Ross Thomas

• Born: February 19, 1926
• Birthplace: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Died: December 18, 1995
• Place of death: Santa Monica, California

Types of Plot: Espionage; amateur sleuth; thriller

Principal Series: Mac McCorkle and Mike Padillo, 1966-1990; Philip St. Ives, 1969-1976; Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, 1978-1992

Contribution

Ross Thomas made the dark side of the worlds of politics, finance, and espionage as familiar to readers as the headlines in their daily newspapers. Crossing the mean, dark streets lined with executive suites and using the eye of a reporter and the tongue of an adder with a malicious sense of humor, he made the reader feel like an eavesdropper in the halls of power, often using the inside political manipulator as hero. As Oliver Bleeck, Thomas invented a new occupation for amateur sleuth Philip St. Ives. As a professional go-between, St. Ives dabbled in crimes ranging from art theft to Cold War double-crosses.

Biography

Ross Elmore Thomas was born on February 19, 1926 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to J. Edwin Thomas and Laura (née Dean) Thomas. He began his education as a thriller writer while a reporter on the Daily Oklahoman in his hometown before serving as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines during World War II. After he graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1949, he directed public relations for the National Farmers Union and later for the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Thomas managed election campaigns in the United States for two union presidents, for a Republican Senate nominee and for a Democratic governor of Colorado. Interestingly, he also advised an African leader who was running for the post of prime minister in Nigeria, though without success.

Thomas covered Bonn, Germany, for the Armed Forces Network in the late 1950’s, and served as a consultant/political mastermind to the United States government from 1964 to 1966 before publishing his first thriller, The Cold War Swap (1966), a book that won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1967. In 1974, he married Rosalie Appleton. He always cast a cynical eye on institutions and society at home and abroad, dissecting both with the wit of a morgue attendant and a wiretapper’s ear for dialogue. Briarpatch (1984) won Thomas another Edgar Award in 1985, and Chinaman’s Chance (1978) was selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of the One Hundred Favorite Mysteries of the Century. Thomas served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America. Thomas died in 1995 in Santa Monica, California.

Analysis

If Ross Thomas needed any apprenticeship in writing fiction, he served it during his year as reporter, public relations man, and political manager. His first novel, The Cold War Swap, was published three years after John le Carré’s pathbreaking The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) captured the attention of readers by inverting the morality of the espionage novel. In his first offering, Thomas showed that he was already a master of the Hobbesian world of espionage double-cross, where every man is against every other, the only rule is survival, and the agents from both sides are more sympathetic characters than their masters. His hero, Mike Padillo, is a fully “amortized agent”—the agency’s investment in him has long since paid off handsomely. He is to be traded to the Soviets for a pair of gay National Security Agency defectors. His triumph, if it can be called that, is in carrying out his mission without falling into the hands of either side.

Thomas’s universe is not the weary world of fallen empire inhabited by Le Carré’s neurasthenic heroes but the permanently rotten one invented by the creators of the hard-boiled American detective. In it, few men (and fewer women) are loyal, everything is for sale, and everything is connected—in the worst possible way. His men are professionals whose only pride is in their professionalism and their survival. They survive because a few people have followed E. M. Forster’s advice to remain loyal to their friends rather than to their nation, or because they can buy aid from those who have no loyalties. Heroes cannot reform Thomas’s world, but the quick or the unprincipled can manipulate it, briefly, in pursuit of the ancient triad of money, power, and sex.

Cast a Yellow Shadow and The Singapore Wink

Thomas’s area of specialization was the world of the double-cross—espionage, politics, and the con game. His viewpoint characters are men of a certain age and experience who can handle themselves in the boardroom, battle, or boudoir. Journalists, former spies, and political insiders, his heroes come in two kinds, those who, like the cowboy, do not go looking for trouble, and those who, like the private eye, do—for money. Those who do not go willingly into trouble have to be blackmailed into doing the job, and their only recompense is money, lots of it, and peace and quiet until the next time. In Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967), Mike Padillo agrees to assassinate the prime minister of a white-ruled African nation after Mac’s wife is kidnapped. In The Singapore Wink (1969), Edward Cauthorne, former Hollywood stuntman and current dealer in vintage cars, agrees to go to Singapore to locate a man for the mob after several of his cars are vandalized. Hoods have also crushed the hands of Sidney Durant, his twenty-year-old body man, by repeatedly slamming a car door on them.

Those who do go willingly into trouble include con men Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, go-between Philip St. Ives, and a miscellaneous crew of journalists and political consultants whose job descriptions cannot be easily distinguished from those of the con men. The professionals cannot be distinguished in their expertise from the amateurs either, and the survival of all depends on quick reflexes fueled by low cunning, inside knowledge, and lashings of untraceable money.

Thomas invents female characters who are as capable of violence, lust, greed, and chicanery as the men; they may be physically weaker, but they make up for it. Although they are usually subsidiary characters in the typical women’s roles of secretary or assistant, there are exceptions. Georgia Blue (Out on the Rim, 1987) is a former Secret Service agent who has a role equal to the men’s in persuading the Filipino revolutionary to retire to Hong Kong, and Wanda Gothar (The Backup Men, 1971) is an experienced member of a family that has been involved in espionage since the Napoleonic era. If the women are older, they are capable of the exercise of power, such as Gladys Citron (Missionary Stew, 1983), West Coast editor of a National Enquirer-type newspaper and former Office of Strategic Services officer decorated personally by Charles de Gaulle for killing three dozen Germans. Realistically, most of the older women exercise power as wives or widows, and they do it by manipulation, at which they are as adept as the men around them. All Thomas’s characters like sex the way they like food or drink.

The Seersucker Whipsaw

Perhaps because southerners have traditionally had verbal skills that take them into politics, or because Thomas is from the edge of the South, many of his political characters are convincing southern gothics whose careers would enliven the dullest work of academic sociology. The seersucker-suited Clinton Shartelle, hired to manage the political campaign of the African chief Sunday Akomolo in The Seersucker Whipsaw (1967), describes his life in Denver to his associate, Peter Upshaw:

I lived here in a house with my daddy and a lady friend from 1938 to 1939. Not too far from that ball park which is—you might have noticed—a somewhat blighted area. It was a plumb miserable neighborhood even then. I was sixteen-seventeen years old. My daddy and I had come out here from Oklahoma City in the fall driving a big, black 1929 LaSalle convertible sedan. We checked in at the Brown Palace and my daddy got himself a lease on a section of land near Walsenburg, found himself a rig and crew, and drilled three of the deepest dry holes you ever saw.

Shartelle’s story goes on for several pages, and before he has finished, Thomas has involved the reader in a three-dimensional character whose childhood has produced a man of flexible morals with a gift of gab that could charm a sheriff bent on eviction or an outraged creditor. He is a man drawn to political manipulation just as naturally as steel filings are drawn to a magnet.

The minor characters Thomas creates are as fully drawn as the major ones. The reader comes to understand them as clearly as he understands his own quirky relatives. The reader can never tell, however, whether the cab driver whose long life story Thomas relates will take his tip and disappear from the pages of the book, or whether he will play a larger part of the story. The characters are so engaging in their frankly seamy humanity that the reader is simply happy to meet them, even if only briefly. Certain minor character types, such as the Village Wise Man or Fixer, reappear in successive books. One of the Fixer types is David “Slippery” Slipper, white-haired and seventy-five, who

had been, at various times, a New Deal White House aide, or to hear him tell it, “Harry Hopkins’s office boy”; a spy of sorts for the wartime Office of Strategic Services; a syndicated columnist (121 daily newspapers); a biographer of the iron-willed Speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas Brackett (Czar) Reed; an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture (six months); a deputy Undersecretary of the Interior (ninety days); ambassador to Chad (one year, “the longest year of my life,” he later said); and for the past fifteen years a political fixer and consultant who charged outrageous fees for his sensible, hardheaded advice.

After several more detailed paragraphs about Slippery, Thomas has him tell the hero to drop his investigation and he disappears forever from Missionary Stew. These categories are not exclusively male. Señora Madelena de Romanones plays both the Village Wise Woman and Fixer characters in Cast a Yellow Shadow.

The Mordida Man and Out on the Rime

Thomas’s spies and spymasters are painted as ridiculous and two-faced. The reader can never tell who is on which side, as even the hero is not always committed to conventional morality. The double-crosses come fast and furious, and the reader will always be wise to expect one more, unless he has just read the last line of the book. Thomas’s male characters like fast, expensive cars, exotic weapons, and fast, exotic women. When he is setting up the story, Thomas can “tell the tale” better than any con man alive. His political manipulators are heroes as often as they are villains, and his union officials are simply normal men with a normal lust for power and money, not Working Class Heroes or Red Revolutionaries. In fact, his revolutionaries are normal men with normal lusts. The Libyans in The Mordida Man (1981) finally accept revenge when they cannot obtain the return of a kidnapped terrorist, and, in Out on the Rim, the aging Filipino rebel Alejandro Espiritu becomes so power-mad that he executes his own nephew without remorse, allowing Wu and Durant to carry out their mission to remove him (and keep a large portion of the money they were supposed to have used to bribe him).

Thomas has a crime reporter’s eye for concrete details such as the exact age of a building (and often its history), the number of steps in a flight of stairs, and the number of an airline flight and the precise number of minutes takeoff is delayed. This use of detail creates a sense of reality so palpable that the reader can almost taste the dirt on the cement. Thomas’s style, directly descended from the colorful speech of the oral tradition, is so wry and amusing that he makes the reader regret the homogenization of American English by television announcers and bureaucratic memorandum writers. His dialogue is realistic, and conversation between male friends, such as McCorkle and Padillo or Wu and Durant, is as elliptical as the exchange of a couple who have been married for fifty years.

Thomas takes his plots from the front pages of the daily papers, using his experience to invent an inside story that is more treacherous than reality. In Yellow-Dog Contract (1976), political campaign manager Harvey Longmore comes out of retirement to investigate the disappearance of a nationally known union leader. The Porkchoppers (1972) investigates a crooked, no-holds-barred union election. In The Mordida Man, the president’s brother, a slick political manager, has been kidnapped by the Libyans. In Out on the Rim, Wu and Durant become entangled in the guerrilla war in the Philippines; with an immediacy unmatched by the experts who write for the op-ed pages, Thomas depicts the violence and corruption that plague that former American colony.

The Philip St. Ives Books

When Thomas writes as Oliver Bleeck, his voice is more serious, and the Philip St. Ives stories are closer to classical mysteries, but the characters are as closely observed and as colorful as they are in the Ross Thomas books. The crime situations allow him to include overweight, overworked, and underpaid cops, whose lives are as disorderly as they are human, and St. Ives is more nearly a hard-boiled, if amateur, detective, whose own life in a seedy New York residence hotel is not any more orderly than anybody else’s. He is as competent and as tricky as Thomas’s other heroes, but his soul is darker than the souls of the enthralling manipulators who find real joy—and profit—in the tawdry world around them.

In his books, Thomas has invented a complex world of greed, lust, and chicanery where inside knowledge and money are the only security, a world of betrayal where the quick and flexible may, for a while, stay alive, find a good woman, and come out a bit ahead—and maybe even get in a few licks for the good guys in the process.

Principal Series Characters:

• Mac McCorkle , the undescribed viewpoint character, is probably in his late thirties as the McCorkle and Padillo series begins. With Mike Padillo, he runs a saloon first in Bonn and then in Washington, D.C. Mac’s Place features high prices, low lights, and honest drinks. A typical understated American, Mac was behind the lines in Burma during World War II and can handle himself in a fight when necessary. His bonding to his partner and his commitment to finishing the dirty work so that he can return to drinking motivate his actions.
• Mike Padillo , half-Estonian and half-Spanish, with a facility for languages and violence, is blackmailed into military intelligence during World War II and into working for an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) competitor after the war. All he wants is to run a good saloon, but Mac’s Place provides his cover as well. Cynical and suspicious, he wants to come in out of the cold but is not allowed to do so. His relationship with Mac is a tribute to male bonding.
• Philip St. Ives is a former newspaper columnist who has a wide acquaintance with shady characters. He uses that knowledge to act as a go-between in ransoming stolen objects, in the process finding himself obliged to solve the crimes involved, although he is loyal to the criminals until they deceive him in some way.
• Myron Greene is St. Ives’s attorney and accountant. A corporate lawyer with a taste for flashy clothes and cars, he would not be caught dead trying a case in court but revels in his connection to the seamy life through St. Ives. Cases usually come in through Greene.
• Artie Wu is more than six feet tall and weighs nearly 250 pounds. The illegitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the last Manchu emperor and semiserious claimant to the throne, he met Quincy Durant in an orphanage, and they have been partners in crime ever since. An expert in classical con games, he is the planner of the pair. He is married, with two sets of twins.
• Quincy Durant , tall, thin, and nervous as a coiled spring, is the action man, although his talent as a planner of con games is not to be despised either. His love life usually complicates things.
• Otherguy Overby is so called because when the gaff is blown, it is always “the other guy” who is left holding the bag. An experienced con man, Otherguy gives the impression he might sell out the partnership, but he never quite does.

Bibliography

Donovan, Mark. “With Twenty-first Thriller, Writer Ross Thomas Just Might Hit It Big—Not That He Hasn’t Been Trying.” People Weekly 28 (November 30, 1987): 109. A look at Thomas’s output and his lack of a breakout hit after twenty-one attempts.

Hiss, Tony. “Remembering Ross Thomas.” The Atlantic Monthly 278, no. 5 (November, 1996): 117. Tribute to the late author by a writer known for his biographies and social commentary.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Hitz, a former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, compares fictional spies to actual intelligence agents. Gives perspective to Thomas’s writing, although he is not directly discussed.

Kelly, R. Gordon. Mystery Fiction and Modern Life. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Examines the parallels between real life and detective fiction. Contains brief analysis of Thomas’s work.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Mentions Thomas and helps place him in context.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains a chapter on crime thrillers that sheds light on Thomas’s work.