Richard Himmel’s pulp noir back in print
The University of Chicago has produced many great writers.
Saul Bellow, of course, the Nobel Prize-winning author of such bestsellers as “Humboldt’s Gift,” “Herzog,” and “The Adventures of Augie March,” with its unforgettable opening: “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
There was Norman Maclean, who taught for decades at the school before retiring and writing his first brilliant book, “A River Runs Through It,” which was published in 1976 and was unfairly denied the Pulitzer Prize in 1977.
Then there is Richard Himmel.
You may not have heard of most of his book titles and it’s unlikely you read them when they were first published, most in the 1950s, even though he sold many copies of books with such jazzy titles as “Two Deaths Must Die,” “The Chinese Keyhole” and “The Rich and the Damned.” They were written on an ancient Underwood typewriter that now sits on a shelf in the artfully appointed apartment of his son, John Himmel. It is a typewriter that his mother once said, “should be washed out with soap.”
Yes, Himmel’s books were of that genre known as hard-boiled pulp noir and peppered with sex that is downright tame in these free-and-loose times. The first of these books feature a tough, world-weary, clever and booze-loving Chicago lawyer named Johnny Maguire and they helped launch Gold Medal Books, an imprint started in 1950 by Fawcett Publications. They were paperback originals, a publishing innovation at the time: short and snappy with colorfully sexy covers and selling for 25 cents. Himmel sold millions and shared literary agent Sterling Lord with such heavyweights as Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and later Mike Royko.
I have known and been friends with John since seventh grade and was almost as excited as he was to hear that his dad’s books
were being handsomely reissued by Lee Goldberg’s Cutting Edge Books, a firm noted for republishing “cutting edge crime novels, literary fiction, Westerns and selected nonfiction.”
“I was contacted by Lee and we talked,” says John. “It was a great opportunity to let people know what a wonderfully creative and multifaceted man my dad was.”
Richard Himmel was born in 1920 and raised on the North Shore. After graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka, he attended the University of Chicago, majoring in English and journalism. He wanted to be a writer, an ambition sparked by winning a writing contest as an 11-year-old and further fueled in college by the relationship he developed with writer Thornton Wilder, with whom he studied. (Wilder was a part time teacher for nearly a decade at the university beginning in 1931 and was, of course, the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for the novel “The Bridge of San
Luis Rey,” and the plays “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.”)
After serving in World War II, for a time on the staff of Gen. George S. Patton, Himmel returned to Chicago and, banging out his books at night, joined his sister, Muriel Lubliner, in a new interiordecorating business. The demands of that job would pull him away from his typewriter and make him one of the country’s best known and most successful designers.
He operated on a clientfriendly philosophy, telling them, “You tell me, baby, how you live and what you like, and I’ll deliver.” He was protectively secretive about his clients, but his work would include designing residential projects for such high-profile clients as Irv Kupcinet and Muhammad Ali. He worked on corporate jets, country clubs, banks, restaurants and nightclubs, notably Arnie’s and Zorine’s.
He was, as furniture designer and decorator
Holly Hunt once put it, “Our star. All of Chicago design was influenced by him. He was a treasure.”
He was married to the delightfully ebullient Elinor, a devoted White Sox fan among her many activities, and they had two children, daughter Ellen and son John, who has long owned and operated John Himmel Decorative Arts.
“I was born about the time his first book came out,” says John, whose full name is John Maguire Himmel, a nifty homage to the character. “My childhood memories are full of the sound of my dad hitting that typewriter with two fingers.”
Cutting Edge Books has reissued the five novels featuring Maguire as well as some of Himmel’s other novels. The covers are moody and relatively sedate.
“I was naturally thrilled,” said John. “I had always wanted to write a book that celebrated him as a designer, but he was so private about his clients. So, when I was approached
about his books I was very excited. I didn’t want any money. This recognition is a great thing.”
And it hits a personal chord too, since one of my late father Herman Kogan’s books, a 1952 history of Marshall Field & Company, “Give the Lady What She Wants” written with his pal Lloyd Wendt, had last year been reissued by the folks who run Barbara’s Bookstore. And late last year, the father of another of our lifelong friends, Rudolph Pen, was given a handsome exhibit, “Pen on Paper: An Exhibition of Watercolors & Drawings,” at the Richard Norton Gallery in the Merchandise Mart. His son Ron, an emeritus professor of music at the University of Kentucky, was delighted. But unable to travel in for the show, he heard from of his friends who saw it and relayed favorable impressions.
“Well, at least our dads had a good 2020,” said John.
Though he would stop publishing for two decades, Himmel never stopped
writing. He returned with a bang: the publication of three hardcover novels, “The Twenty-Third Web” (1977), “Lions at Night” (1979) and “Echo Chambers” (1982). They are longer than his previous books and feature more sex, as well as spies and international intrigue. Always a showman, he orchestrated a lavish book release party for one that featured men dressed in fatigues and real lions roaring.
Beset by bad health in his later years, he died in 2000. He was 79.
Sitting with John and his wife Kim Kubiak, a television and film producer, and their friendly 8-year-old Labrador named Lou, the conversation was filled with stories of fathers and hopes for this coming year. I mentioned something I had read in an online review of one his dad’s books, “Really appealing style … fast-paced, funny, almost breezy at times, with lots of excellent dialogue, but (Himmel) also manages to work in some poetic bits from time to time and some angst and tragedy. I’m not sure I’ve read anything exactly like it before, and I can see why ‘I’ll Find You’ was a big success. It really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.”
I had already finished that novel and so, the sky growing dark and the streets outside as gloomy and empty as ever, I thought it a fine time to head home and start another.
It was “I Have Gloria Kirby” and it began, “It came back the minute I saw her again. Everything. All at once. The way it used to be. There was the crazy way my blood ran when she walked into a room; the hot spot under my collar when she was near me; the terrible tearing of my insides telling me how much I wanted her, wanted to have her; the skip beat of my heart and the dizzy, almost drunk feeling in my head. All these things were back again …”