Dentists and Drugstores: Pulpy, Noiry Details!

[pyat]

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…

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Drugstores pay a significant role in The Sting -- there's the one where Hooker gets belted by the lady with the umbrella when he tries to call Luther to warn him, then there's the one where Hooker and his gang rope in Doyle Lonagan with the phone call from the "guy at the Western Union"...

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

I'd play in your pulp game in a heartbeat.

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for sharing this stuff.

Lee.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

And one day, I will watch that movie!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, come on up, then!

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

The drugstores of San Fernando Valley and Burbank outside of LA where I spent a lot of time as a small kid were time capsules of the drug stores of the 1940s and 1950s even as late as the mid 1970s. I can remember sitting at the counter of them for lunch and sodas. In fact, it was a long time before I was cognizant of the fact that you could get perscriptions at one. Yeah, these noir cliches really do have their roots in the everyday life of bygone times. These places were always dark and cool inside which accounted for the sheer number of people hanging out in them in the San Fernando Valley. Mainly it was older people in these places, though. The drug stores where I lived were all modern and had none of the 1940s touchs that the ones near my grand parents did.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! And thank you!

[ludickid.livejournal.com]

This is a swell post, man. Mind if I link to it elsewhere?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Link away, sir!

[thebitterguy]

Awesome, and educational. How do you know these things?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at his film collection lately?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I read of lot of books with characters named Mugsy.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

And, come to think of it, that's actually the area Phillip Marlowe was operating.

[thebitterguy]

He learned it from Flash Gordon & Dr. Who?

Actually, that makes sense.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

::goggle::

It's hard for me to believe that anyone hasn't watched this movie. My wife only saw it for the first time a few weeks ago!

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

One of these old-style drugstores plays a prominent role in Murphy's Romance which depends on that generational age difference between Garner and Field's characters. He's a traditional older man who likes "the old way of doing things" and runs one of these old-style drug stores; she's a new-fangled single mother who never-the-less falls for his old school charm (especially when chases off her dead-beat ex-husband).

So, it's not just in pulps; and the transition period between these kinds of social phenomena can provide for an interesting setting, too.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Luckily, you'll be on a submarine, so there won't be any drugstores about. On the other hand, maybe the boat's medic is a dentist by trade... ::grin::

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Seriously? I need to read some of these. I always picture the classical detective stories as happening in Chicago or New York. That's cool.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

You should! The two most influential private eye characters - Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe - actually operated out of San Francisco and LA, respectively. The Marlowe books are actually a good lesson in local geography, with Marlowe driving up and down real streets and living in a real neighbourhood.

The Marlowe novels were written between 1939 and 1958, and you can see LA changing in that period.

[tanela.livejournal.com]

I saw it by accident in high school because I recognized "The Entertainer" from music lessons as I was flipping channels and was curious what on TV would use that song. :D My husband still hasn't seen it and I just learned this now. I will have to remedy this asap.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

ANother movie I should check out!

[paka.livejournal.com]

Question, what was phone surveillance like during the 1930s? Is it possible that part of the whole use-the-phone-in-the-drugstore thing is that the line's almost impossible to tap, and while plenty of people could be watching the PI's office or gangster's brownstone, nobody's going to be watching who uses the phone in the drugstore?

[paka.livejournal.com]

I'll add that the reason Spade, and the Continental Op, were based out of San Francisco is that Dashiell Hammett knew San Francisco. Apparently area knowledge; the man seems not to have demonstrated any unusual fondness for the place. So you can actually wander around the city and find the exact places mentioned in the stories - there's even a tour and guidebook based on this, and there actually is someone living in the exact apartment that Spade is supposed to have had in "The Maltese Falcon."

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Quite likely! In those days, every single phone call required a single wire. So, if you were calling New York from LA, you were actually "renting" a single length of wire that covered that entire distance...

But a public bank of phones would have multiple connections running out of it, so they'd have to tap every single one - and monitor every single one - to make sure they'd got your call.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of The Maltese Falcon, but sure.

That, and the flavour text for Justice Inc.

[used_songs]

This was really interesting. I'm going to have to revisit some movies with a keener eye.

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

Gaming with you must be pure awesome.

Darn the several hundred miles that keeps me from finding out. :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, drive on up some time, anyway. We can get sushi with Moment.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Great post!

I think you'd enjoy reading "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair", a fun noir short story by Cornell Woolrich that's been reprinted umpteen times.

::B::