Introduction to Punk & Other Stories, by Cleve F. Adams

Cleve Franklin Adams was born March 21, 1895 in Chicago, Illinois. His father died young. He had passed away when the 1910 U.S. Census was taken in April of that year, and Cleve was raised by his widowed mother, Gertrude. Adams moved to Los Angeles in the 1910s where his name first appears in the 1915 Los Angeles City Directory as “Cleave F. Adams.” His name is spelled “Cleave” on all the earliest documents where he appeared, including census records, his World War I draft registration card, marriage records, and city directories. The spelling changed to “Cleve” somewhere in the early 1930s on both official and unofficial documents, but it is unclear if it was changed legally or simply by his persistent usage of the new spelling.
     Adams’s early years in Los Angeles appear to have been lively. He moved frequently, with different addresses in 1915, 1916, 1918, and 1921. His occupation changed just as often. In 1915 he identified himself as a clerk, in 1916 as a property manager, in 1918 as a decorator. The 1920 U.S. Census listed Adams’s occupation as a motion picture “technical man,” and 1921 saw him clerking again. He married Vera Daily on April 7, 1923, and their only child, a boy named Warren, was born in 1924. After marrying, the Adams moved to Culver City and then Santa Monica before settling in Glendale. Adams and his wife opened a candy store and in 1933—at the ripe age of 38—he sold his first story to the pulps. That first story, “Inspector Thomas Wins a Hat” appeared in the February 1933 issue of Clues All Star Detective Stories.
     The next few years saw a handful of Adams’s tales appear in Clues, All Detective Magazine, and Top-Notch. In 1935, Clues published Adams’s first Violet McDade and Nevada Alverado mystery; a Hardboiled tale featuring a former circus strongwoman, weighing somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds, that took guff off nobody and wasn’t afraid to use violence. It was the first of thirteen stories featuring the two female private eyes and it marked Adams as a writer to watch. He really hit his stride in the late-1930s. Between 1937 and 1939, at least 55 of Adams’s stories—shorts, novelettes, and novellas—hit newsstands in multiple pulp markets, including: Argosy, Sure-Fire Detective, Ten Detective Aces, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Double Detective.
     In 1940, Adams cracked the pages of Black Mask with “The Key,” featuring another hardboiled duo, Canavan and Kleinschmidt. The pair would appear in five more tales published by Black Mask, but at this period in his career Adams was shifting away from the pulps and towards the more lucrative novel length form. A market where he found success and even hit hardcover, which is something most of his contemporaries never did. His first novel, Sabotage (1940), featured the problematic private eye, Rex McBride. McBride, like all of Adams’s novel-length detectives, is controversial because his world view is harsh, in a way mystery critic and historian Francis M. Nevins called “chauvinistic,” “fascist,” and “racist.” Ron Goulart, in an article he wrote for P. S. Magazine in 1966, wrote the following about Adams’s “detective”:

“The detective had different names in different books, such as McBride or Shannon, but he is the same disassociated storm trooper in them all.” He continued, “His detective is given to moments of rage, to strange seizures. An Adams detective suspects a vast conspiracy against himself, therefore suspects all law and authority.”

The famous New York Times mystery critic, Anthony Boucher, wrote that Adams’s Up Jumped the Devil (1943), the fourth Rex McBride tale, is “a grand piece of ultra-hardboiled action and dialogue in the toughest tradition, and at the same time a very nasty piece of work.” Boucher concluded that Adams had written a racist “white Nordic” tale and the author appeared to have “contempt” for everyone except whites. A charge hardboiled maestro, W. T. Ballard, a close friend of Adams, claimed was untrue.
     While Adams’s pulp stories have the same cultural issues as most of his contemporary hardboiled writers—sexism and racism, particularly—they lack the overpowering cynicism and extremes of his novels. Their heroes, almost always anti-heroes, are a few plays away from heroic and every one of them is in it for themselves. But they are less bleak, less racist, and more consumable by a modern audience as entertainment than are his novels.
     The four novelettes included in this collection—“Punk,” “Default with Doom,” “Frame for a Lady,” and “Forty Pains”—were published between 1937 and 1941. Each is a showcase of Adams’s strengths as a writer. The prose is muscular and hardboiled, the dialogue clipped with steel, and the plotting is wickedly sharp. And while two are exactly what we expect from Adams, “Punk” and “Default with Doom,” the other two show Adams’s lighter side, and there is even a touch of humor in one.
     Cleve Adams died of heart failure on December 28, 1949, in Glendale, California, at the age of 54. While his work has fallen out of favor with modern readers, much it, especially his shorter works, are fine examples of mid-twentieth century hardboiled crime fiction that deserve a new audience all these decades after they were written.