Evan Lewis’s stories featuring the ghost of Davy Crockett and his descendant David Crockett are distinguished by the lively verbal jousting of the principals, though when the two can simmer down, they make a great pair of sleuths, as demonstrated in “Mr. Crockett and the Longrifle” in our May issue. Here, however, we’re delighted to offer Mr. Lewis’s reflections on a very different kind of mystery writing.
Pulp fiction came into my life when I was eleven years old, and I was never the same again. It happened at the neighborhood Rexall Drug store, and came in a series of paperbacks starring Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze.
The writing spoke to me. It was direct, conversational, and loaded with personality and humor. The author was not only having fun, he was being paid to be a smart-aleck. I wanted to be a professional smart-aleck too.
Years later I learned that Doc Savage was a pulp hero, that most of his adventures were written by Lester Dent, and that the style I so admired was considered hardboiled. My search for more such stuff led to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and their less-famous contemporaries. At the time, very little of that stuff was in print, so I went to the source, hunting down the pulps themselves.
The more I read, the more I realized that my favorites were the guys having the most fun. They were the smartest of the smart-alecks, experimenting with the language and injecting plenty of personality and humor into their writing. I found their style infectious, and if my own stories are a little wacked-out, it’s mostly their fault.
The guiltiest parties follow.
DASHIELL HAMMETT is revered by fans and critics for 
The Maltese Falcon, and I think it’s a fine novel, but the stories that really grab me feature The Continental Op. The Op began as a nearly invisible narrator and evolved into a supreme smart-aleck, reaching his peak in the novel Red Harvest (originally published as four novelettes in Black Mask). Continue reading
Trace Evidence 