“Oh!” Dodd moaned. “Oh-oh!” He looked reluctantly down at the paper the waiter had given him and read: “You are herewith informed that you have been named defendant in a suit instituted...”
“Dodd!” Meekins said. “When am I going to see you again?”
“At ten A.M. on May 7th,” Dodd answered bitterly. “In Department A of the Superior Court.”
John D. Macdonald
(1916–1986)
Ask any aficionado of hard-boiled and noir fiction to compile a list of its best writers in the 1940s and 1950s, and chances are that John D. MacDonald’s name will not be on it. Despite his pulp origins and the numerous paperback originals he wrote, MacDonald’s work is generally considered to be upscale and literary, rather than wholly in the mean-streets tradition. Yet many of his stories for Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and other pulps are distinctly hard-edged, peopled with men and women who are anything but upscale. Two-thirds of the contents of The Good Old Stuff (1982) and More Good Old Stuff (1984), his two collections of pulp stories, fall into this category. His first novel, The Brass Cupcake (1950), is nothing if not a noir tale, as are The Damned (1952), Soft Touch (1958), One Monday We Killed Them All (1961), and several other nonseries novels; so are the early Travis McGee novels, most notably the first, The Deep Blue Goodbye (1963), and Darker Than Amber (1966). The latter title, in fact, has one of crime fiction’s hardest and most evocative opening sentences: “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.”
“Nor Iron Bars” is vintage MacDonald in more ways than one: the story was bought in 1946 by his first editorial mentor, Babette Rosmond, shortly after MacDonald returned from his World War II military duty, and it appeared in the March-April 1947 issue of Doc Savage. Brief though it is, it is hard as nails; and it would be difficult to find a tougher — or more human — character in any pulp story of the period than Sheriff Commer.
B. P.
Nor Iron Bars
(1947)
The appearance of Sheriff Commer’s hand as he sat in the office of the jail told as much about him as most people who had lived in that little Southern city all their lives had learned. It was a square heavy hand with a thatch of brown curling hair on the back and short knobbed powerful fingers, tanned by the sun and wind, yellowed by the constant cigarette. He sat listening to the angry crowd noises, yelling for Burton, roaring from the park across from the jail, his thumb and first finger clenched so tightly on the short butt of his cigarette that the damp end of it was only a thin brown line.
He glanced down at his hand propped against the side of the oak desk and marveled that his fingers didn’t tremble; secretly he always wondered at it. He respected and admired the independent nervelessness of his body, the way his brain could whirl in a mad haze of fear, his throat knotted, his heart thumping, and still his body, huge, ponderous and powerful, would go about its appointed tasks, with steady hands, calm eyes, quiet voice.
He kept safely tucked back on a secret shelf of his mind the thought that one day the body would break, the frenzied mind would have its way; and he would collapse into a quivering hulk, moaning over the imminence of pain and death.
The swelling roar of the lynching crowd faded from his conscious mind as he remembered the bright afternoon long ago when he had walked out of the group surrounding the Otis barn, walked steadily across the dark timbered floor, climbed slowly and heavily up the ladder until his head was above the floor of the loft, turned slowly and looked with chill impassivity into the crazed eyes of Danny Reneta. The only objects he saw in the dim hay-fragrant loft were those two shining eyes and the round vacant eye of the rifle which stared at him with infinite menace.
The room seemed to swing around him in a dizzy cycle of remembered fear as he recalled how he had calmly said, “Now, Danny. Better give me the gun,” had slowly reached out with a hand as firm as a rock and grasped the muzzle of the rifle.
The two insane eyes had stared into the two calm ones for measureless silent seconds until Commer thought he would drop screaming down the ladder.
Then a great rasping sob had come from Danny’s throat and Commer had pulled the rifle out of the nerveless fingers.
Now he dropped his cigarette butt on the stained floor and ground it out with his heavy heel while that incident faded with the others from the dark place in his soul.
He rose slowly to his feet, walked over to the window, stood and looked out into the park, saw dimly the shifting, growing crowd, heard the increased roar as they saw his bulky silhouette against the office light. He half-sneered as he realized who they must be: The drug-store commandos. The pool room Lotharios. The city’s amateur Cagneys.
But he felt also the slow certain growth of fear, an ember threatening to ignite the ready tinder of his mind. He realized what a lynching would mean to him and to the city. It would kill his pride and self-respect more certainly than the impact of lead would kill his stubborn body.
He sighed, trying to shrug off his fear, walked to the desk and brought out two large official thirty-eights. He held one in each hand and looked at them then tossed them back into the drawer, slamming it shut with his chunky knee. He fumbled in the wall locker and brought out a submachine gun. He held it and looked down at it, looked at its shining, oiled efficiency, fingered the compensator, tested the slide and then stood silently, testing his strength against the smoldering ember of fear.
He grunted as he stooped and hauled two heavy drums of fifty shells each out of the bottom of the locker. He snapped one onto the gun and then walked back toward the cells, the gun dangling from one blunt hand, the drum clenched in the other.
At the door of Burton’s cell he laid the gun and drum on the floor, unlocked the cell and walked in. The hanging bulb made harsh light and blocky shadows in the cell. Burton slid off the cot and made quick short steps backward until he was pressed against the far wall, his huge black hands pressed palm-flat, fingers spread, against the whitewashed concrete, his face a shining impassive mask except for the wide eyes, dark iris rimmed with white. He was straight and tall, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, a graceful and living creature, shocked and helpless under the pressure of the threat of sudden, violent death.
Commer stood for a few minutes looking at him, expression calm, eyes friendly. “Got a feeling you didn’t do it, Burton,” he said. “You look like a good boy to me.”
Burton licked his lips, the glaze of fear fading slightly from his eyes as he answered, “I swear to God, Sheriff, I didn’t do it. I ain’t a killin’ man. I hear em yellin’ out there like they goin’ to come in and get me any minute. Don’t let ’em do it. Don’t let ’em do it!” The last few words were a sob.
“Whether they come in or not depends on you, Burton.”
“On me, sir? On me?” His tone was incredulous.
“That’s right. Can I trust you?”
“Yes, sir. I do anything you tell me.”
“Would you run away if you had the chance and knew I didn’t want you to?”
Burton stood silently. Then he said, “No, sir.” Commer believed him, believed him because of the pause, the weighing of loyalty against the fear that he could almost see in Burton’s eyes. The man hadn’t answered too fast.