From Murder Ink: Hardboiled vs. Cozy, with Stage Directions

When MURDER INK was published, Marilyn Stasio was about a decade away from taking over as the New York Times Book Review’s mystery critic, and was still working at Cue Magazine as its theater critic. She was also still married to Richard J. Hummler, a longtime theater critic and editor at Variety (with an interstitial period as theater producer Alexander Cohen’s head of development) who died in 1990 at the age of 47. For this book the then husband-and-wife team cooked up a theater scene that, while somewhat dated, still resonates frighteningly true for those who delight in endless debates on the merits of hardboiled vs. cozy fare. And so, after the jump, read the script for A SLIGHT DEBATE: A Hard-boiled Fan and a Country-House Fan Discuss the Genre.

Scene: A breakfast nook in an upper-middle-class suburban American home. A married couple, MIKE and MARGERY, face each other across a glass breakfast table.

MARGERY

Christie.

MIKE

Chandler.

MARGERY

Marsh.

MIKE

Who?

MARGERY

Ngaio.

MIKE

Oh, right…the New Zealander.

(Sucks in gut.)

Spillane. (Pause. Lasciviously.) Mickey.

MARGERY

I’m simply not going on with this if you won’t behave decently.

(Pause. They glare at each other.)

MIKE

Ross Macdonald.

MARGERY

That’s better…Margery Allingham.

MIKE

(Unbuttons his shirt collar and wrenches his tie away from his neck. Grins.)

Walker.

MARGERY

(Looks away from him nervously as she straightens the tea cosy.)

Who?

MIKE

Francis X. Walker, sweetheart. Detroit. His detective is Mickey Reilly.

MARGERY

Hardly in the premier rank, I’d say. (Pause) Michael Innes. No — make that P.D. James. (Pause) I’m saving Innes.

MIKE

Gores.

MARGERY

(Pause) Are you making yours up?

MIKE

(Rolls up his shirt sleeves and slams his elbows on the table.)

Joe Gores. Nobody you’d know, baby. Just one of the greatest detective novelists in American crime fiction.

(Margery rattles her teacup ominously.)

MIKE

Don’t gimme that, Maggie. Just because Gores writes about real people killing other real people for real reasons, instead of effete Oxford dons knocking each other off with African blowguns, doesn’t mean you have to turn your nose up.

MARGERY

You’ve dribbled egg on your chin. (Sniffs.) Maybe I should have cooked it hard-boiled. (Opens her newspaper – the London Observer – and screams.)

MIKE

(Slams down the Daily News.) What the —

MARGERY

John Dickson Carr died.

MIKE

(Pause) Who?

MARGERY

You must be joking. He is the master mystery craftsman of the century. His books are the ne plus ultra of the locked-room genre.

MIKE

(Lights a cigarette, blows the smoke in her eyes.)

Figures.

MARGERY

And what is that supposed to mean?

MIKE

Only broad I know gets so worked up when some academic pedant kicks off.

MARGERY

(Picks up her knitting and begins to work the long needles savagely.)

And when Mickey Spillane dies, I suppose you won’t disappear into some bar for a week of sodden grieving.

MIKE

(Crumples his empty Lucky Strike pack and tosses it into a plate of cold kippers.)

Listen, sweetheart — maybe guys like Parker and Stark have never seen the inside of a cathedral close, but they tell it like it is, not like it was.

MARGERY

Name me one who writes with the literary erudition of Nicholas Blake. Or the wit of Edmund Crispin.

MIKE

(Sullenly.) Raymond Chandler.

MARGERY

(A hoot of contempt.) And I supposed that John D. MacDonald is a better writer than Michael Innes.

MIKE

Okay, so that’s how you want to fight?

(Pause. He spikes his orange juice with a shot of Jack Daniel’s. She winces.)

MacDonald at least tells a good story. Those English biddies you read – you can’t even follow the plot if you don’t have a Ph.D In Etruscan funerary statuary.

MARGERY

(Smiles grimly over her knitting.)

Any intellectual demand beyond the size of a women’s bra cup is utterly beyond the mental capacities of your heroes.

MIKE

(Stands up, grabs his coat.)

Let me put it this way, Maggie. SHUT UP!

MARGERY

Why is it, every time we have this discussion, you retreat into macho petulance? (Pause) Are you really going to wear that filthy trench coat to the office, Michael?

MIKE

Now, don’t go giving me that macho stuff again. A little normal sex is healthier than all those repressed vicars and inbred toffs sitting around doing crosswords in the drawing room. (Lurches over to hear. Grabs her knitting.)

And when you stop wearing riding tweeds and those damned English brogues, then you can start telling me how to dress…sweetheart.

MARGERY

(Nervously.) The sense of societal…uh…communality does get a bit thick with some of the older writers, I admit…

(Fortifies herself with another sip of tea.)

But the familial social structure has a distinct advantage, I should say, over the blatant fascism of your lone-wolf avengers. (Pause) More tea?

MIKE

Buncha chinless snobs…(Pause.) Coffee.

MARGERY

(Sweetly.) I don’t suppose you’ve ever analyzed the latent misogyny of the blood-and-guts brigade?

MIKE

(Gives his coffee a blast of Jack Daniel’s)

Don’t get sarcastic with me or I’ll shut a drawer on your fingers.

MARGERY

George V. Higgins, I believe. (Pause) And I suppose Travis McGee isn’t a closet queen?

MIKE

(Mumbling.) Buncha chinless snob faggots!

MARGERY

(Furiously butters a scone.)

Adolescent mentalities attempting to compensate for their own impotence.

MIKE

(Getting more incoherent)

Lester Dent…Henry Kane…

(Reaches for the bourbon bottle; knocks it over.)

MARGERY

Sexual sadists!

MIKE

(Draws himself up)

I’m warning you, baby…

MARGERY

(Wildly shreds watercress.)

You want to destroy it all – the puzzle, the pace, the atmosphere, the literary clues.(Pause. Sobs.) The compound-complex sentence.

MIKE

(Draws a gun from his trench coat pocket.)

No jury would ever convict me.

MARGERY

Do you smell that souffle in the oven? (Pause) It’s your first edition of The Big Sleep!

MIKE

That does it sweetheart.

(He shoots. She falls across the table, scattering the watercress.)

MIKE

Thirty-eight caliber automatic. Makes a nice clean hole. Not too much blood. (Pause) She never did like blood.

(He grabs his throat. Slumps back in his chair.)

MARGERY

(Weakly.) Potassium Cyanide. Two grains. Chemical symbol: KCN. Crystalline salt with the following properties: colorless, soluble, poisonous. (Pause) Used in electroplating.

(She dies.)

MIKE

I won’t play the sap for you, angel.

(He dies.)

END