The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [92]
It was, maybe, a week later, that Mr. Brown and I had dinner together at a certain very famous restaurant.
“Pigeons——” said Mr. Brown, meditatively—“I like ’em best with a neat little packet of diamonds fixed under their feathers.”
“Same here!” I said, smiling reminiscently.
I filled my glass.
“Pigeons!” I said.
“Pigeons!” said Mr. Brown, raising his glass.
And we drank.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, with a citation praising “his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” Lewis is not thought of as a crime writer, but he was no stranger to con men. Glad-handing puffery is the hallmark of many of his best known characters, including the businessman who lent his name to Babbitt in 1922, two years after Lewis’s breakthrough novel, Main Street. Evangelist Elmer Gantry was first and last a con artist. Only a few characters here and there, such as the idealistic young research physician Martin Arrowsmith, have much nobility about them.
During the 1920s Lewis cheerfully joined his friend H. L. Mencken in lampooning the ignorance and credulity that marked the heyday of spiritualists, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and the Scopes trial. His books often lack subtlety and depth, but they aimed much-needed spotlights at dark corners of the American psyche—and did so with the kind of naïve glee typical of gaslight crime writers. Babbitt, for example, portrays the law-abiding, business-minded boosters on whom J. Rufus Wallingford preys so successfully.
Lewis’s early tales include many duplicitous and opportunistic characters who were not officially criminals. In “The Willow Walk,” he edges toward Dostoyevsky’s turf, the crisis of conscience. In the best caper-movie mode—and for years Hollywood maintained an option on the story—his protagonist encounters troubles he did not foresee when he was planning his crime. The story first appeared in the August 10, 1918, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and was soon anthologized in Best Short Stories of 1918. In 1935 a Time reviewer dismissed most of the tales in Lewis’s Selected Short Stories as “long-winded and mechanical,” except for “his brilliant ‘The Willow Walk,’ a first-rate story in any company.”
THE WILLOW WALK
From the drawer of his table-desk Jasper Holt took a pane of window glass. He laid a sheet of paper on the glass and wrote, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” He studied his round business-college script, and rewrote the sentence in a small finicky hand, that of a studious old man. Ten times he copied the words in that false pinched writing. He tore up the paper, burned the fragments in his large ashtray and washed the delicate ashes down his stationary washbowl. He replaced the pane of glass in the drawer, tapping it with satisfaction. A glass underlay does not retain an impression.
Jasper Holt was as nearly respectable as his room, which, with its frilled chairs and pansy-painted pincushion, was the best in the aristocratic boardinghouse of Mrs. Lyons. He was a wiry, slightly bald, black-haired man of thirty-eight, wearing an easy gray flannel suit and a white carnation. His hands were peculiarly compact and nimble. He gave the appearance of being a youngish lawyer or bond salesman. Actually he was Senior Paying Teller in the Lumber National Bank in the city of Vernon.
He looked at a thin expensive gold watch. It was six-thirty, on Wednesday—toward dusk of a tranquil spring day. He picked up his hooked