Like Poole, Willis Quick was an inveterate globetrotter, and he worked for several multinational corporations dealing in minerals, metals, the transfer of industrial products, the financing of major civil engineering projects in those countries we now label as “Third World.”  He modeled Poole’s employers—TransAtlas Corporation—on some he knew, with an ironic echo of the strange career of Alfred Nobel, the dynamite mogul who later left his monies for world peace, literature and scientific research.  Willis Quick worked on high bridges in the Andes, hydroelectric dams in east Africa and the Oronoco basin, oil field construction in Saudi Arabia.  A hint of intrigue and mystery emanated from some of his job descriptions (“They once had me shooting tigers in Kashmir,” he said nonchalantly about his 1930s stint in India), of which he spoke only laconically and without awe over the multi-billion-dollar budgets he handled.

            For a farm boy from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (a stone’s throw from Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” country), Willis took off on the same skyrocket trajectory as the twentieth century itself.  When he was born, Henry Ford, downstate in Dearborn, was just creating his Model T and the system of serial production that made it possible and that revolutionized labor, leisure and transportation across the planet.  By the year he died—of congestive heart failure—we were within sight of the millennium and fickle humanity was already bored with flight, space travel, atomic power, electronic communications, DNA miracles, the conquest of the basic diseases and disabilities that had cursed homo sapiens for 50,000 years.

            But Willis Quick remembered the glitter of the teens and twenties of the century.  He was lucky enough to matriculate at Harvard before the Crash and unlucky enough to be a year short of graduation when the family business (lumbering and small town banking) were eaten by the monster Depression.  Like most of his generation, he witnessed and participated in hard times—on the bum, following the wheat harvest with the Wobblies (the IWW or Industrial Workers of the World, a syndico-anarchist union), landing a coveted WPA job as copywriter for their guidebook to Michigan, acting briefly in a radical theatre troupe on Chicago’s north side.

            When World War II loomed, he put his education in geology to work and became an industrial metallurgist.  This gave him an occupational deferment when the draft was instituted, and Willis spent the Duration at steel mills, aircraft assembly plants and ship-yards, developing new alloys and metallurgical processes.  By 1945 he was as ready for the peace as any military hero.

            Taking a wanderjahr in 1946-47 with a new bride, Charline (nee Foster—1921-92), Willis drove across shell-shocked America in a resuscitated 1930 Packard touring car, which served them as a gypsy caravan.  She was a skilled photographer just out of three years’ work for the War Department by way of the Chicago Art Institute, and she practiced her art as they rolled across the continent.   The couple drove through all of the (then) 48 states, camping, talking with locals and absorbing the flavors of a nation just emerging from the bitter crucible of war.

            Charline developed her career by making thousands of photographs that led to a legendary 1950 show at the Museum of Modern Art.  Willis honed his writing skills with magazine work (Collier’s, Liberty, Look, Saturday Evening Post) and an extensive journal, which served as a resource when he returned to writing in his last years.  His observations of America paralleled (and outshone) Henry Miller’s ruminations in The Air Conditioned Nightmare (1945).  While young Jack Kerouac was leaving Columbia, hitting the road and discovering the outlines of Beatdom, Willis Quick reaffirmed his optimistic beliefs in an America battered by economic ruin and global war but emerging into the future more energetic, more prosperous and powerful than ever.

That power—its mysterious workings and irresistible action—fascinated Willis Quick and became the core of his thought, even as he became a business executive, a servant of international capitalism (today we would call it “globalization”) and its evolving world order and a widely traveled entrepreneurial consultant.  His name became legendary among those who buy and sell land, who manage large-scale engineering projects, mining interests and the high-stakes alchemy of petrochemical research.

            His writing did not hint at its author’s own stature in the misty world of mega-financing and cartel industrialism.  Willis Quick claimed to have known—casually—both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, from a stint in Hollywood during the 1950s.  He modestly disclaimed a place in the mystery pantheon near them, but he was intrigued by the classic murder mystery and set out to write his way around the modern genre’s whole territory.

            He began with a mutated version of the English cozy, The Process of Murder (1985), went on to an American heartland crime story, Deck the Malls with Murder (1987) and by 1990 had largely completed two other MSS.—a western-cum-science fiction romp, Murder for a Distant Stranger, and Come to the Murder Gras, a jazz-and-high-cuisine New Orleans mystery.  All his stories drew on his on visits or sojourns and on his many interests—English gardens and country houses, the history of utopian communities in the U.S., movie history, science fiction, classic jazz and gastronomical adventuring.

            His wife’s sharply realistic documentary photography (closest perhaps to Charles Sheeler of all her mentors and influences) haunted Willis, and he once said, “Charline taught me how to see the world in that year we traveled.  I owe her all my ability to visualize and describe people, places and things.”  Willis Quick was an American original, although his stories sometimes recall Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain, even Ross McDonald and Ruth Rendell.  He denied reading classics like Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, but it must have been impossible to escape their influences a half-century ago.  Willis claimed his roots lay in pop culture, saying he was influenced by Mickey Mouse, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chan and Boston Blackie more than any approved literary sources.  More seriously, he revered British novelists Joyce Cary and Angus Wilson and often cited the latter’s Anglo Saxon Attitudes (1956) as a perennial favorite.

            Willis and Charline Quick raised two children, Roger (1951-88) and Marietta (1953-91), both lost tragically young.  Roger died in an industrial accident in Thailand, and Marietta succumbed to a rare form of liver cancer.  Charline predeceased Willis (she died in 1992, he in 1996), leaving him alone and largely bereft of family, which may account in part for his failure to complete and publish his projected Richard Poole mystery quartet.

In editing Willis Quick’s fiction, we have silently corrected obvious errors and typos and—in the semi-finished final two novels—made editorial insertions to connect passages fragmentary or problematic in the typescript.  We have not tried to update the works or to sanitize them of phrases or passages that might be deemed “inappropriate” or “incorrect” by today’s literary puritans.  Part of the flavor and charm of these novels lie in their period observations and in the accumulated experiences and insights of Willis Fillmore Quick over his long, active, cosmopolitan life.

            His fiction draws on many sources and is filled with off-the-cuff allusions.  The Process of Murder, for example, seems based on the Tavistock Institute’s famous annual conference at Leicester, and imbedded in the story are references to classic murder mysteries and writers, as well as puns and in-jokes about grand and famous English country houses like Stowe, Blenheim, Rousham, Ashridge and Longleat (among others) and allusions to Willis Quick’s favorite British authors (most clearly Kingsley Amis and the T.H. White of Mistress Masham’s Repose).  The stories also convey a slightly dated fascination with “modernity,” ca. 1985—much mention of pre-PC computers, Telexes and other communication devices that in the Internet Age seem antiquarian implements.  The references do show that Willis Quick had eyes for the past of history and the present of a “new Britain” in the Age of Thatcher.

            As a result of the long delay in publication, time has caught up with Willis Quick’s writing in several ways.  First, the device of the hanged Hungarian in The Process of Murder—the dovecote that becomes a scaffold—was used by prolific British mystery writer Peter Dickinson in A Perfect Gallows  (1988), several years after Quick’s invention.  Second, the tone and language of the stories reflect the mid-1980s, a more or less pre-postmodern era (especially for a busy octogenarian), so the stories are absent the hyperactive sexuality and free-form vulgarity of speech informing contemporary fiction.  This may not be a symptom of prudishness so much as reticence and is a positive virtue.

            The mysteries featuring Richard Poole, globetrotter, corporate security man and after-hours sleuth, are light entertainments (as Graham Green used the term), but they also depict the world before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the recent ascent of economic globalization.  While Willis Quick valued his writing, he was never over-serious about the sardonically comic adventures.  He would be equally pleased by readers who laughed and by those engrossed in the puzzles shaping his tales.

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William J. and Martha Q. Schafer

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The Journal of Provincial Thought

MEMORIES OF WILLIS QUICK

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HE WOULD NOT have approved of any “authorized biography”—too formal, stuffy and bookish for a down to earth mining engineer and wanderer.  So we won’t try to

tell you all the facts of his active life (1910-96), family and multiple careers. Willis F. Quick (he never used the middle name [Fillmore] or initial) was a bit like his semi-professional sideline sleuth, Richard Poole, invented when Quick retired from a final career (of many) as a geological surveyor and assayer.   Unfortunately, many of his papers—letters, diaries, professional journals—were lost in his travels, especially in the chaos of World War II.  It would be difficult to write a comprehensive biography of the man, despite public records and some fragmentary memoirs Willis Quick drafted in his later years.