Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Not In Novak's House

For those of you history buffs out there the name E. Howard Hunt should bear some signifigance.  He was one of the journalists who went to prison over  the Watergate Conspiracy, but before history recorded him as a scoundrel and a crooked reporter, Hunt was a successful novelist and wrote several  crime stories and political thrillers.  I came across one of them while scavening the book rack at a Big Lots in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.  Titled House Dick (mind out of the gutter, you), it's the story of Pete Novak, the resident house detective in an upper-crust Washington, D.C. hotel.

Pete is called in to investigate the theft of ninety thousand dollars of jewels from Julia Boyd's room.  Julia is married to Chalmers Boyd, a man who  claims to be very influential in his home state of Maine.  Due to Julia's obesity and her nervous condition, Chalmers has hired the enigmatic Doctor Bikel to attend to his wife's health.  Chalmers tells Pete that there wasn't any theft and that Julia was having a spell, which leaves our hero confused and wanting to know more about this strange trio.

Down the hall from the Boyd's, Pete runs into Big Ben Barada and the former Mrs. Barada, Paula Norton, who is the blonde-haired, gray-eyed femme  fatale of the story.  When Pete hears Ben working Paula over, he uses his pass key to bust in and take Ben down...but our hero soon regrets this decision  when Paula points a .25-caliber pistol in his kidneys and tells him to split.  "Lady, in case you didn't notice, the guy was beating you up," Pete points out as he leaves.  Soon, Paula calls Pete back to her room and explains that Barada wanted money, which she came to D.C. to pick up.  When the house dick  asks Paula how much money she's collecting, she responds with the shattering "Ninety thousand dollars."

And with more nuance than he's given credit for, Hunt draws you into House Dick and never lets you go.  His prose is the epitome of hard boiled crime fiction, and the dialogue sounds exactly like the movies that were playing during that period.  Pete is probably the best example of crime fiction's over-played stereotype: the smoking, drinking, tough-as-nails private eye, but Hunt uses this to his advantage and creates a detective who gets in over his head in something that he knows isn't going to end well.  The really entertaining part is watching Novak struggle with himself as to what he should or  shouldn't do and how far he'll go for Paula, or Julia, or any of the other characters in the book.

One of the more interesting aspects of House Dick was trying to place where I had heard Pete Novak's manner of speech before.  His cadence was so  familiar to me, and yet I couldn't place it until about the middle of the book, and then it hit me--Pete Novak sounded an awful lot like Humphrey Bogart,  the infamous Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon and Rick Blaine of Casablanca fame.  And it wasn't just his speech pattern that drew me to this conclusion, either; it was the way Novak thought, the way he moved, the way he felt.  Everything played out like he'd been modeled after Bogart, and once  I started picturing Novak as Bogart, the book became twice as fun and ten times as enjoyable.

E. Howard Hunt may not be remembered by anything else but his involvement in Watergate for years to come.  However, if you pick up a copy of House Dick (either the original or Dorchester Publishing's Hard Case Crime reprint), you'll find one of the greatest literary minds of the 1960's at work, and  when he was at the top of his game.  The book does not disappoint on any hardboiled level--the crime, the romance, the mystery, the intrigue, or the  action.  It's hard to find a book like that in these modern times, and even though this tome was written in 1961, I'd like you to pick up a copy, set the Wayback Machine to the old days (and for God's sake, leave Sherman behind), and sit in awe as a great detective, and a great writer, get to work.


--J.S.