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PETE HARRIS
LEARNING THE LINGO: Heaven only knows who the first writer was who tried to capture authentic-sounding dialogue on paper (or a stone tablet, for that matter), Whoever it was--and whenever--writers have been trying ever since to transform into the printed word the sundry ways that people carry on conversations, One of the most notable was, of course, Mark Twain who, in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, attempted to recreate the various dialects encountered along the Mississippi in the mid-19th century, And, Charles Dickens seems to have had an ear for the various idioms of 19th century English society, high and low. In the 1930s and 40s, Damon Runyon wrote an argot that wasn't so much a re-creation as it was a model to be aped by ensuing generations of hoods and would-be hoods. Ring Lardner caught the conversational flavor of ballplayers with rural and small-town backgrounds, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both had a flair for the nuances of lowlife lingo.
The secret of putting the spoken word into print would seem to be selectivity. There is nothing more tiring to read than non-stop idiomatic English, and, for the most part, it's best for writers to use mangled spellings (wuz, sez, etc) as sparingly as possible and let the syntax, or sentence structure, impart the nature of the character doin’ the talkin', Which brings us to Peter Cheyney and his Lemmy Caution novels, Or at least one of his Lemmy Caution novels,
I first became aware of the character as the protagonist of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville, starring Eddie Constantine. And, Steinbrunner and Penzler's Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection mentions the character under the entry for Cheyney. But, I had never read any of the Lemmy Caution books until quite recently when, in my neighborhood second-hand store, I picked up a copy of Cheyney's Poison Ivy for a cool 75 cents, Originally published in '37 (the edition I found was a '53 reprint), Poison Ivy must have seemed like the real thing in the 1930s to mystery readers in England who, no doubt, were deliciously thrilled to be given a glimpse of the American underworld.
With all due respect to British writers, let it be said here and now that over the decades, few have been able to find the handle on American as she is spoke. Everybody from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Ian Fleming has tried and most have failed. They fail, for the most part, because they don't listen or pay attention to the real thing. Among other things, they throw in "I reckon" for "I guess" as in "I guess I better scram outa here," But, none of them was wider of the mark than Peter Cheyney in Poison Ivy, The book is written in the first person (Lemmy Caution speaking) and, as his first and foremost mistake, Cheyney has Caution (ostensibly a U.S. federal agent) talking like a comic book hood, dropping the “d" from absolutely every "and", ‘and generally fracturing the language, There is one unintentionally hilarious moment (or intentional for all I know) when Caution spots the femme fatale of the piece and proceeds to set her up as the ultimate in regal feminine sex appeal, Whereupon she speaks, It's as if Norma Shearer suddenly started talking like Iris Adrian.