Perhaps because Paul initially regarded mystery-writing as not requiring the same
demands as the novel proper, he could release playful elements in his prose and his
imagination previously held in abeyance in his fiction. Like his later
"whodunits," The Mysterious Mickey Finn is less a straightforward example
of the genre than, in Philip Eppard’s words, "almost... a burlesque" of it,
more a comic fiction which appropriates the whodunit as an object of fun and a
springboard. Whatever the cause, the narrative is distinctly more energetic and successful
than in its labored fictional predecessors Concert Pitch (1938) and
The Stars and Stripes Forever
(1939).1
Paul eagerly seizes his opportunity to recreate the Montparnasse street-life of the
later 1920s:
they strolled back and forth along the sidewalk between the Select and the Rotonde,
enjoying the contrast between the chorus of American voices on the terrasse of the
former and the Scandinavian inflections which poured from the latter. Rug peddlers with
fezzes and brightly colored wares walked to and fro in a half-hearted way, a fire-eater
filled him mouth with gasolene, sprayed it out and lighted it, long-haired sketch artists
with portfolios braced likely groups of tourists and were enjoying a fairly brisk trade.
The foliage of the trees showed yellow-green around the street lamps. Montparnasse was
hitting its evening stride of those unforgetful days gone by when mankind was dancing
without thought of the fiddler’s recompense.
He thus began to write about the life of Paris - which with the gathering of the new
European conflagration he would of necessity abandon - without himself having yet to face
that "fiddler’s recompense."2
Real or faintly disguised figures people Mickey Finn’s Paris, from "a
batch of disciples of Raymond Duncan" to the alleged Mohammedan visitor "Vincent
Ben Shee’an." Paul wittily captures the literary scenery:
James Joyce was making the sixth revision of page two thousand and forty of his magnum
opus called "Work in Progress"; Harold Stearns was sitting at the Select Bar,
murmuring that murders were unusual, therefore banal, consequently uninteresting; Gertrude
Stein and Alice Toklas were drinking brandy and soda, Gertrude the brandy and Alice the
soda; Ernest Hemingway was in the Bois thinking what he would do if the Bois was Wyoming,
the swans were wild ducks, and he had a gun.3
Paul makes his American protagonist very much at home on the terrasse of
Montparnasse’s Café du Dôme, in the heyday of the 1920s. Writing against the
background of the 1930s disdain for the alleged aesthetic "irresponsibles" of
the previous decade, Paul creates "an American dilettante" as his hero,
shamelessly of no visible occupation; Paul was himself a working journalist, short and
growing stout: Homer Evans was, however,
a tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired young man who looked sturdy without being
athletic, and responsive although indolent. He did not lounge awkwardly over table and
chair like a character from Mark Twain, and decidedly he did not sit erect and perform
moral gymnastics like an American business man. He looked as if he had lived easily and
well, neither rich nor poor, but nobody in Montparnasse knew how he did it, where his
funds came from or what his antecedents were. His friends, and he had scores of them,
secretly wondered why a man of such brilliance and poise was content to let his talents
lie fallow.... His output was small. He had written one short monograph entitled,
"Democracies, Ancient and Modern" and had painted only one picture....
Like some of the background figures in Mickey Finn, Homer Evans wasn’t
wholly invented. Samuel Putnam recalled Evans’s "original":
Not all our Montparnasse characters were picturesque or fantastic ones. Some were
tragic: fine lives that had somehow been strangely twisted out of shape. I think of Homer
Bevans - Homer, who would sit all day long on the terrace of the Dôme, a highball in
front of him, staring off into space across the boulevards as though they were some
illimitable plain, and then, when night came, would move around the corner to the Dingo to
stand for long
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hours at the bar and be jostled by a crowd of strangers with only now and then some
acquaintance to nod to him. Get to know him, as a few of us did (everyone knew him by
sight), and you would find him to be gentle, generous, lovable, cultivated, and urbane;
and this was the man whom Elliot Paul was later to take as the prototype for his detective
story hero, Homer Evans.
Bevans had been an engineer, a flautist in the New York Philharmonic, and a sculptor,
but "somehow, he had come to abandon... everything, for his highball glass." In
his hero, Paul captured the essence of an expatriate idea, imagining the career of which
Bevans may have dreamed as he stared into space, one which would have justified his
existence.4
By his own admission, Evans is "eccentric, wilful and selfish... an idler,
escapist, and expatriate." He asserts his aim in life:
"The great loafer. That’s what I want to be. I have written a book and
painted a portrait, only to prove to myself that I don’t have to loaf if I don’t
want to. But that’s what I want to do. I like it. I have activity and bustle. I
don’t want to carry on the torch of civilization...."
"As you know," Evans said, "I’m not a man of action. I deplore
action. All my life I have avoided unnecessary exertion and fuss. I do not work because I
have money, not unlimited wealth but enough. Quite enough. My duty is to spend it, to keep
it in circulation."
The patrons of the Montparnasse bistros recognise Evans as a kindred
spirit (and afford him a monthly account). He commiserates with them over the daily
mountains of broken glass inflicted on their cafés by Scott Fitzgerald’s "crazy
boat-loads" of his increasingly uncouth compatriots. Paul in fact splits the
historical Homer Bevans into two fictional American expatriates, the good Homer Evans and
the repulsive Ambrose Gring, the very worst of the type, "murdered" in his
chair at the Café du Dôme.5
Evans’s friends and acquaintances turn to him for assistance, and he complies by
inventing schemes for their succor. Significantly it is his intuitions of criminality
coupled with his well-intentioned interventions which get some of them arrested, some
endangered, more than one abducted, and others even killed. Later, when increasingly and
troublingly aware of his accumulating author-like responsibilities for mayhem, he
perseveres in good part to undo the unforeseen consequences of his own earlier actions.
The plot of The Mysterious Mickey Finn concerns the disappearance in Paris of the
American millionaire art collector and patron Hugo Weiss - modelled on Otto Kahn of Kuhn,
Loeb and Company. Realising that Weiss has been kidnapped because of information which
Evans once gave to the collector, it becomes "the least I can do... to devote myself
to finding Weiss." Or as he puts it later, "‘At that point I took a hand in
the case because it seemed my obvious duty.’" The dilettante becomes a detective
for the first time. Being unchosen, it is no career, careers being what Americans have
created to valorise their working lives. And we are invited to consider that it is the
fate which had been waiting for him. The decision alters him instantly from idler to man
of action: "It was surprising... to note the change that had come over Evans. Gone
was all his indolence. He radiated energy and decisiveness." The nature of the change
is underscored when Evans’ own life is threatened: "The split second during
which his life should have passed before his eyes was occupied by a wistful glimpse of his
former self, in pre-detective days, sitting quietly in his seat at the Dôme thinking easy
thoughts and sipping [sic]...."6
At first Evans and his ingénue sidekick from Montana, Miriam Leonard, are
themselves suspected by the Paris police. To evade the restrictions this is likely to
create, Evans prevails on the amiable, witless buffer of an American Ambassador to have
him "appointed special agent of the U.S. government to cooperate with French
authorities in the finding of Weiss and the exposure of an important smuggling ring."
Thus instantly, parodically legitimised, Evans commandeers the forces of the law - the
catastrophe-expecting Sergeant Frémont and the gloomy Alsatian Schlumberger - to save
Weiss, solve subsidiary murders, defuse land mines, rescue his abducted sidekick (a dead
shot who, eager to please Evans, plugs a number of villains), and inadvertently demolish a
chateau and its dubious inhabitants with TNT. By the end, Evans brings to justice a
dastardly art-forgery and smuggling ring comprised of U.S. tax evaders, French Royalist
plotters, and their Paris underworld agents, "the St Julien rollers."7
Once he had matters worked out, says Evans in terrific understatement, "the rest
was simple, although mishaps occurred." When the aristocratic forger Paty de Pussy
accuses him of being "an interloper and a busybody," Evans flushes:
"‘I’m afraid that is true,’ he said. ‘I assure you that I shall
never try sleuthing again.’" That was his idea, but not Elliot Paul’s.8
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NOTES
1 The same demands: Amy Sinberg, however, recalls a visit
of Paul and Flora to Flora’s step-father’s summer home, where all the books on
the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves appeared to be whodunits: "Flora began
to apologise for the literary taste of her step-father. Elliot broke in with a defense of
mysteries. He gave us a long lecture on how great mystery stories could be." The
visit occurred most likely after Paul had begun writing them (Sinberg, unpublished note,
2; private collection). Eppard: Philip B. Eppard, "Elliot Paul," in Rood, Karen
Lane, ed., American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, Dictionary of Literary
Biography 4 (Detroit: Gale, 1980), 308.
2 Paul, The Mysterious Mickey Finn (New York: Collier
edition, 1962), 33.
3 Ibid., 92, 190, 101.
4 Ibid., 59, 11. Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress:
Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation (London: Plantin Publishers, 1987), 84, 85. In
the his text for Fritz Henle’s photographs of Paris, Paul recalled "sitting on
the terrasse of the Closerie des Lilas having breakfast one morning with Homer
Bevans and Hendrik Willem Van Loon (Henle, Paris [Chicago, New York: Ziff Davis
Publishing Company, 1947], n.p.).
5 The Mysterious Mickey Finn, 21, 53, 81. In one
twist among many, the "murder in the Café du Dôme" of Ambrose Gring turns out
not to have been a murder after all, but the effect of an otherwise harmless soporific -
the "Mickey Finn" of the title - on the Evans-doppleganger Gring’s
enervated constitution.
6 The Mysterious Mickey Finn, 21, 53, 81. In one twist
among many, the "murder in the Café du Dôme" of Ambrose Gring turns out not to
have been a murder after all, but the effect of an otherwise harmless soporific - the
"Mickey Finn" of the title - on the Evans-doppleganger Gring’s
enervated constitution.
7 Ibid., 80-1, 105.
8 Ibid., 240, 242.
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