Richard S. Prather
The Meandering Corpse
1966, Pocket Books
Reading a Richard S. Prather novel is like eating steak while drinking bourbon, smoking a cigar and playing with a loaded gun as you place a long-shot wager on a boxing match. There’s nothing healthy going on here. You don’t learn anything. You didn’t get here by following good advice.
No, all that these books have going for them is that they’re crackling, fast-paced entertainment and that’s that. They’re from a time when trash was trash and no one, neither the writer nor the audience, ever needed to apologize for it. No one came to these books looking for a message.
It’s a contrast to today, when ALL entertainment is burdened with providing a message and weighed for politics. Oh, we still love trash in 2018, but we won’t ADMIT that we love trash. Uh-uh, no way. Our time is valuable and we all want to be the smartest cookie on the internet. So what we do is over-explain the trash that we love until it comes off like something that it’s okay for smart people to like. Superhero movies are social statements. Zombie films are political dramas. Kinky sex novels are feminist proclamations. We can’t just be entertained. That’s not enough. We need to soak in essential nutrients all of the time (or make a big deal about it when we feel that the work isn’t putting forth a positive message).
A lot of media criticism today reads like it was written by a brain in a jar. Even with the freedom of the internet, I’m not seeing a whole lot of people who are willing to admit that they enjoyed a sex scene for no other reason than that it was just a great sex scene.
But I digress…
Richard S. Prather found his calling writing a small mountain of novels about the misadventures of private detective Shell Scott and his world of cartoonish crooks and full-breasted women. What makes Prather great is his sense of humor. He wrote at the furious pace of a hack, but he’s not a hack. He’s hilarious.
Shell Scott is a tall, lean, scarred ex-Marine with a conspicuous white buzz-cut. He has a weakness for women and liquor and the whole swinging bachelor lifestyle circa the 1950s and 60s. And he’s also imperfect. He bungles things. The bad guys get the drop on him all of the time. He screws up royally and he knows it, relating it all with some embarrassment via his sardonic narration. He’s not Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. The only reason why he lives sometimes is because he’s one lucky fucker.
I guess that’s a commentary on masculine fallibility, a setting up and then knocking down of the tough guy hero… but I think that Prather was just trying to be funny. And perfect people aren’t funny.
Anyway, this late novel in the series brings all of its crucial elements (Prather was nothing if not reliable). It’s the one about the new gang that arrives in Los Angeles with intentions of killing off the city’s big crime kingpin, Cyril Alexander, a man hated by Shell Scott. So, why is Shell Scott on the case to protect him? Because Alexander’s extremely unshy 17-year-old daughter, Zazu, shows up at Scott’s apartment with a trench coat on and ripped clothes hidden underneath, threatening to cry rape if he doesn’t. To Prather, it’s a sexy and comical scene. (“She’d torn the bra apart in the middle, and I could see part of its lacy pink cloth bunched beneath one of the big rips in her blouse. One big, firm breast was halfway out into the room. Way out into the room,” as he delicately puts it.)
Many hi-jinks follow as Scott struggles to keep his head above water working on a case he doesn’t want with people who don’t want him around. He gets beat up, shot at and targeted by every by gangster in the city. Along the way, he forgets to load his gun on an unfortunate day to do that, makes clever use of a news crew helicopter and verbally spars with Zazu again, this time while she swims stark nude in her private swimming pool at her family’s blood money-bought estate. The highlight is the rampagingly absurd six-page chapter in which Scott crashes a well-attended funeral and has to swipe the body from the coffin in full-view of all. The time duration of the chapter is mere seconds, but Prather runs it in slow-motion, describing every muscle move, twitch of the nerve and thought in Scott’s head so vividly that you’d think Prather had done that sort of thing himself before.
This is a slimy, sleazy book with no redeeming social value, and hooray for that.
Though these books sold well in their day (over “40,000,000 Shell Scott books sold!”, boasts the cover), they have not stayed in print. There are no film adaptations. No recent reprints of which I’m aware. If you have a copy of a Prather novel, it’s probably at least fifty years old. They are buried in the past, but not too deeply. Copies are affordable. I don’t think I’ve paid more than $3 for one. If you know a used bookstore that maintains a vintage paperback section, Shell Scott and Prather and his mobsters and buxom temptations probably lurk somewhere in there, ready to thrill, tease and tickle.