Biographical sketch of Linklater from the March 16, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly
Supplied by Monte Herridge
HERE is a personal greeting from J. Lane Linklater, author of "One O'Clock in the Morning," in this issue. We asked him to stand up and say a few words to you:
You can't mean me, cap'n?
Oh, well—
We'll avoid the statistical as far as possible and get down to the vital.
I have lived more or less decidedly and existed more or less uncertainly, in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana; that is, down the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to the Mexican border, and across the south to Louisiana. Thus it will be seen that I have never set foot on any but a coast or border State.
I have held down -- sometimes for a very brief period -- forty-three jobs, in offices, restaurants, hotels, boarding houses, and again in offices; in large cities, small towns, construction and logging camps, in green valleys and desert plains. If I was working in a town, it was never far away from a restaurant; if in a camp, it was never very far away from the cookhouse.
Incidentally, the transition from job to job was at times sudden and drastic. On one occasion, for instance, I was night porter in a "coffee and" dump, and a week later I was head bookkeeper for a chain store system some two thousand miles away. Honestly -- or perhaps I should say, actually -- I am a very fair bookkeeper.
While I'm on the question of jobs -- and what is more important? -- I might add that the last regular job I had, and the one I was on longer than any of the others, was as editor of a farm paper. I was never better fitted for any job than for this one inasmuch as I had never in my life touched my hand to a plow and couldn't tell the difference between a Jersey heifer and a Shorthorn bull. Now I know what a Shorthorn bull is, having met one in a dissatisfied mood.
Among the people I have met and become friendly with -- and this is vital, from the point of view of both life and letters -- were bankers, labor agitators, gamblers, ministers, politicians, hoboes, Chinese cooks, mining-stock promoters, hard-working bohunks, and waitresses. Of these I should say that the bohunks were the most useful, the hoboes the happiest, the Chinese cooks the most successful, and the waitresses the most interesting -- to me.
Perhaps the most accurate indication of the kind of life a man has led is where he has slept. Well, I have slept in very expensive hotels -- when I was working there -- in middle-class hotels, in cheap hotels, and in fifteen-cent flophouses; also in bunk houses, ditches, city parks, fields, woods and swamps. Of these I should say that the woods were the most comfortable and the flophouses the most interesting.
I have never been arrested. This I now regret exceedingly. I have had several opportunities, although I never offended society very seriously, except by going broke. I have been accosted on the street around three o'clock in the morning in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans and other minor municipalities which suspected that my financial status warranted my arrest as a vagrant. Their suspicions were correct, but I was always able to convince them otherwise. As I say, I now regret it. I may yet overcome this disadvantage.
In these emergencies my tongue was assisted by my face, a deceptively mild arrangement that never seemed to fit the role of roving mendicant. I have been mistaken for a well-known Methodist minister in Portland, Oregon, and for a Chatauqua lecturer in Sweetwater, Texas.
My formal education, unfortunately, was not very extensive. However, I have read rather incessantly, if not systematically. Meditating upon what I had seen and what I had read I decided, about a year and a half ago, to forsake the discussion of ton litters and live stock diseases for the production of fiction. I inquired about it. I read the writers' journals. I asked advice of people who know about these things -- I was always keen for advice.
They all told me to hang on to my job for five or perhaps ten years, the while I tried to write fiction. I thereupon quit my job cold. Advice is fine, but I have always thought that if you're going to do a thing, the thing to do is to go ahead and do it, sink or swim. I'm not rich yet, but the wife and I are going back down to California for the winter.
I have never been well enough to undertake anything violent, and never sick enough to take to my bed. It is a condition that presages a long life. Under the head of more good luck, I have a wife -- acquired about eight years ago -- who is a good scout and a smart woman; a father and mother, both alive and well, who are intelligent and good natured -- they had to be to put up with me -- and a number of friends who stick through the years.
All of these things count. Not that it matters, but I am now thirty-six years old.
Links:
"Hugo Oakes, Lawyer-Detective" is an overview of Linklater's series of stories about an attorney in the days before Erle Stanley Gardner created Perry Mason. The Oakes stories appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly. You can read Monte Herridge's article elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.
Linklater has a story in the anthology, 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories. Click here to visit Amazon.com for a copy.
Posted by ds at July 13, 2006 01:25 PM
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