NEW MEXICO DREAMIN'

I recently returned from a trip to New Mexico. This is the second time I’ve been there (the first was on my honeymoon), but I’ve been dreaming about the Land of Enchantment for 17 years, thanks to that All-American Super-Spy Matt Helm.

In 1990, I decided to pick up a second-hand paperback copy of The Silencers, primarily to see how different the literary Matt Helm was from the celluloid one. I knew the novels couldn’t be as absurd as the movies, but I wondered if any of the plot from the book was retained for the movie. As it turned out, quite a bit of the story was carried over to the movie, but it was twisted, pretzel-like, so that it resembled a James Bond spoof rather than a hard-boiled spy thriller. I was so impressed with the novel’s gritty realism, I suddenly felt sad that the movie series was such a lost opportunity. However, I was glad that I read the book and was particularly taken with the book’s setting: New Mexico.

The author, Donald Hamilton, followed the writer’s adage of “write what you know” and based Matt Helm in Santa Fe, Hamilton’s hometown at the time. Although Helm would later become something of a globe-trotter, early novels like The Silencers remained rooted mostly in the Southwest. I was immediately captivated by Hamilton’s descriptions of the quaint town and the stunning high desert which surrounded it. Of course, these desolate stretches were perfect backdrops for high speed chases and tense shootouts. No witnesses and little chance of police interference. These open expanses of brush-dotted desert also forced Helm to be a bit of an outdoorsman, something Donald Hamilton was in real life. By the time I finished reading The Silencers, I was convinced that New Mexico was a place I wanted to move to one day. Thankfully, after meeting my wife, I was able to talk her into my dream as well, and this latest visit to the state was a chance to make a serious assessment of our future home.

As we drove around those deserts and mountains, I couldn’t help but think about those harrowing battles Matt Helm fought under the blazing sun, with little cover and no hope of reinforcements. When my wife and I got caught in a heavy thunderstorm on our way to Bandelier National Monument and were forced to pull off the road, I was reminded of the scene in The Silencers when Helm and his witness were forced to spend the night in his truck after getting caught in a snow storm. Coming from a congested state like Maryland, I’m always struck by the wide open nature of New Mexico. There’s a real sense that you could get stuck out there and have to contend with rattlesnakes, heat stroke, or vicious storms. It’s a little scary, but exhilarating at the same time.

When we visited the town center of Santa Fe on a bright, warm Saturday afternoon, I was reminded of the opening of The Retaliators, when Matt Helm visits “the gleaming, modern lobby of the New Mexico National Bank.” The bank’s probably been remodeled since 1976, but it’s still there. I also thought about the following passage from later in the book:

Formerly, leaving Santa Fe southwards, you were out in coyote-and-prairie-dog country almost immediately; nowadays, the town peters out gradually through a dismal twilight zone of gas stations and drive-ins and housing developments that no self-respecting wild canine or rodent would tolerate. The desert is still out there, however; you just have to drive a little farther to find it.

If Mr. Hamilton could only see it now! Santa Fe, from any direction, is now surrounded by the kind of suburban sprawl that infects every city and town in America. I would only update his statement to say “Targets and Starbucks.” Just in the seven years since I was there last, the growth is astounding. There are housing developments on the west side of I-25 that didn’t exist seven years prior. I just hope that by the time my wife and I can move there, downtown Santa Fe doesn’t look like Baltimore!

Fortunately, growth in New Mexico is limited by the presence of Native American Reservations and National Parks. There are still vast stretches of breathtaking desert and mountains. Along with the sunshine and dry climate, you can’t help but feel happy every time you look out the window anywhere in New Mexico. I’m really grateful that Donald Hamilton, through his paperback thrillers, opened my eyes to a whole new world.

R.I.P. DONALD HAMILTON

I just learned this week that Matt Helm creator Donald Hamilton died November 20, 2006, at the age of 90. I was surprised at how the news affected me, or I should say the degree to which it affected me. Although I only knew the man through his writings, the fact that he was still alive out there gave me a tangible connection with a bygone literary era which I love so much, that being the early years of the dime store paperback thriller. Now that he’s gone, along with so many writers who thrived in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, I feel like that fertile era of gritty fiction has slipped away for good.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started reading the Matt Helm novels shortly after college. I had already read most of the James Bond novels and I was curious to see how the so-called “American James Bond” fared by comparison. What I found startled me. There really was no comparison. Matt Helm was a completely different animal, born from an entirely different style of writing.

My take on James Bond was that Ian Fleming took the essential elements of the old pulp magazine adventure stories (i.e., global sweep, fast-paced action, colorful villains, exotic love interests, etc.) and elevated the genre with sophisticated details about fine wines, the best restaurants and casinos around the world, proper customs, and frank sexual descriptions. For young men who had grown up reading pulp magazines, then experienced the world during WW II, the James Bond novels provided a comfortable blend of the adolescent and the adult for the post-war audience.

Matt Helm’s world was rooted in the shadowy alleyways of the private eye novels. His character was more in keeping with the Sam Spade or Mike Hammer tradition. While James Bond would occasionally fret over the messy business he fell into, Matt Helm had no such worries. This was the Cold War, and there were plenty of commies and commie sympathizers out there who wanted to undermine our democratic way of life. Helm knew his job was to take these people out regardless of how dirty or underhanded his methods had to be. Bond would hold himself to certain rules of behavior like never shooting a man in the back; Helm would shoot a man anyway he could if the dirty bastard deserved it. In short, James Bond inhabited a fantasy world where the villains were polite enough to let themselves be caught; Matt Helm existed in a dark world where the bad guys would take you out without even introducing themselves, so you’d better be prepared to do the same.

Another element the Matt Helm novels shared with the hard-boiled detective genre was that they were written in first-person, allowing the reader an intimate look into the man’s psyche. In addition to understanding his approach to his job, we were treated to amusing ruminations on everything from Helm’s aversion to women wearing pants to his hatred of cheap gimmicks on American automobiles. Donald Hamilton was an ex-Navy man who also enjoyed many outdoor activities, so Matt Helm would provide lengthy monologues on manly topics like sailing, fishing, camping, and hunting. I suspect Mr. Hamilton used Matt Helm as a way to present many of his own opinions about the world around him. The result is a richly detailed character that seemed quite real and surprisingly likeable for an assassin.

While the Matt Helm books were my main exposure to Donald Hamilton’s work, he also wrote numerous novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction pieces on his outdoor interests. One of his better known Westerns is The Big Country, which was turned into a big-budget movie starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. Recently, one of his old crime thrillers, Night Walker, was reprinted by Hard Case Crime. I can only hope that this new publisher, specializing in crime stories from the 40s and 50s, will choose to reprint more of Mr. Hamilton’s work.

I suppose it seems odd to feel such a tremendous loss over someone I never knew and who lived longer than most. For me, Donald Hamilton represented an era when average people read novels and fiction magazines as everyday entertainment. To feed that need for rich storytelling, a generation of terrific storytellers like Louis L´amour, Lawrence Block, Frank Gruber, and Donald Hamilton rose to the challenge and left a legacy of amazing fiction. The stories are still out there if you make the effort to find them, but the era is gone. With so many other entertainment distractions, reading has become an activity for the truly dedicated. Never again will we see such a diverse wealth of published material, created solely to entertain a mass market, devoid of the cynical marketing mentality so heavily plaguing today’s publishing world. I mourn the loss of a great writer, but I also mourn the loss of the era that spawned him.

DEAN MARTIN AS MATT HELM

I’m sure I’m not alone in my belief that Dean Martin was the coolest actor to ever appear in movies. There are plenty of actors that I think were pretty cool (Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, etc.), but none of these actors combined manliness with impeccable comic timing like Dean Martin. Who else could’ve held his own next to Jerry Lewis for 10 years, and still had a long, successful career afterward both in comedy and drama? He played a wide range of roles, but he was always essentially Dean. That may sound like a put-down, but I really mean that as a compliment. No matter the character, whether he was an alcoholic gunslinger or an airplane pilot, you always sensed an underlying truth to his performances because the essential person that was Dean Martin always came through. And that person was damned likable.

I didn’t always feel that way. When I was a pre-schooler, I became frightened of him whenever he would come on the t.v. screen in his variety show. To this day, I don’t know what caused this irrational fear, but whenever Dean popped on the screen, sliding down the fire pole with his glass of scotch, I would start to cry and my mom would have to put me to bed.

Then my dad took my brother and me to see Airport. This was the first grown-up movie I ever saw in a theatre, and I was mesmerized. So much action, so much tension, so much excitement. And right in the middle of it was Dean Martin, saving the day as the cool, in-control pilot Captain Demerest. I suddenly saw Dean Martin in a whole new light. He became a hero.

Around the same time, the Matt Helm movies were seeing regular rotation on television. They were clearly inferior to the James Bond films, but I got a big kick out of Dean Martin playing the hero again. Unfortunately, not only were the films trying to spoof James Bond, they were also caught up in the era of camp where the thinking was, the more ridiculous the better. In fact, audiences quickly realized that, not only was ridiculous not very exciting as it killed all sense of suspense, ridiculous was also not very funny when ladled out in heaping spoonfuls. The Matt Helm movies were devoid of any suspense since we were presented with the premise that our “hero” would escape all peril and save the day even though he was drinking and fornicating through most of the picture. Still, as a kid, I didn’t worry too much about these issues, and enjoyed the films for the action and gadgetry.

In college, I took to reading the James Bond novels and was struck by how different they were from the movies. I knew the Matt Helm books had to be light years away from the movies, and after reading The Silencers, I was proven correct. Although all four Matt Helm movies borrowed characters and plot points from the novels, the elements were shaken vigorously with several shots of scotch and a dash of absurdity to create the final scripts. It’s a shame too, because the literary Matt Helm was about as tough a spy as you will find. He was, in fact, a government assassin who, while not entirely lacking in humanity, kept it well hidden while on the job. Think Lee Marvin rather than Dean Martin.

While I’m still trying to collect and read all the Matt Helm novels, I still have a warm spot in my heart for the Matt Helm movies. I even bought them all on VHS, then again on DVD. And when Sideshow Toys started putting out their James Bond action figures, I kept longing for a Matt Helm figure. I wanted a nice rendering of Dean Martin as Matt Helm standing between my Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan James Bonds. Of course, Sideshow would see no strong bottom line in such a creation, so I had to make my own.

The big issue was the headsculpt. Where would I find a head that looked like Dean Martin? My answer came while I was flipping through my book on Marx action figures. Marx made a Best of the West figure called Sheriff Garrett and, for reasons lost in the sands of time, created him to look exactly like Dean Martin with a moustache. The likeness was uncanny. I quickly went into eBay mode and finally won a vintage Sheriff Garrett figure. Once I had it, I repainted the head to cover over the moustache and change the gray hair to black. I used a skin tone to match the hands, but I’ve never been satisfied with it since it’s very pale. Dino had a darker complexion than my figure, but it works okay. The outfit was relatively easy, since the movie Matt Helm was partial to turtlenecks. I put him in a yellow one like in The Silencers, and used some mod checked paints from an old Ken doll. I couldn’t get a jacket that matched the suede one in The Silencers, but this mod tan jacket works pretty well. I’m still looking for new clothes to make a version that will look exactly like one of his outfits in the movies.