INTRODUCTION: HE STEPPED IN IT!

Let’s start with a spoiler alert. Anybody who wants to approach Five Million in Cash with a mind like a blank slate, the proverbial tabula rasa, may be excused right now. Turn to Chapter I, enjoy the book, and come back when you’re ready.

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Okay, Gentle Reader, you’re either still here or you’re back again. In either case, let’s feel free to talk about this very odd novel.

It starts like one of those comic fantasies that were popular in the 1930s. The most famous and successful of all was Topper, by Thorne Smith. Smith had been writing for years. He’d tried his hand at everything from thinly disguised war memoirs to poetry to at least one serious murder mystery, but it was his humorous fantasies about ghosts, living statues, magical sex changes, walking skeletons, and people turning into animals that made him wealthy and famous.

When Topper was published in 1926 it captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties, otherwise known as the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Smith gave the reading public a generous portion of sex, booze, and supernatural hi-jinx. When the Great Depression hit three years later, the same formula offered readers a light-hearted escape from their gloom. Smith’s fantasies inspired a whole school of fiction. Writers who imitated him included pre-Psycho Robert Bloch, pre-Dianetics L. Ron Hubbard, and a fellow named Charles F. Myers whose made a modest career out of writing about a Topper-inspired sexy apparition named Toffee.

One can well imagine the young Tiffany Thayer (1902-1959), then a struggling young writer not yet out of his twenties, deciding to try his hand at the genre. Thus:

When Ben Flinders’ alarm clock rattles him out of a sound sleep, he steps from his bed and discovers that he’s ankle-deep in money. Literally. He’s an ordinary guy, a bachelor living in a Spartan rented room, working in an auto paint shop in Manhattan. He has no idea how much money he’s stepped into, although it’s clearly a fortune, and he has no idea how it got into his room.

Did the Tooth Fairy fall in love with Ben and favor him with several million simoleons? Did Ben get drunk, wander into an illicit gambling den, and break the bank? Is this all a dream?

One can imagine what Thorne Smith would have done with this story, or any of Smith’s imitators. I imagine that Tiffany Thayer had just such a task in mind when he started writing Five Million in Cash, but for some reason he never followed through with the zany humorous fantasy that he seemed to have in mind.

Instead, Thayer’s mild-mannered automobile painter soon discovers that the source of all that money was neither a beautiful fairy with a magic wand nor a streak of gambler’s luck, but a crooked scheme involving not one but two criminal gangs and some crooked politicians.

The simplest solution for Ben would have been to give the money back. But back to whom? And how is Ben to arrange the transfer? Instead, Ben Flinders decides to keep the money. And once he is plunged into the underworld of 1920s New York, he’s off on one of the wildest adventures you can imagine.

The ingredients of a pulp gangster novel are all there. Mobsters, car chases, disguises, alluring vamps, blasting revolvers, blazing machine guns, false identities, speakeasies. I don’t know this for a fact, but it’s my guess that the young Thayer wrote this book in the late 1920s, sent it out to any number of publishers, and got back nothing but rejection slips.

But in 1930, Thayer hit with his own first, most distinctive, and most successful novel, Thirteen Men. The fact that the book was illustrated by the great Mahlon Blaine didn’t hurt. Suddenly Thayer could sell, and sell he did. Thirteen Men was followed by Thirteen Women, One Man Show, Three-Sheeter, and Thayer’s unique re-imagining of such classics as The Three Musketeers and the Mona Lisa.

But there was Five Million in Cash sitting in a bottom drawer in Thayer’s desk. Authors don’t like to have unpublished manuscripts hanging around. Now Thayer could probably sell Five Million in Cash¸ but it wasn’t really a very good book. At least by conventional standards. Not that any of Thayer’s books were. He was an odd bird, that’s for certain.

Still, one can imagine: he wanted Five Million in Cash published but he didn’t want it published.

Today we might call Thayer’s state of mind, cognitive dissonance. In Thayer’s day a simpler term might have been, confusion. But there was a solution, a scheme that would reconcile his two desires. If he used a pseudonym on the book, he might clear some cash while maintaining his new-found succes d’estime as Tiffany Thayer.

Hence: O. B. King. And he was right. He sold the novel and it appeared twice in 1932. A hardcover edition was published by Doubleday, Doran. A few copies survive, but the dust jacket is extremely scarce. And the text was included in Star Novels Quarterly, a pulp magazine issued by the same company.

As far as I can determine, Thayer never used the O.B. King pseudonym again, nor did he ever reveal what the initials “O.B.” stood for. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps Thayer just snatched the name out of thin air, the same way he snatched all that money out of thin air and dropped it on Ben Flinders’ bedroom floor.

There are some things that we’ll never know.

But this much I do know: Five Million in Cash is a wild, amazing, incredible yarn. It’s unlike any other book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of books. A lot!

As Tiffany Thayer said of his own most famous work, Thirteen Men, “This probably isn’t the best book you’ve ever read, and it certainly isn’t the worst, but it’s the damnedest.”

Or something like that.

Richard A. Lupoff

Berkeley CA

Spring 2014