thought it was funny. After playing it for us in our living room, she laughed and said, “‘Chad told me all about ‘Human TV.’ I think it’s great. I’ll try to be as interesting as I can for you people.” She was gorgeous and ruthless and we had a lot of hope for her. Unfortunately…

  Unfortunately, our advice to Chad was a little too sage. Just when it looked as if she’d never be faithful to him, we suggested that he seduce her best friend, who Chad felt had some interest in him. Heather herself had told us that she and her best friend, Jane, had an agreement—they would never sleep with any man the other friend was going out with.

  The night the deed was to be done, Tish came up with a diabolical twist: Chad had the key to Heather’s apartment, right? Why not really add insult to injury and make love to Jane in Heather’s bed?

  Which was exactly what he did.

  Heather came over two nights later and wept in our kitchen. Chad had humiliated and debased her and now she realized that she really, truly did love him after all.

  Chad slept with her a few more times and then, on our advice, said goodbye.

  A month later Chad slept with Tish.

  I came home one rainy afternoon and found Tish curled up on the couch, looking despondent.

  “Famous Blue Raincoat” was playing on the CD player.

  She had her moods and this seemed to be one of them. I sat down on the floor next to the couch and put my hand on hers. Her hand was cold and made no effort to respond to my touch. Thunder rumbled. Rain hissed.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “I slept with him.”

  I didn’t have to ask who “him” was. For years I’d been dreading this moment, and it had come now, and in an odd way I was curious about how I’d react now that it had finally happened.

  “This afternoon?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That was the only time?”

  ‘Uh-huh.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Sorry for me. I don’t want to be just one more of his conquests.”

  “But not sorry for me?”

  “You had your little nurse.”

  “Ah.”

  “But that wasn’t why I slept with him.”

  “Oh? Then why did you sleep with him?”

  “Because it was raining.”

  The thing was, I knew my wife well enough to know that for her this was a complete answer. Rain had a terribly melancholic effect on her, and sometimes lovemaking is the only defense you can put up against the vagaries of the universe.

 
“You think it’ll happen again?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “I hope not.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I could be.”

  “That’s not an answer, either.”

  “I’m afraid I might be.”

  “That’s an answer.”

  “I wish I was suicidal.”

  “I’m very angry,” I said.

  “You don’t sound very angry.”

  “You want me to slap you around or something like that?”

  “No.”

  I stood up. “What I really want to do is slap Chad around.”

  “That won’t change anything. It will still have happened.”

  “Right now, I don’t give a shit if it will change things or not,” I said, and drove over to Chad’s

  As soon as I saw his face in his doorway, I drove my fist into his nose and watched as blood bloomed in both nostrils.

  When he’d gotten a cool washcloth for his nose, and a scotch for both of us, and when he took the chair and I took the couch, he said,

  “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I didn’t want it to happen.”

  “You’ve been wanting it to happen for a long time. One of the few women you’ve never taken to bed.”

  “I’ll do anything you want.”

  “I don’t want you to call us or phone us or write us ever again.”

  He took the washcloth from his nose. “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “But we’re sort of a trio.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “There’s this new woman I met. I wanted to tell you about her. See what you and Tish thought I should do.”

  “You heard what I said, Chad. No more contact of any kind.”

  I left.