Big City Girl by Charles Williams

“Once they get you in there in the pen, there ain’t no long-nose bastards  writing about you and talking about you on the radio. Not till maybe thirty years from now, when they might let you out if you behave yourself, or till someday they kill you if you don’t.”

Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press, continues his unflagging quest to put classic noir titles back into the hands of readers: this time it’s with a Charles Williams Revival–a writer who seems to have been largely forgotten in the annals of noir fiction. So it’s back to Charles Williams (1909-1975) for another noir gem. Big City Girl (1951) is an unusual noir for its setting, and it’s certainly a change of pace from perhaps this author’s most famous work, Hell Hath No Fury (AKA The Hot Spot), a novel I read and reviewed a few years ago.

Big City Girl is a story of a family of dirt poor sharecroppers in the American south. Widower Cass Neely, a hopeless man who’s losing his mind, used to own an impressively large cotton farm, but for the past 14 years, he’s sold off one parcel at a time.

There was nothing vicious about him, and the money he had received over all this period of time from the piecemeal sale of his land and farming equipment had not been thrown away on liquor or gambling or any other active vice, but had disappeared down the bottomless rat holes of shiftlessness and bad management and a perennially wistful fondness for secondhand automobiles. And now the deteriorating carcasses of seven of the defunct cars squatted about the sandy yard around the house where they had wheezed their last, giving it the appearance of a junk yard.

Now all that’s left is the crudely-built house and a few acres of poor soil, and Cass and his son Mitch, who basically does most of the labour, find themselves working the land they used to own.  Mitch also has a young, impressionable teenage sister named Jessie, and there’s also a brother, Sewell, a brutal, violent criminal who was involved in rival gang wars until his conviction for armed robbery. At first glance, Sewell’s criminal career appears to be an anomaly, some quirk of nature that set this son on a bad path while Mitch stayed on the straight and narrow. A closer look at the family’s bleak, hopeless, back-breaking existence offers another explanation of Sewell’s life for crime: he simply broke free of a lifetime of virtual slavery and decided to take his chances with crime.

When the book opens, Sewell’s blonde, trashy wife, Joy has joined her husband’s family out of desperation, and she reasoned that at least with her in-laws she’ll have a roof over her head and food in her stomach. A good-time girl addicted to the attention of men, Joy is now thirty and beginning to lose her looks. Just as Mitch relies on his strength to get by, and Sewell counts on his ruthless violence, Joy has counted on her looks and her body to see her through the hard times, and with the prospect of aging, Joy is worried about what lies ahead. In theory she can stay on the farm, but the lifestyle is driving her mad with boredom. There are only two elements to her new life that she finds remotely interesting: Jessie’s worship (Jessie acts as her ex-facto maid) and the distinct possibility of teasing and seducing Mitch. While Joy acts out her own little dramas at the cotton farm, Sewell “Mad Dog Neely“ is being transferred to the state pen to begin a life sentence for armed robbery….

The novel has its surprisingly poignant moments as Mitch recalls rich childhood memories when he and Sewell did everything together:

You lay awake when you were dead tired and needed the sleep, lying there on the cot in the darkness thinking of hunting squirrels with Sewell and running the setlines at night along the river’s banks with the pine torch blazing and sputtering and throwing your long-legged shadows against the trees, hunting coons with him to the baying of hounds on frosty, starlit winter nights a long time ago before he began to get into trouble, and all the way you always had to run to keep up with the endless vitality of him. You thought of him then and you thought of him now, and it was like a sickness eating at you from the inside where you couldn’t get at it.

But with the crop, thank god, it was different. You could still lose because the rain could whip you and the boll weevils could whip you and any one of a half-dozen things could do it too, but at least you were fighting something you could see and when you hit it you could feel something solid under your hand. It was an elemental problem, with nothing fancy about it. The crop was there and if you didn’t save it you went hungry. It had rained far too much already and there wasn’t much chance now of that big crop you were always going to make next year, that fifteen bales or more when you would come out at the end of the year with more money ahead and Jessie could go back to school and you could buy some more of your own equipment again and not go farming on halves all your life. That was probably just a dream for another year. What you were fighting for now was survival. You had to pay off the credit to get credit for another year to go on eating to make another crop.

Big City Girl has an unusual setting, but all the hallmarks of excellent noir fiction are here with the twists and turns of fate determining moments of apparent choice. The lines between the good and the bad characters are blurred and murky with heroes and villains defined by a brutal society that refuses to recognize that the have-nots are forced to sell whatever it takes to get by. Sewell sold his strength to become muscle for gangsters. Joy sells her body because that’s all she has to sell. Mitch is the hero here, the one decent character, but his decency is based on his willingness to work himself to death. The energy required to farm cotton stops Mitch from thinking about anything except the crop, so during the day he’s able to keep on the treadmill, but at night it’s different. There’s a deeply buried unasked question underlying the validity of the two brother’s respective, grim choices: In breaking away from the back-breaking subsistence work of the farm, Sewell makes a bid for freedom through a life of crime. Mitch doesn’t reject his brother’s choices and understands that Sewell is fighting society–a largely invisible and unconquerable enemy.  Which of the two brothers is a freer man? What will Mitch think of his choice to stay on the straight and narrow when he’s a broken, worn out man by the time he’s 50?

Review copy

2011–It’s a Wrap

It’s never easy to whittle a year of some truly great books down to just a few personal preferences, but here goes my completely arbitrary categories anyway (in no particular order):

Novels that continue to haunt me: Little Monsters by Charles Lambert and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

Perhaps the best Simenon I’ve read to date: Dirty Snow

Best of the seven Jim Thompson novels read for my noirfest: Pop 1280. The Killer Inside Me came a very close second, but the nasty sense of humour in Pop 1280 ultimately won the day.

Speaking of nasty sense of humour, the award has to go to Henry Sutton’s FABULOUS Get Me Out of Here and The Pets by Bragi Olafsson

For crime, it doesn’t get better than Drive by James Sallis.

Best classic noir: Build My Gallows High by Geoffrey Homes and Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams (both made into films, btw).

Best 20th C American: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams

Best Classics, French: Gobseck  by Balzac. Russian: The Duel by Chekhov and The Eternal Husband by Dostoevsky. British: The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy.

Best new American release: Calling Mr King by Ronald de Feo

Best new British Fiction: The Old Romantic by Louise Dean, King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher–both of these were the second books I’d read by these authors and the reading enjoyment firmly sealed me as a fan of both.

Best non-fiction: The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal

So thanks to all my readers and all those who left comments, and also thanks to the authors who sweated blood and tears over the novels that enriched my life beyond measure in 2011.  With a good book, life is never boring.

Hell Hath No Fury aka The Hot Spot by Charles Williams

“When you break the law, you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time.”

The Hot Spot (1990) from director Dennis Hopper is one of my favourite neo-noir films. The film features Don Johnson, Jennifer Connelly, and Virginia Madsen, and I’ll leave you to guess which of those two women plays the femme fatale here. It’s the tale of a used car salesman who is trapped in a shabby Texas town by his relationships with two very different women. It was just a matter of time before I read the 1953 book, and I was not disappointed-this is pure unadulterated noir, and here’s the very first line:

The first morning when I showed up on the lot he called me into the office and wanted me to go out in the country somewhere and repossess a car.

A simple enough sentence, and yet it drops us right in the action while telling us a few things about the narrator’s attitude towards his job at Harshaw’s used car lot. Newly hired used car salesman Harry Madox is the narrator of this tale. He drifts to a dry, sun-bleached, dull small town after leaving Huston, lands a job at the town’s only used car lot, and a room at depressingly drab boarding house. He left Huston quickly, and as the story unfolds, fragments of information about Harry’s troubled past (specifically his problematic record with trashy women) appear through the narrative.

Strong descriptions of the locals and of the terrain add a great deal of throbbing atmosphere to this dark, brooding tale. Passages describing Harry’s airless room at the boarding house ooze with suffocating boredom combined with encroaching desperation. It doesn’t help that Harry, cooking in the muggy heat of his tiny room, can hear his neighbour droning on as he reads aloud from the Book of Genesis night after night.

It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?

But things look up for Harry when he meets Gloria Harper who’s the bookkeeper for their mutual boss, Harshaw.

I watched her, thinking how it would be, the way you always do, and how pretty she was. She was a little over average height, and there was something oddly serious about her face, more so than you’d expect in a girl who couldn’t be over twenty-one. She looked like someone who could get hurt, and it was strange I thought about it that way because it had been a long time since I’d known anyone who was vulnerable to much of anything. Her legs were long and very nice, and she wore rather dark nylons.

Harry’s usual rough approach to women doesn’t work with Gloria, and so he backs off. Soon he’s comparing her to a long-stemmed yellow rose. Could this be love?

On the other end of the female spectrum is the trashy wife of Harry’s boss, Dolly Harshaw.  While Gloria is serious, quiet and introspective, Dolly is 100% unadulterated tramp with a drinking habit and an unquenchable desire for rowdy sex. In this small, gossipy Texas town, Harshaw is one of its wealthiest citizens, and Harshaw and his wife make an incongruous couple. He’s in his 50s and out-of-shape while Dolly, provocatively dressed and reeking of sex prances around town like a cheap hooker desperate for business.  Here’s Harry on Dolly:

I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowsy.

Harry believes that “in this world you took what you wanted ; you didn’t stand around and wait for somebody to bring it to you,” and while that may be an admirable attitude, in Harry it spells trouble. It’s not long before he finds himself a Person of Interest with the local law enforcement. And then there’s Dolly Harshaw–a woman whose sexual designs on Harry are hardly discreet. Harry doesn’t exactly have a good track record “in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp.” Harry makes the mistake of thinking he can handle himself and that he can handle Dolly. The problem is that Dolly is a lot more conniving and vindictive than Harry can even begin to imagine:

It began to come home to me then that maybe I didn’t know all there was to know about her. I began to sense a steel-trap deadliness of purpose operating somewhere between that baby stare and sensuous face. She was as tough as a shark, and she got what she wanted.

This is all set against the perfectly drawn back-drop of the small Texas town–a town in which people wait and watch each other because there’s nothing else to do. Scenes between Gloria and Harry often take place in the gorgeous, cool local watering spots just outside of town. These scenes are in contrast to the scenes between Dolly and Harry in which heat is emphasised in various ways.  Hell Hath no Fury AKA The Hot Spot is a masterpiece of noir–a novel which shows us a man who’s divided about what he wants in life. On one hand there’s a lifetime of hard work and mediocrity, and on the other hand there’s a fast track to easy money greased with lust and greed. The problem is that Harry thinks he can have it all–he thinks he can please both sides of his nature and still manage to keep everything, and everyone in balance. This is a little gem of a novel, and the story plays out with its emphasis on the undeniable draw of human nature to our corrupt, baser desires. Harry thinks he is master of his own destiny; he believes he can control events and ease himself up to a better life, but this is noir, and there is no escape from the sticky web of fate.…