Former Roosevelt resident Benjamin Appel lives on in his pulp crime novels, posthumously rereleased. His daughter shares memories of growing up in the Appel household and arts community.
By:Susan Van Dongen
When was the last time you sunk your teeth into an old-fashioned crime mystery, one with words like "ginzos," "dames" and "dough," where "flatfoots" raid "classy joints" in search of characters like "Tony the Wop" and "Paddy the Pimp?"
Maybe it’s been a while since you could even find such a book. That’s why lovers of pulp crime will be interested to know one of the genre’s most prolific writers of the early 20th century has just had two of his novels republished postumously. Benjamin Appel’s Brain Guy, first published in 1934, is teamed with his 1952 book Plunder in a republication by Stark House Press ($19.95). They’re just two of some 40 works of fiction and non-fiction by this author.
"As a story teller, Appel is the last word… by comparison, Hemingway’s style is flowery," was the word at the time in The New York Herald Tribune.
Although Mr. Appel, who died in 1977, was a natural born story teller who worked around the clock, he never realized the financial success of his contemporaries.
"My father’s career as a writer could be summed up in four words great praise/lousy sales," writes his daughter Carla Appel in a recent issue of Mystery Scene magazine. "Keeping regular hours, he worked all morning, broke for lunch, then all afternoon at the desk in his bedroom. There was never any money for a studio. Besides, he was keeping an ear out for me and my sisters while my mother taught second grade."
Mr. Appel outdid Hemingway in writing discipline. While "Papa" wrote in the mornings, then broke away from his desk for outdoor and social activities, Mr. Appel wrote all day, sometimes seven days a week. He could also write in many mediums in addition to crime and mystery, including biography, geography and history.
"He’d be writing in the morning when we went to school, then he’d break at lunch time to make us lunch, then begin again when we left," says Ms. Appel, speaking from her home in Washington, D.C. "If we were home, he’d come out if there was an emergency. But we knew that we weren’t supposed to bother him. He wrote every day weekends, holidays and summer vacations. He didn’t seem to need a vacation from it he lived to write. What he really loved was writing, family and friends."
Perhaps because Roosevelt was an artists’ community where many of the adults worked from home instead of commuting to corporate jobs, Ms. Appel never thought it was odd to have a stay-at-home dad who sat at the typewriter all day.
"I remember when I had whooping cough and was home for about two months," she says. "I remember hearing the sound of the typewriter coming through the wall, and I always felt that was very soothing."
Meanwhile, Ms. Appel’s mother seemed to take it in stride when Mr. Appel would tell his favorite joke: "What’s the definition of a creative writer? One whose wife supports the family."
The two met at a party in Greenwich Village shortly after Brain Guy was published and their fate seemed to be cast. Mr. Appel’s future bride had a good job as a secretary in a law office whereas he and all his friends were perpetually broke.
"I think she understood that it came as part of the package," Ms. Appel says. "She knew he was a writer and that was what he was going to do all the time."
Teaching at the Roosevelt elementary school was her most steady job. Ms. Appel says her mother also taught at Chapin School and for a while worked as a typist in one of the research departments at Princeton University.
Money may have been short for Mr. Appel, but luck, support from admiring publishers and a legion of friends enabled him to enjoy a series of adventures.
E.P. Dutton publishers recognized "Bennie’s" skills as a listener, as well as his rapport with people from all walks of life, and in 1939 they commissioned Mr. Appel to travel across the United States to write a non-fiction account of what he saw and heard. Borrowing a car from his great-uncle, the Appels went to Provincetown, Mass., a sugar cane farm in Louisiana, the pueblos of New Mexico and a copper mine in Montana, among many stops. The result was The People Talk, published in 1940, an oral history of the Depression.
During World War II, the author was sent to the Philippines as a ghost writer for U.S. High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt. He diligently kept a journal, recording their meetings with the nationalist movement, impressions of American troops in Manila and his developing friendship with Hernando Abaya, a Filipino journalist opposed to the American occupation.
These writings would later unfold into Plunder a tale of two corrupt American G.I.s in post-war Manila, and another novel, Fortress in the Rice. The latter was made into a now-obscure movie, Cry of Battle, which starred Rita Moreno and Van Heflin.
Later, when Ms. Appel was in college, the family traveled to the Soviet Union, where Fortress in the Rice enjoyed lively sales. Although Mr. Appel couldn’t collect royalties, the family got a generous stipend to travel and enjoy the country’s best restaurants and hotels. This was part of a trip around Europe to collect interviews, an international version of The People Talk.
"In every other country he was an anonymous writer, but here (in the Soviet Union) he was official, a translated author in a land that revered writers," Ms. Appel writes.
Mr. Appel was born in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City in 1907, the son of socialist Polish immigrants. Although he didn’t care too much for formal studies, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Lafayette College. At age 24, he won his first writing award and published a book of poetry. Soon, his short stories were appearing in Esquire, Scribner’s and other publications.
Set in Hell’s Kitchen, Brain Guy is the story of the rise of a young gangster in the midst of the Depression. Like the main character, Mr. Appel was once a rent collector there, so he picked up the language of shop keepers, landlords and tough guys.
"He had a really good ear for language," Ms. Appel says. "He was a tremendous mimic, so as a parent he was extremely entertaining. He liked playing with language and was forever making terrible puns. But his ear never shut down and he could translate it into print."
Ms. Appel says living in Roosevelt sometimes called "Red Roosevelt" by surrounding, more conservative towns got to be especially interesting during the McCarthy Era when the patriotism of American writers and artists was being questioned.
"It was a community of like-minded people who worked in some branch of the arts, who were ‘liberal’ in politics," Ms. Appel says. "So I wasn’t scared of McCarthy. We always thought we were right and he was wrong."
Mr. Appel enjoyed collaborating with several of Roosevelt’s most prestigious artists. Ben Shahn did the cover for The Funhouse, one of the author’s science fiction novels. Bernarda Bryson Shahn created illustrations for Shepherd of the Sun, a non-fiction work about the ancient Incas. And Hell’s Kitchen, a collection of short stories, features cover art by Gregorio Prestopino. Former WPA photographer Sol Libsohn took Mr. Appel’s portrait for book jackets. And friends from Roosevelt appeared as thinly disguised characters in his fiction.
Ms. Appel says she thinks her father’s work is ready to be rediscovered, especially since his short stories have appeared in anthologies, including Hardboiled An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Master’s Choice (Berkeley, 1999).
"With the republication of ‘Brain Guy’ and ‘Plunder,’ I hope this momentum can continue," she says.
Brain Guy and Plunder by Benjamin Appel are available from Stark House Press, 2200 O St., Eureka, CA, 95501. On the Web: www.starkhousepress.com