Mystery Writer Robert Wade Has Died
He was not on the list.
Robert Allison “Bob” Wade (1920-2012) and H. Bill Miller (1920-61) penned their novels using the joint pseudonym of Wade Miller. Their writing tandem followed the highly successful Ellery Queen team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who produced top-notch mystery fiction from 1929 to 1958.
Other bylines for Wade Miller such as Will Daemer, Dale Wilmer, and Whit Masterson were also pressed into service. Between the years 1946 to Mr. Miller’s premature death on August 21, 1961 from a sudden heart attack, they produced some thirty-three books. Counting two made-for-TV movies, nine titles were filmed in all. This includes Orson Welles’ noir classic TOUCH OF EVIL, which was adapted from their novel, Badge of Evil.
The two future authors first met while 12-year-olds taking violin lessons. Friends for life, they attended San Diego State and together edited the campus newspaper and literary magazine. After leaving in their senior year in 1942, they enlisted in the Air Force and after the war resumed their joint ventures. Fawcett Gold Medal published the brunt of their creative output. In addition, they wrote novelettes, short stories, and television plays, including for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The back cover copy to Evil Come, Evil Go which included a photograph of the team also lent some insights about their collaborations:
The first question asked them is always: ‘How do you work together?’ Their usual answer is: ‘Wade writes the nouns and Miller the verbs.’ Actually, their method is similar to building a house, each man contributing his particular talents and skills. After discussing an idea at length, they outline extensively. Then Wade rushes through a first draft, Miller rewriting close behind, and they revise the result aloud, which amounts to a third draft. But the real secret to the success of this method is that, after thirty years, Wade and Miller think so much alike they have never had a major argument regarding their work.
Among the Wade Miller early entries was the PI Max Thursday series generally held as one of the best from the post-war era. Something of an alcoholic and loner, the PI Max Thursday character was also flawed and complex enough to escape the private detective cliché. Thursday’s life and career, moreover, evolved in interesting twists and turns throughout the series. Mr. Wade mentioned in a March 1984 interview that he had worked on a manuscript to revive PI Max Thursday, but it has never been published.
After 1961, Mr. Wade went on alone to publish hardcover noir and such police procedurals as 711–Officer Needs Help and Play Like You’re Dead under the Whit Masterson pen-name with Dodd, Mead. By the close of the 1970s, he had abandoned his solo efforts. His last published novel was The Slow Gallows in 1979. All totaled, Mr. Wade had a hand in writing forty-six novels, a prodigious yet high quality output.
In the ensuing years, Mr. Wade wrote for television and the cinema. His clients included Walt Disney and the San Diego Zoo. The Private Eye Writers of America’s 1988 Lifetime Achievement Award recognized Mr. Wade for his contributions to the genre. The award presentation was made at the San Diego Boucheron conference. A generation earlier in 1956, the Wade Miller tandem had been awarded the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Wade Miller team was also nominated for Best Short Story in 1956 (“Invitation to an Accident” in the July 1955 EQMM).
More recently, Mr. Wade was given the 1998 City of San Diego Local Author Achievement Award. Still an active octogenarian, he writes a monthly mystery wrap-up column called “Spadework” for the San Diego Union Tribune. From this vantage point, he can survey past and present crime writing. He has praised such crime authors diverse as Martha Lawrence, Robert Crais, Rochelle Krich, Sue Grafton, Donald Westlake, Marianne Wesson, and Janet Evanovich.
While researching “Wade Miller” on a google search, most of the hits refer to the Houston Astro’s right-hand pitching ace with the same name. For some perspective, this Wade Miller was born in 1976 about the same time Mr. Wade was winding down his novelist career. Indeed, the author tandem Wade Miller has all but passed from the current literary scene. That is a shame, too. As Bill Crider posed in his Gold Medal column from Mystery*File #40, today’s crime authors don’t write books like they use to in the 1950s.
Wade Miller has attracted some recent notice. In 1993 HarperPerennial reissued four PI Max Thursday titles: Calamity Fair, Murder Charge, Shoot to Kill, and Uneasy Street. Their works have been translated into as many as sixteen foreign languages including Swedish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, and Finnish. Modern practitioners in the crime writing genre such as Bill Crider and James Reasoner find much to admire about the Wade Miller oeuvre.
For me, it’s always a style thing. The Wade Miller titles typified the top-notch Gold Medal books. Their novels, clocking in at around 160 pages, show lean prose, tight plots, and controlled voice. Kiss Her Goodbye was a stand-alone title issued not by Gold Medal, but Lion Library out of New York City. Lion House was a paperback house also publishing the likes of noir-meister Jim Thompson and Mississippi novelist Ben Ames Williams.
Kiss Her Goodbye appeared in 1956, three years before the authors’ most colorfully titled novel, Kitten with a Whip. This novel became a movie in 1964, a drive-in theater fare starring Ann-Margret and John Forsythe. Wade Miller later wrote the screenplay for KISS HER GOODBYE, a homonymous movie slated to star Charlton Heston, Robert Taylor (the antagonist), and Barbara Lang, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike starlet. When that deal fell through, it was made into a largely forgettable film in 1959 starring Andrew Prine, Steven Hill (the DA in the original Law and Order TV series), and Sharon Farrell. The movie, however, treats the female lead as only a precocious, adult-looking girl.
The novel, however, concerns a young, beautiful, but also mentally challenged young lady named Emily Darnell. This premise leaves open many possibilities for cheap exploitation: men having their way with a full-figured desirable woman having the mind of a twelve-year-old. The lusty blurb topping the front cover almost suggests this: “Caress her trembling form, hold her close – and forget not the evil this woman can do.” The lurid cover art illustrates a curvaceous blonde with the reddest pouty lips, her flimsy white sundress ripped from one shoulder down to the upper hemisphere of her breasts.
Intrigued, I recently plunked down the three dollars for a paperback that in 1956 cost 35 cents. Thankfully, the book is a far, far cry from how the still bright crimson wrapper portrays it. The opening sentences, terse and spare and vivid, are the narrative hook:
Where the earth is unmasked it is called desert. It is the naked face of the earth and it is strangely expressionless.
The two people in the car had driven all day through the searing heat. The man’s name was Ed Darnell, the girl’s name was Emily. It was nearly sundown but the heat was still fierce and the sky still vast and bright. Under a sky that size, not even the earth seemed very important.
Reading about this desert landscape echoes the prose style of W.R. Burnett, Bill Pronzini, and to nail down the point, Tony Hillerman. We are sucked into the setting from the sheer force of its description, beginning with the first two lines’ stark imagery.
Ed Darnell and his sister Emily have fled Bakersfield, California for a new chance with hopefully better odds in Barstow. They make it as far as Jimmock and beset by an automobile breakdown are forced to rent a cabin from an older man named Tubbs. Tubbs looks out his office window at Emily:
Emily stood before a jasmine bush, her lithe figure outlined in the glow of the headlights. The white radiance pierced the gossamer of her frock here and there, intimating the turn of her thigh, the upsweep of her breasts.
Of course, therein lies the rub. Nobody believes Ed’s glib explanation that Emily is his half-witted sister and must be protected. While Ed hunts for gainful employment, Emily lounges around the cabin, unsuspectingly attracting all sorts of men trouble. Among her ardent admirers is a married alcoholic lout named Cory Sheridan. Ed, meantime, fixes his romantic interests on a local business lady, Marge.
Cory Sheridan, through a sly contrivance transparent to all except Emily, lures her to his mansion when his wife is out of town. The seduction scene is brief. Later, Cory is discovered murdered and suspicion falls on the hapless Emily. Again, Ed is forced to go to incredible lengths to rescue her. Without giving away the novel’s ending, all this conflict plays out in a sensitive while unsentimental manner. Ed remains a sympathetic protagonist.
All the hallmarks making for effective hardboiled writing are present here. Dialogue is laconic; action verbs are visceral; monologues are streamlined. The writing style is unadorned and plain but the prose is not parched and parsed to the point of becoming soulless or tedious. I don’t grow tired of reading it. By contrast, most paper blockbusters in every supermarket throughout America bore me to tears.
One aspect I find appealing about a Gold Medal book is the assemblage of 1950s lore and pop culture. You can almost see and smell and hear the insides of old movie theaters, cars, and rented cabins. Take rented cabins, for instance. Today I drive by the cinderblock ruins to such a refuge. I wonder, Who lodged there? Now I know. Ordinary but desperate folks like Ed and Emily Darnell. With highway expansion slated in a few years, these ruins will be bulldozed into oblivion. Another Gold Medal book rich in its 1950s details is John D. MacDonald’s Dead Low Tide (1953). Both books evoke nostalgia but the kinetic plot of each tale leave little time for savoring it.
Wade Miller wrote and published about the same time as such hard-boiled writers as Mickey Spillane.
The Wade Miller novels, however, are stronger on story line and characterization. Perhaps their one-two punch approach to the writing process resulted in creating novels more accomplished in these aspects.
