Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (1995) by Jack Adrian; Bill Pronzini eds

Author:Jack Adrian; Bill Pronzini eds. [eds., Jack Adrian; Bill Pronzini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

JONATHAN CRAIG

(1919-1984)

Jonathan Craig (Frank E. Smith) was a staple of Manhunt during its best and most influential years, the mid-1950s. He was variously described in the magazine’s editorial column, “Mugged and Printed,” as a “former night-club pianist,” an “ex-trombonist,” an “erstwhile bartender,” a “carnival man,” and a “sailor.” The third edition of Lesley Henderson’s Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991) presents a quite different and rather less rackety curriculum vitae, one that sits somewhat uneasily with his alleged Bohemian and freewheeling lifestyle. There Craig is said to have been “head research analyst for the U.S. navy, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II,” a startlingly mature role for a man who was barely twenty-five years old at the time of the Normandy landings in 1944. Later he is reported to have been “adviser to President Truman at the Potsdam Conference, 1945.”

Given that the editor of Manhunt was keen to have his authors be seen as leading colorful, even mildly gamey lives, it is difficult to ascertain the truth about Craig’s history. But without a doubt, Craig clearly had more than enough experience of the hard end of life to become one of the leading chroniclers of the “JD” (juvenile delinquent), or “juvie,” genre, which was so popular with editors and readers in the “rebel without a cause” era of the mid-1950s. He combined a gritty realism with a sardonic outlook and mastered a style that was spare while at times hinting at lushness and moral decay. In his early novels, especially So Young, So Wicked (1957), young women are depicted as sly and knowing, concupiscently old for their years, and all too aware of their own sexual power. Yet in their greed lies the seed of their inevitable downfall. A palpable undercurrent of misogyny can be found in many of Craig’s stories, “The Bobby-Soxer” in particular. The theme was always power without responsibility, a hoary plot line that Craig hauled into the 1950s again and again, freshening it up each time.

Craig began his Sixth Precinct police-procedural series set in Manhattan with The Dead Darling in 1955, beating the first of Ed McBain’s famous Eighty-seventh Precinct books, Cop Hater, by a year. But whereas McBain began his long-running saga in paperbacks before graduating to prestigious hardcover houses, Craig worked on an altogether less epic scale, beginning and ending in paperback.

J.A.

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