Epitaph for a Tramp

Harry Fannin #1

by David Markson, Robert McGinnis (Illustrator)

Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin.
Epitaph for a Tramp has everything you'd look for, and everything you'd want, in a pulp thriller. It doesn't transcend the genre or anything, but it's a damn fine example of it, and more memorable than most. A very good read.

Genres: Crime, Noir, Novels

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including This is Not a Novel, Springer's Progress, and Wittgenstein's Mistress. His most recent work, The Last Novel, was published in 2007 and received a positive review in the New York Times, which called it "a real tour de force."

Markson's work is characterized by an unconventional approach to narration and plot. While his early works may draw on the modernist tradition of William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, Markson says his later novels are "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage."

Dalkey Archive Press has published several of his novels. In December 2006, publishers Shoemaker & Hoard republished two of Markson's early crime novels Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat in one volume.

In addition to his novels, he has published a book of poetry and a critical study of Malcolm Lowry.

The movie Dirty Dingus Magee, starring Frank Sinatra, is based on Markson's first novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, an anti-Western. He wrote three crime novels early in his career.

Educated at Union College and Columbia University, Markson began his writing career as a journalist and book editor, periodically taking up work as a college professor at Columbia University, Long Island University, and The New School.

Markson died in his New York City, West Village apartment.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admire David Markson’s latter day novels… So I decided to look how it all started.
A hot summer night in New York… The private eye is insomniac… It’s after three o’clock in the morning… He is in the process of reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann… Suddenly his former wife enters the stage… Deadly wounded…

The stain was as big as a six-dollar sirloin below her breast, dark and seeping, and the inside of her hand was soaked with it from where she had had her palm pressed against herself. I saw the slash in the blouse where the blade had gone in, no wider than a man’s leather watch band, centered and near the top of the seepage.

In this way all the troubles commence…
Yes, neo noir with a quirk… Or rather the grotesque mockery of the genre… All the clichés are exaggerated to the degree of absurdity… An echo of beat culture style is also palpable… A lot of smart literary allusions…
He met her one night on a beach… And in half an hour he offered to marry her…

She was trembling, maybe laughing, maybe crying, I don’t think it mattered which. Because we came together and it was all there again and it had to be right. It was. For maybe ten months.

A hurricane of actions ensues… Some secrets of the past… Some false steps as usual…
There are ones who commit crimes… And there are ones who ought to catch them… And eventually they have to meet.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know what the best thing about this particular Pulp Fiction is? It has absolutely zilch to do with noted asshole, talentless, thieving hack/huckster Quentin Tarantino. Cause, um, fuck that guy. Can he and Harold Bloom make a seppuku pact together to rid the world of their general slim-shittiness? Cough/Cool. Seriously, the best part of this book is the titular tramp's (read: woman, in 1950sese) insatiable hunger for dongage so severe she literally commits crimes in pursuit of hot wang. To which, you go girl! Sisters doing it for themselves. Markson writes the shit outta this boiler, while taking the time to pointedly shout out The Recognitions' genius...IN 1959!!! Which pretty much puts him ahead of the game of, dunno, everyone? Better: he does so twice. So if that and a peni-crazed dame silly on the reefer and goof juice ain't enough for you, stick around for mention of Lowry. Yep, in there too. All of which adds up to one logical declaration: suck it, Bloom!

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

маленький детектив, написаний не за правилами. інтелектуальна забавка, що насправді є дуже цінним і цікавим портретом Ґрінвіч Віллідж 1950-х.

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harry Fannin, ex-college football star, war vet, and crime beat reporter turned PI, narrates this pulpy adventure in a nonstop self-deprecating, jaded style (reminiscing about his estranged wife: "it was a recollection you'd cherish, like your first swift hobnail boot in the shins"). The story begins on a sweltering summer night, when a woman shows up stabbed on his doorstep. It's Cathy, his wife, the very woman he was thinking about, and she dies in his arms trying to tell him something. Of course, Harry tries to find whoever is responsible. He digs into Cathy's life, and soon finds himself facing the business end of a couple of guns. It seems Cathy got mixed up in some sort of heist, "real cops and robbers stuff," as she told Harry with her last breath, and one of her partners is looking for the money from the big score. As Harry searches for her killers, he fills in some of the blanks from their star-crossed relationship and what ended it, and he also learns a bit more about what made Cathy do the things she did.

This is pure page-turning pot-boiled pulp noir, of the Chandler and Bogart kind. There's never a straight description when a jaded simile or a wry remark will do. Harry isn't just talk, he's a picture of sang-froid and can deliver rough justice. (Though he also can catch a blow to the temple and be laid out; he's no superhuman hero.) A scene where he roughly handles a young punk who'd been torturing a woman with a cigarette is particularly memorable. When she asks him if there will be scars, Harry can answer from experience: "a generous racketeer had let me smell a six-bit panatela along the cheekbone once. He had been going for the eye so I still consider myself the big winner if I was seeing a mark every time I shaved." But Harry is also charmingly erudite in his no-big-deal tough-guy way, reading The Magic Mountain in his spare time and using Thomas Hobbes as an alias. Markson plays with the noir language to very impressive effect ("Observant Fannin, the astute private eye. I, eye. Ask me what the bedroom looked like and I'll tell you it had some walls"). The book is so pulp that it's practically a semisolid, but it's a hell of a thrilling ride.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you gobble up hardboiled tales like they are Halloween candy, you'll chomp this one to bits. Yes, it is purposefully filled with all the cliches about a down on his luck PI who is holding a torch for an ex who descended into a downward spiral of trampiness and chasing the next high. But, it is simply a terrific read. Fannin slings the one liners like any great PI and stays just friendly enough with the police to stay out of the clink - barely. Cathy is the one who slipped through his fingers, but she stumbled back into his life, desperately seeking his help. She's still so lovely that poor Harry can't even think straight. And now she's brought danger and knives and tough punks into Fannin's life.
This book is just plain old fashioned over the top hardboiled PI fun. Every page is an absolute joy to read.

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The door behind me opened while I was standing there and a face poked itself out. It was a woman's face, about forty years older and not too much longer than Seabiscuit's. The face stared at me, probably wondering if I'd brought the hay. I stared back. Finally the woman grunted and went away." pg 94

This is a pitch perfect hard-boiled noir and I don't even mind that it's dated with old ideas about race, gender, sex, and psychology. Though our hero is calloused his hard shell is made of the kind of irony that makes this genre sing. It also gives enough distance between old notions and today that the reader doesn't have to take any of it with solemnity.

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Life was going on. You couldn’t be sure exactly why.” Camille Paglia would have a field day with this novel and its use of “tramp” iconography. Your standard wise-cracking gumshoe gets the smile wiped off his face when his ex, Cathy, gets fridged on his door step. It had ended badly between them but it’s Cathy’s own sister calling her a tramp.

This is a novel that twists all over the road and makes for interesting reading when keeping in mind how we expect/demand women to be treated in fiction in 2020. It starts with out of work P.I. Harry Fannin unable to get any zeds in a heat wave and trying out his stand-up on a phantom phone caller. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I was up for 300 pages of so-so zingers so it was good news for me, if not the characters, when Fannin’s ex-wife Cathy knocked on his front door and promptly dropped dead. It’s the sort of opening Steve Martin might have spoofed in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” but it’s swiftly, and tactically, followed up by a chapter detailing Cathy and Fannin’s first encounter (straight out of “From Here To Eternity”), their marriage and then their painful, confounding, divorce and it’s got a huge seam of wistfulness shot straight through it; “Tramp” is definitely readable. It also, bless it, wants to do right by Cathy, it clearly wants to deconstruct the “tramp” archetype and while the novel’s heart is in the right place certain things look a tad off to a modern eye. It is, however, five years in front of John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels which spun a (very enjoyable) series out of the whole White Knight thing.

While Fannin heads out to tap some coconuts we are not allowed to forget the physical fact of Cathy’s death. Markson commendably does not shunt her off stage. We’re not allowed to buy the label of “tramp”, either. It’s Cathy’s good-girl sister who slut-shames her while we readers are privy to slightly more sophisticated analyses, although in death Cathy’s story ends up owned by and defining the surviving men, as would Ellroy’s Black Dahlia. It looks a lot like she was either bi-polar or had the existential heebie-jeebies and self-medicated with sex. That destroys her marriage and leads directly to her death and the novel can’t help but heavily mansplain away Cathy’s promiscuity with some increasingly gothic trauma-porn. She’s not allowed to just enjoy sex, it has to be a function of some childhood horror. So “Tramp” gives with one hand but takes with the other. It champions a troubled woman but the gay character gets short shrift. You desperately, unfairly, want the novel to be more in tune with 2020 sensibilities and every tiny dissonance disappoints.

Still Fannin’s flippancy while cliched these days is rather well-deployed, he’s obviously using it as a defence mechanism and battling the same inner nullity that did for Cathy. The cops start off as gorillas but in one great volte face Fannin is told the backstory of some knuckle-head he’s just been bad-mouthing and has to eat humble pie. Fannin and the very effective cop Brannigan end up in a fantastic car pile-up, guns blazing and a key suspect suddenly in custody. Another suspect learns the hard way to tie his shoelaces before doing a runner. The plot turns, reversals, reveals and bursts of action are all thrill-tastic and the eventual reveal of Cathy’s killer is unexpected but completely in tune with what Markson was trying to do, if not entirely successfully. There is an awful lot to like in “Tramp” but for this reader time has knocked it off course from a dead-centre bullseye. Heck of a first novel though and boffo final line too. “How you gonna figure broads anyhow?”

[Redwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Markson doesn't take to noir banter organically, his most colorful epithets bordering on inscrutable. Either those zingers have grown stale in the meanwhile, or they were simply inelegant at the time of writing. His talent lies elsewhere in observing Greenwich Village, high and low. The ill-fated chemistry between the private eye and the free spirit, the criminal element running parallel to the art world, the suits and the junkies. They share the pain in equal measure.

Markson begrudges writing hardboiled fiction, littering every chapter with allusions to the works of literature he'd rather be concerning himself with. Paying the rent laid a lot of writers low in those days. He'd go on to make a name for himself in the postmodern tradition, and that's the dissonance that drew me to this stuff in the first place. That barely repressed disappointment is resonant in the character of Harry Fannin and the case he's on. It lends itself to regret.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Markson's substantial talent at surprising similes and metaphors makes this roll along, but it just feels so damn cynical, with misogynistic (starting with the title which is closely tied in to the premise) and homophobic asides (as well as period racism) seemingly thrown in just to "juice" things. Or maybe Markson really was this way, which would make things a lot worse.

So, yeah, problematic in the truest sense of the word, in which the entire premise is a problem, no matter how well executed. However, where else are you going to read, about a door: "[It] was small and newly painted, the color of a stale whisky sour"?

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Bryan Brassfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would give 3.5 stars.

[B.G. Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had never read, or even heard of David Markson until just before reading this. Knowing that he was eventually established as a more "serious" writer, I was inclined to think his execution of the detective crime novel would be something beyond ordinary. I admit, it was a dumb thing to assume, and although I may never read his later work, I wouldn't doubt there is some merit to it. The fact is, I'm a crime fiction fan with an eye for novels that include the word TRAMP somewhere in the title, hence my discovery of David Markson.

Besides there just not being much action or cool twists in this, there was a certain character that annoyed the shit out of me. This character was a jazz musician named Henry Henshaw, and the ridiculously exaggerated way in which Markson had him speak, was so cringe worthy as to almost make me put it down for good around page 150.

The other annoying aspect was the wise cracking detective Fannin himself. Markson's credibility as a more serious writer had given me hope that he would avoid the biggest cliche of the detective novel, which is the dumb one liner/analogy; the kind that prevents detectives from having any depth at all. I could give an example from the book but trust me, there were too many to count. Fannin had his serious moments though so it wasnt all horrible.

The one redeeming factor was the ending. The last ten pages took me by surprise and we learn much more about Fannin's slut of an ex wife to whom the books title refers. The word "tramp" is even substituted for "slut" at one point. Talk about pushing the boundaries.

This really wasn't a horrible read considering he stuck the landing, but I wont be reading EPITAPH FOR A DEADBEAT unless I'm in jail or on an island where there's nothing else to choose from

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

With Markson's later work being post-narrative 'fiction', I don't know whether to take this book at face value as a Chandler-esque PI romp or as an homage to / satire of that style. In the end, he probably just wanted to get published. Either way, he does a good job of creating the quick-witted PI who's smart enough to know that he doesn't know exactly what's going on. The dialogue borders on self-indulgent, but it's still fun to read. I'll get to the next one soon to finish off the short series.