Songs in the Key of Death Read online

  SONGS IN THE

  KEY OF

  DEATH

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bankier, William

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Songs in the key of death / William Bankier.

  (Dime crime)

  Some stories were previously published.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77161-073-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77161-074-2 (html).--

  ISBN 978-1-77161-075-9 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A56A6 2014

  C813’.54

  C2014-906155-2

  C2014-906156-0

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permissiosn in writing from the publisher, except by a review who may quote brief passage in a review.

  Pubished by Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 2014.

  Distributed in the United States by Bookmasters (www.bookmasters.com).

  Distributed in the U.K. by Gazelle Book Services (www.gazellebookservices.co.uk).

  MOSAIC PRESS, Publishers

  Copyright © 2014 the estate of William Bankier

  Printed and Bound in Canada.

  ISBN Paperback 978-1-77161-073-5

  ePub 978-1-77161-074-2

  ePDF 978-1-77161-075-9

  Designed by Eric Normann

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for this project.

  Nous reconnaissons l’aide financière du gouvernement du Canada par l’entremise du Fonds du livre du Canada (FLC) pour ce projet.

  MOSAIC PRESS

  1252 Speers Road, Units 1 & 2

  Oakville, Ontario L6L 5N9

  phone: (905) 825-2130

  [email protected]

  www.mosaic-press.com

  VOLUME 2

  SONGS IN THE

  KEY OF

  DEATH

  WILLIAM BANKIER

  Enter the lively and lurid world

  of DIME CRIME!

  Dime Crime is an exciting new series collecting some of the best crime short stories by many of the legendary and overlooked authors in the genre. To learn more about past and future volumes in the series, or details about the authors and their stories, visit the Dime Crime website for details:

  www.dimecrime.com

  Contents

  Songs in the Key of Death: The Fiction of William Bankier by Peter Sellers

  The Choirboy

  Making a Killing with Mama Cass

  The Prize in the Pack

  Silently, in the Dead of Night

  Fear is a Killer

  The Last Act was Deadly

  Songs in the Key of Death

  The Fiction of William Bankier

  by Peter Sellers

  A MAN HEARS A WOMAN OPERATOR’S VOICE ON THE phone and, attracted and intrigued, he makes an appointment to meet her. Three questions spring to mind. What drives a man to ask? What kind of woman responds? And what godawful things are going to happen?

  That basic premise, from William Bankier’s story “Her Voice On The Phone Was Magic”, is typical of his work. Acts committed on whim or on the basis of incomplete or incorrect information lead, invariably, to nightmare. But the characters involved aren’t often given the blessed relief of waking up. At least, not in time. Also typical of Bankier, and evident in that outline, is the recurring theme of relationships as destructive and a breeding ground for all manner of evil.

  Bankier himself is no stranger to acting on a whim. In 1974, having grown as he describes, “incurably dissatisfied with life as it stood”, Bankier and his wife Phyllis packed up their two daughters, packed in his career in advertising, and headed for London where he was to live for ten years, much of it on a cramped houseboat moored on the Thames. Bankier left England after Phyllis’ untimely death. He now lives in West Hollywood with his second wife, editor and gag-writer Felice Nelson. His daughters, Heather and Amy, continue to live and work in London.

  Prior to his move, Bankier had published sporadically. He sold his first story to Liberty Magazine in 1954. A few years later, two horror stories appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Then in 1962, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published “What Happened in Act One”, Bankier’s first professional crime fiction sale. Over the next ten years, he sold seven or eight more crime stories to the major mystery magazines. But once he left the advertising business in which he’d laboured for 25 years and became a full time writer, the floodgates opened. There were over 45 romantic “nurse” novelettes under a variety of women’s names, and a steady stream of increasingly assured crime fiction.

  That assurance has been reflected in Bankier’s status as one of the most frequent contributors to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine over the past two decades; an Edgar Award nomination in 1980; three Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award nominations, and the 1992 CWC Derrick Murdoch Award for his lifetime of achievement.

  Bankier started writing crime stories as a child in his native Belleville, Ontario. “A brother and I used to write a story together often on a Sunday afternoon, one writing a paragraph, the other coming along and reading it and adding the next paragraph. We killed off each other’s characters and left the plot in impossible situations.”

  Decades later and three thousand miles away in LA, the killings continue. And characters are still thrust into impossible situations.

  In Bankier’s world, families aren’t just unhealthy, they’re dangerous. He doesn’t always restrict himself to dysfunctional relationships between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Siblings, as in the deeply unsettling “The Prize In The Pack”, included here, or the wonderfully titled “How Dangerous is Your Brother?”, have their moments, too.

  Titles and first lines are a Bankier strength. Richly evocative, the names of his stories often hint strongly at his underlying themes. “Girls, Like White Birds”, “By the Neck Until Dead”, “Only If You Get Caught”. And the opening lines (“Darius Dolan climbed the iron stairs with another beer for his wife’s lover”) reinforce the menace and the message. Relationships don’t work. Happiness is not a realistic goal. Shocking violence appears when you least expect it.

  Despite the violent death in many of Bankier’s stories, his work is not about bloodshed. His concern is motivation. What drives people to the actions they ultimately take? In stories such as “What Really Happened?” he goes so far as to apply that concern to real life, offering his solution to one of history’s most fascinating murders, the Lizzie Borden case.

  Although he played detective himself in that case (as well as later in “Death of a Noverint”, about the killing of playwright Christopher Marlowe) Bankier has written about detectives only infrequently. Bankier’s sole entry into the detective pantheon is Professor Harry Lawson, known as the “Praw”, a former professional stage magician who specializes in finding people and objects that have disappeared. He, along with his voluptuous wife Lola and her slightly thick brother Al, made his first appearance in “The Mystery of the Missing Penelope” in December 1978. “The Mystery of the Missing Guy”, followed the next year. However, after his third case, “The Missing Missile” in February, 1980, Praw Lawson himself disappeared without a trace. Lawson could possibly have stepped into the guild of detective magicians peopled by the likes of Clayton Rawson’s Great Merlini, but whodunits are neither Bankier’s interest nor his forte. They lie elsewhere: in Baytown, in sports, and in music.

  In the geography of longitude and latitude, Baytown lies on the north shore of the St. La
wrence River, a little less than halfway along the main highway between Toronto and Montreal. In the inner geography of the soul, however, it lies about equidistant between despair and tragedy.

  The people of Baytown are Bankier’s true recurring characters. People who drift in and out of the ongoing series, changing, aging, gaining a promotion or losing their hair, giving the series a ring of truth beyond the emotional, forming a consistent backdrop for the action, occasionally stepping to centre stage. Radio station personality Clement Foy. Sammy Luftspring, the bellboy at the Coronet Hotel. Police chief Don Cleary. Coronet owner Jack Danforth.

  In the Baytown stories, Bankier explores all his recurring themes. And the presence of Baytown colours most of his other fiction as well. A story may take place in Montreal or London or Los Angeles, but chances are at least one of the characters will be from Baytown. Creating unhappiness seems to be the towns’ largest industry; killers its biggest export.

  Many of those characters, whether at home or abroad in the Baytown diaspora, are performers and the action is centered around the arenas in which they perform. Invariably, the arenas are ones in which Bankier himself has held a long and active interest. Amateur theatrics, in which he has been a keen participant, are the basis for this collection’s “The Last Act Was Deadly” but also show up in other tales such as “Rock’s Last Role” and “Is There A Killer in the House?”

  Bankier is an avid sports fan. “A sports watcher,” he says, “not much of a doer.” His particular passion is for baseball, a common theme most notably in the loosely connected Jonathan “Johnny Fist” Fitzwilliam stories. Other sports that come up include boxing in “The Dreams of Hopeless White” where a security guard’s vision of a career in the ring ends in tragedy. Bankier’s Canadian roots show in his use of hockey in “The Missing Missile”, in which the star player of the Montreal Canadiens is kidnapped, which would be sort of like snatching the Pope out of Vatican City.

  Television and ad writers abound. Radio station DJ’s show up frequently. The hero of “Funny Man” yearns to be a stand-up comic. Professor Harry Lawson is a retired stage magician. And then, of course, there are the musicians.

  Ellery Queen once wrote, “No one in the genre writes about music better than William Bankier.” Several stories in this collection bear eloquent testimony to that. Bankier’s life-long love affair with music is reflected in some of his finest work, including his 1980 Edgar Award nominated masterpiece “The Choirboy”. In occasional pieces such as “Murder at the O’Shea Chorale”, the tone is comedic. Most often, however, music forms the soundtrack of a tragedy. Each musical story becoming a song in the key of death.

  The types of music involved, each described with passionate understanding and palpable affection, range from jazz to pop, classical to chorale. “Music has always been important to me... I sang in church choirs for many years...I love jazz and taught myself to play the clarinet and tenor saxophone, but I let them slip. Today, I play recorder by ear. My big number is “I Can’t Get Started”.

  The diversity of Bankier’s stories is as impressive as the output. Humour and suspense, whodunits and character studies, historical recreations and contemporary shock endings. The real mystery is why, with almost 200 stories to his credit, this is the first collection of Bankier’s stories to be published. Welcome then, to the world of William Bankier. A world where nightmare comes silently, in the dead of night. Where the last act is often deadly. Where fear is a killer. Now turn the page and enter a bar where the patrons demonstrate Bankier’s finely tuned ear for the lyrical, almost musical way people speak. Listen and find out what happens in Act One...

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  March, 1995

  Postscript

  On January 10, 1914, William Bankier died in Los Angeles. Behind him, in addition to a career spanning 50 years and hundreds of published stories, Bill also left behind loving family, devoted friends, admiring fans and story fragments, outlines and completed manuscripts intended for publication after his death. Bill was a consummate professional, a witty, charming man and a constantly inquiring mind. Although his output slackened in the last few years, every work he produced maintained the high Bankier standard. His love of music remained, along with his ability to find menace in the mundane and unexpected nightmare in any waking moment. Adios, Bill. You will be missed.

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  August, 2014

  The Choirboy

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June 1980.

  THE MUSICIANS HAD TAPED THEIR TRACKS AND DEPARTED the studio, heading for wherever musicians go in Toronto on a July morning. Now Barry Latchford was alone in the soundproof room, adding his voice to the prerecorded background.

  In the control room, Norman Inch pressed the intercom button. “You’re a disappointment, Barry,” he said.

  Latchford was a sinewy man in his thirties with shoulder length blond hair and a sinister-looking mustache. Padded earphones gripped his head. He wore a striped freight-engineer’s cap to go with his vagabond outfit of leather vest and stovepipe jeans. His boots were army surplus—parachute corps.

  Barry Latchford resembled more a villain out of a spaghetti western than the best singer of TV and radio commercial music in Canada. The drummer on the gig had been awarded the laugh of the morning when he said Latchford looked like a tall angry Muppet.

  When the producer from the advertising agency told him he was a disappointment, Latchford sat erect while a jolt of fear emptied his eyes. “What’s the problem?” He was perfectionist enough to believe that criticism was always justified. Once, years ago, he had become a hermit for weeks, practicing his scales and breathing to be ready for the December night when the choir would perform the Messiah.

  Behind the glass, Inch put a hand on the shoulder of his companion, Steve Pullman, the copywriter. “We were hoping we could stretch this session into an extra day,” he said, his voice booming through the speaker. “But if you keep delivering the goods on the first take, we’ll be on our way back to Montreal tonight.”

  Latchford relaxed. He slipped off the stool, eased the “cans” from his head, and hung them on the music stand.

  “My wife complains about the same thing,” he said. “I’m fabulous but I’m a little too quick.”

  “We’ll hear a playback of everything so far,” Inch proclaimed, “then we’ll buy you a drink.”

  They went into a place near the studio. After drinking and talking baseball for a few minutes, Pullman said to Inch, “Tell Barry the idea. Let’s not waste time.”

  “Mysterioso,” Latchford said, taking an invisible sip of whisky.

  “We write songs,” Inch said dogmatically. “You’ve never heard of us because our commercial success to date has been the square root of nothing at all.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “Come on, you were in the charts with ‘Apple Dreams’ a couple of years ago.”

  “The Canadian charts—and even that was a struggle. I’ve never made it with a pop single in the U.S.”

  “So let’s get together and create some prosperity,” Pullman said. “Tell him the idea, Norman.”

  “The idea is you come down to Montreal and record one of our songs.”

  Latchford could feel remorse rising about him like ground mist in a horror film. God protect him from amateur songwriters. “Cutting a side is an expensive business,” he said in the gloomy voice of a businessman.

  Pullman’s impatience was beginning to peak. “Will you tell him the idea, Norman?”

  “We do it through my company, Inchworm Productions. The recording studio will be Carlo’s—he owes us a couple of favors, so there’ll be no studio charges. As for musicians, we do it on half scale. If the song takes off, everybody gets paid.”

  Latchford looked for a way out. “I’ll have to check it out with Carol. My wife—she’s my business manager.”

  “Do it and let us know as soon as you can.” Inch directed glance
s around the room like a marked man watching out for assassins.

  “Even if you make the record and it’s okay,” Latchford persisted, “you’re only half way there. If the stations won’t play it, you’re dead.”

  “Leave that to me,” Pullman said. “I worked for three years as a DJ at CBAY.”

  “Baytown?” Years ago, on vacation, Latchford had spent an eventful thirty seconds driving through the town.

  “The voice of Crystal Bay,” Pullman intoned, cupping his ear pseudo-professionally. “I know how the hit parade can be rigged.”

  “Providing it’s a good song,” Latchford said. “You can’t sell garbage.”

  “We won’t give you garbage to record,” Inch said patiently. “Be a good boy and check with your wife.”

  Carol Latchford sat at the kitchen table in one of the old cinema seats Barry had bought when the neighborhood Palace gave up and became a block of shops. Four maroon-plush recliners were now bolted to the vinyl floor, two on either side of the low pine table.

  “I think you should record their song,” Carol said. She was drinking beer from a bottle and smoking a thin brown cigarette.

  Latchford was playing around with a wok on the gas stove, throwing in green peppers and mushrooms and slivers of chicken, being a virtuoso chef. “These are two little businessmen from the minor leagues,” he said. “The writer is from Baytown—do you believe that? It’s amateur night.”

  “What are you doing otherwise that’s so important?” Carol was a short plump woman in her late twenties. She had a pussycat mouth, a turned-up nose, and green eyes with brows that arched in permanent astonishment. If faces had to be assigned countries, hers was Irish. “Something may come of it. You never can tell.”

  “You don’t know these guys,” Latchford insisted.

  “Take me to meet them then,” she said, finishing her beer, dropping the empty bottle into the case on the floor at her feet and flicking out a full one with a deft backhand movement.