COULDA, WOULDA, SHOULDA

I’ve argued before on this blog that 1975 was the greatest year in the history of crime/mystery fiction. Whenever I find myself in a good used-book store, I can’t resist looking for crime novels from that era, hopefully obscure ones, neglected masterpieces that no one, myself included, remembers any more. I’ve been working on a book about this topic for years. One chapter of the book is called “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda.” In this chapter, I investigate books that, for one reason or another, feel as though they should have been published in 1975 (or thereabouts), and then I speculate on how they might have been received, by readers and book critics, had they been published in that year. I have written, for instance, that Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of his film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (the ellipses are elided from the title of the book) was clearly intended to mimic a crime novel of the mid 1970s. It deals, in part, with the Mason family killings of 1969. And much of the story concerns the protagonist’s role as a guest star on the Lancer TV program, which debuted in 1968 and concluded its run in 1970. Thus the novel couldn’t have been published any earlier than about 1971. But, given the nature of the writing game and the nature of the publishing business, it is unlikely that a long and ambitious book such as Once Upon A Time in Hollywood could have hit the bookstore shelves any earlier than about 1973 or 1974.

Through the years I have compiled a list of crime fiction that is set in 1975, or otherwise connected with that year, but written afterwards. For instance, Frederick Forsyth’s novella The Miracle, which first appeared in the 2001 collection The Veteran, comprises a tall tale being told on July 2, 1975, by a German doctor to an American couple on vacation in Italy (although the doctor’s story moves back and forth across the years). Perhaps the most famous of these 1975-adjacent stories is Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. This classic prison tale (the source of the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption) first appeared in the collection Different Seasons, published in 1982. Though the story spans many years, the pivotal event – Andy Dufresne’s escape from prison – occurs on March 12, 1975. The tale is narrated by a character named Red (played by Morgan Freeman in the film). Red claims to have written his narrative between September 15, 1975, and January 14, 1976. Later he adds a short coda set in 1977. This doesn’t mean that the story couldn’t possibly have been published in 1975. After all, King’s first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974 but set in 1979. An interesting thought experiment is to imagine how the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption might have been treated had it been published as a standalone book in 1975. At 120 pages, it wasn’t much shorter than Carrie (199 pages) and could conceivably have been beefed up a bit. Carrie was only modestly successful in hardback, but became a runaway bestseller when it was released in paperback in 1975. That success might have turned Rita Hayworth into a hardback bestseller and prompted a film version much earlier than 1994. Escape – metaphorical and actual – was a prominent theme of the pop culture of 1975. Among the hit films of 1975 were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Breakout, Prisoner of Second Avenue, Escape From Witch Mountain, Three Days of the Condor, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, And Then There Were None, The Stepford Wives, The Wind and the Lion, Rosebud, and Aloha, Bobby and Rose. Of course, we all know that Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption wasn’t published until 1982 (although, according to King, it was written shortly after he finished writing The Dead Zone in 1978), nonetheless, because it purports to be a text that was written in 1975, I find it fascinating to think of how it might have been received in that year. As it happened, King released a different novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, in 1975. That novel was a huge hit, which pretty much cemented King’s reputation as a writer of supernatural horror novels. Almost from the beginning, he began rebelling against that label, publishing crime stories with no supernatural elements, fantasy stories with no horror elements, and some straight out mainstream stories, such as The Body (one of the novellas in Different Seasons), which is essentially a coming-of-age tale. But if King had followed up his 1974 book Carrie with a 1975 novel-length version of Rita Hayward and the Shawshank Redemption, who knows how his career might have played out. He might have been alternating between crime novels and horror novels right from the get-go.

At the other end of the spectrum we have little-known author Tom Alibrandi’s cult-classic novel Killshot, which was first published in 1979 but takes place mainly in 1975. It tells a story very similar to the one in Walter Tevis’s 1959 novel, The Hustler, but it is set in the world of professional handball players rather than pool players. The Hustler was a crime-adjacent story about a character who finds himself frequently involved with various hoods and mob enforcers. Killshot is about a handball player so dangerous he can deliberately kill or seriously injure an opponent in a game and make it look like an accident. This makes it even more of a crime novel than The Hustler. Curiously, this book was published in the same year as Jerzy Kosinski’s Passion Play, a novel about a polo player so dangerously accurate that he can kill an opponent with the shot of a polo ball. Because Killshot is a crime novel set in 1975, it feels as though it should have been published that year. It is just one more book that I associate with the greatest year in crime/mystery publishing.

Another example of the phenomenon is J.R. Moehringer’s 2012 novel Sutton, which is a fictionalized account of the life and career of American bank robber Willie Sutton, who lived from 1901 until 1980. This novel is, essentially, a tale being told by Sutton himself on Christmas Day, 1969, to two New York journalists (a reporter and a photographer). Sutton had been incarcerated in a New York prison (Attica) for seventeen years at that point but, because he was believed to be in ill health, had been granted a Christmas Eve release by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The next day, the two reporters pick up Sutton in a battered Dodge Polara. He has promised their newspaper an exclusive story in exchange for financial consideration. Sutton hands the two journalists a map of New York City on which he has circled roughly fifteen locations. These locations mark significant events in his life – banks and jewelry store robberies he participated in, prison breakouts, romantic liaisons, brief stints of lawful employment, etc. He instructs the men to drive to each location and he will tell the story of his life while the photographer snaps photos of what the spot looks like now. This is a somewhat gimmicky narrative strategy but it works.

Obviously, this tale couldn’t have been told prior to Christmas Day, 1969, the day on which it purports to take place. And it couldn’t have been told any later than 1980, the year in which Sutton died. A brief concluding chapter describes the reporter’s effort, in December of 1980, to add a coda to his original profile of Sutton, but this felt unnecessary to me. The book really should have concluded with the previous chapter, which closes with these words, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Sutton,” uttered by the pretty young granddaughter of a woman Sutton once loved.

Despite having little formal education, Willie Sutton was a rapacious reader and a decent writer. According to Moehringer, he spent many years working on a novel called The Statue in the Park, but was never able to get it published. He did publish two (highly inaccurate) memoirs in his lifetime. The first of these, Smooth and Deadly, appeared in 1953. The second, Where The Money Was, came out in 1976. These books not only contradict each other in many of their details, they contradict various journalistic accounts of Sutton’s criminal career as well as records kept by the FBI and various New York law enforcement agencies. They were written for a quick buck with the help of ghostwriters. Had Sutton actually possessed Moehringer’s novelistic gifts and, upon leaving prison in 1969, set about writing a long, detailed account of his life and times, the resulting memoir probably couldn’t have arrived in America’s bookstores any sooner than the mid 1970s. And that explains why, though it mostly covers events that took place before 1953, Sutton still feels like a crime novel that might have surfaced in 1975. Many of the best crime novels of 1975 – E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, for instance, and Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery – were based in fact and set in much earlier decades. Moehringer’s novel would have been right at home in their company. But how would the novel have been received, by readers and critics, if it had been published in 1975 instead of 2012?

In my estimation, it would have competed with Ragtime and Judith Rossner’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar for the title of Most Talked-About Novel of the Year. All three are set almost exclusively in and around New York City. All three incorporate a great deal of actual history in their narratives. Curiously, Sutton is probably the least violent of the three novels, because Willie Sutton deplored violence and never fired a gun during any of his robberies. J.R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. Sutton was his first and, to date, only novel. And it is a surprisingly beautiful piece of work. It is filled with history, humor, hardship, and heartbreak. It contains scenes of great beauty and scenes of pure horror. An episode in which Sutton tries to swim his way to freedom through a prison sewer pipe filled with…let’s just say raw sewage, was so disturbing that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it out of my head (Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank via a sewer pipe but, curiously, King didn’t wallow in the gory details the way Moehringer did). An interlude in which Sutton finds employment tending the gardens of a fabulously wealthy New Yorker is filled with descriptions of lush foliage and dazzling flowers that wouldn’t have been out of place in a love story (which Sutton, essentially, is).

Upon its publication in 2012, Moehringer’s novel received plenty of complimentary reviews. But I don’t think it got anywhere near the attention it deserved. In my estimation, Moehringer’s book is every bit as good a “true crime novel” as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980. Novels based on true crime stories have long been a staple of American popular fiction. But the genre really exploded with the serialization of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which ran in the New Yorker in 1965 and was published as a book the following year. Capote’s book was offered as straight non-fiction, but it has since been proven that Capote made up many of the details of the story. It’s now safer to refer to the book as a true-crime novel. In any case, In Cold Blood kicked off a Golden Age of high-profile true-crime novels that probably peaked with the publication of The Executioner’s Song in 1979. Other prominent entries in the genre were Louis Auchincloss’s 1966 bestseller The Embezzler, based on the crimes of real-life Wall Street fraudster Richard Whitney, Leon Uris’s 1970 bestseller QB VII, a courtroom drama based on a real-life libel case filed against Uris by a man he claimed had committed war crimes in World War II, Jimmy Breslin’s 1970 bestseller The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a novel based on the life of mobster Joey Gallo, and the aforementioned 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was inspired by the 1973 murder of New York City schoolteacher Roseann Quinn. J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton fits comfortably into this list of bestsellers inspired by real-life crimes and criminals. Had it been published in the mid 1970s, it would almost certainly have generated a great deal of buzz, and might now be regarded as one of that decade’s greatest crime novels.

At times, in the pages of Sutton, Moehringer seems to be signaling his admiration for some of the books that must have inspired his. At one point Willie Sutton asks an old safecracker to hold up his hands for inspection. When he sees how badly the safecracker’s hands shake, Willie tells him he’s too old to be robbing banks any more because even at rest his hands appear to be playing ragtime. This could be a nod to Doctorow.

One of the most interesting sections of the book describes the time that Willie and several confederates escaped from Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. When the confederates need some sort of device to aid in their escape plan they always turn to a fellow convict named Kliney, who has a knack for acquiring the unobtainable. Willie notes that, “If you gave Kliney two weeks he could get you Ava Gardner.” This is almost certainly a nod to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, whose narrator says, “Yeah, I’m a regular Nieman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no problem at all.”

Although it is more of a crime novel than a mystery, there is at least one great mystery at the center of Moehringer’s novel. In February of 1952, Sutton was recognized on a New York City subway car by a fellow passenger, 24-year-old Arnold Schuster. Sutton, having again escaped from jail, was in the midst of one of his robbery sprees and was listed among the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals. When Sutton got off the subway car, Schuster got off as well and followed him. Eventually he was able to inform the police of Sutton’s whereabouts and Sutton was arrested and jailed for the final time. By this point Sutton was a folk hero. Even the cops who arrested him asked if they could pose for a photo with him. New Yorkers would stand outside the police station and chant Willie’s name. But when a local paper wrote an article publicizing Arnold Schuster’s role in Willie’s capture, tragedy soon ensued. Schuster was a likeable young man, part of a close knit Jewish family in Brooklyn, and engaged to be married. But a few weeks after the newspaper story was published, Schuster was executed gangland style near his Brooklyn home one night. It was long assumed that Sutton must have put out a contract on Schuster as payback for turning him in to the police. From the very first pages of Moehringer’s novel, the two journalists are trying to get Sutton to talk about Arnold Schuster’s murder, but Sutton refuses to tell his story out of chronological order. We learn about Schuster’s death early on, and a get a few teasing references to it, but not until the end does Willie go into detail about it, finally wrapping up that particular mystery.

So there you have it, a review of an underappreciated 2012 crime novel that would probably by now have been deemed a classic had it been published in 1975. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. Timing, they say, is everything. And nobody knew that better than Willie Sutton.