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RARA-AVIS: Hardboiled slang, and Chicago overcoats 

On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, William Denton <buff@vex.net> wrote:

[SNIP]

> Does anyone know a precise meaning for "Chicago overcoat"?  Does
> anyone know of any cases of this actually happening?  Has anyone seen
> it in any books outside of _The Big Sleep_?

I reckon it's a Chandlerism.  We can all guess what it means, or what it
*might* mean.  
Whatever the precise trechnical details of "Chicago overcoating", it'll
probably hurt, and the effect is likley to be permanent and  terminal.

> The fellow also wondered about the relationship between the people who
> spoke this kind of slang and the writers.  I think there was a lot of
> cross-pollination: writers would pick up things from the street, and
> hoods wanted to act tough.  

And of course, *writers* wanted to *sound tough*.
And it's a lot less scary thinking up hard-boiled terms over a bottle and
typewriter than it is to engage in banter with potentially dangerous types.
 I doubt very much that the rather sad Raymond Chandler, for example,
really mixed with the criminal types he wrote about so imaginatively.  As
Wood Haut puts it, 

        Concerned less with the state of society than with the society of
the state, Chandler, once 
        a businessman and a director of independent oil companies, guided
his narrative down a 
        cultural and literary cul de sac ... until his style turned into a
literary cliche.
                                *Pulp Culture* (Serpent's Tail: NY & 
London, 1995), 68-69.

        

> Has anyone studied hardboiled slang, or read a good look at it?  I'd
> be interested in knowing if some of the terms we know now, or think we
> know, were actually invented by writers. 

Actually, I thought *you had*, Bill <g>
Though of course we are now all operating in a post-modern mode, it's
difficult to give any precision to these issues, though the well known
examples of 'phoney slang' being invented by writers, then 'resurfacing' as
'real' slang is the term 'gunsel', first found in Hammett's *Black Mask*
story, "The Maltese Falcon"

> On a related note, what's the story behind "gooseberry lay"?  This was
> used in _The Maltese Falcon_, I think, and seemed to mean homosexual
> activity.  Am I wrong - did it actually mean something fairly
> innocuous?  

Yes --- it's pinching clothes off a washing line --- though innocuity is in
the eye of the beholder: there's no limit to the *type* of clothing that
can be lifted from a washing line, much less to waht can be done with it
afterwards ;-)
The popular story goes that Hammett 'planted' this rum-sounding term in
"TMF" so that it would satisfy the editor's blue-pencil, thus allowing the
much more *serious* 'gunsel', meaning 'catamite', or 'boy kept for immoral
purposes'  to slip by.  Personally, I don't buy it --- the story smacks of
post-hoc idealism, made up as a neat after-dinner anecdote, or invented to
fill out an introduction to a set of short stories.  The tale is often
repeated and paraphrased, but never sourced (it seems to originate in the
Ellery Queen introduction to the Sam Spade stories) and, for me anyway,
there is no *evidence* to support this in anything I've read by those who
reproduce it, and there certainly doesn't appear to be anything else of
this order in the rest of the Hammett corpus.   Though Messrs Ellery Queen
might not be responsible for making this up themselves, as a deliberate
falsification: by the time they came to collect and introduce the Spade
stories, Hammett was successful enough to be able to feed them his own
self-glamourising version of his past.

>I know there was some discussion about this in
> rec.arts.mystery a while back, but in switching Internet providers
> I seem to have lost the articles I saved.

Didn't I send you an article, 'Getting Away With Murder',  by Erle Stanley
Gardner a while ago?
I seem to recall, on the same subject that started your posting, that
Gardner couldn't locate a 'genuine' origin for the term 'shamus': everyone
he spoke to knew the term (ie screws, lags and others connected with
criminality) but only knew it from *fiction* (it's a term Chandler uses a
lot, as a synonym for private investigator).

There may be a connection here with the Irish immigrant community, as the
term closely resembles 'seamus', an Irish (male) name.
There maybe a forgotten connection with an investigator of some sort with
the name Seamus (the only irish-american I can recall, off the top of my
head, is Chief O'Hara <g>)  Can anyone on the list shed any light here?


Eddie Duggan
------------------------------
My other address is an ac.uk
-----------------------------


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