Stanley Ellin

• Born: October 6, 1916
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: July 31, 1986
• Place of death: Brooklyn, New York

Types of Plot: Private investigator; psychological; thriller; amateur sleuth

Principal Series: John Milano, 1979-1983

Contribution

Indisputably a master of plot structure in both the short story and the novel, Stanley Ellin is more highly regarded by many critics for the ingenious imagination at work in his short fiction. His mystery novels, however, have a wide and loyal following, and it is in his novels that Ellin most effectively demonstrates his opposition to the view that crime fiction is at best merely escapist fare. Ellin identifies not only with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle but also with Fyodor Dostoevski and William Faulkner, who also dealt with the theme of crime and punishment. Ellin simultaneously works within and transcends the traditional formulas of mystery and crime detection, creating, quite simply, serious fiction on the problem of evil—in all of its psychological complexity.

Biography

Stanley Bernard Ellin was born on October 6, 1916, in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, New York, the son of Louis Ellin and Rose Mandel Ellin. He was an only child, and his parents were intensely devoted to him and to each other. His childhood was extremely happy, and his parents served as excellent role models, approaching life with simplicity and integrity.

Ellin was a bright and somewhat precocious student. After graduation from New Utrecht High School, he attended Brooklyn College, where he edited and wrote for the school literary magazine. He was graduated, at nineteen, in 1936, during the height of the Depression. Following graduation, he worked as a dairy farm manager, a junior college teacher, a magazine salesperson and distributor, a boilermaker’s apprentice, and a steelworker. In 1937, he married Jeanne Michael, a freelance editor and former classmate. They had one child. Although he tried unsuccessfully to sell his fiction during the difficult years of the Depression, he had, not unhappily, reconciled himself to a career as a shipyard and construction worker.

After a short stint in the Army at the end of World War II, Ellin saw his literary fortunes change. Discharged in 1946, he decided once again to attempt a career as a writer. Combining his veteran’s unemployment allowance with his wife’s editing income, Ellin became a full-time writer. His first published short story, “The Specialty of the House,” appeared in 1948 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and won the Ellery Queen Award for the best first story of that year. Also in 1948, Simon and Schuster published his first novel, Dreadful Summit. Altogether, Ellin published fourteen novels and four collections of short stories. He was a three-time winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, twice for short stories in 1955 and 1957, and in 1959 for his novel The Eighth Circle (1958). In 1974, the French edition of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (1972) won Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. In 1981, Ellin received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. With the exception of some travel abroad and some time spent in Miami Beach, Ellin lived all of his life in Brooklyn, where he died at Kings County Hospital of complications following a stroke, on July 31, 1986.

Analysis

Although generally acknowledged as a master of the well-constructed plot, Stanley Ellin actually placed considerably greater emphasis on the value of characterization. In a brief essay titled “Inside the Mystery Novel,” published in the 1982 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, Ellin offers what is for him the basic principle of fiction writing: “Plot is the skeleton, characterization the flesh, everything else the clothing.” He further states that there are two vital elements in “putting the story across”: “the characterization of the protagonist—demonstrated in his pursuit of his goal—and the ambience of the locales through which he moves.” Although the plot is undoubtedly essential, it is the center of attention for the literary critic rather than for the reader, and as Ellin indicates, its failure is far more notable than its success:

[The author] must provide a plot for his story that makes dramatic sense, but if he achieves this, he will not be judged by it. If, however, he totally fails to construct a sound plot, he will be judged by it in very unkind terms.

Dreadful Summit

In his first novel, Dreadful Summit, Ellin illustrates these precepts. The plot is relatively simple: A bartender is taunted and sadistically beaten by a customer. His teenage son witnesses the beating and determines to avenge his father’s (and his own) humiliation. Focusing on the development of the teenage protagonist, Ellin creates a three-dimensional character whose youthful sense of responsibility is distorted by the emotional effects of profound humiliation and the desire for vengeance. The result is an admirable study of adolescent psychology, a story in which a Dostoevskian protagonist struggles with and is all but overwhelmed by impulsive and destructive vindictiveness.

The Key to Nicholas Street and Stronghold

In his second novel, The Key to Nicholas Street (1952), Ellin expands beyond the concentration on a central protagonist to a narrative of shifting viewpoints, revealing how five characters are variously affected when the woman next door is found dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs. Once again the mechanism of the plot, although expertly contrived, is subtly overshadowed by intriguing characterization. Ellin takes a similar approach to group characterization in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, in which he explores psychosexual areas relatively new to the mystery novel, and in Stronghold (1975), the story of four escaped convicts, the two women they hold hostage, and the father and son-in-law who fight for the women’s freedom. Stronghold, however, is somewhat flawed by its breadth of characterization; it is clearly a novel that needs an effective center, a central protagonist to provide the core of strength, integrity, and sanity through which the actions of such a diversified array of personalities could be more effectively analyzed and interpreted.

The Eighth Circle

Ellin does provide such a protagonist in The Eighth Circle, his third novel and the first to introduce the private investigator as central figure. Murray Kirk is a private eye unlike any of his predecessors in the genre. A disillusioned lawyer who joins Frank Conmy’s detective agency as a trainee operative, Kirk soon finds success as a gumshoe; he also puts the agency on a sound fiscal footing, expanding and increasing its efficiency. As the novel opens, Frank Conmy has died and Kirk is in control of Conmy and Kirk. Conmy, however, almost constantly in Kirk’s thoughts, maintains a shadowy presence in the novel as father figure and alter ego. Kirk has even taken over Conmy’s Manhattan apartment and continues to weigh his daily decisions and actions under the influence of his deceased partner.

The Eighth Circle is on the surface a conventional New York detective story, complete with the requisite illegal gambling and bookmaking operations, police corruption, and politically ambitious district attorney. Yet, on another level, it is a philosophical novel, in which Kirk and his interior ghost of Frank Conmy reflect on such diverse questions as social strata and the effects of the Great Depression on the common person. At heart, Kirk is a cynic, but his self-assurance and personal integrity are unwavering. The world in which he operates is Dante’s “eighth circle,” the bottom of Hell, populated by pimps, panderers, seducers, sycophants, grafters, thieves, and liars. The Eighth Circle, however, is not without humor, an often-overlooked attribute of Ellin’s work. Ellin is particularly adept at portraying social pretensions, and nowhere in his work is he more effective or more entertaining than in The Eighth Circle when a wealthy crime boss, who has left the Lower East Side without having it leave him, offers his philosophy of fine wines and how to select them.

Star Light, Star Bright

Many of Ellin’s more ardent followers regret that Murray Kirk did not make an appearance in subsequent books. The Kirk characterization is transformed, however, and finally reemerges as John Milano in Star Light, Star Bright (1979) and in The Dark Fantastic (1983). Like Kirk, Milano is an ace detective, highly proficient in observation and deduction. He is also a tougher, more physically formidable version of Kirk. It is difficult to imagine Milano taking the kind of beating that little Billy Caxton, the former bantamweight, gives to Murray Kirk in The Eighth Circle. In the opening pages of Star Light, Star Bright, Milano disarms a fence who has assisted him in recovering stolen property but who also has a flair for extortion at gunpoint, teaching him in emphatic terms that one does not “change the rules in the middle of the game.” He is also known and respected by other characters in the novel, who are aware of how he effectively persuaded Frankie Kurtz, the physically abusive manager of an actress, to take up another line of work. In the course of their professional relationship, the actress and Milano have become lovers, although she still fears Kurtz and his “muscle.” Milano’s solution to the problem is coldly precise in its evident logic:

As for the muscle, I came to the conclusion . . . that my girl must be made to understand that Frankie wasn’t the only one ready and willing to use it. It took a little doing to get him up to that Chelsea flat, and with Sharon cowering against its locked door, to provide her with the necessary bloody demonstration.

This side of Milano’s character is clearly a throwback to the hard-boiled approach reminiscent of Hammett’s Sam Spade. Nevertheless, Milano is not simply a thug opting for the physical solution. Like Murray Kirk, he is a man of high integrity; he is incorruptible, relaxed and at ease at any level of society. Above all, he is a realist, fully aware that his New York, like Kirk’s, is the “eighth circle,” and he deals with it accordingly. Unlike Kirk, Milano is the consummate realist, with little time or inclination for introspection or cynicism.

Very Old Money

In addition to his work in the private investigator subgenre, Ellin wrote a collection of densely plotted thrillers that follow a similar pattern: A young man, down on his luck, becomes involved with people of wealth and power who are using him to further some nefarious end. Control of an estate or legacy is frequently the objective. Following this pattern are House of Cards (1967), The Valentine Estate (1968), The Bind (1970), and The Luxembourg Run (1977). Very Old Money (1985) is the final entry in the group, offering a slight variation on the theme: The hapless “young man” becomes a married couple, unemployed schoolteachers hired as domestics to work in a large and mysterious mansion in Manhattan. In two of the novels in this group, the protagonist is a former athlete: Chris Monte, a former Wimbledon champion, in The Valentine Estate, and Reno Davis, a former heavyweight boxer, in House of Cards.

House of Cards

The design of House of Cards is a fairy-tale motif, in which a knight-errant, Davis, risks all to save a beautiful princess, Anne de Villemont, from the Parisian mansion where she and her nine-year-old son, Paul, are being held captive. Anne is independently wealthy, but her former husband’s family is slowly but steadily drawing on her funds to finance a fascist overthrow of the world’s democratic governments. Davis rescues the distressed Anne, initiating a chase by train, boat, and car over most of France and at least half of Italy. It is no surprise to readers of Ellin that Davis ultimately rescues the lady, retrieves her son, and aborts the entire world revolution. It is one of Ellin’s strong points as a writer of suspense thrillers that he effectively renders situations that defy credulity eminently believable.

Principal Series Character:

• John Milano , a private investigator, is single, in his mid-thirties, cosmopolitan in his general awareness but decidedly ethnic in his deeper sensibilities, particularly in the self-assured, quiet pride he takes in his New York Catholic, Italian American heritage. Milano is a keen observer, particularly of the quirks in human nature. He views society with a general hopefulness, although it is tinged with cynicism. He combines a strong sense of professional integrity with an active social conscience.

Bibliography

Barzun, J., and W. H. Taylor. Introduction to The Key to Nicholas Street. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. This introduction to one of Ellin’s earliest novels places it in the context of contemporary work.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes discussion of Ellin’s Dreadful Summit.

Keating, H. R. F., ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982. Examination of generic conventions that helps one understand Ellin’s work in terms of those conventions.

Panek, Leroy Pad. An Introduction to the Detective Story. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987. This history of the detective story contains a brief mention of Ellin.

Penzler, Otto. Introduction to The Eighth Circle. New York: Random House, 1958. Discussion of Ellin’s work by the editor of The Armchair Detective and proprietor of New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop.