MacKinlay Kantor (February 4, 1904 – 1977) was an American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his novel Andersonville.

Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa. He published his first poem at the age of 17, and at 18 he won a state story writing contest. His first novel, Diversey, was about Chicago gangsters and was written in 1928, when the subject matter was contemporary. In the 1930's, Kantor first wrote about the American Civil War with his novel Long Remember. Kantor had spoken with Civil War veterans when he was young, and he was an avid collector of first-hand narratives. Long Remember is one of the first realistic novels about the Civil War.

His detective writings include Signal Thirty-two (1950), a police procedural, Midnight Lace (1948), about a woman terrorized by anonymous phone calls, and It's About Crime (1960), a collection of short stories.

Mike Grost on MacKinlay Kantor

MacKinlay Kantor was a pioneer writer of pulp suspense fiction. His "The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930) is a terrifying tale of seemingly impossible events at an apartment house. Kantor's work seems definitely to be in the same genre as Cornell Woolrich, whom he preceded. There are many similarities: the evocation of suspense; the urban setting; the look at "little people" trying to get by on routine jobs during the depression; the scared summoning of authority figures by those people; the anonymity of apartment houses evoked; the ratcheting of terror up notches; the plunging of ordinary people serving as detectives into terrifying situations; the emphasis on clocks; the background of gang warfare and kidnapping as a source of crime in the 1930's; the vivid descriptive writing; and the use of seemingly impossible situations that are eventually rationally explained. Kantor's work could have served as a model for Woolrich's, it is so similar.

MacKinlay Kantor's "Yea, He Did Fly" (written 1931) shows his skill with the non mystery story. While definitely not a mystery, one hesitates to call this a "mainstream" story, because it is also so different from most "literary" fiction. Written with an almost Shakespearean richness of language, it could be considered a prose poem. Like Shakespeare, Kantor here uses words outside their original contexts, in novel and unusual ways. For example, he speaks of a scene being "rinsed" by light, when a car's headlights swoop over it. Oddly enough, one can see similarities between this tale, and the storyteller of "The Light at Three O'Clock". There is the same fascination with light after dark, the same drawing of his heroes to places where danger and mystery lurk. There is also an emphasis on characters hiding in small narrow spaces, and ultimately emerging. Like "The Second Challenge" (1929), another early pulp tale, there is a nocturnal world in this story, one filled with danger, adventure, and personal self discovery. Kantor's use of rich language in "Yea, He Did Fly" is in the tradition of such 19th Century American Renaissance writers as Herman Melville and Harriet Prescott Spofford ("The Amber Gods"). It runs orthogonal to the dogma of his era that good prose should be in the American vernacular: see Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway. While Kantor often wrote about ordinary people, he rarely used ordinary language to do so. Kantor is too interested in lyrical descriptions, especially of nature and small town or neighborhood social life, to want to be plain. He is a rhapsodist, who wants to celebrate the beauty of the world around him. Kantor differs from American Renaissance writers such as Melville or Hawthorne, in that his stories are not loaded with symbolic meanings or resonances. There are no Minister's Black Veils in his tales to intrigue the reader with their symbolic weight. Kantor's typical hero is a young person beginning to discover the social world beyond his home. He is eager to explore the world around him. While the events he sees can be sad or even tragic, they are usually not bitter. Just seeing what lies beyond his own fence is fascinating to Kantor's hero. The lead can be a grown man or a child, or even an animal: Kantor had an especial sympathy for animals in his tales.

"The Trail of the Brown Sedan" (1933) is part of Kantor's Detective Fiction Weekly (DFW) series about police officers Nick Glennan and Dave Glennan, two Irish cop brothers. Little remembered today, it is a pioneer work of the Police Procedural. Kantor always had a strong realist side to him - he was a mainstream writer, and shared the bias of that tribe toward realism - and these tales try to give a fairly realistic look at police work, without sacrificing excitement and drama. They are very different in feel from the hard-boiled stories then appearing in Black Mask, and are perhaps a little bit closer to the tales of gangsters then appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, although Kantor's work has a bit more of a working class feel to it than the typical Post story. (See also Howard McLellan's "The Moll-Trap" (1929) from Colliers'.) While Nick Glennan is the central character, a whole group of cops are portrayed, anticipating the police procedural technique of an entire squad of cops as the "hero" of a tale. There is also an emphasis on ethnic diversity, with a wide range of immigrant groups sympathetically portrayed, both among the police, and the witnesses to the crime. Most of the characters are poor but respectable members of the working class - this is the depths of the Depression. Many city locales are also portrayed, with the police traveling from one to another. Kantor likes open spaces: city plazas, street corners, the entrance steps of buildings, fields, vacant lots. There is always a railroad in the background somewhere. This is the same technique he used to describe the Iowa neighborhood of his childhood in "The Neighbors Light Their Lanterns" (1931), and also recalls his classic, "Yea, He Did Fly" (1931). The collective portrait of his neighbors in "Lanterns" also recalls the collective portrait of the cops in "Sedan". "Lanterns" is to a degree a cross between the mystery and the mainstream story, an unusual hybrid for its era. In fact, Kantor was not able to sell this tale anywhere. Kantor's first published story, the mainstream tale "Purple" (1922), also shows his ability to describe Iowa life. It contains some sharp comments on the relation between art and life. Both this tale and "Brown Sedan" also show Kantor's interest in unusual, non-standard things that can be done with photography.

Kantor would go on to write an early novel of the police procedural school, Signal Thirty-Two (1950). He records in his commentary in Author's Choice how much real life policemen of the early 1930's liked his Glennan tales. Not all of them are up to the quality of "Sedan". Both the OK "Sparrow Cop" (1933) and the dismal "The Hunting of Hemingway" (1934) are much too violent and plotless. The best parts of "Sparrow Cop" are the early sections, which deal with Glennan's pleasure in his new police uniform. Kantor also wrote non-series tales of police procedure. "Something Like Salmon" (1933) is a well done story that mixes a police man-hunt for bank robbers with detection. The man-hunt theme is a perennial feature of Kantor's police stories. The detection in "Something Like Salmon" is performed not by a policeman, but by the sympathetic and highly observant Greek owner of a lunch counter. He anticipates the Greek restaurateur in Kantor's "That Greek Dog" (1941), and is typical of Kantor's sympathetic treatment of immigrants. "Blue-Jay Takes the Trail" (1933) is also an absorbing story of a man-hunt around a small Midwestern city and its surrounding countryside, probably a fictionalized version of Kantor's home town of Webster City, Iowa. "Blue-Jay" suffers from excessive violence, but is otherwise an interesting tale. It is a pulp story, but it echoes the tradition popular in slick magazines of the era of pitting ordinary people against mobsters.

Kantor's "Night of Panic" is a short tale that takes place in Civil War era Washington D.C. It is not a mystery, but it can be considered a suspense work. Although it was first published approximately in the early 1950's, it has many of the hallmark's of Kantor's earlier tales. It takes place at night, one that is partially and inadequately illuminated. It takes place in an urban landscape that includes houses, yards and streets, like "The Neighbors Light Their Lanterns", and urban open spaces, like "The Trail of the Brown Sedan". Everybody is looking for an elderly man in jeopardy, as in "Lanterns". It is written in Kantor's richly evocative style. It has two brothers, both in uniform, just like the Glennan Brothers of Kantor's pulp tales, one older and more experienced, the other young and eager. Both get involved in derring do and excitement, also like the Glennans. There are animals in the tales, horses and mules, like the dogs and moths of Kantor's earlier stories. These are archetypal Kantor landscapes and characters, ones that appear whenever his creative mind is evolving a story. It is a landscape that has its roots in Kantor's childhood memories, as he makes clear in Author's Choice. Children's worlds are heavily bounded by yards and streets, and everything in them takes on an enormous importance, and great tactile reality. This is true of Kantor's yards: every wall or hedge or feature seems overwhelming vivid and real. It is a world most of Kantor's readers can identify with, because we can remember childhood worlds of our own that are equally vivid in their details. Kantor's family members are always bound to each other by affection. They might have difficulties with practical issues - the wife in "Night" cannot face her husband's danger in the Civil War- but they are always full of warm feeling for each other. Both the family members, usually brothers, and the animals in Kantor's stories also seem child like. This is a child's world view, projected onto adults. When one uses the word "child like" one conjures up a stereotype of sticky sentimentality, faux naiveté, etc. None of that is present here. All the same, Kantor's stories are close to the genuine aspect of the world viewed by a child.

"That Greek Dog" (1941) is also a mainstream story with strong elements of the thriller. Even though Kantor was largely aiming toward mainstream markets at that era (the story appeared in the Post), his imagination was clearly still drawing on suspense situations. (Similarly, when many science fiction writers write mainstream fiction, there is often a strong sf tinge to it.) This is probably a good thing; Kantor became much less sentimental when including mystery or suspense elements in his tales; far too many of his later mainstream stories are dunked in sentimental goo, and the sort of small town folksiness that was real big in his era, but which today seems as phony as a three dollar bill. The tale recycles imagery from his early pulp story, "The Second Challenge" (1929). Both take place in what is essentially his home town of Webster City, Iowa, both contain little restaurants (here a sweet shop), and both have dogs who get involved in nocturnal crimes, protecting their masters. Even though these stories were written 12 years apart, there is a strong personal element in common. This tale and others of its era show Kantor as an early, outspoken advocate of racial integration.

Kantor's "Gun Crazy" (1940) was the source for the 1949 film noir classic directed by Joseph H. Lewis; he collaborated on the script with Milard Kaufman. The short story seems to be the barest outline or plot synopsis of the movie, however. Scenes that are dramatized in detail in the film are just summarized in the story, and the prose tale is basically just a footnote in film history.

Cornell Woolrich was perhaps influenced by Kantor's suspense tales; there might also be an influence from his police procedural tales, as well. Police characters are extremely common in Woolrich's work, and their behavior, characterization, and modus operandi largely fit into the patterns established by Kantor. The rain of bullets descending on the bad guys at the end of "Brown Sedan" finds its parallel shoot out in Woolrich's "Funeral" (1937), although Woolrich tells his story from the viewpoint of the crooks. There is also an encounter between children and the villains in "Brown Sedan", anticipating many such encounters in Woolrich. Woolrich was much less interested in authentic police procedure than Kantor; his stories apparently are largely fantasies, albeit gripping ones.

Of course, there might be a large common heritage of police stories drawn on by both writers as well: the police are by no means an institution neglected by popular literature, and Futrelle's "The Diamond Master" already showed many clichés of police activity, such as the third degree, way back in 1909, not to mention Gaboriau back even further. Pulp historians are largely in love with private detectives who appear in series tales, and police fiction from the pulps is much less reprinted. It is hard to tell how much or what kinds of police tales appeared in pulp magazines, let alone how good they were. Kantor has been reprinted because he was a mainstream author, Woolrich because he was a master of suspense. Carl ~McK. Saunders' police tales of Captain Murdock appeared in Ten Detective Aces, otherwise home base of much weird menace fiction. Both Kantor and Woolrich also have ties to the weird menace school, and one wonders if there is a systematic link between weird menace and the police tale in the pulps, unlikely as that first sounds. At the very least, both weird menace and police stories are alternatives to the hard-boiled p.i. tradition, and might have struck an alliance for mutual survival. For another, the police seem to show up often in Paul Chadwick's weird menace stories, with police characters realistically and sympathetically described in the Kantor mode. Frederick C. Davis' Moon Man is also a policeman in his secret identity, and once again there is a realistic police drama lurking in the background of Davis' fantastic center stage melodrama.

Bibliography

Signal Thirty-Two (1950)

Midnight Lace (1948)

It's About Crime (1960)