Now and then he got another twinge on his left side, where a bullet had nicked him last month in Philadelphia.That's a line from the opening chapter of Richard Powell's Say It With Bullets, the latest from Hard Case Crime. I read that line and thought, wait a second. Nobody sets a crime scene in the City of Brotherly Love for the fun of it. I'll bet this Powell cat was from Philly...
And sure enough, a couple of Google queries later, I learned that Powell was a son of Liberty City. Born here in 1908, Powell worked at the long defunct Philly Evening Ledger as well as the N.W. Ayer & Son advertising agency, the legendary Philadelphia firm that came up with slogans like "I'd walk a mile for a Camel" and "A diamond is forever." Powell even wrote a novel called The Philadelphian, for Pete's sake. Can you get more hometown than that?
Happy to learn there was another Philly noir great (in addition to Goodis, McGivern and Dexter), I e-mailed Hard Case honcho Charles Ardai to learn more.
Secret Dead Blog: Charles, we've known each other for a while. You know I'm from Philadelphia. And yet you didn't tell me you Richard Powell was a Philly boy? What gives, man? Where's the love?
Charles Ardai: I have the world's worst sense of direction -- also the world's worst sense of place. I can get lost in my own apartment. One consequence is that I never know where friends live, or where authors are from, or where books are set. In fact, I just assume all books are set in New York City. Sometimes it's a sort of subtropical neighborhood with beaches and palapas and such, sometimes it's the part of the Upper West Side known for windswept plains and saguaro cactus. So: I kinda knew on some level of my addled brain that Powell and you were both Philly boys, but...not on the level of my brain that actually does things like "thinking" and "remembering."
SDB: When did you first read Say It With Bullets?
Ardai: I first read Say It With Bullets in 2002. Found myself laughing my ass off. And that's rare. First of all, my ass is quite firmly attached. But apart from that it's just plain hard for a book to make me laugh out loud. A smile here or there, sure. But actual laughter? But here was Richard Powell with his self-deprecating one-liners and wonderful situations (like the scene where the main character just can't pick a bar fight no matter how hard he tries), and I was just gone. It was the reading equivalent of a great old black-and-white Bob Hope comedy.
SDB: Admit it: there's a serious Philly streak in the Hard Case series as of late. Powell's out this month, and then we have Philly native Seymour Shubin's Witness to Myself in April. Edgar nominee Al Guthrie even once visited Philly. Is Philly the most noir city going, or what?
Ardai: Philly Noir. Philly Noir. Hm. I think there may be an idea for an anthology in there somewhere.
SDB: Okay, so maybe not. But it's up there, right?
Ardai: Listen: A few years back, a friend of mine who lived in Philly got mugged on the street and seriously beaten up in the process. Ever since then, I take Philly pretty seriously as a noir city.
SDB: Do you know much about Powell's life? Was it tough tracking down his estate?
Ardai: I know Powell went to Princeton and later worked as an ad agency executive. I know he worked for the US War Department during WWII and as a police reporter. He wrote a series of books about a husband and wife team called Arab (short for "Arabella") and Andy Blake -- also funny, though a bit more dated than Say It With Bullets. And I know he had a daughter, Dorothy. That's pretty much all I know. Fortunately, though we sometimes have to do a lot of work to track down estates, in this case it was simple because I discovered (more or less accidentally) that Powell's estate was handled by the same folks who handle David Dodge's, and we'd already bought one Dodge book.
SDB: Not to beat a dead horse... but c'mon. You have to admit that Philly is the noir capital of the U.S. (excluding New York, L.A., Chicago, Missoula, Seattle, Miami, Baltimore, Skiatook and Poughkeepsie.) Am I right or am I right?
Ardai: Skiatook Noir. Skiatook Noir. Hm.
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