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I’ve been reading a fair amount of classic noir detective stories lately, and I’ve decided to put down in writing a couple of common elements I’ve noticed. I’d noted these before, but never sat down to think about them.
Dentists and Drugstores!
Pick a crime novel from the 20s, 30s, or 40s, and there’s a very good chance that one or the other (or both) will show up at some point. Why? Well, let me speculate.
Dental offices are a common setting in crime fiction. The hardboiled detective often has an office in a building full of two-bit dentists and seedy insurance brokers. Dentists fairly regularly show up as underworld doctors, drug peddlers, sinister killers, and as the “brains of the outfit.”
This is because dentists were the lowest class of legitimate medical professional in the 1930s, mainly because their licensing and training regulations were ridiculously slack. While there were certainly respectable dental programs at colleges and universities, a given dentist might have received his medical credentials by mailing five dollars to a degree mill. In some areas of North America, it was still possible to be a dentist by simply calling yourself one.
Despite this, dentists were generally respected as professionals and educated men. So, one could easily gain a portion of that inherent respect by becoming a dentist, or pretending to be one. And since any reasonably capable person can handle the bulk of tasks performed by a 1930s dentist – cleaning teeth and yanking out bad ones – even a con artist with no training whatsoever could put on a white coat and make a good show of it.
Unfortunately, the lack of strict licensing meant that there was a great deal of competition. Even well-trained and legitimate professionals had trouble standing out from the crowd, never mind the dodgy types. So, many dentists – legitimate and otherwise – paid the rent with crime.
The most obvious source of shady income was from the sale of narcotics. Dentists were authorized to prescribe drugs, and authorized to keep a supply in their office. Narcotics like Demerol could be sold at a profit, and made to look legal by cooking the books. Stronger stuff – like morphine – was often sold in-office on a “per injection” basis. Drug sales of this kind were even legal, to some extent. If a patient complained of intense pain in his jaw, it was not the responsibility of the dentist to ensure that the patient was telling the truth – at least not under the laws of the 30s. So long as a dentist made sure to tie each prescription or injection to a patient with a “legitimate” complaint, he could operate under the radar of the law.
Of course, from the quasi-legal sales of regulated drugs it was sometimes a short step to trafficking in entirely illegal stuff. While this was riskier, it was fairly easy to hide hard drugs in amidst the legitimate supply.
A crooked (or desperate) dentist could also make money by offering medical services. They had surgical tools, painkillers, first aid supplies, general anaesthetics, and an examination room. A trained dentist (or experienced phoney) has a good grasp of simple surgery. These are ideal traits for an underworld doctor. When Bugsy gets a slug in his shoulder, you can count on Doc Yanktooth to get it out, no questions asked, cash on the barrelhead. Sure, it might be a little messy, but you get a nice shot of morphine to take the edge off.
A dentist might even take on this kind of work for noble reasons, like treating homeless people who can’t afford a hospital. Some dentists offered backroom abortions of a kind that were at least cleaner and safer than the sort generally available in those days. This is actually mentioned in some of the grittier pulp noir stories.
And that’s not to mention the role of dental torture (“Is it SAFE?”) in the nastier stories…
Now, then… drugstores. Gangsters and hardboiled detectives are constantly walking into drugstores, meeting in drugstores, and having shoot-outs at drugstores. If you’re imaging this action taking place in the 1930s equivalent of a Shoppers Drugmart, you might be understandably confused.
Drugstores of the kind described in noir and pulp stories were not like modern drugstores. They were like combinations of restaurants, pharmacies, and convenience stores. A large drugstore would have a juke box, cigarette machine, a bank of pay phones, a lunch counter, a soda fountain, a selection of dry goods, and a druggist in the back. Most sold alcohol – though it could not be consumed on the premises.
They were often open 24 hours, and might be only place for miles around open in the middle of the night. Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade were constantly ducking into drugstores to use the pay phone, Rocky Sullivan almost gets ambushed in one in Angels with Dirty Faces.
They were ideal places for a midnight rendezvous, or just a place to pick up a pack of smokes and bottle of rye. You could spend hours in a drugstore, if you were quiet and kept ordering coffee. Their payphones were private affairs, with a door and often a chair and a pad of paper. These payphones served as a kind 1930s equivalent of a cellular phone for people who couldn’t afford a phone of their own. A down-at-the-heels lawyer or salesperson might use one as his de facto office, even paying the store clerk to take messages.
You know those modern action movies in which the hero and the villain exchange barbs while scowling into a handheld phone? All those scenes have equivalents in movies from the 1930s, and usually one of the participants is sitting in a drugstore phone booth, hollering into the receiver while a comical Italian stereotype tells him to “keepa downa noise!”
And, of course, you can’t have a drugstore without drugs. While they were actually more stringently licensed than dentists in many areas, a druggist (or even the soda jerk) could certainly make some cash on the side by selling handfuls of painkillers or whatever to people with ready cash. And, if you can’t get that slug in your shoulder to Doc Yanktooth anytime soon, a dozen over-the-counter aspirin will dull the pain enough for you to fall into a restless sleep on your pull-down Murphy bed…
Dentists and Drugstores!
Pick a crime novel from the 20s, 30s, or 40s, and there’s a very good chance that one or the other (or both) will show up at some point. Why? Well, let me speculate.
Dental offices are a common setting in crime fiction. The hardboiled detective often has an office in a building full of two-bit dentists and seedy insurance brokers. Dentists fairly regularly show up as underworld doctors, drug peddlers, sinister killers, and as the “brains of the outfit.”
This is because dentists were the lowest class of legitimate medical professional in the 1930s, mainly because their licensing and training regulations were ridiculously slack. While there were certainly respectable dental programs at colleges and universities, a given dentist might have received his medical credentials by mailing five dollars to a degree mill. In some areas of North America, it was still possible to be a dentist by simply calling yourself one.
Despite this, dentists were generally respected as professionals and educated men. So, one could easily gain a portion of that inherent respect by becoming a dentist, or pretending to be one. And since any reasonably capable person can handle the bulk of tasks performed by a 1930s dentist – cleaning teeth and yanking out bad ones – even a con artist with no training whatsoever could put on a white coat and make a good show of it.
Unfortunately, the lack of strict licensing meant that there was a great deal of competition. Even well-trained and legitimate professionals had trouble standing out from the crowd, never mind the dodgy types. So, many dentists – legitimate and otherwise – paid the rent with crime.
The most obvious source of shady income was from the sale of narcotics. Dentists were authorized to prescribe drugs, and authorized to keep a supply in their office. Narcotics like Demerol could be sold at a profit, and made to look legal by cooking the books. Stronger stuff – like morphine – was often sold in-office on a “per injection” basis. Drug sales of this kind were even legal, to some extent. If a patient complained of intense pain in his jaw, it was not the responsibility of the dentist to ensure that the patient was telling the truth – at least not under the laws of the 30s. So long as a dentist made sure to tie each prescription or injection to a patient with a “legitimate” complaint, he could operate under the radar of the law.
Of course, from the quasi-legal sales of regulated drugs it was sometimes a short step to trafficking in entirely illegal stuff. While this was riskier, it was fairly easy to hide hard drugs in amidst the legitimate supply.
A crooked (or desperate) dentist could also make money by offering medical services. They had surgical tools, painkillers, first aid supplies, general anaesthetics, and an examination room. A trained dentist (or experienced phoney) has a good grasp of simple surgery. These are ideal traits for an underworld doctor. When Bugsy gets a slug in his shoulder, you can count on Doc Yanktooth to get it out, no questions asked, cash on the barrelhead. Sure, it might be a little messy, but you get a nice shot of morphine to take the edge off.
A dentist might even take on this kind of work for noble reasons, like treating homeless people who can’t afford a hospital. Some dentists offered backroom abortions of a kind that were at least cleaner and safer than the sort generally available in those days. This is actually mentioned in some of the grittier pulp noir stories.
And that’s not to mention the role of dental torture (“Is it SAFE?”) in the nastier stories…
Now, then… drugstores. Gangsters and hardboiled detectives are constantly walking into drugstores, meeting in drugstores, and having shoot-outs at drugstores. If you’re imaging this action taking place in the 1930s equivalent of a Shoppers Drugmart, you might be understandably confused.
Drugstores of the kind described in noir and pulp stories were not like modern drugstores. They were like combinations of restaurants, pharmacies, and convenience stores. A large drugstore would have a juke box, cigarette machine, a bank of pay phones, a lunch counter, a soda fountain, a selection of dry goods, and a druggist in the back. Most sold alcohol – though it could not be consumed on the premises.
They were often open 24 hours, and might be only place for miles around open in the middle of the night. Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade were constantly ducking into drugstores to use the pay phone, Rocky Sullivan almost gets ambushed in one in Angels with Dirty Faces.
They were ideal places for a midnight rendezvous, or just a place to pick up a pack of smokes and bottle of rye. You could spend hours in a drugstore, if you were quiet and kept ordering coffee. Their payphones were private affairs, with a door and often a chair and a pad of paper. These payphones served as a kind 1930s equivalent of a cellular phone for people who couldn’t afford a phone of their own. A down-at-the-heels lawyer or salesperson might use one as his de facto office, even paying the store clerk to take messages.
You know those modern action movies in which the hero and the villain exchange barbs while scowling into a handheld phone? All those scenes have equivalents in movies from the 1930s, and usually one of the participants is sitting in a drugstore phone booth, hollering into the receiver while a comical Italian stereotype tells him to “keepa downa noise!”
And, of course, you can’t have a drugstore without drugs. While they were actually more stringently licensed than dentists in many areas, a druggist (or even the soda jerk) could certainly make some cash on the side by selling handfuls of painkillers or whatever to people with ready cash. And, if you can’t get that slug in your shoulder to Doc Yanktooth anytime soon, a dozen over-the-counter aspirin will dull the pain enough for you to fall into a restless sleep on your pull-down Murphy bed…
