Free Kill Your Darlings by Max Allan Collins Page A

said, getting back on the track of an earlier train of thought, “
Noir
’s a slick little ’zine and Gorman’s getting his books into Dalton’s and Walden’s and other outlets, so I keep nudging him to do something on a bigger scale with my little baby. But he doesn’t.”
    “He’s a man of vast imagination; some people see a sunset and just see a sunset—Gorman sees a sunset, and belches.”
    She nodded. “That’s Gregg. He’s a paternalistic little shit, is what he is, making passes at me every chance he gets.”
    “That’s not something I want to hear about while I’m eating.”
    She waved a hand that had a little catsup on it. “Don’t worry, Gregg’s too much of a coward for there to be any gory anecdotes behind what I said. Fortunately we live half a continent apart and get together only rarely, and his come-ons are restricted primarily to the phone. But that’s bad enough, believe me. He comes on to me in the sleazy, chauvinistic way that went out with Gat Garson.”
    I’d put Roscoe Kane’s death almost out of mind, for a few minutes; her flip remark brought it back to me, and my face must’ve shown it, because she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t in very good taste, was it? With Roscoe Kane dying last night and everything. I just could never read those stupid books, frankly.”
    A wall came up between us.
    “I loved those books,” I said. A little coldly.
    She didn’t pick up on the coldness. “That’s just ’cause you’re a man. You grew up in the ’50s, and that was your era, and it hits you in a way that just goes right past me. I look at those macho private eye books and my stomach turns the corner, y’know?” She noticed the catsup on her hand and kissed it off; an unconsciously sexy little move. Seeing her do that, I would have hada hard time not warming back up to her. Which proved I was the chauvinistic boor she apparently suspected me of being.
    Or did she?
    “See,” she was saying intensely, her dark eyes looking at me with a naïve sophistication, “your books are worlds apart from that tough-guy tripe. Your hero is sensitive. He thinks of women as persons, not sex objects... he sees women as...” And she looked upward for the word; while she did that I studied the word
Noir
. “... existential beings trapped in the same absurd world as he is. Don’t you agree?”
    I raised my eyes, if not my consciousness. I smiled at her. “Completely. Does this mean separate checks?”
    She stopped and her face was a blank for a moment, and then one of her repertoire of wry smiles found its way to her face, and she said, “I sound like a pretentious jerk, don’t I?”
    I shrugged. “You sound like somebody who writes reviews for
Noir
.”
    “Is there a difference?”
    “That depends,” I said, placing tongue firmly in cheek, “on whether you’re praising G. Pompous Donaldson, or me.”
    She shook her head, the smile shifting to one side of her face. “How a writer as sensitive as you can dislike Donaldson, and deify Kane, is beyond me.”
    “The last time anybody called me sensitive was when I got my flu shot. And how somebody as insightful as you can fall for Donaldson’s bombastic claptrap is beyond yours truly, Johnny Dollar.”
    “Huh?”
    “Old radio show. You’re too young to remember it, and too literary to have heard of it. Listen, Donaldson’s guy is named Keats—a private eye named after a poet! Gimme a break!”
    “That’s no more pretentious than calling your hero Mallory. That’s a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, and
Morte d’Arthur
, I assume. Linking your hero to knights, rather obviously.”
    “Like hell! It’s my name!”
    “Oh. Well, why do you only use one name? You’ve got a first name, don’t you?”
    “People call me Mal.”
    “But that’s short for ‘Mallory.’ What’s more pompous than signing your work with one name?”
    “Using a first initial, a middle and last name; or, God forbid, three names! Look, I have a first