About 30 years ago, I thought I first made Jack Ritchie's acquaintance thru his Cardula Detective Agency series in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. It's exactly as the name suggests -- Count Dracula done as a private investigator. This may well be among the first of the vampire PI stories, and its certainly one of the best done and funniest.
In Ritchie's stories, the Count has immigrated to New York City after being run out of his own country and losing all his money to the communist take-over (these stories are circa early 60s). Being obliged to earn a living the hard way, he undertakes detective work for an assortment of old supernatural friends and human oddballs who have reason to prefer a detective who works only at night.
I've been looking for years to find these stories again, without luck. I'll find one, every now and then, in a weird tales collection but not all in a collection of their own and the AHMM does not have back issues from that far back. However, my search did lead me to one collection of Ritchie's short stories called Little Boxes of Bewilderment which caused me to realize I'd meet Ritchie before the Cardula stories.
He was, it turned out, the author of "The Green Heart", on which Elaine May based her hilarious and terribly overlooked movie "A New Leaf" (don't bother looking for this one on DVD, it never even made it to VHS -- that's how overlooked it is), which I'd read and seen years before. And even earlier a story I'd loved since childhood without any idea who the author was, "For All the Rude People".
"The Green Heart" concerns a broke, lazy and murderous aristocrat who marries a fantastically wealthy botany professor for her money and ultimately has a change of heart about killing her for it. The true pleasure of this story is the murderous cad's taking over of the brainy but helpless professor's life and home and sorting them out for her.
"For All the Rude People" is a basic revenge fantasy. A single, friendless man is told he has only 4 months left to live and is asked, by his doctor, how he intends to spend it (the dr. is writing a book). Well, of course he doesn't know right then but over the next few days he discovers what his final purpose in life is: killing rude people. Not people being momentarily rude or simply having a bad day, but people he can determine are life-long and sadistically rude. After about a month the city is hit by a wave of nervous politeness (he's left notes on the bodies explaining why he killed them) and he has cause to trust that others will carry on his work after he's gone.
These stories may not seem like much just from my description, but that's because I'm not the writer Ritchie was -- from the Introduction of Little Boxes of Bewilderment:
His fellow crime writers described him best. Donald E. Westlake called him "a brilliant man in the wrong pew, a miniaturist in an age of elephantiasis." Anthony Boucher said: "What I like most about [his] work is its exemplary neatness. No word is wasted, and many words serve more than one purpose. Exposition disappears; all needed facts are deftly inserted as the narrative flows forward. [He] can write a long short story that is virtually the equivalent of a full suspense novel; and his very short stories sparkle as lapidary art."
Absolutely. And according to Ritchie himself:
In an interview near the end of his life, Ritchie quoted the shortest story he had ever written. It went like this:
When it was all over, only two people remained on the face of the earth. After twenty years, the older man died.
Then he said: "I think I can still cut it a little."
I will say that reading much of a writer's work all at once rather than a story every year or so can be a startling, and upsetting, experience. I love Ritchie's dry, unsentimental, Spartan style but I'd been unaware how cold and callous so many of his early characters are -- characters who love money more than anything and plot and carry out murders of convenience without a single emotional quiver. The style was still beautiful but the content was starting to get to me.
Fortunately, just as I was thinking I might not be able to finish this book, I noticed a change in tone. The characters started to warm up a bit, taking lives was no longer treated blithely, and spouses were not automatically burdens to be shed of. The driving force in life was money less often, becoming instead a secure home, a place to belong.
Interestingly, this secure and desirable home was often a prison -- literally, with a warden and guards. Even more interesting, when I matched the dates of these warmer toned stories with the biography of Ritchie's life that the Intro provided, I found that they co-incided with his marriage sliding into divorce, and the loss not only of his wife of some 25 years but his home.
It may well mean nothing at all but I know I couldn't help wondering, as I read those early stories, what his wife had made of them, of their depictions of marriage in general and wives in particular. I wonder if it's another sad case of appreciating something only in its absence.
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