Eric Knight: You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up

When it comes to citing novels that evoke 1930s California, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up often goes unmentioned. Written under the name Richard Hallas, and marketed as a “hardboiled novel” in the style of James M. Cain, Knight’s book was first published by McBride in 1938, and republished by Dell in 1951, Gregg Press (Boston) in 1980, and by Black Lizard and Carnegie-Mellon Press, Princeton in 1986. What surprises many is that this 130-page first-person narrative was written by an Englishman who crossed continents as well as genres, authoring, in addition to You Play the Black..., lachrymose fiction like Lassie, Come Home and The Flying Yorkshireman. Sadly, You Play the Black... would be Knight’s only hardboiler, prompting one to wonder how Knight, who lived in L.A. for just two years, could be feted for writing the bathetic Lassie..., but remain virtually ignored for writing what amounts to a genre classic.

According to California historian Kevin Starr, You Play the Black... is the “most sociologically explicit of the hardboiled California novels” with a “crackpot utopian subplot.” Indeed, it’s a quirky fast-paced novel that reads like a cross between Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Its protagonist, Dick, an Oklahoma-born Marine AWOL, hops a freight in Texas bound for Southern California only to find life on the West Coast a perpetual gamble, and people noticeably different: “Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California, they go insane.” With eccentric characters and abrupt plot turns- each chapter represents a different bet and a possible means of cheating fate- the novel is a veritable catalogue of Southern California culture, depicting, in the process, movie people, hoboes, amusement park workers, homosexuals, followers of Aimee Simple McPherson’s Four Square Gospel, advocates of Townsend’s Ham & Eggs programme and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign, Palos Verde socialites and members of various ethnic communities.

At the time, L.A. was well-known for its eccentrics. This was a period in which, out of 1,833 churches in Los Angeles, only a thousand belonged to orthodox religions. Says the sexually ambiguous movie director Genter regarding the era’s various fringe movements, “I kept thinking that the goofier the plan the more quickly people seem to fall for it in California.” And “These people were so slaphappy they couldn’t tell the difference between Thursday and a fan dancer.” Dick gladly joins the fray, embroiling himself in the Ecanaanomic Party- a mishmash of McPherson’s church, Sinclair’s party and Townsend’s programme. Along the way the protagonist falls in love with Sheila, an unbalanced and secretly Mexican socialite, only for his former girlfriend to inform him that she’s pregnant. Seeking a remedy to his predicament, Dick decides to kill her. But the woman is a born survivor. When he tries to drown her off the coast of Catalina, he discovers that she’s an expert swimmer. Even the arsenic he administers has no effect. Then, at the Long Beach amusement park where he works, Dick unloosens a bolt on the chute, only for it to fly off and kill an unsuspecting Sheila. Dick is arrested and convicted for a crime which he has barely committed. Genter visits him in prison, tells him the world is merely a movie, and that he is responsible for Sheila’s death, for he gave Dick the idea that he should kill his former girlfriend. The director commits suicide, leaving a note exonerating his friend. Released from prison, Dick’s conscience proves too much for him, but when he confesses his crimes, the police simply laugh at him. Fed up, Dick leaves town. Having hopped the same freight that brought him to L.A., he concludes that “California was just a dream.” But in the desert, he realises how attached he is to Southern California and its bizarre inhabitants. At the risk of misfortune and nightmare, he decides to return.

Thanks to the success of Lassie, Come Home, one is able to piece together Knight’s biography. Born in Leeds in 1897, Eric Mowbary Knight was the third son of Frederick Harrison and Hilda Creasser Knight. When the father, a wholesale jeweller, died in the Boer War, leaving his family penniless, Hilda went to St. Petersburg as governess to the children of Princess Xenia, and later to America, while Knight was raised by relatives in Yorkshire. He began work at twelve, as a bobbin doffer in a Leeds mill. Over the next three years he worked in an engine-works, a sawmill, and a glass factory. In 1912, aged fifteen, he joined his mother and brothers in Philadelphia, where he became a copy boy for the Philadelphia Press. He attended the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. Come World War I, he joined the Canadian Light Infantry, and served as a signaller. Both brothers, having enlisted in the Pennsylvania 110th Artillery, were killed in France in 1918. Knight’s mother died shortly afterwards.

After becoming an artillery captain in the U. S. Army Reserve, Knight reported for several newspapers in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, and, between 1926 and 1934, was drama and movie critic for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the Town Crier magazine. He sold his first short story, "The Two-Fifty Hat," to Liberty in 1930, and began contributing to popular magazines like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, MacLean's, and the Saturday Evening Post. In July, 1917, he married Dorothy Hall of Boston. The couple had three daughters, but divorced in 1932. Knight then married writer Jere Brylawski. Two years later, Knight’s first novel, Invitation to Life, appeared, after which he moved to Hollywood to work as a script writer. Though the studio did not renew his contract, Knight, having designed and built a house in Southern California, published, in 1936, his second novel, Song on Your Bugles, which might well have been subtitled “a portrait of an artist as a young Yorkshireman.”

The following year, the Knights moved east, to a farm in Croton-on-Hudson. His first real success came with the publication of a novella, "The Flying Yorkshireman," in a 1938 anthology. During the late 1930s he travelled back to Yorkshire, where observing the unemployed inspired his novel, The Happy Land (1940), aka Now Pray We For Our Country, a critical but hardly a popular success, which details the disintegration of a mining family under the pressures of unemployment. Impoverished Yorkshire was also the setting for his most famous book, the aforementioned Lassie, Come Home (1940), which was a Junior Literary Guild Selection, first appearing in a shorter version in the Saturday Evening Post in December, 1938, the same year as You Play the Black....

At the outbreak of World War II, Knight volunteered his services to the British Ministry of Information. He would write one more novel, This Above All. Set in the Battle of Britain and acclaimed as "the first great novel to come out of the Second World War," it was an immediate best seller in the United States and England and, with a few changes requested by the Hays Office of movie censors, made into a 1942 movie starring Joan Fontaine and Tyrone Power. A tragic love story set during the Battle of Britain, it explores the ambivalence of its working-class hero toward English society. It was a Book of the Month Club Main Selection, and within the year had sold over 35,000 copies in Great Britain alone.

After working on the Ministry of Information's film World of Plenty, Knight lectured and delivered radio talks on America for British audiences. In 1942, he returned to the United States, became an American citizen and was commissioned as a captain in the Special Services Division. He contributed to war information films and worked on the military pocket guides to several countries. In January 1943 Knight was promoted to major. Sent to Cairo, his transport plane crashed in Dutch Guiana, and Knight was killed. Posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit, Knight would secure a place in doggy heaven with the release, a few months later, of Lassie, Come Home starring Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowell.

Despite, or maybe because of, the Lassie’s success, few reviewers took kindly to Knight’s hardboiled novel. In his influential essay, “The Boys in the Back Room,” highbrow critic Edmund Wilson calls You Play the Black... a “clever pastiche of Cain...indicative of the degree to which this kind of writing has finally become formularised that it should have been possible for a visiting Englishman...to tell a story in the Hemingway-Cain vernacular almost without a slip.” Believing that all California hardboilers lacked literary weight, Wilson quotes Knight’s protagonist, who, at the end of the novel, says, “I could remember everything about California, but I couldn’t feel it. I tried to get my mind to remember something that it could feel, too, but it was no use. It was all gone. All of it. The pink stucco houses and the palm trees and the stores built like cats and dogs and frogs and ice-cream freezers and the neon lights round everything.” If that’s lightweight writing, let’s have more of it. But Wilson really meant the region, as represented by the quote, lacked reality. Of course, it’s that very lack of reality which makes California, and Knight’s writing- the work of an outsider- so attractive. Wilson goes on to say that Knight’s novel is simply a “devil’s parody of a movie,” which contains everything excluded by “Catholic censorship: sex, debauchery, unpunished crime, sacrilege against the Church,” which Knight lets loose “with a gusto of pent-up ferocity that the reader cannot but share...What a pity that it is impossible for such a writer to create and produce his own pictures!”

Certainly, Knight would have liked to have forged a career writing for the studios. During his short tenure in Hollywood, he did, in fact, write a number of unproduced original screenplays. They had titles like The Hypothetical Murderer, The Bandit Governor, A Future in Hollywood, and The Magnificent Liar. While his film reviews discussed a variety of related subjects, including his dislike of poorly written dialogue, his favourite actors, and the arbitrary decisions made by the Pennsylvania movie censors, he was also occasionally lectured on film history. But other than his uncredited contribution to the documentary Prelude to War (1943)- on why the U.S. should enter WW Two- his only real connection would be the screen adaptations made from his books.

Wilson wasn’t the only critic to pan Knight’s novel. Most classified it as an imitation hardboiled novel. Another wrote, “James Thurber, himself, couldn’t have done a better parody... After it is all over you feel sort of disgusted with yourself for having strung along with him.” Perhaps there were so many parodies around that it was all too easy to ascribe that label to anything that looked as though it was written in that style. Yet how could critics have missed the novel’s more salient points? For not only does Knights’ novel stand the test of time, but its evocation of the 1930s is the equal of anything written by McCoy or Nathaniel West. What’s more, Knight’s novel appeared a year before West’s Day of the Locust and McCoy’s No Pockets In a Shroud (though five years after They Shoot Horses, Don’t They).

However, David Feinberg, in his introduction to the Black Lizard edition of Knight’s novel, maintains that critics disliked the book simply because the author was an Englishman who dared to write a hardboiled novel. This might well have been the case. Though, when Wilson’s essay appeared in 1940, that other notorious English writer of hardboiled fiction, the middle-class public-school refugee Raymond Chandler had already published The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940).

Perhaps critics dismissed Knight’s work, but were willing to accept Chandler’s, because the former appeared out of nowhere, had no body of hardboiled work behind him, and had not served an apprenticeship writing for pulps like Black Mask. What’s more, Knight’s book was neither a whodunit nor a detective novel, but was anthropological and political in scope. While eschewing Chandler’s wisecracking artificiality and cynicism, You Play the Black... contains a playfulness noticeably absent in the work of Cain and McCoy.

It could be that critics, on the eve of World War Two, were, if not xenophobic, reluctant to entertain the notion that a foreigner could write a hardboiled critique of America. For here was someone apparently masquerading as an American- never mind that Knight had been living in America for some thirty years- who had the nerve to write about the culture. With his morally anarchic manner, Knight, rather than relegate cultural information to mere background material, turns it into the very subject of his novel. Though mocking in his depiction, Knight, still hanging on to his working-class perspective, replaces the genre’s usual cynicism with a sense of what is possible. Englishman he might have been, Knight illustrates, as Hammett had nine years earlier in Red Harvest, that hardboilers can be an effective means of criticism. No lightweight imitation, You Play the Black... is the strongest and most individual of statements. Had he lived longer, Knight might well have written other hardboiled novels. Certainly there is one more such novel from the same period in the Knight archives at Yale. Entitled Rose Without Warning, it concerns a young girl’s climb from marathon dance halls to stardom. Unfortunately, it would go unpublished.

So successful was Knight that his portrait was painted by the famous American artist Andrew Wyeth. Standing against a mountain range, Knight wears a blue shirt and a pencil moustache. With brown hair, chiselled face, and penetrating gaze, he looks like an emaciated Errol Flynn. The portrait is preserved for the masses on a web site devoted not to noir fiction, but- you guessed it- to collies, at the end of which there is a picture of a handcarved sculpture that Knight did of his favourite canine. The dog bears an uncanny resemblance to a petrified sheep. A short biography accompanies the two images. While it cites Knight’s fiction, You Play the Black is conspicuous by its absence.