If I said that Damon Runyon, who died 75 years ago this month, is one of the most influential artists of the last century, you might think me mad. In the UK, he is little-read, and what reputation he has rests on the faded glamour of having written the stories that inspired the Fifties musical Guys and Dolls.
But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.
We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).
The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.
But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.
The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.
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Subscribe“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet”
Gangsters flourish where there is chaos. In many ghettos of Mumbai, gangsters provided social stability and, dare I say, quick justice to ghetto occupants. Gangsters are a result of weak, corrupt and incompetent governance.
“But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties….” His stories were published in the 30s and 40s, but I read somewhere that Runyon was writing about a previous generation, which makes sense to me. He moved to New York as an experienced sports writer in 1910, and I think his inspiration was the fellows he met over the next twenty years. The passage of time allowed Runyon to transmute nasty low-lifes into lovable rogues. I see him as closest to PG Wodehouse, who went to New York in 1904. In that year Wodehouse wrote a show song called “Put Me In My Little Cell”, a Gilbertian number for a trio of comic crooks. His novel “Psmith, Journalist”, in which Psmith visits New York, was first serialised 1909-10, and contained a cast of picaresque sporting coves who hung around pugilists. The gangsters of the 30s and 40s were too violent, professional and organised for humour.
This dislocation explains why the show Guys and Dolls, which I love, creaks with anachronism. “Luck be a Lady Tonight” was musically of its time (the show opened 1950) not Prohibition, which ended 1933. The film (1955) was worse yet, Sinatra looking as if he’d just come from a gig. The clothes, particularly the women in slacks, are pure 1955.
Yes, the delight in the sufferings of others at the hands of the most evil. Not for me! The only just ending for a fictional criminal is his reaping of the whirlwind he himself sowed.
Feeble middle class types may idolise gangsters, those who went through the reality of close quarter combat and the horrors of war do not . As a WW2 Special Forces soldier said , ” I spent, the rest of my life trying to forget what I did in the War “.
Watch the BBCs Rogue Warrors and listen to Squadron Sergeant Major Reg Seekings; there is no idolising violence, just an acceptance it was the least worst option other than surrendering to the Nazis.