Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Fiend
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Of all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby's influence on the gangster tales and film noir and given the fact the crime fiction was racing toward its hardboiled peak when the unfortunately titled "The Fiend" appeared in Esquire in January 1935. Rather than a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler ode to moral corruption, though, Fitzgerald's short tale of a widower's attempt to destroy the incarcerated killer who murdered his wife and child reads more like a nineteenth-century Hawthorne or Poe tale of obsession and revenge. Even then the final product is a far cry from Criminal Minds, to say nothing of "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "Ethan Brand." We here at the FBI (Fitzgerald Bureau of Investigation) crack open the case of this odd entry in Fitzgerald's canon, taking on the mission impossible of uncovering clues to what exactly our man thought he was doing with this bloody plot, as well as why he included it in his final story collection, Taps at Reveille (also 1935).