Look beyond Guys and Dolls – the Depression-era legend wrote some of the funniest short stories ever published, writes Sam Leith

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Damon Runyon was a Depression-era New York newspaperman who wrote, I think, some of the funniest short stories ever published. Yet he’s been only patchily in print in the UK over the last few decades, and inasmuch as most people know his work it’ll be through a vague sense of him as the writer behind the musical Guys and Dolls.

I don’t denigrate that musical, but Runyon’s stories are their own thing. No musical can capture their special quality, for they are magical to the sentence level. I don’t think there’s anyone who wouldn’t benefit from reading him. He’s as funny as PG Wodehouse and, like Wodehouse, Runyon creates entirely his own idiom and entirely his own comic world. But unlike Wodehouse, who is always sunshine and innocence, Runyon’s world is wry and coloured with exquisite melancholy.

His is a world of gangsters and hustlers and conmen, ill-starred professional gamblers and diners serving blue-plate specials and gefilte fish – all observed by a narrator “known to one and all as a guy who is just around”. The characters seldom ever have normal names: they are called things like Harry the Horse and Rusty Charley and Dream Street Rose. And this narrator speaks in an inimitable slang that is at once vernacular and almost comically circumlocutory, where a gun is a “roscoe” and money is “scratch” or “potatoes”, and women are “dolls” or “Judies” or “ever-loving wives”. If you are inconveniencing a citizen as he goes about his unlawful business there are such guys as will lay you plenty of six-to-two that you will receive a “bust in the snoot”.

The famous thing about Runyon’s stories is that they are infallibly (or nearly infallibly; scholars scour the text for the handful of rare slips) narrated in the present tense. Hence the typically talky opening of The Snatching of Bookie Bob:

Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.

There is very little scratch anywhere and along Broadway many citizens are wearing their last year’s clothes and have practically nothing to bet on the races or anything else, and it is a condition that will touch anybody’s heart.

When talking about Runyon, sooner or later all you want to do is quote him. Here, for instance, is a passage from The Hottest Guy in the World, in which Big Jule describes how he passed the time shooting rats for target practice while holed up in a barn:

Well, sir,’ Jule says, ‘I keep score on myself one day, and I hit fifty rats hand running without a miss, which I claim makes me the champion rat shooter of the world with a forty-five automatic, although of course,’ he says, ‘if anybody wishes to challenge me to a rat shooting match I am willing to take them on for a side bet. I get so I can call my shots on the rats, and in fact several times I say to myself, I will hit this one in the right eye, and this one in the left eye, and it always turns out just as I say, although sometimes when you hit a rat with a forty-five up close it is not always possible to tell afterwards just where you hit him, because you seem to hit him all over.

For belly laughs from darkness, you will struggle to beat Sense of Humor. And that streak of melancholy I mentioned? Man alive. Try The Lily of St Pierre. And not for nothing is the title of one of his best stories All Horse Players Die Broke.

There are dozens of these stories, and the standard omnibus edition is called On Broadway (bundling the collections More Than Somewhat, Furthermore and Take It Easy). It’s in Penguin Modern Classics. Go get it. You won’t regret it.

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