William P. McGivern

• Born: December 6, 1922
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: November 18, 1982
• Place of death: Palm Desert, California

Types of Plot: Police procedural; thriller

Contribution

William P. McGivern’s work differs considerably from the general run of crime fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the years when the author did his best work. Although much of the writing of his contemporaries during this period presented protagonists with fixed, relatively stable personalities, McGivern’s work generally took another direction. His novels on crime are particularly notable for their depth and sensitivity in the portrayal of the central character and for their trenchant analysis of the moral and psychological effects of the corruption that surrounds him in the netherworld of big-city politics and public service.

The McGivern protagonist is generally at the crux of a moral dilemma, wrestling with problems of ethical, moral, even spiritual responsibility. Although formidable and independent in his interaction with others, the McGivern protagonist struggles with an inner world of psychological complexity and moral peril. He is consistently engaged in reluctant self-analysis and introspection, following a path that inevitably leads to self-discovery.

McGivern also brings to his writing a thorough knowledge of police work. In a subtle blend of casuistry and objective analysis, he examines the implications of its pressures and scant rewards, its frequent inability to meet the high and often-unrealistic expectations of the public, with an insight achieved by few of his contemporaries in the genre of crime fiction.

Biography

William Peter McGivern was born in Chicago on December 6, 1922, the second son of Peter Francis McGivern and Julia Costello McGivern. His father was a banker and businessman, his mother a dress designer who catered to a fashionable clientele in her shop on Michigan Boulevard. For a time, his father’s business interests brought the family to Mobile, Alabama, where McGivern was reared.

In 1937, McGivern quit high school and returned to Chicago, where he worked as a laborer for the Pullman Company in the Pennsylvania Railroad yards. During this time, he read widely and eclectically, particularly the works of American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also discovered the prose of G. K. Chesterton and the poetry of Robert Burns. In addition to his wide reading, he had begun to write. By 1940, he was publishing in the pulp-fiction market, particularly in science-fiction and fantasy magazines.

During World War II, McGivern served three and one-half years in the United States Army and was decorated for service in the European campaign. He would later draw on these experiences in an autobiographical novel, Soldiers of ’44 (1979), based on his experiences as a sergeant in charge of a fifteen-man gun section during the Battle of the Bulge. At war’s end, he was stationed in England, where, for a period of four months, he attended the University of Birmingham. McGivern was discharged from the army in January, 1946.

In December, 1948, McGivern married Maureen Daly, also a writer. They had two children, a son and a daughter. From 1949 to 1951, McGivern worked as a reporter and book reviewer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. As a police reporter, he became interested in police officers and detectives and how they function in an environment of big-city corruption. The experience provided the details and factual basis for several of his crime novels.

In a long and distinguished career, McGivern published some twenty-five crime novels and an array of short stories, screenplays, and television scripts. In 1980, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America, which in 1954 had given him its Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture for his writing of the novel The Big Heat (1952). McGivern died on November 18, 1982.

Analysis

William P. McGivern began his career as a conventional crime-fiction writer, submitting to pulp magazines the formula fiction that was their mainstay through the 1920’s and 1930’s. He continued this formula approach into the late 1940’s, when he turned from the short story to the crime novel with the publication of his first book, But Death Runs Faster (1948). His brief tenure as a crime reporter in Philadelphia gave him both factual material and psychological insight into the daily, behind-the-scenes operations of big-city police, a combination that brought considerable authenticity to his writing. In the early 1950’s, McGivern experimented with other forms of writing, including fantasy and science fiction. More notably, in his writing about crime he experimented with a Mickey Spillane-style plot and protagonist, exemplified in his fifth novel, Blondes Die Young (1952). Apparently, he had some misgivings about the Spillane approach to plot and characterization, for he published the novel under the name Bill Peters. It was the first and last time McGivern used a pseudonym for crime fiction.

Eventually, McGivern’s interest focused on the complex characterization of the police detective as fallible hero, the culpable human being on the front lines of civilization’s perennial battle with a criminal element that threatens to undermine and destroy it. Specifically, McGivern centered his attention on the intrinsic nature of urban corruption, the two-sided, inherent duplicity of society. He concentrated on the darker, ambiguous side of human nature that is subsumed and obscured by the surface appearance of a functioning, law-abiding society.

Rogue Cop

In novels such as The Big Heat, Rogue Cop (1954), and The Darkest Hour (1955), McGivern places his protagonists in solitary—and lonely—confrontation with the seemingly overwhelming power of an underworld that thrives on duplicity. Although the detective/protagonist is clearly superior to his fellow officers in his ability to observe, investigate, and make deductions concerning a crime, that superiority is always taken for granted. Mike Carmody, the protagonist of Rogue Cop, stops by a hotel room where a murder has been committed. His fellow detectives are in the middle of their investigation. It is not Carmody’s case, but in a matter of minutes and in an offhand, matter-of-fact way, he solves the crime for his befuddled colleagues.

In his crime fiction, McGivern is never overly concerned with details of investigative deduction and solution; his emphasis is on character study. The reader’s attention in Rogue Cop is focused on Carmody’s inner struggle, the psychological/ethical/moral conflict that McGivern’s protagonists invariably face. The depiction of their struggle frequently reflects the influence of McGivern’s Catholic background and his abiding interest in humanity’s need for a spiritual center. Essentially, McGivern illustrates a very basic conflict between good and evil. In these novels, evil in the modern world comes in a highly attractive and deceptive package, with money and power its primary attributes. It is simultaneously seductive and destructive, and its appeal is easily and readily rationalized.

Mike Carmody

In developing the character of Mike Carmody, McGivern has drawn, at least indirectly, on the New Testament story of the prodigal son. Seduced and corrupted, Carmody is a crooked cop, the scion of a loving Catholic family that he rejects. As the novel begins, he is a prodigal without a home to which he can return. His mother died when he was a child; his father, whose values and spiritual optimism Carmody cynically dismissed, lived long enough to know the pain of his son’s corruption. In his attempt to justify his choices and the life he lives, Carmody has all but totally convinced himself that he is simply playing the percentages, living the good life that only a fool would reject. Yet the richly furnished apartment, the expensively tailored suits, and the other accouterments of a life lived according to material wants all bear testimony to a moral, ethical, and spiritual poverty.

Carmody’s redemption, along with the opportunity for retribution and subsequent atonement, comes after his younger brother, an incorruptible rookie cop, is murdered by racketeers because he has refused to follow his older brother’s example. Bereft of family and career, Mike Carmody nevertheless regains in some semblance his lost integrity by turning state’s evidence. The lost son returns, if not to the father, at least to the father’s values. When Carmody becomes the star witness for the prosecution, however, his motivation is not only retribution and atonement; there is also an old-fashioned desire for revenge, another element of the darker side of human nature that plays a significant role in McGivern’s fiction.

The Big Heat

The motif of the good man in righteous pursuit of vengeance is the energizing force in several of McGivern’s novels—including The Big Heat, The Darkest Hour, Savage Streets (1959), and Reprisal (1973). In The Big Heat, Dave Bannion, the protagonist, is a police detective who has rigorously maintained the straight and narrow path and is uncompromising in his opposition to racketeers and corrupt officials. Unlike Mike Carmody of Rogue Cop, Bannion has a spiritual center. (He reads, for example, the sixteenth century Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross for guidance and perspective.) His meditations are put aside, however, when first a fellow police officer and later Kate, Bannion’s wife, are killed by racketeers who enjoy respectable status in the community and the protection of corrupt police officials and politicians. Like a patriarch of the Old Testament, Bannion pursues his adversaries with the fury of an avenging angel. His winning struggle against seemingly overwhelming odds is a veritable Armageddon. When he and the forces of good have triumphed, he returns, at the conclusion of the novel, to his meditations on Saint John of the Cross.

Savage Streets

In his exercise of the revenge motif, McGivern explores the gray areas of the issue as well. The law-abiding citizen, for example, vengeful because he is frustrated by the apparent inability of the police to exact justice in a legal system that seems to offer more protection to the criminal than to the victim, is effectively portrayed in Reprisal and Savage Streets. In both novels men whose lives, family, and property had always been insulated from crime suddenly become victims. That which had previously occurred only in the remote strata of society to which they were passive witnesses and bystanders has struck home, filling them with a sense of personal outrage and injustice.

Savage Streets, ostensibly a novel about juvenile delinquency and the lynch-mob mentality of vigilantism, reads like a sociological treatise. In this novel McGivern indicts middle-class, suburban America and the shallow values of a materialistic society. John Farrell and his neighbors live the comfortable commuter life of cocktail parties, backyard barbecues, and dinners at their restricted country club. When their children are threatened and intimidated by two teenage thugs, Farrell and the others become involved, attempting to intimidate the teenagers with their adult authority. The young hoodlums, however, are not intimidated, and a small war develops. When Farrell is driven to beat one of the young thugs senseless, mistakenly believing that this youth was responsible for the hit-and-run accident that sent Farrell’s daughter to the hospital, he realizes what he has become. He attempts to reason with his vigilante neighbors to prevent further violence—but to no avail. Before Farrell can successfully enlist the police to halt the madness, one of his neighbors is dead, another boy is badly beaten, and a teenage girl is raped. In the course of the experience, Farrell comes to realize that there are actually two “gangs”: one led by teens from the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks,” the other by the exclusionary suburban set, whose property and career positions will be preserved at any cost, stopping, only by chance, just short of murder. The plot is a bit simplistic, but to his credit McGivern offers no easy answers to what he presents as a veiled class warfare. The focus in Savage Streets is on John Farrell, the typical American family man who comes to discover, after almost destroying his own life, that there is no satisfactory substitute for rule by law, regardless of how provocative the circumstances may be.

Odds Against Tomorrow

McGivern examined social issues in other crime novels, one of the best of which combines a social question with a well-plotted caper, a major robbery planned in extensive detail. In Odds Against Tomorrow (1957), Dave Burke, a former police officer who was fired from the force for taking bribes, and Novak, his accomplice, have planned a seemingly foolproof bank robbery. They require two additional men with special talents to make it work: John Ingram, a black man who needs money desperately to pay overdue gambling debts, and Earl Slater, a Southern redneck, a misfit who is painfully becoming aware that after distinguishing himself in wartime combat, he seems unable to do anything else. From the moment these two meet, it is clear that Slater’s prejudice threatens the success of the robbery. Ironically, it is the failure of this desperate enterprise that brings Slater and Ingram together. Deserted by Novak after Burke is killed, they gradually become closer, even dependent on each other.

McGiven’s political liberalism is clearly in evidence here, offering the failed robbery as a metaphor for a stalled society, impeded in its progress by bigotry. As is typical in McGivern’s novels, the details of the well-planned robbery and its failure are of secondary interest. Although his character study of Ingram is pedestrian and not particularly insightful, his study of Slater proves far more penetrating and interesting. McGivern offers a vivid analysis of a frightened sociopath, a man desperate for love and security, whose only talent is for making enemies.

McGivern’s novels of the 1970’s and 1980’s show a marked commercial bent and seem to have been written for the screen. This is hardly surprising because McGivern was a successful writer of screenplays and television scripts, and nine of his novels have been made into motion pictures. Novels such as Night of the Juggler (1975), about a Central Park serial killer, seem written more for film producers than for readers of crime fiction. Caprifoil (1972), however, is a first-rate espionage/secret agent thriller, worthy of comparison with the work of John le Carré.

Lie Down, I Want to Talk to You

McGivern’s fiction is not without a lighter side, evidenced by the dual spoof of psychiatry and the caper plot in Lie Down, I Want to Talk to You (1967). Otis Pemberton, an overweight psychiatrist with a tendency to gamble (and lose), is a most unlikely and atypical McGivern protagonist. Pemberton is blackmailed into participating in a bank robbery by a patient. Because the patient has failed at previous robbery attempts, he needs Pemberton to “reprogram” him and his associates for success. Complicating the entire operation is a rival psychiatrist who has been treating the same patient and who ultimately becomes part of the scheme.

McGivern’s books constitute crime fiction of a high order. In each, the actual crime and its concomitant details serve primarily as a point of departure for his highest interest: the texture of humanity that emerges with the creation and development of character. McGivern writes in the third person, combining spare prose and taut dialogue with an economical, highly selective use of descriptive detail. The situation in which the McGivern protagonist finds himself may be remote from the average reader’s experience, but the reader readily empathizes; the angst McGivern depicts is universally felt and understood.

Bibliography

Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Study of the representation of masculinity in hard-boiled detective fiction; helps contextualize McGivern’s representation of the inner psychology of his protagonists.

Gunning, Tom. “The Big Heat.” In The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Study of the most famous film adaptation of a McGivern novel, emphasizing its distinctive place in the modern culture of the 1950’s.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Analyzes McGivern’s two most famous noir novels, The Big Heat and Odds Against Tomorrow.

Irwin, John T. Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Study of noir fiction and film that emphasizes the interrelationship of the two forms and the representation of masculinity in each. Provides perspective on McGivern’s work.