Cold Case

People asked me then, and they still do now. What’s your job description? Initially, I’d reply “R&D, you know, research and development“. Almost always the response was “So you’re a scientist?” No, the exchange would go, not exactly. It wasn’t long before I decided it was necessary for me to go back to the drawing board, so to speak. Which is when a notion began to nag at me: What does every R&D project have? Why, a prototype, of course. Right then and there I knew I also needed a role model.

That was when Jack Webb came into the picture, so to speak.. He’d researched and developed the archetype policeman, Sergeant Joe Friday, who set the stage for every television cop show to follow. He even had his own catchphrase “Just the facts, ma’am”, which, I was quick to admit, would be an appropriate apothegm to appear on my own business cards. Then I remembered reading somewhere Webb as Friday had never actually said those words during any episode of Dragnet. What he did say; “All we want are the facts, mda’am” and “All we know are the facts, ma’am”, but neither seemed to have that cha-ching ring to them. All of a sudden it was right in front of me. R&D – prototype – cop. No, not a police officer, darn it, but a PI, a private eye, right out of a Raymond Chandler novel!

A Marlowe For All Seasons

Ah, good old Philip Marlowe. In my mind’s eye, I could see myself as a rough-edged, Hollywood bad boy, but, more than a little, like Robert Mitchum’s portrayal instead of and rather than that of George Sanders, Lloyd Nolan, Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert and George Montgomery [no relation], James Garner, Elliot Gould or James Caan, who all starred, in some shape, matter and form, as Chandler’s classic anti-hero character in the big screen versions of his noir narratives. Needless to say, I decided then and there I’d re-invent myself along the lines of Mitchum. After all, who’d know Marlowe better than the only actor who ever portrayed him twice, in 1975 in Farewell My Lovely then in 1978 in The Big Sleep.

I came to my feet then and tried the private eye persona on for size, which included doing a dash of Chandleresque dialogue, Marlowe wrapping it up and putting a bow on it from Farewell My Lovely:

“Think that over. And who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who had loved not wisely, but too wellâÂ?¦âÂ?¦Did my pink bug ever get back up here?”

I stood in front of the full length mirror and sized up my serious looking reflection for a moment. Not bad at all, especially since Marlowe is not your typical street smart tough, but a guy who’d even go out of his way to save a bug’s life. Chandler put the solipsistic words in his gumshoe’s mouth in The Big Sleep:

“Sure, but there’s very little to tellâÂ?¦âÂ?¦went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me you wanted to see me. I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives. I was fired for insubordination. I test very high on insubordination, General”.

A Marlowe By Any Other Name

I sat back down and nodded. Chandler’s and Mitchum’s quintessence Marlowe even came with instructions [well, sort of] “Well sure there is, it comes complete with diagrams on page 47 of how to be a detective in 10 easy lessons correspondent school textbook“. I literally jumped for joy – a historical detective! However, easier said than done for I soon learned the field was a crowded one. They called themselves investigative journalists. Some were ensconced at networks and newspapers with full-time staffs, while others were autonomous authors of books and willful writers of articles.

To make a long story short, I hung out my shingle and expected somebody to come in with a case to crack wide-open. I woke up every morning expecting an email which would engage me to weigh in on a whodunit. It goes without saying, of course, those were the days [and nights] I smoked a lot of unfiltered cigarettes and drank too many coffees to count. But still the damsel in distress was a no show. Like Mitchum as Marlowe, I was weary of waiting and leery of loitering only to be stood up.

The great seventeenth century English historian, Thomas Fuller, once wrote: “It is always darkest just before the day dawneth”; how apropos, how exactly right. It was clear that the historical detective thing wasn’t working. Family and friends tried to help by telling me tales of hope, but to no avail, for I was afflicted by the worst of the worst – writers block. Then as if making a mockery of my melancholy, a magnificent miracle made plain. A textbook-like tome titled Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln, as luck would have it, written by a trio of historical detectives, by William A. Tidwell with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy.

One miracle turned into two then, when an investigative journalist, Richard de Mille, and an old source of his, Bernard Stein, contacted me, coincidently, about, of all things, the Lincoln assassination. The difference, as it would shortly be determined, between the five aforesaid gentlemen and I, was that where they saw acts of war, I spotted two historiographical crimes; the Lincoln homicide and the robbery of the Confederacy’s Treasury, with clues to the criminality hidden in plain sight.

A New & Improved Marlowe

Like a retrorocket, a perpetual phoenix rose from the celluloid ashes of Bogart and company, as critics and audiences agreed, Mitchum “walked through the film[s] as though Marlowe’s clothes fit him because he’s lived in them his whole life“. Nobody seemed to care that Mitchum as Marlowe “in his mid-fifties he’s a bit old for gumshoe heroics”, because the consensus opinion was “that just adds to the comfort level”. Maybe perhaps to a negligible degree, nostalgia for the niftiness of 1940s noir fueled the fame of the film[s], but truth be told, Mitchum was applauded by moviegoers as “a better Marlowe than Bogart“.

I’d found the formulae: R & D, prototype, and invention, right? Wrong. In reality, it was at the very least, a reinvention, or a reengineering or a rewiring – as a crime historian. Like recalling one’s first kiss, I’ll never forget my first day on the job. Having sworn off cigarettes and coffee and swapped them for trail mix and spring water, it was time to test if my transition was indeed a real thing. As I flexed my fingers over the keyboard and winked at the white page on the screen, I was startled to see standing before me an eye-catching walk-in.

Enrapturing in a red robe, with an ancient manuscript in her left hand and a medieval trumpet in the right, she looked like the vision she was. Utilizing my newly discovered Marlowe-like powers of deduction I could tell right-away this was no femme fatale. The dreamy, dare I say it, dame declared herself then to be Clio. She said she had eight sisters: Urania, Terpsichore, Thalia, Polyhymnia, Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, and Calliope. The Hollywood press dubbed them “the divine deities of Rodeo Drive”. They were, of course, the nine daughters of that celebrated California [Mount Olympus] couple with clout; Zeus, “the movie-making mogul from Marin County”, and his wife, Mnemosyne, “the goddess of Beverly Hills”, of the Olympian family with the same name, fame and fortune.

I finally found the words to ask how I could help her, and she stated that I had it backwards she was there to help me complete the book about the two crimes of the nineteenth century. Clio stayed with me all the way until the day it was done. When I awoke, at my desk after falling asleep in my chair as usual, she was gone. The only thing she left behind, on the sofa where she had sat for months, was the ageless manuscript she’d kept by her side the whole time, along with a handwritten note: “Apologies but I took the liberty of exchanging one of the two copies you printed out of your finished manuscript for one of my own as a reminder of our time together. It is my hope you always think of it as a very fair trade.” I sat down to read it, however, it wasn’t long before I burst out laughing, due to the fact that each and every single one of its age-old pages was blank.

Sources:

âÂ?¢ Boorstin, Daniel Joseph. The Historian: “A Wrestler With The Angels”. Ã?© The New York Times. September 20, 1987. [Note: Johan Huizinga b.1872 – d.1945 Dutch historian who coined the phrase “wrestling with the angels”]

âÂ?¢ Boorstin, D.J., Hidden History: Exploring Our Secret Past. Ã?© Harper & Row 1987. [Boorstin b. 1914 – d. 2004 was the 12th Librarian of Congress]

â�¢ Wood, Gordon Stewart. The Purpose Of The Past: Reflections On The Uses Of History �© Penguin Press 2008. [Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University]

âÂ?¢ Lepore, Jill. Just The Facts, Ma’am: Fake Memoirs, Factual Fictions, And The History Of History Ã?© The New Yorker dated: March 24, 2008. [Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and chair of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University].

â�¢ Hayde, Michael J., My Name Is Friday. �© Cumberland House 2001. pp 72-73.

â�¢ Chandler, Raymond. The Raymond Chandler Omnibus: The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window & The Lady in the Lake. �© Modern Library 1980.

â�¢ Chandler, Raymond; Hiney, Tom & MacShane, Frank, editors. The Raymond Chandler Papers, Selected Letters, and Nonfiction 1909-1959. �© Hamish Hamilton 2000.

Note: Cold Case: Wrestling Angels, Demons & Writer’s Block was entered in to the National Gallery of Writing hosted by the National Council of Teachers of English on July 8, 2011