Marijuana Girl
Marijuana Girl
N. R. De Mexico
WHO IS N. R. DE MEXICO?
This is a question that has haunted readers of crime noir for over fifty years now. There are rumors and theories but so far no one has stepped forward to claim authorship of three of the finest examples of masterful suspense writing:
All we have is the cryptic pseudonym. Ramble House is proud to provide you with all three novels in one huge volume. From the urban drug scene of MARIJUANA GIRL to the Cornell Woolrich-like city of MADMAN ON A DRUM to the beach resorts of PRIVATE CHAUFFEUR, get ready for a roller-coaster ride of suspense you'll never forget.
The above is the back cover text for the 2006 Ramble House edition of its omnibus of the three novels of N.R. de Mexico. Obviously we played up the "mystery" of the identity of the author. I'm not an expert when it comes to vintage literature and pulps but I've always heard that no one really knows who wrote those novels. At BoucherCons and other book shows, when I asked the highly knowledgeable fans and authors who he was, I invariably would get, "Nobody knows! Maybe Larry Shaw?"
Hence the breathless blurb that shouts its ignorance from the back of the Ramble House book.
But when I listed the omnibus for the first time on my web site and Lulu store, I got an e-mail from Kimberly Bragg, formerly of San Francisco, now of Saint Martin, France which began with this tantalizing paragraph:
Just ran across your website while doing some research on N.R. de Mexico. I read with some amusement he is considered a mystery and thought to be one "Larry Shaw" I can assure you he was not, as I am his son and his name was Robert Campbell Bragg. He died in 1954 of a heart attack in a grocery Store in Greenwich village where he lived.
Kim asked for more information about the omnibus and I immediately e-mailed him back, asking him for more information. Kim provided much.
F.Y.I. the pen name N.R. de Mexico means N. for nee (born) R. for Robert of Mexico. I think the Mexico was just a gag because at one point he had taught himself to speak Spanish well enough to translate for some additional income. During the war (being 4A) he worked for military intelligence. In the years just after WW II he was an editor for an architectural magazine, and only began writing novels after that period. He also sported one of those thin Mexican mustaches briefly. He had a great love of music and played Flamenco guitar. I seem to remember he had a classical music collection of "78" records that numbered in the thousands, They took up an entire wall floor to ceiling in his Greenwich Village apartment, which I believe was on Horatio Street, and were sold after his death to help pay my mother's expenses. He was very involved in the New York Greenwich Village intellectual scene and was great pals with artist Larry Rivers and a number of other now famous people of the time; like Jack Kerouac. Interestingly when he died in 1954 Walter Winchell did a brief eulogy on the radio about him. Sadly, that is how my mother found out about his death, as they were separated at the time.
The answer to the mystery of his pen name has actually been on the web for some time. There is a reference to my father on a website about bawdy songs collected by a Gershon Legman, I have enclosed a copy of the text below.
The most extreme statement of this kind is a recitation called variously "A Girl's Prayer," "The Yeomanette," and other titles, first recorded in the scarce erotic miscellany, Cleopatra's Scrapbook ('Blue Grass, Kentucky' [Wheeling, W.Va.?] 1928: copy, Kinsey Library) p. 53. This begins romantically, "Put your arms around me, darling," and so forth, each stanza becoming more and more passionate, though never omitting the "darling" -- in deference to the presumed female character of the speaker -- until it ends in a blaze of castratory (vagina dentata) passion, after the orgasm: "Break it off and let it stay!" Other texts of this recitation are longer and much heightened in their eroticism, in one case by a man known to me. The pornography and "fantasy"-fiction writer, N. R. de Mexico (Robert Bragg, who is not the man just referred to, and who was born in New Jersey), was accustomed to deliver this piece at mixed parties. Although he did not change the already-supercharged text, he would attempt to heighten still further its tone of female erotic acceptance and passion by reciting, or rather crooning it, in a special dialect accent. He assured me that it was "much more exciting when you say it like a red-hot nigger wench," meaning that he would recite the girl's presumed lines in a sultry, comedy-Negro falsetto.
In a later e-mail I asked Kim if he knew of any other novels or short stories written by his father under the N.R. de Mexico pseudonym and he remembered a short story called "A Question of Which" that may have been published under that name.
I just googled "n.r. de mexico" and the first four hits were for the Ramble House web site. Flattering, but not helpful. So I Yahooed, Altavistaed and Asked Jeeves and found even less. It will take a much better websurfer than I to use the power of the world wide web to get more information. Instead, I e-mailed what I knew about de Mexico to Francis M. Nevins, author/ scholar/lawyer and general know-a-lot guy and here's what he replied:
That's fascinating stuff! So N.R. de Mexico was Robert Campbell Bragg and he lived on Horatio Street in the Village. When I visit New York I usually stay in a wonderful old brownstone on Jane Street, which is a few feet from Horatio. From the late 1930s until his death the house was owned by Chuck (Charles Spain) Verral, who wrote gazillions of stories for the old air adventure pulps and with whom I became friendly about five years before he died. I'll bet he and Bragg knew each other! Chuck's widow still lives in the house but she's now 101 years old and needs 24-hour nursing care so I don't think it would make sense to ask their son to ask her if she remembers Bragg.
Kim, in a later e-mail, said that he recently heard from Al J. Hubin, famous former main man at THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE and editor of Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1749-2000. If Al Hubin is involved, it's official: Robert Campbell Bragg IS N.R. de Mexico.
I think maybe it's time I uploaded a new cover for THE N.R. DE MEXICO NOVELS to my web site and Lulu.com, where the Ramble House books are printed. Mystery solved. Mission Accomplished. Robert Bragg was an excellent novelist and we all wish he had written more. But in the meantime there's the classic dope novel, Marijuana Girl, the disturbing noir gem, Madman on a Drum, and the enjoyable aviation thriller, Private Chauffeur.
They complement each other perfectly. Read for yourself.
Fender Tucker
March 2007
MARIJUANA GIRL
Prepuce
By Fender Tucker
I've heard of this legendary book for years and now, thanks to the generosity of the legendary Art Scott, I am finally able to read, edit and thoroughly enjoy the book. And enjoy it I did. But why? How could I enjoy a book written 50 years ago that can have no relevance to today's world?
Well, the main reason I enjoyed the book was that it surprised me. Just about all of the other thirty or forty vintage paperbacks about drugs in the '40s and '50s that I've read adopt the Harry Anslinger line: purveyors are evil; users are doomed; no one in the scene is clean. But Marijuana Girl, although it has some of these elements, has a few characters who use marijuana wisely and make it through the book (and beyond, we presume) without suffering the wrath of Gawd or Man. How progressive of N.R. de Mexico!
The book also tackles sex and other social issues without preaching. You won't find that in many books published since Ronald Reagan slept in the Oval Office. The book simply describes the path of Joyce Taylor's descent into addiction as a series of logical steps, most of them brought on by need rather than greed. And though we of the 21st century tend to forget it--or deny it--the U.S.A of Marijuana Girl's time was full of needy people. The average urban workers of the '50s lived in seedy apartments, not in sprawling suburban homes. The ones with jobs were the lucky ones.
So why is reading about drugs of the '50s so much more enjoyable and satisfying than reading about drugs of today? It's because we know there was a general air of naivete about dope back then and we can forgive our parents and grandparents for their anti-drug attitudes--just as we forgive them for their sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes. It's much harder to forgive the Mrs. Grundys and Harry Anslingers of today because they damn well ought to know better. After all, they've had plenty of chance to smoke some pot and see for themselves that it's probably the most benign--hell, I say beneficial--substance known to man.
But the main charm of the marijuana underworld of 1950 is its "social" atmosphere. In those days there were night clubs where you could go and smoke pot. There were "pot parties" where people would actually socialize with other people smoking. Of course they were illegal and everybody risked going to prison, but at least the night club or home where the party took place was not confiscated by the state.
In this fourth decade of the modern war on marijuana there's still a lot of weed smuggled into the country and there's even more being grown internally. But most smokers tend to light up at home while watching TV or reading and rarely socialize with other smokers. Indeed, even though many of their fellow workers smoke at home, most people who smoke think they're the only ones who do. Thanks to the Nixon-Reagan-Bush policies, you can get away with using marijuana if (1) you're white; and (2) you keep your mouth shut about it.
Do a thought experiment: imagine all of the pot smuggled into and produced in the United States each year. Better yet, look up the DEA estimates of how many millions of pounds that is. Then divide by the number of people in the U.S. of smoking age (10-90). You come to one of two conclusions: (1) either there are just a few million smokers and they're each puffing away about an ounce of weed a day; or (2) there are a lot more than the 20,000,000 people that the government claims regularly use marijuana. One thing for sure--at $150-$300 an ounce there is absolutely NO wastage of weed these days. You drop a one-hit pipeful on the carpet--you get down and pick up every little nugget.
So even though a much higher percentage of people smoke today than did in the 1950s, there is much less socializing. No one admits that they smoke. They couldn't; they'd lose their jobs.
That's why it's so much more fun reading about old-time drugs. Back then the argument was that you'd go insane and kill your family, a charmingly laughable proposition. Now the Bushites are claiming that pot smokers are actively supporting terrorists, a tack that convinces 0% of the people it's purportedly aimed at, and only works on anti-smokers, making them even more rabidly fanatical than they were before the "pot equals terrorism" ads.
Let's face it. Drugs are just as beneficial as they ever were, but they're not as much fun. You have to go back to the good ol' days of N.R. de Mexico, Cornell Woolrich ("Marijuana") and David Dodge ("It Ain't Hay") to find enjoyable scare stories about weed.
Ramble House is proud to make this classic of American drug literature available again to modern readers who are tired of the preaching prissiness of the hypocritical media. The book is full of real people, just like you and me, and it shows how we as a society had a chance to develop a benign and rational relationship with dope--but blew it. We let the wrong assholes rule the roost and now we can only puff gently on our 10 o'clock bongs and flip between South Park and The Daily Show, thinking we're the only ones on our block who are cool.
Sad, really.
MARIJUANA
GIRL
Part One
THE GRASS
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old
I should not find that hidden mystery
Oh, 'tis imposture all:
And as no chemic yet the Elixir got....
John Donne
1 ~ Reflection
"Hubba, hubba," the long thin boy with the unruly hair said, as she brushed past him in the high school corridor. He stopped and turned to watch her as she walked, her dark hair falling to her white-sweatered shoulders, her books held in her folded arms so they squared the heavy roundness of her breasts, her wine-red corduroy skirt a little smooth from sitting, clinging to her hips and buttocks, and her crepe-soled shoes whispering on the highly waxed floor. There was something adult, almost regal, in her walk.
Joyce flung back over her shoulder, "Hi, Tony." She was pleasantly aware of him, carrying herself even a trifle more erectly, so that her breasts molded her sweater into sharper relief as she swung sharp left through the door marked DEAN.
The office of the Dean of Paugwasset High School had been an afterthought of the board of education of that suburban Long Island community. It had emerged, during additions to the building, as a vaguely triangular alcove growing off a corridor, in which Dean Iris Shay and her secretary, Miss Ellsworth, occupied cramped space.