When The Big Boys From The East Got Their Wanting Habits On-A Saga From The Files of Ace Private Detective Phil Larkin

By Lawrence Parker

The popular best-selling private detective writer Max Bloom says that Ray Chandler mostly got it all wrong back in the 1930s when Private Detective Phil Larkin landed the Sternwood case which made his nut for a long time. Maybe too long as it turned out because after some early successes he fell under the bus, wound up doing repo and key-hole peeping work for some sleazy Post Street agency and then as go-fer for the rising star Sheila Graham over on Bay Street when his star got pulled down in San Francisco. But that was later, later when the shades got pulled down tight. What Max, what Max told me okay, was from the days when Phil was the rough justice windmill guy ready to churn up bad guys and sweep the ladies off their feet and into some silky sheets.

A generation ago if I said the Sternwood case all ears would be listening since that was the one where the rich and famous of early Hollywood mixed freely with the gangster element out in California in the days before the boys from the East decided to crash the party and get some sun as well. Phil Larkin who had worked in the Los Angeles D.A.s office before getting the boot for not being able to look the other way when the graft came around for the office still had some friends there. One of them had some kind of connection to the Sternwoods, maybe had done the old man, a retired general among other things, a favor or two and was he was saying thank you. This Sternwood family by the way is yes the same family or at least the old man was who along with silent partners John D, Rockefeller and Jay Gatsby cornered the La Brea tar pits and the rest is history.      

That part Ray Chandler got right but what he got wrong, wrong as rain was what the General wanted Phil for, what chore needed tidying up. Ray tried to chalk it up to the old man needing help trying to figure out what to do about Carmen, his youngest and wildest daughter’s gambling debts-pay and be bled or throw some rough stuff and be done with it. Even Ray admitted that the job if as described was one for a lawyer rather than a brute-like private eye. What the deal really was, and in the end it turned out to be not the General’s play but his equally wild and oldest daughter Vivian’s was to find her husband, a rough trade guy named Rusty Regan out of the IRA and Irish freedom fight so rough trade is right. It looked like she had tried to do the right thing when she decided to divorce him and take up with the legendary gangster Eddie Mars, the guy who ran every racket legal and illegal in Southern California by stepping over everybody else either with his good-looking charms or guns.  Sure it made for a better story if it looked like some old half dead General was looking for salvation, looking for his boon companion Rusty but there you have the skinny.    

Of course Phil took the case, he needed the dough, needed to work the case for twenty-five and expenses a day. Figured to ride the carousel for a month or two, come up empty and make a mint for little heavy lifting. Phil, an old-school street-smart guy knew he had to kick around the jams a little so he headed first to see what was what with that gambling debt stuff, see if there were any leads there. The General, or rather the General’s man-servant had given Phil the card demanding the gambling debt repayment with the name of a guy fronting a rare books operation out of Sunset Boulevard. An operation which had to have had plenty of protection from cops and gangsters alike since even a schoolboy knew back then that “rare books” were a fancy name for pornography, for smut. In this case for the high-end trade, the perverts with dough and no last names.         

That is where Max says Ray got it wrong although how knowing Phil and his thing for the ladies he didn’t know that Phil was not chasing after elderly male perverts and pedophiles to see what they were buying Max did not know. For no known reason once Phil figured the operation out (helped along by a female clerk who was clueless about rare books or anything else for that matter) he decided to confirm what was going on by following some dandy with a book in his arm grabbed from the bookstore. Bingo-smut. And good citizen Phil keeping such stuff off the streets. Reality. Phil went to another bookstore nearby to see if anybody knew what the owner looked like. Bingo-he found a curvy, vivacious bookworm who did and they whiled away the afternoon drinking brandy and whatever waiting for the owner to show. That owner would show but faced a tough night as Phil would find out after following him and his boyfriend to a secluded cottage where the smut was photographed. Photographs which included young Carmen in the buff. Somebody did not like that idea and shot our smut-peddler very dead. It turned out later that this Nancy and his boyfriend were cooking the books against the real boss-one Eddie Mars and found himself in front of a few slugs. So much for cleaning the streets of garbage.    

Max Bloom after reading and reviewing Phil Larkin’s manuscript about the Sternwood case realized exactly what Ray Chandler had done wrong. Not wrong in a literary sense but wrong as to the actual case and its solution which under his guidance the reader was left up in the air with more questions than answers about what was happening. Of course Chandler was writing his lurid detective novels in the 1930s at a time when every crime detection novel had to have some sexual hook into the case if for no other reason than to justify those saucy and sexy front covers with half-naked women in stressful situations to lure the mainly male readers in. In the usual run of the mill story that was the highlight of the event since about sixteen different codes were in play and everything was done by inference and suggestion.

This situation is where Chandler got played false. He, after setting up Phil on the case to find Rusty Regan via some queen rare books dealer named Geiger plays the scene as revenge for broken romance. According to Ray this young stud chauffer named Owen Wilson was all heated up over this hot pants Carmen Sternwood not knowing just how kinky she was and susceptible to any suggestion especially when she was high as the sky on drugs. One night this Owen followed the play to Geiger’s secluded house where Carmen was in the midst of a photo shoot. Bang, bang one stately queen of a Hollywood naughty book seller bites the dust.

Meanwhile a third party, a grifter named Brody connected to the Geiger operation vis his hard as nails girlfriend of the moment, having seen Geiger killed (and been accused of doing the deed himself) having grabbed some photos of Carmen as blackmail bait decided that he could live on easy street by grabbing the load of books and setting up shop for himself. And he almost succeeded, no, the whole set-up was too many moving parts for a small-time hood, a guy who couldn’t put two nickels together at most times. Ray got this part right. Phil caught up with this Brody looking for those Carmen photos which needed to be squashed. After some chatter and a guest appearance by Carmen to claim the photos (and screw things up) Brody saw Phil’s reasoning, gun in hand. Then Brody winds up making his last fatal move by answering his door. Bang, bang one less grifter is around town.

Along the way the reader finds out that young Owen, you remember Owen, got mysteriously washed up to shore after speeding over a guardrail in one of the Sternwood fleet of automobiles. Along the way Phil trailed the guy who he thinks shot Brophy who turned out to be the stately queen of Hollywood’s boyfriend Carl who thought Brody had done his lover (and meal ticket) in. When everybody put their heads together the whole thing looked like nothing but a classic murder revenge cycle with the dip that it involved homosexuals in the big love mix. That is what the coppers spread anyway.

All bullshit, or almost all although Owen was sexually crazy for Carmen and Carl and Geiger were not so closeted lovers.  What Ray missed, maybe others too was that the big boys from the East, the guys with the funny accents and plenty of muscle and firepower had played out the cities on the coast what with their white slave, prostitution, dope, gambling, protection rackets fully developed and needed to expand their operations. California and sun beckoned, wide open territory at least from the scouting reports. The big player in Southern California, the good-looking guy who could handle a gun and starlet at the same time was one Eddie Mars. Eddie who not so coincidentally was Geiger ‘s protection against coppers and interlopers alike. Let Geiger run the smut and rake in the dough while he provided some of the “models.”     

                     

When the big boys headed west, when they sent guys like Owen Wilson also known as the Boogie Kid which if Mars had known earlier might have saves some grief, their first target was the soft underbelly of the illegal trade-smut. This is why whatever feelings Owen developed for Carmen on the job he was sent West and found out that she was connected with Geiger who was the max daddy of the smut operations right out on Sunset Boulevard. Geiger had to go, and he went leaving for a short enough time room for a classic grifter like Joe Brody to get his fingers on the goods. Thinking he would run the easy street racket. Not knowing that the big boys were in town to start their work. Bang, bang Joe Brody farewell. What Joe didn’t know, and what his killer, Geiger’s boyfriend, Carl who actually wasted Joe had been sent out by those same big boys to soften up Geiger with his predilection for the odd and kinky stuff. They had originally thought they could use Geiger as their front, for a while but no go. With this description you know a soft shoe like Eddie Mars is going to find himself in the Pacific Basin in the not distance future. A lot different story than that romance noise Chandler bought into.  

       

Of course Phil Larkin had his own axe to grind, was protecting himself and that Vivian Sternowood he got tied up with for a while. They might have been married but at least they shacked up together for a while so there is that. Then there is the shadowy role, the not quite legal role Phil played in covering for Carmen around the Rusty Regan matter we all found out (via Phil’s memoir or the police files) was so much noise once it was clear that Regan was some kind of emissary from the big boys in the East. Letting Carmen take the slight fall for the death satisfied everybody. With all that, even the murk, everything falls into place better. It is easier to understand that this was nothing but a death knell for one Edward Mars late of Santa Monica shores. Why although everybody knows Bugsy, Lucky, Woody in the criminal pantheon out west Mars has disappeared from that history.     

The toughest thing Phil had to do once he figured the big move from the East was gaining an ally to find Rusty for the old man. Hot pants Carmen was out of the question so the logical choice was Vivian, after all she had been married to the renegade IRA commando. That was not as easy as it seemed since Eddie had for his own reasons mostly to get in with the old-line Sternwood crowd, let Vivian run up some serious gambling debts on her own and it was only after Eddie did a slow-burn double-cross letting her win one night on his off-limits casinos and then had one of his henchmen try to rob her outside the joint. Which would have happened if it wasn’t for Phil eagle-eyed intervention. So Vivian sees the light, or begins to.   

The main drag from there between Phil and Vivian is to keep Carmen out of the clutches of the coppers over what seemed to be Carmen’s murder of Rusty. That dog bone is what kept Vivian deep-tied to Eddie for so long not knowing that the big boys had Eddie earmarked for the Pacific Basin when they thought (correctly as it turned out) that Eddie had his big fingers in that death. Nobody in New York City, Brooklyn, Hoboken or Newark was going to shed tear number one if Eddie went down for the Rusty killing or because he got in the way of what the big boys were trying to muscle into. In short Eddie was one doomed mother.    

Here's the play on how Eddie went down in the end. Somehow that female clerk at Geiger’s storefront, the one who played footsies with the late Joe Brody found another daddy, a small time second-rate private eye with fewer brains than desires. That two-bit punk played emissary from the witch because she knew exactly where Eddie Mars’ wife was holed up. Eddie had the bright idea to cover tracks by putting his wife in cold storage and letting everybody think she had run off with Rusty. That two-bit private eye wasn’t as brittle in the end as one would have thought, as Phil thought. In any case Phil got the address. Although maybe he should not have wanted it since by the time he had gotten there the big boys’ agents had rubbed out Eddie’s small army. Eddie’s wife got away in the cross-fire with Vivian’s help.  The big boys got to Eddie and his two-so-called bodyguards and Eddie Mars left no trace of his small time Southern California criminal operations. (From Eddie’s perch new-found boss of bosses Bugsy branched out to very lucrative Vegas).