The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin. New York. 1988. Penguin Books. 191 pages. paperback. 0140107339. Cover illustration by Peter Maynard.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Jacob Blunt seems perfectly sane to psychiatrist George Matthews, except for the hibiscus flower in his hair. But Jacob himself is not so sure. After all, he is, in the employ of certain ‘leprechauns’ who are paying him to whistle at Carnegie Hall and to give away money. George, none the less, begins to trust Jacob. Even when the young man is suspected of committing a brutal murder. From then on, George becomes embroiled in a nightmare world that may or may not be of his own making. Truth and fiction, memory and reality blur as the psychiatrist is systematically robbed of his freedom, his identity and his past. Somewhere in the back of his mind he must know something critical, a secret that someone is doing their best to make him forget. ‘There is a visionary lucidity about Bardin’s nightmares that makes his surrealist logic both convincing and disturbing’ - Julian Symons. Between 1946 and 1948 John Franklin Bardin produced 3 quite extraordinary novels, all distinguished by a hallucinatory intensity of feeling and an absorption in morbid psychology remarkable for the period. The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take The Blue-Tail Fly are unlike anything else in modern crime literature.
John Franklin Bardin (November 30, 1916 - July 9, 1981) was an American crime writer, best known for three novels he wrote between 1946 and 1948. Bardin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father was a well-to-do coal merchant and his mother an office worker. Nearly all of his immediate family died of various illnesses, however, with an elder sister dying of septicaemia, and, a year later, his father succumbing to a coronary and leaving little money. Bardin, who by then had graduated from Walnut High School, was studying engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and had to leave in his first year in order to work full-time as a ticket-taker and bouncer at a roller-skating rink, and later as a night clerk at a bookstore, where he would educate himself by reading. ‘Mother had become a paranoid schizophrenic by then,’ Bardin said. ‘It was on visits to her that I first had an insight into the 'going home' hallucinations’ that would later form the core of his third novel, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. Other jobs, held in some combination of Cincinnati and New York City, to which he moved before turning 30, including working as a bench hand in a valve foundry; in the advertising department of a bank; in the production department of an advertising agency; and doing freelance market research for Barron Collier. In New York, he began working in 1944 for the ad agency Edwin Bird Wilson, Inc., and from 1946 to 1948 completed the three novels for which he would be best known: The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter, and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, published over the course of 18 months, though that last not in the United States until the 1960s. Bardin would eventually write 10 novels over the course of his lifetime. His magazine articles include ‘The Disadvantages of Respectability’, a review of the book Father of the Man: How Your Child Gets His Personality, by W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst, in The Nation, May 3, 1947. After gradually rising to become vice president and director of Edwin Bird Wilson, Bardin left that agency in 1963. Two years earlier he had begun teaching creative writing and advertising at the New School for Social Research, which he would continue to do through 1966. That year he worked as associate publicity director for the United Negro College Fund, and from 1967 to 1968, he wrote for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York. Turning to magazines, he then served as an editor at Coronet through 1972. For the next two years at least, Bardin lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he served as managing editor of the American Medical Association magazine Today's Health through 1973; and through 1974 originated, and served as managing editor of, two American Bar Association Press magazines, Learning and the Law and Barrister. While his official site states he returned to New York in 1974, one source places him in Chicago still in 1978. He resided in New York City's East Village until his death on July 9, 1981. In 1946, Bardin entered a period of intense creativity during which he wrote three crime novels that were relatively unsuccessful at first, one of them not even being published in America until the late 1960s, but which have since become well-regarded cult novels. He went on to write four more novels under the pen names Gregory Tree or Douglas Ashe; the writer Julian Symons, in his introduction to an omnibus collection of Bardin's first three works, called those later novels ‘slick, readable, unadventurous crime stories’. Under his own name, Bardin also wrote three more novels, the first two of which Symons called, respectively, ‘an interesting but unsuccessful experiment’ and ‘disastrously sentimental’. His best-regarded works, The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly experienced renewed interest in the 1970s when they were discovered by British readers. Symons, who compiled the omnibus, had difficulty tracking down information on Bardin. He was unable to find any American critic who had heard of him and even his original publishers and agents did not know how to contact him or even whether he was still alive. Symons wrote that Third Degree, the journal of Mystery Writers of America, found Bardin in Chicago, editing an American Bar Association magazine, and willing and eager to see his work republished. The Deadly Percheron tells the story of a psychiatrist who encounters a patient with apparent delusions and a strange story to tell, but who does not otherwise exhibit signs of mental instability. His story turns out to have at least some connection to reality, drawing the psychiatrist into a complicated alternate identity that changes his life. The Last of Philip Banter sees a man receiving (or apparently writing) disturbing predictions about his life. The predictions partly become true, the effect of the predictions themselves being destructive and mind-altering. Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, perhaps his most acclaimed work, is a complicated story told almost entirely in terms of the psychology of the protagonist Ellen, a mental patient who experiences mental disintegration. Bardin gave his literary influences as Graham Greene, Henry Green and Henry James. In the film Mona Lisa one of the characters is reading The Deadly Percheron and makes several conversational references to it.