Portland Confidential

Title : Portland Confidential : Sex, Crime & Corruption in the Rose City

Author : Phil Stanford

Cover : Photographic collage

   [Portland, Or.: WestWinds Press, 2004. Paperback. Second printing. ISBN 1558687939. The subtitle pretty much says it all. Hollywood Babylon with feeling, if you will.]

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The subtitle says much of this delicious quasi-exposé of Portland’s colorful history – there’s plenty of sex, crime and corruption to go around. Focusing on the vintage years of 1935-1955, the eminently readable text presents Portland’s seedy underside through the many personalities of the era. And all without a trace of wholesome environmentalism or double lattés! The Rose City’s noirish little secret indeed has remained elusive, its seamier past being well hidden by the coifurred, cultivated face. However, present book delivers the dirty laundry in admirable fashion.

From its wonderful Weegee-like cover dominated by the imposing figures of Candy Reneé and Big Jim Elkins (different kinds of figures, each, to be sure!), through Stanford’s chatty text with accompanying tabloidy photos, the book is a pure delight. But what really makes the story stick is the coverage - often quite sympathetic - of the many colorful personalities in all their small-time glory. The luminaries include the aforementioned Ms. Reneé, “Diamond Jim” Purcell, Blubber Maloney, Little Rusty, Tempest Storm, and the ever-present Big Jim Elkins. Even Bugsy Siegel makes a fleeting appearance, stopping by to check out Portland as a place to build one of his casinos. Alas, it rained every day he was in town, so he set his sights southward to the sunny climes of Hollywood and Las Vegas, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that the book stops fairly abruptly, ca. 1957, and many questions linger. When exactly did Portland stop being a corrupt and vice-ridden town, and why? How did a place with such a shadowy history transform itself, relatively quickly, into an anti-sleaze mecca of coffee shops, used bookstores, and progressive thought? Who were the principals involved, and when did it take place? Most of all, can we hope for a sequel to sort out all the mysteries? For the moment, however, we’ll have to settle for savoring the current book, and indeed there’s much to savor. 

Consul Books #1133, 1962

Title : The Men in My Life

Author : Marthe Watts

Cover art : uncredited

[London : World Distributors, 1962. Consul Books edition, #1133. First published in hardcover by Christopher Johnson Publishers Ltd, July 1960. Printed in Great Britain by C. Nicholls & Co. Ltd. "The wickedest woman in London." Memoir of a French prostitute who worked for the Messina vice ring in London's West End in the 1940s and 1950s. The Consul reprint benefits from the anonymous cover art which depicts the author in a late vintage neo-realist style]. 

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Signet 1151, 1954

Title : Mafia
Author : Ed Reid
Cover art : James Avati
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We generally associate the covers of James Avati with Erskine Caldwell-esque scenes of soft summer nights and languorous figures, albeit rendered with an undercurrent of tension and dissatisfaction. Here is a rare venture into the crime and hardboiled milieu for this usually restrained artist [1]. Mafia shows that Avati could boil hard with the best of them; the book is executed (no pun inteneded!) with his usual low key lighting but he sure gets the message across – the cover depicts a hit man putting a gun back in a shoulder holster as he looks down at a dead guy sprawled on a table. Here Avati’s preference for earthy tones suits the gritty subject matter perfectly.

The book’s presentation is such that it looks more like a novel than nonfiction, in fact I thought this was the case until I did a little research and discovered that the book indeed is nonfiction, a mid-century classic on organized crime in America, a collection of 16 stories of the Mafia and its members, to be precise.

[1] In the popular imagination old, or vintage, paperbacks – particularly those of crime fiction – are generally thought of in terms of “good girl art,” “lurid,” “sensationalist,” or “pulp fiction,” as portrayed in over-the-top glory by publishers like Avon, Popular Library and the like. Avati and Avati-influenced covers, with their Rembrandt-esque lighting and predilection for browns and grays, are really a different strain in the popular culture and can be thought of as a different school altogether.
Probably due to commercial demands, even Signet, the quintessential Avati publisher, occasionally had to come into the lurid fold, as is witnessed by the Signet versions of Mickey Spillane novels and, later, the James Bond novels. [Even Avati himself did a couple of Spillane covers!]