Some time ago, I published a column in Nichi Bei News discussing writer Len Zinberg, who wrote a short story sympathetic to Japanese Americans during the World War II era. Zinberg, I noted, went on to write crime and detective novels under the name Ed Lacy, including the 1957 novel Room to Swing. That book introduced the private investigator Toussaint “Touie” Marcus Moore, one of the first African American detectives in mainstream popular fiction.

Today I wish to discuss Howard Fast, another proletarian novelist and Leftist activist who wrote detective novels. Fast’s works, written under the name E.V. Cunningham, record the exploits of a Nisei crimefighter, Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto.

Howard Melvin Fast was born in New York on November 14, 1914, the child of Jewish immigrants (the family’s original name was Fastovsky). As he later described in his autobiography, Being Red, Fast began writing seriously as a teenager, and published his first novel, Two Valleys, in 1933, when he was only 18 years old.

During the following decade, the young Fast turned out a series of popular novels and short stories, many of them on themes drawn from American history. His fictional biography Citizen Tom Paine (1943) recounted the life of the writer and radical supporter of the American Revolution. Freedom Road (1944) told the tale of a Reconstruction-era Black legislator and his fight against the Ku Klux Klan (it would much later be turned into a film, with boxing legend Muhammad Ali in the lead role). Fast’s novel The Last Frontier (1941), which helped inspire the later film “Cheyenne Autumn,” was set in the 19th century and dealt with the exodus of Native Americans to Wyoming.

Like many 1930s intellectuals, Fast was attracted to the Communist Party. In 1943, while working for the wartime agency Office of War Information, he joined the Party. He would become one of the Party’s best-known writers and speakers. In 1952, Fast ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Communist-affiliated American Labor Party ticket.

During the McCarthy period, Fast was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was subsequently imprisoned on a charge of contempt of Congress. During his time in prison, he wrote his most famous novel, Spartacus (1951), on the revolt of slaves in ancient Rome—which would subsequently form the basis of the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film. He broke with the Party by the end of the decade.

Throughout the next decades, he continued to publish novels, short stories, plays and nonfiction, both under his own name and under the pseudonyms Walter Ericson and Behn Boruch. His historical novel The Immigrants (1977) would gain widespread attention and be made into a successful TV miniseries.

In 1960, Fast began publishing mystery novels, in order to give himself a respite from more serious work. Following a suggestion by his agent, he adopted the pen name E.V. Cunningham.

Over the next years, he produced a dozen such works, which were put out by the mainstream presses Doubleday and William Morrow. Each book in the series carried a woman’s first name as its title, and in each a woman was the main character—as heroine, villain or victim. Fast/Cunningham framed his plots around murder, rape, and revenge, featuring a panoply of private detectives, police, and investigators. The first two books in the series, Sylvia and Penelope, were each adapted into films after publication.

In Samantha (1967), the tenth novel in the series, Fast/Cunningham introduced a new protagonist, Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto of the Beverly Hills Police Force. The book starts with the death of Masuto’s friend, the famous Hollywood producer Al Greenberg. On taking up the investigation, Masuto learns that eleven years earlier, a woman named “Samantha” was lured to an empty screen set with the promise of a part in a TV show.

Instead of getting the part, she was attacked and gang raped by a group of young men, including Greenberg. Now, after Greenberg’s death, the other men who participated in the rape, all of whom have since become movie stars and studio executives, fear the murderous revenge of “Samantha.” Masuto must uncover whether “Samantha” is the wife of one of the men—or in reality a man himself. As the dust jacket of the book’s first edition stated:

“It is up to Detective Masao Masuto to stop the killings and catch the killer. A Buddhist, aloof yet involved, a man of simple yet sophisticated tastes, Masuto must overcome the crass Hollywood world where a Nisei is still cruelly taunted. And Detective Masuto must decide, too, whether one of the beautiful, acid-tongued wives of those slated to die is Samantha.”

Fast later explained that he had been inspired to create Masuto out of his desire to explore and validate the Japanese American experience, in a period when members of the group still faced ignorance and prejudice. “Years before, a Nisei woman had worked for me. She came to us from the World War II concentration camps of America, where people of Japanese ancestry had been interned. She was a delightful person, and from her I learned much of the life of Japanese Americans.”

Furthermore, Fast explained that the years he had lived on a hillside above Beverly Hills and had studied Zen Buddhism had inspired him to make his hero a practitioner of Zen meditation—“a man who neither judges nor condemns the crime, but seeks only for the inner truth.”

Fast’s authorship of the work seems to have been something of an open secret. In a review of Samantha published in the Chicago Tribune, Alice Cromie commented,“The versatile author behind this pseudonym, keeping, as ever, a nimble leap ahead of the times, introduced a handsome Nisei detective sergeant.” Cromie commented archly, “Who’ll be the first with the Apache or Eskimo D.I.?”

Fast did not include Masuto in the two remaining “woman” mysteries that he published in the following years. However, in 1977, a decade after Samantha appeared, Fast revived Masuto as the hero of a new mystery, The Case of the One-Penny Orange, published by Delacorte. The plot involved the search for a rare antique postage stamp from Mauritius. Alice Cromie, in her Chicago Tribune review of the new book, outed Fast as its author, but other reviewers generally respected his pseudonym. Indeed, many reviewers, notably the New York Times mystery book critic Newgate Callendar (AKA Harold Schonberg) seemed unaware of Masuto’s previous appearance in Samantha, and hailed the book for introducing a Nisei detective.

In the years that followed, Fast/Cunningham proceeded to publish five more Masao Masuto detective novels with Delacorte: The Case of the Russian Diplomat (1978); The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979): The Case of the Sliding Pool (1981): The Case of the Kidnapped Angel (1982); and The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie (1984). Over the course of these books, in addition to offering mystery plots, Fast/Cunningham fleshed out his hero's personal life, especially his relations with his wife Kati and his children. Kati was initially presented as rather submissive, but by the later books, she had joined a Nisei women’s consciousness-raising group. In the later books, Masuto also refers obliquely to his childhood experience in camp and the dispossession of his family.

The Masao Masuto books attracted a wide readership, and were translated into French, German and other languages—where they ranked among the first mainstream books with Japanese American content to appear. (On a more troubling note, the 1985 French edition of The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie appeared under the title Le Jap se débride [“The Jap unslants himself].)

The series also drew respectful comment among Nisei. In 1982, Pacific Citizen columnist Bill Hosokawa reported that he had received a letter from reader Harry Takagi, praising the series and asking about the author: "It's a good story…written with a decent regard for Japanese Americans, and while some people might nit-pick at minor background details, the story depicts the detective and his family with respect and understanding.”

Several letter writers identified Fast as the author. Kay Tateishi noted his affection for the series and his “curious fascination about the six-foot Nisei who is a Zen Buddhist, karate expert, lover of roses, [who] lives in Culver City with his wife Kati and daughter, possesses a caustic wit, rides an aging Datsun, and moves coolly among the richly corrupt of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles.”

Critics divided over the books. Murray Dubin raved in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “E.V. Cunnningham has created a cross between Charlie Chan and Columbo of television. Masuto is inscrutable but lovable, wise and yet terribly human.” One critic, writing in the Washington Post Book World, asserted that Fast had “produced first-rate procedurals with an original, appealing sleuth.” However, writing in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, reviewer TL complained:

“This book should be a swell mystery. Should be…[Masuto is] trying to carry on traditional Japanese values in the modern, glitzy world. He has to live in Culver City because his salary as a cop excommunicates him from the rich folk he serves. He has a dry enough sense of humor to say ‘Ah so’ when he's interrogating someone he doesn't like. So how come he's so boring?”

Howard Fast died in 2003. In his last years, he published a pair of anthology volumes with some of the Masao Masuto books, and produced a new introduction in which he expressed his pleasure and pride over his creation. While the Masao Masuto series cannot be classed among Fast’s finest in literary terms, it was notable in featuring a positive but believable portrait of a heroic Nisei protagonist.

© 2024 Greg Robinson