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Norbert Davis

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonyms include Dave Barnes, Harrison Hunt, Cedric Titus
(1909-1949)

“Norbert Davis is a natural. If we were to pick anyone who, in spite of all human trials and tribulations, looks upon life resignedly and mostly as all fun, our nominee would be Bert.”
— Joseph T. Shaw,  in an unpublished intro to The Hard-Boiled Omnibus

Chandler cited one of his early stories as an inspiration for his own writing. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a huge fan. And John D. MacDonald, in an affectionate salute to the man, called him “a writer who almost made it.”

Certainly, NORBERT DAVIS was one of the great tragic figures among the pulp writers of the thirties and forties. He wrote westerns, war stories, romance and adventure tales as well as well as crime and detective fiction. Yet, he never quite got the recognition he deserved while he was alive (and even now, he’s at most a cult favourite, more read about than read), mostly because he abandoned his ace in the hole, a humourously hard-boiled crime hybrid he had perfected in the pulps, for a chance to write for the more lucrative market of the slicks. And it certainly didn’t help that he committed suicide at the age of forty.

Not a good career move, that.

Still, he left his mark. In the thirties and early forties there were several mystery writers who worked the same vein of zany hard-boiled, screwball stories, including Craig Rice, Dwight V. Babcock (who was a pal of Davis’) and Frank Gruber, but none could touch Davis at his peak.

He regularly sold to the very best of the detective magazines of the day, including Dime Detective and even occasionally Black Mask, and regularly appeared in such top titles as Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post.

Nor was he a hack — sure, he cranked out some turds, as did most of pulp crowd, but at his best, he was one of the most entertaining writers around, endlessly inventive, able to imbue even the most hard-boiled tales with a sense of whimsy, witty dialogue; glib, sardonic wisecracks, fast-paced action, chaotic plot twists and outrageous characters — a deft combo of tough guy action and screwball comedy that still stands up.

The guy was funny without rubbing your face in it. If Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was Don Quixote, the last Boy Scout, out to save the world, Davis’ detectives were Sancho, willing to do what it takes, and hoping for a good meal and a soft bed at the end of the day, more than willing to cut a few corners to get there.

And then, just when you thought he was just another funny man, he’d gently lay a patina of clear-eyed prose over everything, sharp, dead-on prose that bordered on poetry.

* * * * *

Norbert was born in Morrison, Illinois, but moved with his family to California, where he studied law at Stanford. Times were tough, though, and Davis had to take on various jobs to pay for his way through school, but, as he later wrote:

“It became obvious that, if I were going to continue what I reverently referred to as my educational career, there would have to be some changes made. I tried mowing lawns and polishing cars and shoveling sand, and I decided that a life of honest toil was not for me. So I started murdering people… with a typewriter, on paper. “

Obsessed with cracking the then burgeoning pulp market, Davis began sending out his fiction, and soon managed to sell a few stories to Black Mask. Encouraged, he continued writing for the pulps as he ploughed his way through law school. By the time he graduated, he was making such a good living from his writing that he never bothered taking the bar exam.

Instead, the tall, lanky writer moved to Los Angeles and befriended many of the other pulp writers in area. In fact, he even made the famous January 11, 1936 photo of The First West Coast Black Mask Get-Together. That’s Davis seated on the right, offering up up a big cheese-eating grin while a gloomy Dashiell Hammett lurks behind him, possibly concerned that the bar will shut before he can get back to it.

Davis and some of the others eventually formed a West Coast writers group called The Fictioneers, which met regularly at a watering hole on Western Avenue, and when Davis moved to Santa Monica, Raymond Chandler was a neighbour, living a few doors down.

In fact, Chandler was an early fan of Davis’ work, citing “Red Goose” (February 1934, Black Mask) in particular as an inspiration for his own fiction, and later recommending “Kansas City Flash,” another early story by Davis, for inclusion in James Sandoe’s Murder: Plain And Fanciful anthology from 1948. Chandler considered that story particularly “noteworthy and characteristic of the most vigorous days” of Black Mask.

But mixing funny with felony has always been a hard sell, particularly for those aiming to crack Black Mask, then the toughest market of them all. Of the several hundred short stories Davis wrote, only a dozen or so ever made it into the legendary pulp mag. Black Mask‘s editor at the time, Josph T. Shaw, was not a huge fan of humour, although he begrudgingly included the afore-mentioned “Red Goose” in The Hard-Boiled Omnibus and admitted (in an unpublished intro to the story) that “There is one thing that makes Bert Davis an individualist; he always did and always will write just what he very well pleases: mostly what strikes him as ‘funny’.”

Yet Davis persevered, and made a good living selling to other pulps, including Double Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and most notably, Mask’s rival, Dime Detective, where he flourished.

The legacy Davis left behind of delightfully eccentric (and often morally elastic) pulp detectives is well worth hunting down: the shady screwball private eye Max Latin (my personal favourite), the wise-cracking bail-bondsman with the patched up eyeglasses Bail Bond Dodd, the chronically fatigued trust company investigator Just Plain Jones (he of the sore feet), and a host of others live on in old pulps and the occasional reprinted story.

But it wasn’t enough for Davis. By the forties Davis, like many of his friends, was itching to escape the pulp jungle, and try his hand at more lucrative markets. His first stab at a novel, The Mouse in the Mountain, introduced Doan and Carstairs, an oddball coupling of a short chubby P.I. and his snooty Great Dane and was published in 1943. A sequel, Sally’s in the Alley, soon followed.

Sales, unfortunately, didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and the third in the series, Oh, Murderer Mine, was published only in paperback. A fourth novel, Murder Picks the Jury, a standalone co-written with Black Mask pal W. T. Ballard and published under the pen name of Harrison Hunt, didn’t sell particularly well either.

Which must have stung. He’d been married briefly as a young man, but somewhere in the forties he’d remarried, to Nancy Kirkwood Crane, a sculptor and a writer herself, who’d had some success selling articles and romance stories to the slicks. Perhaps adding to the tension, Nancy was the daughter of Frances Crane, also a writer, and an even more successful one, having written the popular Pat and Jean Abbott mystery series.

So, perhaps encouraged by his wife Nancy’s success there, Davis cast his eyes on the greener pastures of the slicks. For a while he enjoyed modest success selling stories (mostly non-mystery romances) to The Saturday Evening Post. But as the decade progressed, that market too began to dry up for Davis. In 1948, he wrote to Raymond Chandler, complaining that fourteen of his last fifteen stories had been rejected for publication, and Chandler eventually did send him a couple of hundred bucks in 1949.

That same year, at Nancy’s urging (she was originally from the East), or perhaps to be closer to the New York markets, they moved to Connecticut.

Unfortunately, by July 1949 he was dead. That same July, Davis drove to Cape Cod. Rumours abound about the cause of his suicide, many attributing it to his discovery that he had cancer or the recent stillborn death of his and his wife Nancy’s son, and others to a severe case of writer’s block, the death of his literary agent or simply poor sales (in the last year of his life, he only sold two stories). But whatever the reason, on the morning in July 28, Davis took a garden hose, hooked it up to his car’s exhaust and ran it into the bathroom of the house where he was staying. He died from carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 40 years old. He was cremated in Boston and his ashes were sent to Los Angeles.

Norbert Davis remains in a strange place in the ranks of the creators of P.I. fiction, caught in the no-man’s-land between the fact that only small bits and pieces of his output are available (he only wrote five novels, and until recently, only a handful of his short stories have ever been reprinted) and the fact that he has been, in the words of Pulp Mystery Adventure, “praised to the skies by critics of pulp magazines.” Certainly, anyone who has been fortunate enough to stumble across his work has come away more than satisfied.

If you’re lucky enough to come across a story by Davis somewhere, read it. And spread the word.

     

THE GRIM EPILOGUE

THE EVIDENCE

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REFERENCE

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Photo of Babcock and Davis from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis,  one of several obtained by Bill Pronzini from Ruth Babcock, widow of Norbert Davis’s fellow pulp writer, Dwight V. Babcock. Also, a very sincere thanks to fellow Davis Devotees Bill, Peter Ruber, Stefan Dziemianowicz and John Apostolou for all their hard work over the years tracking mining the Norbert vein.

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