Introduction

When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, I spent a lot of time back in the stacks of the main library at The University of Texas at Austin. It was a wonderful place of small, creaky elevators and the smell of old books. I had a carrel there, and I was supposed to be doing research on various topics for papers in the classes I was taking. I might have done a bit of that, but a lot of my time was taken up by poring over back issues of The New York Times Book Review. I’d become interested in paperback original crime fiction because of my reading of John D. MacDonald, and Anthony Boucher, in his “Criminals at Large Column”, would often include reviews of writers like Charles Williams, Jim Thompson, and Day Keene, writers who were ignored by most of the critics of the time. Another author Boucher recommended was Harry Whittington.

On the weekends I’d leave the library behind and go book hunting in a little store called The Book Stall, where used paperbacks lined the walls and filled the tables between them. It wasn’t long after reading the Whittington review that I picked up one of the very books that Boucher had mentioned: A Night for Screaming. It was an Ace paperback, with one of the best covers I’d seen up until that time. And it was all mine for half price, which came to twelve and a half cents.

I bought the book, went home, and read it in one sitting because, what else could I do? That’s the kind of book it is. Once I picked it up, I really had no choice. I had to race through the pages to find out what was going to happen to Mitch Walker, an ex-cop unjustly accused of murder, who’s fled to a small Kansas town to escape the law. He hardly has time to relax, however, before Fred Palmer, his former partner shows up. Walker’s sure that Palmer would like nothing better than to put a bullet in him, so he slips out of town and takes a job at Great Plains Empire Farms, an establishment that pays the magnificent sum of a dollar a day, except to the prisoners from the county jail. Their labor comes for free. Conditions are brutal. The overseers are more than that, almost professional sadists.

Walker survives the conditions and gets to know the owner of the farm, not to mention the owner’s beautiful wife, both of whom have plans for Walker. Neither, of course, knows the plans of the other, and Walker finds himself caught up in a web of murderous intrigue.

And I should probably say nothing more specific about the plot. There might be times in reading the book when you think you know where it’s headed, but I have a feeling you won’t be right. Whittington throws in several eye-popping twists in the last half of the book, and the first time I read it, I could only grin in admiration at the skill with which he pulled them off.

Here’s what Whittington said about his own abilities as a plotter: “I understood plotting, emotional response, story structure. Fifteen years it took me to learn, but I knew. I could plot – forward, backwards, upside down. It was like being half-asleep and abruptly waking. Never again would I be stumped for plot idea or story line. From the moment I learned to plot, I was assaulted with ideas screaming, scratching and clawing for attention. For the next 20 years I sold everything I wrote.”

What were Whittington’s secrets? One of them was to put ordinary people in terrible situations. Mitch Walker’s an ex-cop, yes, but he’s not much bigger or stronger or faster than anybody else. He sweats and suffers and fears just like anybody else. His pain is real, and so is his desperation. When it comes to desperation, Whittington is the master, and he can dial it up to ten in a heartbeat.

Maybe you’re familiar with Lester Dent’s formula for plotting a pulp story. At least three of its major sections begin with this advice: “Shovel grief onto the hero.” Or some variation thereof. The final one begins like this: “Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.” Dent follows that with this: “Get the hero almost buried in his troubles.” Nearly any of Whittington’s novels is a master class in following that advice. By the time you near the end of A Night for Screaming, you’ll be wondering how anybody could ever escape, and you’ll be zipping through the pages as fast as I did all those years ago.

In fact, I envy anyone who’s reading this book for the first time, especially someone who might be coming to it without having read anything by Whittington before, just as I hadn’t when I first picked it up. I have a feeling you’ll be just like I was when you finish reading it, stunned by the swiftness of the narrative, impressed as hell by the storytelling skill, and ready to go right back to the beginning and start reading again on page one. Even though I’ve read the book several times in the years since that first experience, I still get a tingle from it. Even though I know what to expect, I’m still surprised by some of the amazing twists.

Finally, all I can do is shake my head in admiration at what Whittington is able to do. And not just in this book. Although this is probably my favorite of his works, he does it again and again, in book after book. I hope you share my admiration. I hope you find you like A Night for Screaming as much as I do. And I hope it won’t be the last book you read by Harry Whittington, the King of the Paperbacks.

Bill Crider, December 2013

Contents

Introduction