Karmesin Read online

  KARMESIN

  World’s Greatest Criminal— or

  Most Outrageous Liar

  By GERALD KERSH

  Edited by Paul Duncan

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  Norfolk, Virginia

  Published by permission ol New Worlds Publishing, POB1230,

  Bastrop, TX 78602

  Introduction © 2003 by Paul Duncan ([email protected])

  Bach cover photo of Gerald Kersh

  © 1963 by Simon Richard Bloom

  Cover artwork by Carol Heyer

  Lost Classics cover design by Deborah Miller

  Crippen Landru logo by Eric Greene

  ISBN (cloth edition): 1-932009-02-7

  ISBN (trade edition): 1-932009-03-5

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  P.O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505 USA

  www.crippenlandru.com

  [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  KARMESIN

  Introduction: Man of Many Skins

  Karmesin

  Karmesin and the Meter

  Karmesin and Human Vanity

  Karmesin and the Tailor’s Dummy

  Karmesin and the Big Flea

  Karmesin and the Raving Lunatic

  Karmesin and the Unbeliever

  Inscrutable Providence

  Karmesin and the Invisible Millionaire

  Karmesin and the Gorgeous Robes

  Chickenfeed for Karmesin

  The Thiel Who Played Dead

  The Conscience of Karmesin

  Karmesin and the Royalties

  Skate’s Eyeball

  Oalamaoa

  The Karmesin Affair

  Karmesin Bibliography

  FURTHER READING:

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Subscriptions

  CRIPPEN & LANDRU LOST CLASSICS

  Dedication for Richard Simon Bloom

  Your uncle Gerard always said that he’d dedicate one of his books to you. Well, it’s a little late, but here it is.

  Introduction: Man of Many Skins

  The early 1930s were the ‘lost’ years of Gerald Kersh. Although he considered himself a great writer, he could not sustain himself on the meagre pile of coins and notes that he received from various publishers, magazines and newspapers for whom he contributed novels, short stories and short pieces to fill column inches. For the later, an editor on deadline would call the copy boy and send him around the multitudinous watering holes that peppered Fleet Street and Soho until he had unearthed Kersh. Summoned in various states of inebriation, Kersh would dutifully sit at the typewriter, look at the inches he had to fill, then commence typing. Quickly, without a mistake, Kersh would perform a little miracle — an opinion piece calculated to incite outrage, a strange fact designed to titillate, a poem that would melt the heart or an interesting anecdote that would induce a fit of laughter upon the reader — of precisely the correct length and tone. After collecting his payment, Kersh would disappear into a nearby pub, bar or club.

  When the financial strain was too much to bear or, more usually, when his conscience would not allow his malaise to continue, Kersh took whatever work he could get. He was at various times a salesman, a French teacher (he had spent a year in Paris as a teenager) and a bouncer. For this last post he was employed to keep troublemakers like himself out of nightclubs. Yes, Kersh was trouble. He had intellect, knowledge and an ambition to write but they had no real outlet. He was straining at the leash. Physically powerful and emotionally explosive, it was not uncommon for him to be sparked off by the uncouth behaviour of men towards their female partners. Chairs would fly. Knives would be drawn. Marble tables would be dropped on his head. Scars littered his body, evidence of the number of times his had defended the honour of the gender sex.

  All this is by way of introduction, to give you an idea of the milieu that Kersh inhabited, of the fruitless life that he led in the early part of the 1930s. He had just turned twenty and was unformed. He knew nothing of life and he believed, as Ernest Hemingway had stated, that you can only write about what you know. The seedy bars and jazz joints that he habituated were his offices. The cafes and brassieres were his kitchens. The parks and bridges were his bedrooms. He packed a lifetime of experience into a few short years and used it to fuel his subsequent novels and short stories. The most famous of his London novels was Night and the City (1938), the story of an idealistic pimp who has plans to be a great man but is doomed to failure, but he also wrote the nihilistic noir thriller Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1947) and the hilarious Fowlers End (1957). All of them contained elements from his life.

  Despite the eventual success of his novels, Kersh is best known for his short stories. Many of them are horrific or fantastical in nature, showing the best and worst in people, but all of them tap into the almost limitless supply of ‘characters’ that Kersh met over the years. He often presented these stories as himself, as though he was some kind of reporter, and then let these strange characters narrate the rest of the story themselves. This storytelling device gives a touch of veracity to the tales but the reader knows that these are just tales, that they never really happened.

  Well, actually, there is a chance that some of them are partly true. Take the Karmesin stories, for example, which are collected here for the first time.

  Karmesin (pronounced carr — muh — zin), a name derived from some middle—European term for crimson, is the most sustained character in Kersh’s writing career, spanning 17 stories. The first Karmesin story, called simply ‘Karmesin,’ was published in the London Evening Standard on May 9, 1936 whilst the last one, ‘The Karmesin Affair,’ was published in The Saturday Evening Post on December 15, 1962.

  Generally, Kersh would meet Karmesin, a middle-aged man with a big moustache, who would proceed to tell tales about his extraordinary criminal exploits. They are so outrageous that they cannot be true, but they are full of seemingly real information about criminals, their methods and perhaps a little about human nature. We begin to doubt Karmesin’s stories when we see the way he always asks for cigarettes from Kersh, or surreptitiously stuffs sugar into his pockets. The contradictions in the character are what make him interesting and one would consider

  Karmesin an enchanting creation if it wasn’t for the fact that he existed in real life.

  In letters, Kersh refers to a man named Carfax who was the basis for Karmesin. He told Kersh about a robbery he planned and executed at the Strand branch of Lloyd’s bank in which five men simultaneously cashed five large cheques at a great horseshoe shaped counter and walked out. The trick worked only because of the split-second timing of the transactions. This was the basis of the first Karmesin story.

  A later story, ‘The Conscience of Karmesin,’ concerns the robbery of the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, which Carfax planned. According to Kersh:

  [Carfax] had his technicians examine all the electric wiring leading into the jewel room of the Tower of London, and then rehearsed the robbery in all but its ultimate details over a period of two years. That split-second timing, which characterised the great ghost train mail robbery, he works out himself. He owns custom-made stopwatches that cost £5,000 each. He has a staff of watchmakers in Geneva. So he stole the crown jewels, or was about to do so when purely sentimental considerations made him call the job off.

  King George VI you know had a very bad stutter. His wife, Queen Elizabeth, secretly held his hand when he had to make a speech giving it an affectionate little squeeze when she sensed a stutter coming along. Now when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited New York he was told of a night school up in Harlem for people who stammered. He was very interested in it. Flossie [Kersh’s wife] and I had a servant named Kitty Hinton, a negress, a sort of female Jeev
es, a copper—coloured Admiral Crichton, very beautiful what is more, but a stutterer. Being the brightest girl in the class, she was told that she would be required to make a speech to a foreign visitor and give him a little bouquet of flowers. On the appointed evening a little fellow of no great distinction turned up and told them of his lifelong Battle against his vocal impediment and how he had, with his wife’s help, got the better of it. Applause. Our Kitty comes forward with a bunch of flowers, loses her nerve at the last moment and stutters like a light machine gun. The visitor held her hand, told her to look at him, and to her amazement she got through the whole speech without pause or error. Later she learned that this quiet little gentleman was the King of England, who would come uptown unescorted, without a single bodyguard, to talk incognito to the likes of Kitty. I wrote this story, but it was never published “for fear it might offend minority sensibilities.”

  One night, meeting Carfax in a hotel in Northiam, between Kent and Sussex, over a Skate’s Eyeball, or let us say, sidestepping the blast of the one who was splashing his way through ... I happened to tell him this anecdote. It brought tears to his eyes. As a child he had been a stutterer and had continued to be one until cured at the age of fourteen by being beaten almost to death and thrown into the Thames below Limehouse in the dead of Winter. I little knew that my idle chatter saved the Crown and the Orb and the Sceptre too, among other things. For Carfax, as he told me later, at once went out and cancelled the Tower job. Two of his men went on with it, against his orders. What happened to them nobody knows — we’ll find out when the sea gives up its dead no doubt. They pulled the robbery though. Carfax sent the loot back untouched, he swears. That sort of thing doesn’t get into the papers of course.

  Immediately after Karmesin’s first appearance, Kersh was keen to sell more stories and to exploit other media like radio. On July 3, 1936, Kersh submitted three Karmesin stories to Felix Felton at the BBC, but Felton was not interested. However, Kersh struck lucky with publisher Norman Kark, who was the first to publish 10 of the Karmesin stories in the upmarket Courier magazine, starting with the first issue in 1937. Such was their popularity, that Kersh was inundated with offers:

  [Karmesin] came near to making my life a misery in the late 1930s — editors kept asking for him. I practically got stuck with him the way Simenon got stuck with Maigret — a character with which poor Georges has been heartily fed up with these 20 years or more. You should have heard him cutting off a strip about it on Anna Maria Key in Florida. I did — we were neighbours.

  During World War Two, Kersh wrote several million words of propaganda material for the national newspapers and was the best-selling author in the UK with his novels and short story collections being published every six months. In 1945 he used a trip to America for the Ministry of Information to make contacts with magazine editors and this began his relationship with Ellery Queen ‘s Mystery Magazine, who reprinted the Karmesin stories. Obviously encouraged by Karmesin’s popularity in America, Kersh wrote a few new stories and then dropped the character again.

  The character stayed alive in many people’s eyes because the stories were reprinted in magazines under a multitude of tides. It is a bibliographic nightmare trying to keep track of them all. The alternative tides were obviously an attempt to hide the origins of the stories, but Kersh didn’t help matters by always giving editors a choice of rides. For example, when he delivered ‘Chickenfeed for Karmesin,’ Kersh also suggested it could be called ‘A Snip for Karmesin,’ ‘Karmesin and the Odds on Underselling’ and ‘The Value of Self-Denial,’ but Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine decided to call it simply ‘Karmesin the Fixer.’

  Such was the success of the appearances in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that they asked for more in 1955 and Kersh began work on a story that pitted the fictional Karmesin against the all-too—real Carfax. This perhaps reflected Kersh’s uneasiness with Karmesin:

  If I invented Karmesin nowadays, I don’t know but that I’d make him Carfaxian in type, a kind of uniquely contradictory pastiche, very oniony, very salty, highly cheesey and juniperous, and either a fat boiled beef and pease pudding and squeezed out cabbage standing up at a shelf in the steam of a cookhouse where there is one napkin to every eight customers and the forks are chained down, where you order by the ounce and watch the stuff being weighed too. (I once saw [Carfax] eat 36 ounces of boiled mutton with onion sauce in Shortlands, and once at the establishment of Harris the sausage king near Paddington eat 14 large sausages — he didn’t like 13 — and two soup plates full of onions.)

  It seems that the extraordinary and judicious Karmesin was not extraordinary enough or as flamboyant as his real-life counterpart.

  Despite this, the character had fans all over the world including authors Rex Stout and Henry Miller, philosopher Bertrand Russell, boxer Archie Moore, owner of the Algonquin Hotel Ben Bodne, actor Basil Rathbone, Governor Rockefeller, publishing magnate Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Winston Churchill. Kersh received repeated requests from actors like Walter Slezak, Burl Ives and Sir Cedric Hardwicke (who narrated some of the stories on American radio) to consider them for the role of Karmesin should the opportunity arise on stage or screen. In fact, Kersh began talking to contacts within the TV industry about a possible series. Although scripts were written and actors like Francis L. Sullivan and Charles Laughton considered for the lead, a series was not commissioned. However, Erich von Stroheim played Karmesin in the 1956 TV film Orient Express: Man of Many Skins. This was the pilot for a TV series centred around Major North, a character created by Van Wyck Mason. Directed by Steve Sekely and produced by John G. Nasht, the series did not materialise, and neither did Kersh’s money for the project.

  Three Karmesin stories materialised in the mid-1950s and another three in the early 1960s, perhaps in an effort to generate interest in the character on TV. And that was it for Karmesin. However, Carfax retained a fascination for Kersh and vestiges of him resurfaced occasionally in other characters, most notably as the nemesis in the novel The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966). It was not the amorality of the character that interested Kersh but the way in which he applied his intellect and superior knowledge to make money, as shown in this anecdote:

  Another instance of this strange character’s unique nose for the valuable: about 4 o’clock one morning I was having breakfast at Sabini’s cafe in Soho when Carfax/Karmesin came in, bored. He likes me — God knows why. He said, “less take a ball’o’chalk up the catde market,” meaning a walk to the junk market in the Caledonian Road at Pentonville. He wanted fresh air so off we went to that wonderful old market as it was when I was young.

  Carfax/Karmesin looked amused whilst I rifled through books. He sniffed at piles of bits of timber, rusty cartwheels and whatnot, and pulled out a most wretched looking bamboo walking stick black with dirt. “Ow much, cock?” he asked the junk man. “A tizzy,” the man said, meaning sixpence. “You mean tuppence.” So he got the stick for thrupence and gave it to me saying, “Valuable old stick.” I took it between thumb and forefinger, not wishing to offend him by refusing.

  Meanwhile he had found a huge old tray of baroque design with a tremendous inkstand attached to it, complete with sandbox, waferbox etc. He is a very strong man but even he grunted with the effort of lifting it. “Ow much for this ere?” “Blimey, guy, the lead alone’s worth three half crowns.” “Don’t talk wet you soppy sod, I’ll give you a tosheroon.” i.e. half crown, two shillings and sixpence. Then about 55 cents. In the end he got the tray for about 80 cents.

  It now being six o’clock in the morning we went to Billingsgate market to breathe the aroma of fish and listen to the latest in cursing. In the back parlour of a pub nearby Carfax/Karmesin looked proudly at his purchase. He got a fishmonger’s steelyard and weighed it. It tipped the beam at 421b. I asked, “What the devil do you want a thing like that for?” He took out a penknife and scraped off a square inch of the green paint with which the thing was covered — it was pure gold. Then he remembered something and
said, “You owe me thrupence for that stick. Clean it up nice. I’m sure that’s a valuable stick.” I took it home and cleaned it with soft soap. There was a pattern under the dirt, and what a pattern. The dirt was clean by comparison. From ferrule to band, the bamboo was most exquisitely carved and delicately inlaid in silver with scenes of oriental lovemaking excruciatingly obscene. A great artist must have worked for years on it. I wrapped it in newspaper and sold it to an antiquary for £10.

  In 1968, Gerald Kersh died in relative poverty in a shack in Kingston, New York State. He had been cut open and apart by doctors to remove various cancers that had invaded his body. He continued writing right up until the end, reliving his lost years in Soho and putting them down on paper for posterity. I’m happy that at last some of his ‘lost’ words have been found again and collected here.

  Paul Duncan

  Karmesin

  I never appreciated arithmetical progression, until, in Busto’s apartment house, I learned how tea three times infused becomes intolerably weak, and how cigarette-ends twice rolled grow unbearably strong.

  I may have learned a little geometry at school, but I had to struggle with Busto’s blankets before I realised how ridiculously incongruous two rectangles can be, and I had to sleep on one of Busto’s beds before I got to know the difference between looking at an angle and lying on one.

  In short, I completed my education in Busto’s apartment—house. The physics of cold and darkness became as an open book to me; I picked up zoology without a tutor — I studied it by matchlight, with nothing but a thumbnail for a scalpel; and Karmesin taught me how to rob a bank.

  I wish you could have met that powerful personality, that immense, old man with his air of shattered magnificence.

  I see again his looming chest and unfathomable abdomen, still excellently dressed in a suit of sound blue serge; the strong cropped skull and the massive purple face.