Notes from the Pen Club

By Jos

CASE LOAD-MAXIMUM

by E. RICHARD JOHNSON

204 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Abbie Hoffman, who had ample opportunity for observation, has concluded that "everyone in prison is writing something." Indeed, there is a tradition of prisoner-authors from John Bunyan and O. Henry to Nehru and Genet. Most of the current ones, including Eldridge Cleaver, the Berrigan brothers and Hoffman himself, have used prison time to work out polemical theories. A few, though, are nonpolitical convicts who are trying to write about what they know best--crime. By far the most skillful is E. (for Emil) Richard Johnson, inmate No. 22251 at Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison, now 34 and doing 40 years for second-degree murder.

Johnson has published seven novels in the past four years. Silver Street, his first, won an "Edgar" from the Mystery Writers of America as the best first mystery of 1968. His second, Mongo's Back in Town, was bought for $25,000 and turned into a TV movie that was shown last November. Like Johnson's others, Case Load-Maximum amply displays his ability to thread a meticulous plot line through the grit and slime of an urban netherworld where everyone has an angle too sharp for his own good.

Pimps and whores, hired killers and psychosadists, news vendors and bar bums, "rape-os" and cops--all move in and out of Johnson's scene, rendered without apology or moral judgment. Unlike writers who have never been there, Johnson has no need to sensationalize the seamy edge of society. In taut, frosted gray prose that is flat but never dull, his characters are compellingly stamped with their limiting individuality, totally unable to be more or less than they are. Silver Street's Tony Lonto, for instance, cannot help being a good cop any more than he can keep from making a futile effort to steer a young prostitute into a respectable job as a waitress. Case Load's Detective Mose Hamilton sees only punks in the world he polices, and the sour vision inevitably makes him a mean cop.

Johnson might well have merely lived in such a world instead of writing about it. A Wisconsin-born son of middle-class parents, he intended to make the Army his career. But while serving as a staff sergeant in Kansas, he was thrown into the stockade and eventually given an "undesirable" discharge for stealing a steer--an offense that he admitted but claimed was a lark.

Odd jobs followed as a logger, well rigger, powder monkey and ranch hand. In between, he got deeper into crime. He was convicted in Nebraska on a robbery charge, and while serving that sentence, was brought to trial for a Minnesota gas-station holdup in which he was accused of shooting the attendant. "Coming in for 40 years." he told TIME Correspondent Joe Boyce recently, "I felt, well, if I was going to do anything with my life, I'd have to do it here. I always enjoyed reading, so I turned to writing."

He tries to produce a minimum of two pages a day. Setting a regular routine may be somewhat easier in the monotony of prison life than on the outside, but nothing else seems easier. He still has to carry a full prison workload as a mail distributor, starting at 5:30 a.m. Not until 10:30 p.m., when he has been locked back into his one-man cell for the night and prison noises subside, does he start writing. Because there is no lights-out rule, he sometimes works as late as 3:30 a.m. Each novel takes him about four months. The first two drafts are in longhand. He types the final version before mailing it off to the publisher.

Although Johnson obviously does not need to return to crime--his earnings are being held in a bank for him --he has been turned down for parole three times. But, like every other con, he figures he will make it at his next scheduled parole hearing in 1973. When he does get out, he plans a book on prison life.

Beyond the mystery format, his books already have a penitentiary feel to them. The plot lines turn in on themselves, like ripples bouncing off walls. The cop looking for a killer inadvertently learns that his girl is secretly a prostitute. The hired gunman finds too late that he himself has been set up to be killed by his own brother--who hired him in the first place.

In Case Load, the climax--and a neat one it is--comes when Detective Hamilton, desperate to solve a case. frames and murders a suspect he had concluded was innocent. The victim is actually guilty, and Hamilton gets away with the crime. But Author-Convict Johnson knows that that is an unimportant detail. Whether Hamilton actually goes to prison for his crime matters only to society. For each man, there is prison enough in himself.

. Jose Ferrer III

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