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  Contents

  Introduction by Bill Crider

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  11

  12

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  15

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Newsletter

  Copyright

  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

  1

  I said it again, and when she realized I’d asked her for a handout, she stared at me as if I were crazy.

  We stood facing each other on the sun-struck main drag in this village that was a careless sowing of shacks and one-story buildings clustered around that phallic symbol of the Kansas plains, the district grain elevator.

  “A quarter? For a cup of coffee?” she said, parroting me, and looking as if she was about to laugh in my face.

  She’d paused when I spoke to her, all right. I’d figured she would stop because like every other woman she’d be curious to know what some man, even a stranger, mumbled at her as she passed him on the street. Anyway, this was rubesville where everybody spoke to everybody else, and she looked like the busty, leggy brand of chick that got spoken to by any man with energy enough to open his mouth, which was just about what I had left.

  The look of controlled laughter and contempt angered me and I said, keeping it cold, “That’s right. A quarter. If you haven’t got it, forget it.”

  Something happened in her face; the taunting smile didn’t falter, and the contempt around her mouth didn’t fade, but I felt her looking me over. She was used to being spoken to, but not in that tone.

  “I’ve got a quarter.” Her voice was even. “But you won’t get it from me by begging.”

  I shrugged. “So good-by.”

  “If you want to work for a quarter, why...” She opened a smart handbag she must have bought in Denver or Kansas City, took out a business card and extended it toward me between polished, manicured fingers. “See my husband at this address.”

  I took the card, dropped it in my shirt pocket without looking at it. “Thanks, if I ever get that hard up,” I said.

  Now she did laugh. She had the arrogant look of the spoiled babe who has learned to take everything that isn’t freely rendered to her; laug
hter didn’t come easy to her unless there was the knife in it.

  “You’re already that hard up, mister. You just don’t know this town. If they arrest you for panhandling, you’ll end up working for my husband for nothing.”

  “Thanks,” I said again.

  “It was nothing,” she said.

  She turned away. When I said, “Very nearly,” she turned, looked straight into my face and laughed again. She was a lovely doll, no use playing that down. She got her arrogance from her certain knowledge of this. It was in her walk, the tilt of her head, the upthrust of her breasts, the curve of her sulky mouth.

  You have to see these rich, young, small-town dames to know what she was really like. They might have come out of a family of migrant workers subsistence farmers, or maybe the bankers’ home. They went to school in these small burgs, growing into something so lush, so luscious that every woman hated them and every man coveted them. They had everything they could ever want long before they were ripe. It made them hard and demanding, and looking for the big take. They had love when they were thirteen, and now they wanted everything their beauty would buy. And when they got their hooks in the richest man in the area, they truly began to live. Shopping trips west to Denver, east to Kansas City and St. Louis, and at least twice a year into New York and Chicago to see the shows. They believed their beauty indestructible, the fun was going to last forever. Only it didn’t work that way. The oldest saw was the truest: when you’ve seen one circus, you’ve seen them all.

  That was my judgment of her, my snap judgment, and it pleased me to believe it.

  She looked me over one more time, then she went away along the street, seeming somehow taller and more tightly packed than the grain elevator.

  I glanced around: drugstore, hardware, department store, movie theatre, grocery, couple of filling stations, the Kansas Pacific Railroad station, the bus depot. Nothing much worse than being stranded and broke in a prosperous small town among straight-ticket Republicans. The only more evil situation would be to be in trouble with the law besides. So I was bucking a stacked deck.

  I checked the walk again, but the good-looking doll had disappeared into a store, or in a car.

  I took another tuck in my belt. Panhandling was a misdemeanor in this burg. I had to get out and on an empty stomach.

  I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. I’d purposely limited myself to female touches, telling myself it was the hard way because women are tough to get money away from. But I had another, bigger reason.

  I didn’t want any man checking me too closely. Men listened to car radios, paid attention to faces flashed on TV screens, noted mug shots in newspapers. But I figured women never looked anywhere except in the society section for Ann Landers, the horoscope and the divorce listings. And these were about the only columns I’d not been in recently.

  I walked slowly west along the main street for no good reason except I’d been headed west for three days now.

  I glanced around, feeling a sudden chill in the bright midmorning sun. I had the feeling cops were behind me, across the street, up ahead of me.

  I should have been used to that setup by now, but I wasn’t. I never would be.

  My heart slugged faster. I’d been running so long that when I thought about running, I reacted in fear, like a conditioned mouse in a maze.

  I trembled, wanting to run. Suppose the long-legged doll decided to get her kicks by casually mentioning to a cop that there was a panhandler defiling main street? Sure, she wouldn’t. She’d already forgotten me. But on the other hand these dames had a cruel streak. Laughs were harder to come by for these babes every day. They had to look pain right in the face to really experience any sense of pleasure.

  I turned and the word café struck the rods and cones inside my retina, and there was instant reaction in my brain. My mouth began to water.

  I stared into the café, my gaze fixed between ice-topped letters: Air-Conditioned. A waitress was alone in there; young, blonde, in white smock, crepe sole shoes.

  She was lazily wiping at the counter that ran along one wall, polishing the coffee urn, wasting time between the pancake special and the businessman’s lunch.

  I swallowed the saliva in my mouth. I could eat breakfast, admit I was broke and beat a retreat before she could summon a cop. I’d never tried it before, but I was doing a lot of things for the first time. If anyone had told me a week ago that an innocent man could run in just as much terror as a guilty one, I’d have told him he was nuts. I never thought I’d try to beat someone out of a meal, either.

  There wasn’t any haughty air of arrogance about this blonde. She might even buy a hard luck story.

  I moved toward the thick glass doors, then stopped. She wouldn’t be alone in there. There’d be a cook on duty, the owner might be in his office. If this girl served me food, called the law and I was caught, all the running bought me nothing. I’d be on my way back, handcuffed to Fred Palmer. I exhaled heavily and turned away.

  I saw the cruiser then, parked a block away, door opened on the driver’s side, a uniformed cop slouched on the far side of the seat.

  I couldn’t locate the other cop. He might already be moving toward me, watching me.

  I glanced around. I had to get off the panic button. That cop was sagged hot and bored and sleepy in the cruiser.

  Still, I didn’t want to walk past that cruiser. I hadn’t shaved since yesterday, the freight car had rumpled my jacket, wrinkled my slacks. I had begun to look like what I was—a man on the run.

  I took a quick peek over my shoulder. Nothing for me back that way. I’d been there.

  The waitress glanced up from her polishing when I sat on a stool halfway along the counter. I checked the rear exit; swinging kitchen doors. If I moved that way, no cook could stop me before I hit the alley.

  She set iced water on the chilled counter top before me, waited. Her blue eyes were unimpressed. She was accustomed to seeing young men, with beard shadows, rumpled slacks.

  I took a swallow of cold water, felt it to the pit of my heated stomach, for a moment the room wheeled before me.

  I replaced the glass on the counter, closed my fist around it, clinging to it.

  She waited, pad and pencil poised.

  “Look, Miss,” I said. “I’m broke.”

  She registered no astonishment. She shrugged, replacing pad and pencil in a smock pocket that was heavy with tips. I stared at the money bulging against the fabric.

  “So. What else is new?” Her voice was mild.

  “I’m hungry” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “What will a hard luck story buy me in here?”

  She nodded toward the water glass. “You’re holding it,” she said.

  My shoulders sagged. I felt new ruts around my mouth.

  I pushed the glass away, turning on the stool. That was when I saw the cruiser parked outside the café, two cops in it, very pointedly not even looking toward me.

  My hands trembled and I dropped them to my side. My gaze moved back from the blue-tinted front window, touching the cash register, gleaming coffee urn, tips bulging in the blonde’s smock pocket, double doors to the kitchen.

  “Mister, I better tell you something,” the waitress said in a flat voice.

  “Panhandling is a misdemeanor in this town,” I said.

  “If you knew it, why’d you try it?”

  “I made a mistake. I thought you had a kind face. From outside. Through the window. Probably the shadows, or something.”

  “We all make mistakes,” she said.

  “You haven’t got a copyright on that, have you?” I stared around the room, feeling helpless. “I’d like to use that sometime. It’s real clever.”

  She stared through the window at the cruiser. “They’re coming in here,” she said.

  “Why not? Free coffee. Happy quips with the waitress.”

  “I’ll bring you a cup of coffee first, and a bowl of cereal. That’s fastest.”

  “Why? I told you. I�
��m broke.”

  She moved in a smooth, effortless way, not wasting a motion. By the time the cops crossed the walk and entered the café, she’d spread napkin, silverware, coffee, cereal before me, poured milk and pushed the sugar toward me. The expression on her face did not alter, but she had the props set so it looked as if I were already five minutes into my breakfast.

  She walked away from me, going to the front of the café where the two cops had squatted on stools beside the cash register.

  I didn’t hear what she said to them. I saw they were wearing lightweight slacks, short-sleeved blue shirts with town police emblems on the sleeves. They’d pushed their summerweight caps back on their heads. They looked completely relaxed.

  There was only one thing wrong: they didn’t even glance toward me.

  The waitress set coffee before the two cops, let one of them hold her hand for a moment while he stroked her inner arm, elbow to wrist.

  “Purr, pussy,” he said. “Let me hear you purr.”

  “Not during business hours,” she said, pulling away from him.

  I had all the woe I needed trying to keep my hand on my coffee cup from trembling. But I saw the cop tickling her arm was angered. He’d wanted to demonstrate to his buddy how this waitress reacted to him. They probably whiled away many dull hours with him going into detail about what happened when he got her out in a car somewhere. It teed him off now when she made a liar out of him.

  He laughed. “Dot’s a sweet girl, Arnie. She can give it to you like she was taking something away from you.”

  “Sure she is,” Arnie said.

  The waitress’s face was white, rigid. She came back to me. “I’ll see if your pancakes are ready, sir,” she said.

  She walked away behind the counter. The two cops whistled. “Look at that, Arnie. More bounce to the ounce. And what’s best of all, that girl’s French. Ain’t you, Dot?” He lifted his voice, laughing, but she didn’t hesitate. Her shoulders hunched just slightly as if they were throwing something at her and she was setting herself against it. Otherwise, it was as if she didn’t even hear them.