E. V. Cunningham

• Born: November 11, 1914
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 12, 2003
• Place of death: Old Greenwich, Connecticut

Types of Plot: Police procedural; inverted; amateur sleuth; espionage; private investigator

Principal Series: Harvey Krim, 1964-1984; Larry Cohen and John Comaday, 1965-1966; Masao Masuto, 1967-2000

Contribution

E. V. Cunningham is the pseudonym used by Howard Fast for his mystery fiction. Notable for his prolific output (two or more books a year), he brought a social conscience to the detective genre, with works that expose the pitfalls of power and wealth and the virtues of the simple life. Cunningham was praised for his lifelike characters and action-packed narratives, but it was his commitment to liberal and humanitarian values that truly distinguished his work. His novels are characterized by a sympathetic treatment of women: They are portrayed as courageous, witty, and in some ways superior to men in intuition, reason, and values, empathizing with cultural outcasts, understanding of the pressures that sometimes force decent men to conform, and disdainful of prejudice, hypocrisy, and abuse of power. His Nisei detective allowed him to explore the values of Zen philosophy while facing the materialism and inhumanity of the rich. In sum, Cunningham combined political statement with enjoyable entertainment.

Biography

E. V. Cunningham was born Howard Melvin Fast in New York City on November 11, 1914, the son of Barney Fast and Ida Miller Fast. Educated at George Washington High School and the National Academy of Design in New York, he later worked at odd jobs and was a page at the New York Public Library while working on his first novel. In 1933, he received the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Award. On June 6, 1937, he married Bette Cohen; they had two children, Rachel and Jonathan. From 1942 to 1943, Cunningham served overseas with the Office of War Information. In 1944, while with an Army film project, he became a war correspondent; in 1945, he became a foreign correspondent for Esquire and Coronet.

Cunningham had a long career as prolific writer, lecturer, and political activist. His early novels, written as Fast, focused primarily on the Revolutionary War, and The Last Frontier (1941) received particular praise as a taut and moving story of the abuse and extermination of three hundred Cheyenne. These provocative works tried to humanize history and historical figures, from George Washington to Thomas Paine, admitting their weaknesses and demonstrating the processes that led them to greatness.

In 1943, Cunningham’s antifascist feeling, which had led him to work in a hospital for wounded Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, led him to the communist cause; during this period, he created one-dimensional, doctrinaire works with capitalist villains and proletarian heroes. He continued to write historical fiction, but more and more with a Marxist slant. In 1947, he was imprisoned for contempt, having refused to give the House Committee on Un-American Activities information about the supporters of the Spanish hospital. While serving his term, he wrote Spartacus (as Fast; 1951), a controversial treatment of the great slave revolt of 71 b.c.e., which won for him numerous prizes.

Cunningham later founded the World Peace Movement, and, between 1950 and 1955, he served as a member of the World Peace Council. In 1952, he campaigned for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket. Unable to find a publisher, in 1952 he founded the Blue Heron Press in New York to publish his own materials. By 1957, however, tired of communist pressures to change his works and disenchanted with the Communist Party, he wrote The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (as Fast), clearly and completely recanting.

Until the 1980’s, Cunningham turned out about one book per year: historical fiction, science fiction, and thrillers. These works vary considerably in quality, but they all try to teach, usually focusing on compassion and humanism rather than doctrine. As a consequence, he received the National Association of Independent Schools Award in 1962. Always an idealist, Cunningham believed that books “open a thousand doors, they shape lives and answer questions, they widen horizons, they offer hope for the heart and food for the soul”; thus, a writer has an obligation to portray the truth. He died in New York in 2003.

Analysis

E. V. Cunningham built a series of novels around extraordinary women in a striking variation on the detective genre. Sometimes the leading woman is the criminal; occasionally, she is the co-investigator, the instigator, or the inspiration of the crime. Cunningham’s women may not be stunningly beautiful, but they possess an intelligence, a resourcefulness, and an honesty that makes them attractive in every sense. They may have to deal with husbands or lovers who underestimate their spirit and their capabilities, but once caught up in sometimes bizarre situations, they show pluck, courage, and wit. A typical Cunningham woman is wisecracking, tough, and honest Shirley: soft and vulnerable, at times as hard as nails, able to cope with tough cops, death threats, and complex difficulties, bright and funny, and, for the men around her, exasperating. So, too, is Sylvia, a woman of strength and beauty who began life as an abused child but who, through sheer guts and determination, fought her way into polite society, teaching herself languages, reading voraciously, and lying all the way. These women move in a comic world, with the comedy resulting from their perception of male pretensions; they are willing to play the game, to build on men’s illusions, delusions, and limitations to achieve their own ends.

Penelope

In Penelope (1965), a charming socialite, independently wealthy and bored with her banker husband’s arrogant complacency, takes to theft. She plays Robin Hood to the local parish and associated charities and charms the police commissioner and district attorney, while providing the police with clue after clue to implicate herself. Ironically, their preconceptions prevent their accepting the truth even when they are confronted with irrefutable evidence.

Another character, Margie, is an innocent mistaken for a thief and then for an oil-rich countess; as a result, she is kidnapped twice and threatened with torture and murder, but somehow she remains unflappable, her whole adventure comic and resolvable.

Others, such as Phyllis, Lydia, Alice, and Helen, move in a more somber world, with loss of family, friends, and lives a real possibility. Phyllis finds her mother brutally beaten to death; Lydia sees her father pushed to suicide, her inheritance stolen, and her own life threatened; Alice’s child is kidnapped and terrorized; and Helen must confront sexual sadists. Yet amid such horrors, these women remain quick-witted and humane. Alice, for example, finds her family torn apart when she is caught up in a devilish conspiracy that results in a violent midnight rendezvous, all because a stranger clung to her husband for a second in a subway station. Sally, on the other hand, told that she has only a few months to live, hires a professional gunman to end it all quickly; when she learns that the original diagnosis was wrong, however, she is ready to fight for life and a chance at love.

Masao Masuto Series

Cunningham’s tribute to women continues in his Masao Masuto series. Masuto’s wife, Kati, participates in consciousness-raising sessions and occasionally chides her husband for his insensitivity to her and the family. Even Masuto’s belief that most detectives underestimate women and as a result miss evidence relevant to a case grants women an equality that is often missing from detective fiction. Samantha (1967) focuses on a young woman’s calculated and bloody revenge after she is raped by half a dozen young men on a Hollywood set, while The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979) takes a hard look at some of the uglier costs of wealth.

Cunningham always includes people who are tinged with prejudice but convinced that they have none. He is particularly disturbed by anti-Jewish sentiments, having earlier written a semifictional biography of a Polish-Jewish financier who helped in the American Revolution, as well as a history of the Jews. The hero of The Wabash Factor (1986) is a Jewish police officer with an instinct for foul play, while Masuto’s partner is Jewish and must fight against a Nazi mentality, even in Southern California. In The Case of the Russian Diplomat (1978), Arab and German terrorists kidnap and terrorize Masuto’s daughter, assassinate a diplomat, and plan an explosion that will take hundreds of innocent lives, all to undermine the Jewish Defense League. In other works, the terrors of the Holocaust continue to affect modern events. Former Nazis, brutal, intolerant, and twisted, dominate the landscape. The villain in Lydia (1964) is a suave German actor, one of Adolf Hitler’s close associates, who blackmails his fellow Nazis living in the United States. He has no qualms about eliminating all who stand in his way.

An Antifascist Viewpoint

Furthermore, Cunningham’s strongly antifascist sentiments come across in his mysteries. The Federal Bureau of Investigation uses strong-arm tactics, intimidation, and authority to break the rules and manipulate events, and untouchable entrepreneurs and the unimaginably wealthy prove to be frauds, thieves, and murderers. Income-tax evasion leads to multiple murders, which city police are quick to cover up, and politicians engage in white-collar crime and sometimes even drug smuggling. In Millie (1973), a general and a senator head a heroin-smuggling operation. In The Case of the Sliding Pool (1981), powerful financial forces act to prevent an investigation, and speculators in big industry play games with people’s lives and break the rules with impunity. In The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie (1984), the Central Intelligence Agency turns civilized Beverly Hills into a jungle, fixing evidence, condoning double murder, and even trying to eliminate nosy local investigators to protect a double agent.

Phyllis

In Phyllis (1962), when an American and a Soviet nuclear scientist disappear and leave warnings of atom bombs set to go off if an antinuclear peace pact is not signed immediately, a world-weary police officer and a lonely female physicist are tortured and abused by their own people because they claim, but cannot prove, that the bombs do not exist. Ironically, the alienated Americans have more in common with the Soviet scientist than with their closest American associates. Running through Cunningham’s canon is a consistent thread of moralism and sentimentality, though his politics change slightly over the years and some of his mysteries celebrate precisely those capitalist and intellectual types whom he identified as the oppressors in earlier works.

The Wabash Factor and The Winston Affair

A related concern is that of conspiracy: Octopus-like secret committees arrange “accidents” to eliminate the best and the brightest—those devoted to peace and humanity. In The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun (1969), such a group is totally committed, carefully calculating, and ultimately indestructible, while in The Wabash Factor the method used (causing a stroke with a medical prescription) seems almost certainly unprovable. The latter book uses the mystery genre as an excuse to attack American support of Central American regimes that depend on drugs and death squads for power; it argues that, by turning a blind eye to such horrors, the American government opens the way for drugs and death squads to become a reality in the United States. Cunningham is also interested in the law being used to railroad a cause or a victim; he focuses on this in both Helen (1966) and The Winston Affair (1959). The latter centers on the court-martial of an American soldier who is accused of killing a British one; the defense counsel is under pressure to let his client hang in the interests of Anglo-American relations. Cunningham throughout his works suggests the world’s weaknesses and wrongs through a selected individual crisis.

The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun

Cunningham’s heroes are often disillusioned, wary, and alienated. They have seen too much of the lunacies of life, of war, of injustice; they have responded to the horrors, and they have reached a point in life where they are without hope. It is then that they are plunged into a situation that challenges and puzzles them and demands that they reevaluate their lives. Often this reevaluation is initiated or accelerated by an unexpected but ego-shaking contact with a woman, a woman of competence, intelligence, and conscience. Ironically, before any sort of personal understanding and permanent attachment can be developed, Cunningham’s heroes must deal with political ambition, intrigue, and death. The cold, methodical professional killer in The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun, for example, is a rational man whose response to irrationality is to lose himself in his job and do it efficiently. Acting for a secret international political group determined to undermine any major peace movement, he lives on the knife’s edge; although recognizing that he himself may be hurt in his turn, after facing a Buddhist’s calm acceptance of death, he begins to question his acts. Later, when his assigned victim is a woman to whom he immediately responds, he must play the game to the end, maneuvering to save her though it means his own death.

Helen and Millie

In Helen, a corruptible lawyer, assigned to defend a prostitute who is clearly guilty of the cold-blooded murder of a state supreme court judge (who is also the number-two man in the state’s mafia syndicate), finds that he must deal with questions of good and evil. In Millie, a successful public relations man responsible for the “images” of senators and rock stars must face the emptiness of his marriage and his profession in a deadly battle for self-respect. Ultimately in Cunningham’s works, awareness is not enough; action, even self-destructive action, must result if a person is to be free in heart and mind.

The Case of the One-Penny Orange

Cunningham’s detective Masuto has already found his niche, his values, his human contact; now he must try to live accordingly. Masuto’s method combines Buddhist meditation with Holmesian ratiocination. Observation is a part of Masuto’s religion and of his way of life, and the close observation that allows him to see beauty in the ugly also allows him to see the ugly and mundane behind the facades that surround him. Intuitive leaps of both reason and imagination result, and his colleagues and superiors are left trying to figure out what produced these conclusions, which further investigation, physical evidence, and testimony confirm. For example, The Case of the One-Penny Orange (1977) begins as a routine investigation of a local burglary, but it leads to a murdered stamp dealer and a missing SS commander. Masuto links these seemingly unconnected events with a stamp worth half a million dollars and a revenge ritual originating in the bitterness of the Holocaust.

The Case of the Russian Diplomat

The Case of the Russian Diplomat, in turn, begins with the apparent drowning of a nude fat man—reported to the police by a hotel hooker—but the nature of the scene leads Masuto to an East German spy, Arab terrorists, and a plot to assassinate some Soviet agronomists. While the federal investigators are still trying to cover up a Russian diplomat’s unseemly demise, Masuto is uncovering the actual plot. He does so step-by-step, beginning with marks on the dead man’s nose that suggest glasses and gray metal fillings that suggest foreign dental work and proceeding to the incongruity of the death—which to him suggests chloral hydrate. Parts of the puzzle float around in his mind for days, then come together in a pattern that could explain all.

The Case of the Sliding Pool and The Case of the Kidnapped Angel

The Case of the Sliding Pool is unique in that identifying the body (a long-buried skeleton) will in effect identify the murderer, while the solution to The Case of the Kidnapped Angel (1982) hinges on a sex-change operation and an old-fashioned revenge plot. In Masuto’s eyes, crime encapsulates the general illness of humankind. As a Buddhist, he is involved with humankind, but he must constantly battle his own hatred while struggling with people who are an affront to humanity.

Despite Cunningham’s sympathy with the proletariat, his dialogue is most credible when it is spoken by the educated. When he attempts slang, heavy accents, or the diction of gangsters, street people, and the down-and-out, rhythms ring so false that some critics have accused Cunningham of having a tin ear. Occasionally, his characters will elaborate on a metaphor that sums up their lives or situation, but in the main, the writing is straightforward and unadorned. It is with the exchange of wisecracks or cynicisms in his comic mysteries that he feels most comfortable.

Basically, Cunningham disapproves of anyone or anything that tries to reduce humankind to a class, an ideology, a nonentity. He values above all else struggle, self-awareness, love and affection, family, privacy, and humanitarian values. His attack on funeral homes in The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie is typical of his sensibilities: He disapproves of any group that tries to force people into mechanical categories or that denies genuine emotion. His style is simple and direct; for him the message outweighs all else.

Principal Series Characters:

• Harvey Krim , a thirty-five-year-old insurance investigator, is cynical about love, human motives, and insurance companies. Accused of being nasty, unreliable, and unprincipled, he himself cultivates that image. A man who does not like loose ends, who works with police only when it is to his advantage to do so, and who is willing to temper deduction with hunches and to manipulate evidence in a good cause, he easily sees through shams and feels alienated at times. Nevertheless, he is still able to care about certain people.
• Larry Cohen , a district attorney in New York City, is one part of a background team in two comic mysteries. A sharp young criminal lawyer with a nose for the truth, no matter how unlikely, he is nevertheless a dupe for a sharp mind.
• John Comaday , a New York City police commissioner, is the second part of the team. Although a political animal, tough with underlings but smooth with superiors, he is always susceptible to a pretty face.
• Masao Masuto , a lean, six-foot-tall Nisei attached to the Beverly Hills Police Department, is a Zen Buddhist; his meditative philosophy provides the calm, the self-assurance, and the introspective insights that mark his detection. He is married to a Japanese American woman. Masuto speaks Spanish and empathizes with the common worker. He is sometimes cruelly taunted about his Nisei heritage and must learn to deal with the acid tongues of Southern Californians.

Bibliography

Browne, Ray. “E. V. Cunningham: The Case of the Poisoned Society.” In Heroes and Humanities: Detective Fiction and Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. Cunningham is discussed in the context of a study of humanist ideology in American, Canadian, and Australian detective fiction.

Deloux, Jean-Pierre, ed. “Howard Fast.” Polar 125 (October 15, 1982): 163-185. Survey of the author’s works, his life, and his politics.

Fast, Howard. Being Red. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Cunningham’s autobiographical reflections on the difficulties of being a communist writer in the United States.

Macdonald, Andrew. Howard Fast: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Detailed critical inquiry into Cunningham’s life and work. Bibliographic references and index.

McLellan, Dennis. “Howard Fast, Eighty-eight: Novels Included Spartacus.” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2003, p. B13. Obituary of Cunningham deals with his life and works. Notes his use of Cunningham pseudonym while blacklisted.

Meyer, Herschel D. History and Conscience: The Case of Howard Fast. New York, Anvil-Atlas, 1958. Brief but focused study of Cunningham’s representation of morality and conscience.

Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Examination of the representation and importance of various categories of identity in mainstream American crime fiction. Particularly useful for analyzing Cunningham’s women and his Japanese sleuth.