Quote of the Day (Damon Runyon, With a Female Example of ‘The Underworld Complex’)

“Waldo Winchester says the underworld complex is a very common complex and that Basil Valentine has it, and so has Miss Harriet Mackyle, or she will not be all the time sticking her snoot into joints where tough guys hang out. This Miss Harriet Mackyle is one of these rich dolls who wears snaky-looking evening clothes, and has her hair cut like a boy's, with her ears sticking out, and is always around the night traps, generally with some guy with a little mustache, and a way of talking like an Englishman, and come to think of it I do see her in tough joints more than somewhat, saying hello to different parties such as nobody in their right minds will say hello to, including such as Red Henry, who is just back from Dannemora, after being away for quite a spell for taking things out of somebody's safe and blowing the safe open to take these things.”—American short-story writer and sportswriter Damon Runyon (1880-1946), “Social Error,” originally printed in Furthermore (1938), republished in New York Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (2011)

If the name in that quote sounds very vaguely familiar, it’s because the socialite described here shows up as one of the characters in the not-terribly-well-known 1989 film Bloodhounds of Broadway, a mashup of several Damon Runyon short stories including “Social Error,” and featuring Julie Hagerty (pictured) as Miss Mackyle.

Runyon is best known for the musical Guys and Dolls, adapted from two of his other stories. He made a tidy sum in the Thirties and Forties with Hollywood transferring some of his properties to the screen, not always successfully.

I think you really must read his words on the page rather than seeing them on a screen to appreciate their unusual quality.  Films convey the funny patois of his characters but not the danger and menace that sneak up between the colorful phrases, like “tough joints,” “blowing the safe open” and “Dannemora” (for readers outside the tristate region, an upstate New York maximum security facility).

Runyon himself had something of an “underworld complex.”  Much of the considerable money he earned as a New York sportswriter and short-story writer was spent at the racetrack, where he met many gamblers and absorbed the speech patterns that later figured so prominently in his work.

Some of those people turned up as thinly disguised people in his stories, including:

*Bat Masterson, who became Sky Masterson;

*Walter Winchell (Waldo Winchester);

*Arnold Rothstein (Nathan Detroit);

*Texas Guinan (Miss Missouri Martin);

*Harry Morgan (The Lemon-Drop Kid);

* Otto Berman (Regret);

* Frank Costello (Dave the Dude);

*Johnny Broderick (Johnny Brannigan)

I haven’t been able to discover the original inspiration for Harriet or Red Henry, but they must have been something else.