Ready When You Are, C.B.! by Alan Yates

Author:Alan Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Ltd
Published: 2021-11-09T00:16:41+00:00

Chapter Seven

New York, New York

We were invited to the first Adelaide Arts Festival in 1960 and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Morris and Joy West happened to be staying in the same hotel and we saw a lot of each other. During one of the literary sessions Morris had made a point in discussion and was followed by a university lecturer who earnestly began his contribution by saying, ‘As Patrick West has just said …’

Well, at the time, there was Patrick White who had just published Voss, and Morris West who had just published The Devil’s Advocate. It seemed a pity to waste Patrick West so we decided later on that night he obviously was the author of Schloss.

It was in the early 1960s that ‘in’ words became vogue. Worse was to follow with ‘in’ phrases. Surely the ultimate horror was when people started saying, ‘at this moment in time’, as opposed to ‘now’. Morris and I used to occasionally see what could be done with ‘in’ words contained in one sentence. Points were given for obscurity. Our best effort was, as I remember: ‘When faced with a dichotomy it is best to maintain an attitude of pragmatic ambivalence’.

The one-a-month CB kept me busy. We had started with six Al Wheeler stories then introduced the other recurring characters, such as Danny Boyd. Boyd was a private detective who worked out of New York—and as Tony Boucher, the mystery critic of the New York Times, said, he agreed with another character in the first Boyd book who found him ‘fascinating, in a repulsive kind of way’. Then there was Rick Holman, who worked in LA but almost exclusively for the rich and famous in the movie business.

There was also Mavis Seidlitz, who started life as the dumb, but beautiful, secretary of a private eye called Johnny Rio. But then she somehow outgrew Rio and became a private eye in her own right. She mostly had a scientific approach, like if a bra-strap broke she knew something significant was about to happen. And she always found the right murderer for all the wrong reasons. She was very hard to write and I didn’t write too many Mavis books. There was one where she met up with Al Wheeler and they wrote each successive chapter in turn. Switching from one character to the other didn’t make me paranoiac; keeping the continuity flowing without having one character tell the other what had happened since they last met made me paranoiac.

Somebody in France made a movie based on The Body which I never saw but the money was very welcome. Back in the early 1950s I had written a book with a Las Vegas background featuring a comic, who was accidentally caught in the middle between two mobs who both blamed him for things he hadn’t done. Bob Hope had just finished performing in Australia and I had him strictly in mind when I wrote the book. A friend told me he knew Bob Hope’s manager—who was also his brother—very well.

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