MIKE QUIN AND MORE
JIM BURNS
The man known as Mike Quin was an American journalist, primarily
writing for the Communist press on the West Coast in the 1930s and
1940s. But Mike Quin was not his real name. He was christened Paul
William Ryan when he was born in 1906 in San Francisco. And he
called himself Robert Finnegan when he wrote several crime novels in
the 1940s. I’ll use Quin most of the time.
Quin’s Irish father was a travelling salesman who seems to have
deserted his family at an early stage. His mother, of
Irish-Jewish-French extraction, was a dressmaker. He left school
when he was fifteen and worked at various jobs before going to sea
when he was nineteen. According to a biographical sketch of Quin
written by Harry Carlisle (more about him later) he was in the
merchant marine until just before the 1929 Wall Street Crash. It was
during his years at sea that he met “an old time Wobbly” (member of
the Industrial Workers of the World) who talked to him about the
iniquities of the capitalist system.
When Quin returned to life on shore he worked for a time in a
bookshop in Hollywood which was frequented by people connected with
the film industry. He had been writing himself but hadn’t yet
appeared in print. It was during this period that, influenced by a
writer friend, he began to read Marxist books and pamphlets. I have
often wondered whether the bookshop that Quin worked in was Stanley
Rose’s, famous for being a hangout for many writers employed in the
film capital? More than a few of them had left-wing inclinations,
something which led to their downfall during the late-1940s and
early-1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
focused its attention on Hollywood.
Quin used his real name, Paul Ryan, when he had a short story
published in Scribner’s
in 1934. It was reprinted in
The Best Short Stories: 1934. And it pointed to his main
concerns as a writer in wanting to express clearly material drawn
directly from his experiences and observations. It isn’t overtly
political but it does make an ironic comment on the way in which a
bullying policeman is more concerned about having clubbed a
down-and-out he thought was sleeping but was actually dead than he
is about the live hoboes he has harassed and beaten.
I’m not sure just when Quin joined the American Communist Party, but
he attended meetings of the Hollywood John Reed Club (a communist
organisation meant to encourage proletarian writing), and moved back
to San Francisco in time to report on the 1934 general strike in the
city for the Western Worker,
a communist publication.
His writings were then a regular fixture in Party magazines
and newspapers until his death in 1947. There were several small
collections of his articles, satirical poems, stories, and other
odds and ends, but probably the best source for a general view of
what he did is to be found in
On the Drumhead: A Selection from the Writing of Mike Quin,
edited, with a biographical sketch, by Harry Carlisle and published
posthumously in 1948.
Quin wrote a book-length account of events in San Francisco in 1934,
but had difficulties in finding a publisher willing to take it on.
It was eventually published in 1949, and later reprinted by
International Publishers in 1979. The writing is detailed and direct
and clearly the work of someone there at the time, and who was
without doubt on the side of the strikers. It’s of relevance to note
that the Foreword to the 1979 edition was written by Harry Bridges,
one-time President of
the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU),
which had been at the forefront of the 1934 strike. Quin felt a
close affinity to the union and its members. The authorities
frequently accused Bridges (born in Australia, an ex-seaman and
Wobbly) of being a member of the Communist Party and tried to deport
him, though without success.
Quin never tried to give an impression of objectivity in his
writing. Words were a weapon in the class war, as far as he was
concerned. In retrospect it might seem that this would restrict
their impact. And it’s true that Quin’s adherence to a Party line
could raise doubts about his intentions. When the Party opposed the
entry of the United States into the Second World War he produced a
pamphlet, The Yanks Are Not
Coming, supporting the Party line. When Germany invaded Russia
in 1941 the Party changed its tune and so did Quin as he called for
unity in the face of the Fascist threat.
It’s doubtful if Mike Quin’s name now means anything unless you
happen to be someone with a specific interest in San Francisco
labour history and/or the history of the American Communist Party.
But as Robert Finnegan he still has some credibility, as
witness the three 1940s crime novels Paul William Ryan wrote under
that name. They’ve recently been re-published in one volume by Stark
House Press, which specialises in resurrecting old mystery writers
and their work. The books were originally published by Simon &
Schuster, New York, and later as pulp paperbacks by Bantam and
Signet. One of them, The
Bandaged Nude, came out as a British Penguin in 1952.
All three of the novels feature Dan Banion, a reporter with a social
conscience. In The Lying
Ladies he takes up the case of a young drifter who has been
falsely accused of the murder of a maid in a rich woman’s house. The
setting is pre-Second World War. The immediate post-war period in
San Francisco provides the background for
The Bandaged Nude with
Banion mixing with the city’s bohemian set as he investigates the
death of a young artist. It should be stressed that the San
Francisco Finnegan writes about is one that existed before the 1950s
and the city’s associations with the Beats brought it to the
attention of a wide public. Tom Cantrell, writing about this book,
says that Finnegan used actual locations, though sometimes with
slight twists in their names. The real bars known as the
The Black Cat and
The Iron Pot became
The Iron Cat and
The Black Pot in the
novel.
The third novel, Many a
Monster, also has
events taking place in San Francisco just after the war, and Banion
is out to rescue a shell-shocked ex-soldier from being framed for a
series of murders. An interesting aspect is that, in the course of
his investigations, he comes up against an organisation called The
White Knights which is, it claims, out to save America from Jews and
blacks. It’s interesting because a novel called
Murder in the Glass Room,
written by Edwin Rolfe and Lester Fuller and published in 1946, has
a similar group aiming to attract people to its anti-Jews and blacks
programme. Both Rolfe and Fuller were members of the Communist
Party, and Rolfe had a track record of writing for
The Daily Worker and
serving with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil
War. His book, The Lincoln
Battalion, published in 1939, was the first history of the
Americans who fought in Spain. Rolfe was also a poet and his work in
that field is still worth looking at. He died of a heart attack in
1954, possibly as a result of being harassed by the FBI and HUAC.
Before leaving the subject of a right-wing scheme to persuade
ex-servicemen and others into joining a group with supposed
patriotic aims and a prejudice against Jews and blacks, we might
consider the 1946 film, Till
the End of Time, which starred Robert Mitchum, Guy Madison, Bill
Williams, and Dorothy McGuire. It was directed by the then left-wing
Edward Dymtryk. There is a scene in a bar where Mitchum, Madison,
and Williams, all ex-servicemen, are approached by men who see them
as prospective recruits and, making it clear that they don’t accept
Catholics, Jews, and blacks, invite them
to join their group. A lone
black in army uniform overhears the conversation and moves quietly
away. I assume there was an
organisation, similar to the one described by the writers and
filmmakers referred to, active on the West Coast in the post-war
period?
Paul William Ryan/Mike Quin/Robert Finnegan died from cancer in
1947, and so missed being rounded up, prosecuted, and possibly
imprisoned when the ant-communist hysteria swept across America in
the late-1940s and early-1950s. His writings for the Communist Party
press might best be described as functional. They were lively and
intended for the times they related to and a readership that would
largely agree with what was said. But the three novels do indicate
that he knew how to sustain a story, develop characters and
situations, and make locations of relevance to the plot. He might
never have been a great writer but he had the potential to be a good
one in his chosen field of crime novels.
Earlier I mentioned Harry Carlisle as editor of a collection of Mike
Quin’s work for Communist Party publications. Like Quin he was a
dedicated communist. Carlisle was English, born around 1898, and
moved to America around 1920. He worked at various jobs and had some
connections to the film business. His one novel,
Darkness at Noon (not to
be confused with Arthur Koestler’s book of the same name) was
published in 1931 and was based on his experiences as a young miner
in Britain. When the anti-communist purges began his status as an
American citizen became the subject of a long court battle and he
was eventually deported from the United States in 1962. He spent
time in Russia and several Eastern bloc countries, and then returned
to the United Kingdom.
Mike Quin, Edwin Rolfe, Harry Carlisle. People from a
largely-forgotten past, and, with regard to Quin and Carlisle, too
often dismissed as “party hacks and/or bureaucrats” because of their
communist connections. Rolfe’s poetry should give him some lasting
power. But they all had something to offer, and it’s fascinating to
think about what it was and is it still important?
WORKS CONSULTED
Paul Ryan. “The Sacred Thing” in
The Best Short Stories:1934
(Jonathan Cape, London, 1934).
Mike Quin.
On the Drumhead: A Selection
from the Writing of Mike Quin (The Pacific Publishing
Foundation, San Francisco, 1948).There is an informativel
biographical sketch of Quin by Carlisle.
Mike Quin. The Big Strike
(International Publishers, New York, 1979).
Robert Finnegan. The Dan
Banion Trilogy (The Lying Ladies; The Bandaged Nude; Many a Monster)
(Stark House Press, Eureka, 2022). There is a useful
introduction by Tom Cantrell.
Edwin Rolfe & Lester Fuller.
Murder in the Glass Room (Bantam Books, New York, 1948).
Edwin Rolfe. Collected Poems
(University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1993).
Edwin Rolfe. The Lincoln
Battalion: The Story of the Americans Who Fought in Spain in the
International Brigades (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
New York, 1939).
Tom Cantrell. The Mysteries
of Roy Huggins and the Deportation of Harry Carlisle (Hekate
Publishing, Brooklyn, 2021). Huggins was a novelist (The
Double Take and Too Late
for Tears), screenwriter, and one-time communist, who testified
when called before HUAC and named Carlisle and others as Party
members. He also assisted the Immigration authorities in their
attempts to deport Carlisle.
Bruce Nelson. Workers on the
Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s
(University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1998).
Howard Kimeldorf. Reds or
Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the
Waterfront (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988).
Alan M. Wald. American Night:
The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012).
Harvey Klehr. The Heyday of
American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books, New
York, 1984).
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