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Charlie Resnick

A Mysterious Profile

John Harvey

To the memory of two fine professionals, Laurence James and Dulan Barber, without whom it is doubtful Charlie Resnick would ever have existed—and for Marian Wood, who, as my US editor at Henry Holt, was responsible for keeping Charlie, and myself, more or less in line for a good—a very good—ten years. Thanks, Marian.

Charlie Resnick

Charlie Resnick

That I became a writer at all—and that Charlie Resnick, therefore, was brought into existence—was largely due to a series of convenient accidents. You see, I had never harbored any ambitions to be a writer, at least, not a fiction writer, and until the time that my first book was published [Avenging Angel, New English Library, 1975, under the pen name of Thom Ryder] I had made no attempts in that direction: no early masterpieces stored beneath the bed or in an adoring parent’s drawer, no prize-winning contributions to some children’s short story competition. I had, it’s true, both at secondary school and then again at college, edited a couple of student newspapers, gracing them with the occasional review or what I saw as a scathing muckraking expose, but this was journalism, nothing more, nor less, and although, looking back, I’m somewhat bemused to understand why, it had never occurred to me that it might be my profession. No. I was destined to be a teacher, an inspirational—well, I was still young—teacher of English and Drama to whatever hapless 11–18 year olds found themselves seated before me.

The twelfth year of this career found me in Stevenage, a ‘new town’ an hour’s drive north of London, and beginning to feel more than a tad restless. And here, as chance would have it, I resumed close acquaintance with a former college friend, Laurence James, who, sadly, was to die all too early, in the year 2000, when not yet 60. Laurence had been assiduously working his way up in the book trade—firstly as a book seller, then as an editor and, finally, as an author. and was living not far from Stevenage, close enough for me to make frequent visits during which I complained about the nature of my present lot and observed with no little envy the comparatively pleasant life of a full-time writer. Laurence, it seemed—I later learned the truth to be both more arduous and demanding—would rise in his own good time and, after a leisurely breakfast, make his way into his office where he would sit behind his desk for an hour or so before pausing for the first of several coffee breaks that would occur throughout the day. And at the end of each of those days two or three thousand words of manuscript would have been created with apparent ease. No bells sounding at forty minute intervals to announce a new class and a change of lesson, no recalcitrant or obstreperous youths to chivvy along or bully into submission: just your own quiet room with a stereo and coffee machine close to hand and, in Lawrence’s case, an intelligent and lovely wife, who, having shipped the kids off to school, was most likely working on a new novel in a room of her own.

My envy must have been evident for all to see and now, providentially, more good fortune came to my aid. Laurence had been writing a series of rollicking biker books under the name of Mick Norman and his publishers wanted another; Laurence, however, was committed elsewhere. “You want to write something,” he said, “here’s your chance.” Except, of course, I hadn’t really wanted to write anything at all: what I wanted was what I saw as the writer’s life—the cottage in the country, the Volvo, the ability to organize one’s own days. Faced with actually producing anything somebody else might want to read, never mind publish, I gibbered and blanched.

But Laurence was persuasive: he gave me the Mick Norman books to read, helped me to assemble a story line and then a synopsis, sat patiently—well, mostly patiently—alongside me while I rewrote my sample first chapter more than a dozen times. The whole package went to his editor with a strong letter of recommendation and a month or so later [things moved speedily in those far-off days] I was in possession of a contract. All I had to do was provide a manuscript of 50,000 words and the grand sum of two hundred fifty pounds would be mine in return.

Back in Stevenage, still teaching, I worked at the kitchen table of my small flat—holidays, evenings, weekends—and somehow my deadline was met and the finished manuscript shipped off.

Glancing back, it was a strange book, as much about the iniquities of the education system as the roar of marauding Harley Davidsons, but, to my delight and no little surprise, it was accepted and, graced with the near-obligatory jacket photograph of a young blonde woman in an unbuttoned denim jacket astride a motor cycle, Avenging Angel was duly published—along with a contract for second book at fifty pounds more. I was on my way.

One thing that aided my swift elevation to the ranks of published writers was the happy fact that the mid-’70s were a boom time for British publishing, new paperback imprints springing up seemingly overnight and all greedy for product. And because I had entered the world of writing in the way that I had—because to me it was first and foremost an alternative way of earning a living, rather than a sign of any higher literary ambition—I was only too happy to oblige. War books, movie tie-ins, apocalyptic adventure stories, teen romances—during the years of my apprenticeship, all was grist to my mill.

Then there was the day an editor from Transworld phoned me and said, “We’re looking for someone to write a western series. I wondered if you’d be interested?”

One of the publishing phenomena of the period was the success of a western series called Edge, written by Terry Harknett under the pen name of George G. Gilman. In his role as commissioning editor at New English Library, Laurence James—yes, him again—had suggested that Harknett, up to that point the author of middlingly-successful thrillers, try his hand at a new kind of pulp western, violent and sexy, based to a large degree on the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood spaghetti shoot-’em-ups such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and For a Few Dollars More. A brilliant idea which Harknett fleshed out in spades. After a cautious start, sales of each new book in the series were nudging the 100,000 mark, and, not surprisingly, other publishers wanted a piece of that particular pie.

Soon there was a small group of British writers—hacks, as we delighted in calling ourselves—Laurence, of course, Terry Harknett, Ken Bulmer and Fred Nolan, Angus Wells and myself—laboring away at the western cliff face, more often than not sharing joint pen names. Between us, while the boom lasted, our titles must have gone well into the hundreds; before shifting tastes and the changing economic climate caused me to hang up my spurs, I had myself written between forty and fifty books in different series.

That I was suited to this was to no small extent due to my father, who had been a great western fan [Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage was one of the three books forever at his bedside] and while I was growing up he had taken me to see every western movie that played in our particular part of north London. Under his influence, in my early teens I read and re-read many of the Hopalong Cassidy novels of Clarence E. Mulford—what is it about western authors and that middle initial?—and the Buffalo Bill Annual was virtually my bible. With considerable regularity—how did I get away with it so often?—I would skip school and take the Tube into the center of London, the lunch money I had saved bulking out my pockets, and alight at Marble Arch, where, immediately outside the station, a news vendor sold imported American comics—Superman, of course, and Captain Marvel, but, more interesting for me, the adventures of minor western movie stars—Rod Cameron, Alan ‘Rocky’ Lane and Lash LaRue.

So, when it came to it, the frontier background—mythic, and heavily romantic rather than realistic—was well in place. As an example, look at the opening chapter of Cherokee Outlet [Pan, 1980], the first of ten Hart the Regulator books and the only westerns to have my own name, plus the near-obligatory middle initial, on the cover—John B. Harvey, no less.

He was a tall, dark shape coming out of the sun. Shrouded in his own shadow. A man who rode alone.

Like an orange medallion, the sun hung behind him in the afternoon sky. Its light caught the surfaces of misshapen rock scattered on the hill to the north, making them glow red and silver; it shone on the creek water where a whitetail doe drank nervously; it spread the shadow, long and deep, as horse and rider moved slowly to the east.

Wes Hart rode easily, reins resting across the palm of the left hand, the thumb of the right hooked round the pommel of his saddle. The fingers of his hand were spread wide, touching the leather, never far from the pistol that sat snug in its cutaway holster. A Colt Peacemaker .45, the mother-of-pearl grip carved with the Mexican emblem of an eagle holding a snake it its mouth and between its claws.

He was an inch over six foot, wiry under his light brown wool shirt, seeming lighter than the hundred and seventy pounds that had been his weight for thirteen years. His face was lean and stubbled, the high cheek bones strong against his tanned skin. Above them, Hart’s eyes were a faded blue.

Romantic, certainly; one could see Gary Cooper in that saddle, perhaps, or Robert Taylor, Joel McCrea. But the majority of our heroes, men like Jedediah Herne in the Herne the Hunter series I wrote with Laurence James, were darker, closer to extreme violence and despair. Carved from the same unforgiving granite rock as John Wayne’s vengeful character in The Searchers and the Eastwood of the spaghetti westerns, this hero was no longer young, a loner with a tragic and troubled past that had left him imbued with a fierce but melancholic anger and a concern for few lives other than his own. He was, perhaps above all, a man not out of place, but out of time. In some respects he was not dissimilar to the Charlie Resnick to come—you see, I have not forgotten my principal theme and subject—yet in others he was cast from quite a different metal.

I got to thinking about much of the above quite recently, sitting one Sunday afternoon in one of the few London cinemas to maintain a repertory programme, watching for the umpteenth time Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid—a movie about men out of time if ever there was one.

There’s a moment early on when Billy turns to Garrett, his former running mate, now the lawman who has told him to move on, and says, “We had some times, didn’t we?” And this made me think of all the pleasure, the sheer fun the bunch of us hacks had during our years spent churning out cowboy yarns, and also how important films like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Wild Bunch were in forming the vision of the west we had.

Sometimes this was present in the detail—in Cherokee Outlet, for instance, Wes Hart recalls his own first meeting with Billy the Kid, at which the Kid shoots the heads off several chickens, which is a direct reference to the opening of the Peckinpah movie—but more often in the tone and the predicament of the protagonists, who time and again find themselves shut out from a society they know and recognize but which increasingly fails to recognize and accept them.

Inside and yet outside.

Belonging and yet not belonging.

When I began thinking of a central character for the book that was to become the first of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, there were only two things fairly clear in my mind: he would be a policeman rather than a private detective and—somehow—he would both belong to the community he was policing, and yet be outside it. What I needed, and finally found in the groups of shiny-suited men of an indeterminate age who spent their days hanging around the entrance to Nottingham’s Victoria Centre market, was a way of signifying this “difference”. [Yes, sorry, I’d been dabbling in structuralist theory while working for my masters degree in American Studies and it had rubbed off.]

The men were Polish, part of a large community that had settled in the area around the time of the Second World War; in Nottingham there were two flourishing Polish clubs and a large and well-attended Polish Catholic church. If, I thought, that was the close-knit community to which Resnick’s family belonged, then it was not too fanciful to imagine him being brought up in a home where Polish was still spoken, but going to local schools where English with a pronounced Notts accent was the common currency, and with one set of customs and expectations vying with the other.

And his name? What about his name?

A friend in New York of Polish origin had the name Resnick; foreign and yet not too difficult for the average insular Brit to pronounce and understand. And then, suddenly, Charlie leaped out at me and it seemed perfect. Quintessentially English, friendly, unthreatening, approachable, almost—as far as it is possible in England—untainted by class.

Charlie Resnick.

Insider and outsider both.

I remember several long sessions talking about him with the late Dulan Barber, who wrote crime fiction as David Fletcher and supernatural thrillers as Owen Brookes, and was both a generous and unyielding mentor.

Pretty much following the stereotype, I’d decided early on that Resnick would be living alone and that in his past there would be a failed marriage that would be the source, from time to time, of a certain amount of anguish and regret. Anger, too.

“What else,” Dulan asked, “do we know about this man?”

His age, his weight, his taste in music, food, clothes?

In a glib moment, I once described Resnick as being akin to Jim Rockford but dressed like Columbo. As short-hand perhaps it works, though the visual equivalent I had most clearly in mind was that of Sergeant Valnikov, the police detective in Harold Becker’s fine film of Joseph Wambaugh’s The Black Marble. As played by Robert Foxworth, Valnikov is a fairly hopeless alcoholic of Russian origin, prone to nostalgia and self-pity and more often than not dressed in a shabby raincoat, tie askew, hair akimbo. Skip the alcohol, switch Russian to Polish, and the picture that remains is close to the one forming at the back of my mind.

I don’t know if it was Dulan or myself who first came up with the idea of the sandwiches. But, we thought, a man living on his own and who leads a busy professional life would not have a great deal of time to set aside for serious cooking—though there are instances when he performs near-miracles with a few eggs and whatever leftovers the fridge provides. Sandwiches, though, seemed perfect, especially if the ingredients were mostly bought at one or other of the Polish delicatessen stalls to be found in the market, and at which he could conveniently stop on his way back from the coffee stall where he enjoyed his morning espresso.

It was my decision to make him a lover of jazz. [Dulan’s tastes leaned towards high opera and the songs of Richard Strauss, with a strange but understandable penchant for Dusty Springfield.] A long-term listener to jazz myself [and, for a short period, a less than moderate practitioner], I wanted the opportunity to write about the music I knew, to try and give the reader, as far as it can be achieved in words, a sense of what Resnick is hearing when he listens, be it to Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker or whoever, and to describe as accurately as possible the actual sounds. More than that, I hoped I could make Resnick’s sympathy and enthusiasm for the music say something about the man himself; it might suggest—as, in another way, I suppose, do his culinary appetites—an imaginative richness not otherwise apparent. I also wanted, if I could, to draw a connection between Resnick’s appreciation of that listening experience and his understanding of people and their emotions, the things they feel and do.

Writing in the Chicago Sun Times some years ago, the critic Lloyd Sachs was kind enough to state, “One of the things Resnick draws from the music is the ability to sense deeper possibilities in people, criminals as well as victims of crime. Just as he is aware of Lester Young’s hard life producing this beautiful music, he sees people leading difficult lives being able to produce something of worth too. Maybe even something beautiful.”

I fear I was less successful with the cats. I had, it’s true, owned cats at different times in my life [but also harbored, since childhood, a recurring fear of them—see the opening of the first Frank Elder novel, Flesh & Blood (2004), but it was Dulan who was the real cat lover and probably at his instigation that Resnick’s caring nature should be revealed through his treatment of no less than four cats, named after jazz musicians, who function as substitutes for the children his marriage failed to provide. In retrospect, I think they are in danger of being cute and little more and too frequently get under the writer’s feet in their need for attention. From correspondence, however, I know there are readers—mostly female, and mostly, it appears, living in the United States—who will vehemently disagree.

All of the above, however, means that Resnick’s basic characteristics were pretty much in place before I sat down to write Lonely Hearts, as I think is clear from the beginning of chapter four.

The sandwich was tuna fish and egg mayonnaise with some small slices of pickled gherkin and a crumbling of blue cheese; the mayonnaise kept dripping over the edges of the bread and down onto his fingers so that Dizzy twisted and stretched from his lap in order to lick it off. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were doing it through the headphones, making love to music without ever holding hands. Resnick could not stop thinking about the fact that he had lied to Skelton, wondering why.

His marriage had neither been so bad that he had stricken it from the record of his memory, nor so lacking in incident that he would have truly forgotten. Something over five years and she had walked in while he was painting the woodwork in the spare room and announced that she wanted a divorce. Each year of their marriage he had redecorated that small room at the back of their own bedroom in the hope that one day she might walk in with a glow in her eyes and announce that she was pregnant. Why else did he use alphabet wallpaper in primary colours? Why else the paintwork in bright reds and greens?

Or, as one of the characters observes of him earlier on.

He was an overweight man in his early forties, whose narrow eyes were bagged and tired, and who couldn’t find the time to drop his tie off at the cleaners.

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