Offbeat, oddball detective fiction squared. Wow! Does it ever get any crazier?
We're in Chicago right around 1942, the publication date of American author Robert A. Heinlein's short novel The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. And we're about to enter into a case that's, as the saying goes, nuttier than a fruitcake. Too nutty and too full of unexpected, quizzical U-Turns right from the first pages to say anything more about the story line; rather, I'll serve up several slices from this Heinlein fruitcake to stimulate your literary taste buds. Open wide - here goes:
JONATHAN HOAG
Articulate, gentile, gracious, cultivated, urbane Jonathan Hoag is in need of help – he has lost all memory of his daytime activities including his very own profession. His prime question: what do I do all day that serves as my means of employment? Furthermore, Jonathan is perplexed as to the reddish substance resembling dried blood under his fingernails. The doctor he consults, one Potiphar T. Potbury, is no help at all; quite the contrary, without the least provocation, Potbury throws him out of his office and demands he never, ever return.
SLUTHHOUNDS
Jonathan contacts Randall & Craig, a private detective agency, which turns out to be a husband and wife team - Ted and Cynthia Randall. Hoag hands Mr. Randall a fistful of large bills for shadowing him during the day to find out what exactly he does. Bizarre request, to say the least, but Ted and Cynthia can use the money, so they agree.
These two call each other Teddy and Cyn and have always worked well as a gumshoe team. A few samples of their breezy back and forth at different points in the story: "You didn’t pick up a snifter or two on the way, did you?” . . . “That’s a fine idea. That’s a swell idea. I’ll tell him you’ve broken your leg but you’ll be all right tomorrow. . . . " “We always have fun. Even when we were broke and trying to get the business started we had fun. We went to bed smiling and got up happy. We still do." As readers, we root for Ted and Cynthia from beginning to end, such a genuine good old Midwestern American apple pie couple.
KOOKY IN THE EXTREME
Cyn and Teddy tail Jonathan Hoag around town but they are in for a bucketful of the freakish: afterwards, when they compare notes of their respective experiences, they don't match. Cyn says she clearly saw Teddy speaking with Hoag out on the street but Teddy replies in alarm, he never exchanged a word with Hoag. Teddy recounts how he shadowed Hoag to the 13th Floor of the Acme Building and discovered Jonathan Hoag works as a jeweler for a company called Betheridge. But Cyn claims he did nothing of the sort. They both return to the Acme Building to solve the puzzle. Ahh! - no 13th Floor, no jewelers, and no Betheridge! Flabbergasted, Cyn and Teddy consider the explanation could lie in either hypnosis, hallucination or even madness. The thick plottens.
MIRROR WORLD
Teddy's world is about to turn even freakier. Much freakier. At home one evening he is led through a large mirror into another dimension where he is confronted by beefy business types sitting around a conference table, a group of men calling themselves "The Sons of the Bird" with talk of "The Bird is cruel." These coarse, odious men attempt to bully Teddy, making demands of him concerning none other than Jonathan Hoag. Incidentally, this part of the tale had served as inspiration for a number of the novel's book covers, as per above.
SOCIAL COMMENTARY
"She recalled once having seen a painting entitled Subway. It showed a crowd pouring out the door of an underground train while another crowd attempted to force its way in. Getting on or getting off, they were plainly in a hurry, yet it seemed to give them no pleasure. The picture had no beauty itself; it was plain that the artist's single purpose had been to make a bitter criticism of a way of living." Robert A. Heinlein isn't Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis, but he does include a good bit of commentary on the underside of American society.
Cynthia is probably recollecting Subway, a 1935 painting by Daniel Celentano
In much similar spirit: Subway, a 1950 painting by George Tooker
As below, so above. Here's another instance of scathing social critique: riding the Chicago elevated, Cynthia scans the familiar miles of apartment houses, “Four-and five-story walk-up apartment houses, with their backs to the tracks, at least ten families to a building, more visually twenty or more, and the buildings crushed together almost wall to wall. Wood-construction back porches which proclaimed the fire-trap nature of the warrens despite the outer brick shells, family wash hung out to dry on those porches, garbage cans, and trash bins. Mile after mile of undignified and unbeautiful squalor, seen from the rear. And over everything a film of black grime, old and inescapable, like the dirt on the window sill beside her.”
TRANSCEND GRIM AND GRIME
The novel's ending caught me by surprise. Again, I will not reveal specifics but I will note that I wasn't expecting Robert A. Heinlein to speak in glowing terms of an individual's capacity to be an art critic and refined Epicure with highly attuned tastes and sensibilities. And a lover capable of great sacrifice. Made me wonder if anybody has ever addressed the topic of aesthetics in the literature of Robert A. Heinlein. I'm half joking here but only half. To compound matters, we are asked to ponder the prospect of our created world being one of process with echoes of Alfred North Whitehead and process theology. As to the question of how all of this fits together, I urge you to read The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag to discover for yourself.
One of the giants of science fiction, American author Robert A. Heinlein, 1907-1988
"Poets have sung of the beauty and innocence of childhood. But it could not have been this street, seen through Hoag's eyes, that they had in mind. The small boys seemed rat-faced to him, sharp beyond their years, sharp and shallow and snide. The little girls were no better in his eyes. Those of eight or nine, the shapeless stringy age, seemed to him to have tattletale written in their pinched faces — mean souls, born for trouble- making and cruel gossip. Their slightly older sisters, gutter-wise too young, seemed entirely concerned with advertising their arrogant new sex — not for Hoag's benefit, but for their pimply counterparts loafing around the drugstore." Robert A. Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag
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