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INTRODUCTION, by Joe Gores

With The Comic Book Killer, Nebula and Hugo nominated science fiction and fantasy writer Dick Lupoff moves from science fiction to the mystery for the first time. At first glance this may seem surprising, since Lupoff has said he finds mystery and science fiction mutually exclusive, likening them to “oil and water” with a basic philosophical conflict between them. He calls science fiction an essentially radical literature “subversive of society,” while he finds the mystery “essentially supportive of society and basically conservative in its attitude.”

But the mystery and science fiction have always had a symbiotic attraction for each other. Most science fiction writers have tried or at least contemplated the mystery during their professional lives—and vice versa.

I have written in the future tense, stories which tend to be much darker and more bitter than my mystery stories. Because to me, the difference between the two fields is artistic, not in such terms as “radical” and “conservative.”

There are obviously conservative science fiction novels— Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Just as obviously, there are radical mysteries. Hammett himself was no supporter of the status quo. Richard Stark’s entire oeuvre, as well as novels such as Andrew Vachss’ Flood and Shaun Herron’s The Whore Mother suggest, without making any particular point of it, that it would be just as well if the whole bloody social structure should come crashing down. James Ellroy’s Suicide Hill really is depicting our society in the midst of such a suicidal self-destruction.

The difference between mystery and science fiction is not intellectual, but it is profound. Also simple to articulate.

The mystery says, This is.

Science fiction says, What if?

The mystery is realistic.

Science fiction is speculative.

The strength of the mystery is this moment—this brick, this street, this strand of hair, unique to this person and this place at this precise instant never to be repeated.

The strength of science fiction is in speculating a world, a “what if” reality subject not so much to the laws of nature as to the laws of the creator’s mind.

Unfortunately both fields, by the very term genre, have suffered at the critics’ hands.

* * * *

A few months ago I was guest of honor at a day-long mystery conference sponsored by the library association of a mid-size California city. The head of the city library system introduced me thus: “I give you mystery-writer Joe Gores—of course I don’t read that sort of thing myself, but. . .”

His unconscious condescension brought home to me once again and forever the job that critics and academicians have done on what they decided long ago in their wisdom to call genre fiction. “Light reading,” “Summer fare,” “Escapist literature,” “A Tub of Thrillers,” “Trash reading”—we’ve seen them all a hundred times in the book review section of our Sunday newspaper. The categorists reduce us to second-class citizenship and ship us steerage — “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?”

Thus Dashiell Hammett—whose early stories undoubtedly helped Hemingway learn how to write —is “merely” a mystery writer while Hemingway is literature. Yet The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key stand up against The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms under any accepted literary criteria one might choose.

Indeed, Hemingway’s entire writing career could be said to deal in the psychological and literal vocabulary of Hammett’s tough-guy. To Have and Have Not is unabashedly a suspense novel, ending with that utterly hard-boiled sentiment, “A man alone ain’t got no bloody f—ing chance” (f—ing courtesy the publishing practices of the day). What is Papa’s famous “grace under pressure” except the Stoicism of Hammett’s hard-boiled, almost Existential hero?

The mystery is not a field you can stoop to conquer. A good journeyman mystery is a hell of a lot harder to write than a good journeyman “mainstream” novel. Thus that other Nobel Prize-winner, William Faulkner, who loved the mystery and tried his hand at it with a collection of short stories called Knight’s Gambit, wrote a series of tales that were not very good mysteries and not very good stories, either.

Dostoievski wrote at least one genuine thriller which, because Raskolnikov spoke Russian, is known to be literature. But Crime and Punishment is also a thriller. Much more than a thriller perhaps, a wonderful and effective thriller to be sure, but a thriller for all that.

Shakespeare had a marvelously criminous mind, and in Hamlet and Macbeth wrote a brace of hard-line murder mysteries. Genre stories if you will. The critics of his day had that same disdain for the common clay as their fellows today; during the half-century or so following Shakespeare’s death, Oxford’s Bodleian Library refused shelf-room to his plays on the grounds that they were popular trash, not enduring literature.

So what is a mystery? How does a genre encompass Ludlum and Dostoievski, Shakespeare and Christie, Hemingway and Hammett and Faulkner? Hard-boiled, cosies, international intrigue, noires, formal mysteries, procedurals, locked rooms, espionage thrillers? What element in a book can link something as brilliantly real and solid as Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park with something as maddeningly insubstantial as Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and still be called “mystery”?

Suspense?

Hardly. All novels deal in suspense. Something happens which affects someone we care about—thus keeping us in suspense—or we will end up not reading the novel.

Conflict?

All novels deal in conflict, too. Not always in open, bloody. physical conflict as is often the case in the mystery, but always in conflict—the clash of human wills, the confrontation of philosophies, the facing of one’s inner demons.

Violence?

Not violence either. Consider the body count in The Iliad, then read a mystery like Don Westlake’s Help, I am Being Held Prisoner. His imprisoned hero’s only crime is a fondness for harmless practical jokes that go awry through no fault of his. What, except in antic dress and with a certain added element, is Westlake’s novel but Maupassant’s “A String of Pearls”?

The added element? A crime.

Strip everything else away from the mystery, and what we have that makes it different from other fiction is a crime. And not just stuck in there at the last moment. What has happened to or around or because of that person we care about is, in the mystery, somehow criminous. It need not be murder—the theft of one’s reputation will do nicely—but crime there must be, and the novel must in some way revolve around it. We don’t even need a solution to the crime—nice as that is to have.

What we do need, as we need in any successful novel, is a resolution to the action. We like to feel that we have been dealt with fairly in the dynamics of the drama, in story-line, in character. In mystery circles, best-of-breed is always novel first, mystery second.

But because of that pesky crime in there, that puzzle, that “added element” if you will, the mystery writer also has to deal more fairly with plot than other writers. In so doing he has to deal more fairly with the reader than the mainstream novelist.

In those admittedly rare instances when “mystery” and “novel” come together in perfect balance, we have a classic: Stanley Ellin’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall in 1972 was, for instance, as surely literature and as surely innovative as Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being was to be twelve years later.

Dick Lupoff is a novelist first and a genre writer second. He is a professional at the height of his powers, seeking to expand his writing horizons by moving into a new field. And make no mistake: The Comic Book Killer, entertaining mystery that it is, is deliberately after larger game than just a well-constructed puzzle. The Comic Book Killer is a very tricky book, and I don’t mean just the plot.

First, it takes us on a remarkable ride through the world of the comic book collector, a world where someone will kill for what is between these gaudy paper covers. For many youthful years, until I realized that it was the story behind the pictures that obsessed me, I intended to be a comic strip artist. Reading Lupoff’s novel, I suddenly ached for that obsession of my youth.

Next, almost in passing, Lupoff gives us the Education of Candide. Not that Hobart Lindsey, the protagonist of the novel, is an innocent. Indeed, at first meeting he seems in training to be Ebenezer Scrooge, Jr. He has as much empathy with humanity as a rock. Taking a chance is not waving at a passing auto that might contain a business acquaintance. He has figured out the world long ago, and has quit thinking about it. In his mind, cliché passes for profundity.

The Comic Book Killer is Bart Lindsey’s awakening to this world through which he has moved like a zombie while seeking the next rung on the corporate ladder. As he tries to track down a quarter-million dollars worth of rare comic books for his employer, International Surety, Bart learns some astounding truths about university professors, about blacks, about cops, about lesbians—and about hatred and love and fear and death.

He learns that nobody quite fits into the neat little boxes to which he has assigned them all his adult life.

Most especially, not himself.

There are no black-and-white villains and heroes here, everyone is many-layered, with motive within motive for their actions so the final moment of the mystery is also the final triumph of the poor tattered human psyche.

Memorable characters abound. Marvia Plum, that strangely voluptuous black policewoman, arouses in Bart unknown feelings having more to do with lost virginity than lost comic books. Did the seductive Margarita of the flashing eyes bop him on the head and shove him in the way of an approaching train? What is the relationship of the highly respected Professor ben Zinowicz with Francis, the muscleman who perhaps likes violence almost as much as he likes to oil his skin and pump up his biceps? The radical lesbian Sojourner Strength proves to be not only a Jewish girl named Horowitz, but a martial arts expert besides. Even the proper Ms. Wilbur, despised as a probable head-office snitch, is someone far different than she seems.

The Comic Book Killer is a novel of character even before it is a mystery, but as mystery it ranks high. Lupoff recreates his Bay Area locales with panache and a loving attention to the detail that makes scenes leap off the page. His plot is tricky, many-facetted, so we gradually learn each seemingly unimportant act has many depths of meaning, each more profound than the next. Lupoff handles his violence with restraint and realism; Bart’s scene in the middle of the Bay on a fog-swept night does not suffer in comparison with The Op’s similar adventure during Hammett’s masterful “The Tenth Clew.”

Lupoff writes with intelligence, humor, wisdom, and a zest for life. He had a lot of fun writing this book, and it shows; because of it, we have a lot of fun reading it.