Read Online Kill Your Darlings by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online Page B

would’ve been nice to have seen Spillane honored at a Bouchercon, since Anthony Boucher’s
New York Times
reviews had been among the most brutal of the many anti-Spillane critiques. Seeing Roscoe Kane—and Gat Garson—being honored at this year’s Bouchercon, receiving the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, no less, would have been a sweet sort of justice, since Boucher had trashed Kane and Gat Garson in a manner that made his Spillane reviews seem complimentary.
    Boucher was an astute critic, but he was wrong about Spillane (and came to admit it, in his later reviews) and he was wrong about Roscoe Kane (though that he never admitted). With Roscoe dead, the honors would still come, and probably would be more effusive, as posthumous honors tend to be; but there would be a hollow ring to them. Honoring the dead is so easy. And so pointless.
    Or is it? At least a writer, even a paperback writer like Roscoe Kane, gets a grab at the brass ring of immortality. You never know; something you write just might last... assuming that all of us, including our books, aren’t turned to radioactive dustany second now, of course. Short of that, the writer, any writer, even the popular-fiction writer like Roscoe Kane—following the tradition of such popular-fiction writers as Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, crime writers all—has an honest (if long) shot at living on through his words.
    On the other hand, royalty checks made out to the author’s estate are not this author’s idea of a good time.
    “Is this a private conversation or can anybody join in?”
    I looked up.
    She was small—petite, even—and her straight, shoulder-length hair was the dark brown you mistake for black if the light isn’t hitting it just right. Her eyes were the same color.
    “Was I talking to myself?” I said, embarrassed. I was sitting alone in a booth in the Artistic Café, just up Michigan Avenue from the Congress; I’d wanted to get away from the hotel and the Bouchercon guests, and from past experience I remembered the Artistic, in the Fine Arts Building, where young actresses and ballerinas, in tights and leg-warmers and other form-fitting artsy-type duds, often wandered in for coffee. The Artistic was a good place for me to sit and think, and if thinking got old, be distracted by young actresses and ballerinas in tights.
    “You were moving your lips,” she said, sitting down. She had a pixie face, pert, cute; she’d have made a great hippie, ten or fifteen years earlier.
    “Was I making any audible sounds?” I asked.
    “Just a sort of murmur,” she said, her lips doing a wry little dance around the words as they came out.
    But she wasn’t a dancer, or an actress, at least not one here to use one of the Fine Arts Building studios. She had on a
Noir
sweatshirt—black deco letters barely visible on dark blue—and her designer jeans were snug (not that there’s any other kind).
Noir
was a mystery fanzine I had subscribed to a while back, because somebody had told me the editor’d been reviewing my books favorably; that sounded like my kind of reading, so I sent them a check. So what if Gregg Gorman was the publisher.
    Anyway, I figured she was here for Bouchercon, and said, “I figure you must be here for Bouchercon.”
    “Shrewd deduction,” she said; the corners of her mouth went up, and the rest of her mouth was a wavering line, making a terrific wry smile. She had a great mouth, this girl. Whoops, make that “woman”: I could tell right off she wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as a girl.
    “Do I know you?” I said. “Or is that wishful thinking?”
    “Do I look familiar?”
    “I’ve seen you before, or somebody who looks a lot like you. Maybe a movie star or something.”
    “Brother. Hope that isn’t dialogue you’re trying out for your next story—you usually give that guy in your books better lines.”
    I managed a grin. “Things I say often seem more clever on the printed