Whipped Cream Difficulties

I believe it was Lee Goldberg who tipped me off to the Charles Kelly biography of Dan J. Marlowe, Gunshots in Another Room. I owe him a thank-you note for that.

Marlowe was an interesting guy. Details about his early life are vague, but he may have been a gambler before settling on a career as a writer. He’s mostly forgotten today (though Stephen King dedicated a book to him) but he spent many years knocking around in the Gold Medal publishing empire. Marlowe never had the breakthrough success of John D. MacDonald or some of the other Gold Medal writers; it seems, from Kelly’s biography, that he came close a few times, but was always foiled by some sort of hard luck.

His most famous book, The Name of the Game is Death, features a sociopathic bank robber. From the descriptions I’ve read, it seems that the character is much like Westlake’s Parker, but with the volume turned up to 11.

One of the interesting aspects of Marlowe’s story is that Name of the Game brought him into contact with a man named Al Nussbaum. Nussbaum is an important player, and Kelly devotes quite a bit of space to him, and the Nussbaum/Marlowe relationship. You see, Al Nussbaum was a professional bank robber, and a big fan of Name of the Game. Nussbaum actually wrote Marlowe a fan letter and telephoned him while on the run. After Nussbaum’s arrest and while he was in prison, he became a collaborator with Marlowe. Nussbaum provided advice on weapons, equipment, and techniques for Marlowe, and Marlowe in turn mentored Nussbaum as a writer. (Nussbaum went on to publish a fair number of stories in genre magazines.) Together, Nussbaum and Marlowe turned Name of the Game into a series, in which the sociopathic bank robber became an agent of the US government. (This was not as easy as it might sound, for reasons having to do with the ending of Name of the Game. I won’t spoil it here.)

Fairly late in life, Marlowe suffered some undetermined kind of cerebral event; possibly a stroke, but details are unclear. The end result was that he had near-total amnesia. He could still function – he was capable of reading and writing – but he didn’t remember anything about his past. When he was given a copy of one of his own books, and asked to write a review of it, it was clear that he didn’t remember writing it. In spite of this, and with help from Nussbaum, he was able to rebuild his career, at least to the point where he could get by until his death in 1986.

Gunshots is a surprisingly well-written biography of Marlowe and, to a lesser extent, Nussbaum. It captures a time that overlaps with my own life, though I am too young to remember it well. And it should serve to pique interest in Marlowe and his works. It looks like much of Marlowe’s back catalog is becoming available in Kindle format, but I’d still like to see Hard Case Crime bring out new print editions.

(Speaking of Hard Case, I’m delighted to see that they’re re-releasing the books Michael Crichton wrote as “John Lange”. Especially Binary, which is an interesting thriller that still has some resonance today. But great googly moogly, I really do not like that cover.)

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Adela Rogers St. Johns is another one of those folks who led an interesting life, and is mostly forgotten today. She worked as a journalist for the Hearst papers, covering the Hauptmann trial, Huey Long’s death, and (at the age of 82) the Patty Hearst trial. She wrote screenplays during the silent film era. She appeared as herself in “Reds”. And she wrote the bestselling Final Verdict.

Adela led a fascinating life. She mingled with the powerful and privileged as a young girl. Her first kiss was from a famous prizefighter. Jack London adopted her as his god-daughter.

But she wasn’t a bubble-headed socialite. She was raised to be a strong woman and independent thinker, at a time when those qualities were not highly valued. Her education was, to put it mildly, unconventional. Her childhood and young adulthood brought her into contact not just with the rich and famous, but also with the turn of the century anarchists and radicals. Final Verdict is the story of that childhood and young adult life, and her relationship with her father.

At this point, people who know me well are asking themselves why I would read this. A book about a random woman, famous though she may have been at one time? Concentrating on her relationship with her father? Why didn’t I just go read a Harlequin romance instead? Books about women, their fathers, and relationships are not typically up my alley.

All of this is true. But here is why I read Final Verdict: Adela’s father was Earl Rogers.

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If you ask people to name a famous criminal defense attorney, who are they likely to come up with? Clarence Darrow, F. Lee Bailey, maybe Richard “Racehorse” Haynes if they grew up in Texas during a certain time period.

But nobody’s likely to name Earl Rogers, and that’s a shame. Because Earl Rodgers was a titan among defense lawyers. His record in murder trials was three losses out of 77 total trials. Erle Stanley Gardner based Perry Mason on Earl Rogers.

Here are two examples of how good Earl Rogers was:

1. When Clarence Darrow got into trouble out in California and was accused of attempting to bribe jurors – when he faced prison, losing his license to practice law, and everything he’d worked for – he called Earl Rogers. Darrow was tried twice (on separate charges). The first time, Rogers led the defense and won him a unanimous acquittal from a jury that was probably not inclined to view Darrow with sympathy. (The charges against Darrow arose out of his defense of the accused bombers of the Los Angeles Times building.) Rogers and Darrow did not agree on strategy and fought constantly during the first trial: Adela says that her father officially remained council for Darrow at the second trial, but Darrow ran things his way. (Other sources say Rogers withdrew from representing Darrow “for health reasons”.) The result? The jury in Darrow’s second trial – the one where he ran his own defense – hung 8 to 4 in favor of convicting Darrow. (Darrow ended up making a deal with the prosecution; they dropped the second charge, and Darrow agreed never to practice law again in California.)
2. Rogers defended several politicians on bribery charges after the San Francisco Earthquake. He was going up against Teddy Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s hand-picked prosecutor, who desperately wanted convictions. During one of the trials, Roosevelt’s prosecutor was shot in the head and critically wounded. So imagine the situation; you’re defending politicians on bribery charges, you’re going up against the president of the United States, and then somebody shoots the prosecutor, which is not exactly going to put public sympathy on your side.
   Earl Rogers won acquittals for all of his clients. He beat Teddy, which is something few men could say.

Adela had a front seat for pretty much all of Earl Rogers’ trials. He treated her not as a child, but almost as an equal partner in his practice. He loved her dearly, even if his decisions may not always have been the best ones.

That’s the other part of the Earl Rogers story that Adela doesn’t shirk from. He was a great defense attorney, but he also had horrible problems with alcohol. Adela describes frantically searching for her father and having to drag him, drunk, out of brothels. And yet, he would get up the next morning and show up in court as if nothing had happened.

Unless he couldn’t. Then he’d get a note from a friendly doctor. And there were plenty of those for Earl.

He was most famous for his cross-examinations – it can be said that Earl Rogers pretty much invented modern cross-examination – so it seems fitting that Final Verdict‘s framing device is a cross-examination. Specifically, Earl cross-examining Adela, who was trying to have him committed in an effort to stop his drinking. Earl persuaded her to withdraw the petition, which Adela (from her perspective of almost 50 years later) regrets having done.

He died thirteen years before AA was founded, but I’m not sure that would have made a difference. I’m not a doctor, but from what Adela says, it seems like Earl may have been manic-depressive, and medicated himself with alcohol. He was 52 when he died in a flophouse.

Final Verdict does not deserve the obscurity that has fallen upon it. Adela’s voice is one of the few surviving contemporary accounts of the events and people she witnessed. In particular, she’s one of the few people who saw Darrow up close and wrote about him. Adela was clearly not found of Darrow or Mrs. Darrow, though she admits that her account is somewhat biased. (She particularly resents the way Darrow treated her father, and Darrow’s failure to pay her father’s bill for his defense.)

But it is also a sad and moving book, about a child trying to deal with the legacy of her famous and self-destructive father. She was a talented writer, who had adventures that most of us would envy, and this is a beautifully written book. It hasn’t become a rare book yet; if you find a copy at some used paperback store somewhere, I recommend picking it up.