The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich

“Death is man’s greatest gift from Nature.”

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) began his writing career producing Jazz age novels along the lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but by 1934, in debt and unable to sell his work, he began to focus on the crime genre. Using pseudonyms, he wrote a vast number of stories and novellas for various pulp magazines before embarking on his Black Series: The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948). An impressive number of films have been based on his work, including a film version of The Black Angel starring one of my personal favourites, Dan Duryea. Woolrich was not a fan of the film as it was greatly altered from the source material. Not only is Woolrich a major contributor to film noir, but he is also considered one of the greatest American crime writers of his period. Lucky for us he gave up on the F. Scott Fitzgerald theme.

The story begins with 22-year-old narrator, Alberta Murray, rummaging through the cupboards only to discover that a number of items belonging to her husband, Kirk, are missing. She finds his valise locked and heavy, and jumps to the conclusion that he’s packed his bag and intends to leave her. This is not a decision based on hysteria; Alberta has deliberately ignored a number of tell-signs that her husband is having an affair. The most notable of these is a gold compact she discovered in a pocket. It was engraved to “Mia,” and a little detective work behind the scenes led Alberta to believe that the Mia who owned the compact was also the same Mia, “who looked good to stay away from,” employed by a nightclub. More detective work and Alberta tracks down Mia’s address and what appears to be a very tacky love nest with a turquoise colour scheme and monograms everywhere you look.

A few hours later, Alberta’s husband is arrested for a murder that she knows he did not commit, but according to the police, it’s an open-and-shut case. Taking an address book and a clue from the scene of the crime, Alberta decides that if she wants to save her husband from the electric chair she’ll have to do the sleuthing on her own.

The structure of the novel then follows Alberta’s investigation into four names from the address book. These are four men from Mia’s life, and since Mia wasn’t a very nice woman, so it follows that Alberta is going to have to meet lowlifes and crooks on her determined path to the truth. Alberta is called “Angel Face” by her husband which gives us a clue about what she looks like–she’s a stunner, but her beauty is the look of innocence. Underneath that look, however, she’s steel, and even though Alberta is terrified at times by those she encounters, she never once deviates from her plan to investigate the murder until she finds the truth.

The book’s biggest weakness is arguably its basic premise–Alberta’s determination to save her husband–the man who cheated on her, packed his bags and planned to split. Would most women bother with this heel? Isn’t it more plausible that Alberta would say sayonara to her cheating spouse and let Kirk fry? Or does Angel Face also have an Angel Nature? I chalked up Alberta’s decision to save her no-good husband to the idealism of youth, and, after all, Alberta’s initial reaction when she discovers that her husband is cheating is not anger but dismay. Regardless of Alberta’s decision to save Kirk, the man is still a heel and although he’s off stage for most of the book, at one point Alberta visits him in prison, and he makes a last request of her after she insists, against the odds, that he’ll be a free man soon:

He smiled as though he had his doubts. “but in case, in case I don’t, afterward, after it’s over–Angel face, you won’t let anyone else bring you flowers home at night or kick around the coffee, will you? Don’t let anyone else–I know you’re young yet–but that belongs to me.“

Ain’t that sweet? So let me get this straight– ‘Save yourself for me, honey, even though I didn’t do the same for you’….

Woolrich takes us on a tour of both the high and the lows of the city: the seedy bars, the flop houses, the nightclubs, the dope fiends, the mansions of the blue-blood rich–all the way to the lavish penthouse suite of a psychotic gangster.  Here’s Alberta in a bar where she meets one of Mia’s earlier victims, the hollowed-out shell of a man.

I’d never been in a Bowery drinking place before. I’d heard the phrase “the lower depths”; I don’t remember where.  I think I read it once. This was it now. The lowest depth of all, this side of the grave. There was nothing beyond this, nothing further. Nothing came after it–only death, the river. These were not human beings any more. These were shadows.

And there was one thing more pathetic than themselves, more eloquent of what had become of them. It was the hush that fell when I came in. That bated breathlessness. I went into many places after that, but never again did the same thing happen in just that way. Men in a barroom will often fall silent when a woman comes in. This was not that. This was not admiration or even covetousness. I don’t know what I would call it myself. It was the memory of someone in each man’s past, someone like me, long ago, far away, come back to mind again for a moment, before the memory darkened again and went out-forever. It was life’s last afterglow glancing off the faces of the dead as I brushed by them.

This passage also reflects the idea that while Alberta’s quest is to save her husband, it’s a quest that is, ultimately, a process of experience and maturity for Alberta for she enters a “world of jungle violence and of darkness, of strange hidden deeds in strange hidden places, of sharp-clawed treachery and fanged gratitude, where compunction and conscience are just other words for weakness and used as such.”

There’s one later passage when Alberta notes that gangsters have splashed aftershave on their faces, and she silently marvels that they are just like other men–except they operate without a moral centre. For some reason, that was one of my favourite parts of the book–perhaps because it’s just so simple. Alberta’s nickname may be Angel Face, and while she’s a decent person, when she begins her investigation and penetrates the dark universe of crime and corruption, she becomes The Black Angel–inadvertently bringing death and destruction in her wake and capable of whatever it takes.  According to Woolrich’s biographer, Francis M. Nevins Jr, the dark, destructive angel is a recurring motif found in Woolrich’s work–I’m thinking The Bride Wore Black.

The Black Angel’s ending–dark, haunting and extremely troubling–makes this novel something very special in a twisted noir way. There’s a loneliness here in Alberta’s journey to the truth, and that loneliness and isolation seems to be reflected in everyone she meets. For fans of the genre, or for those who haven’t tried Woolrich, this dark tale of the forbidden world of lust, despair and madness perforated by decency and goodness is well worth catching. Moral choices are a turning point for those confronted with the opportunity to commit crime. In Alberta’s case, there’s an inversion of that common scenario, and the moral choices are made when she pledges to find the real murderer. One intriguing, lingering question remains when the book concludes.  Will her life ever be so simple and innocent again?….

Review copy from the publisher via Open Road Media.

The Investigation of Ariel Warning by Robert Kalich

I’m going to admit to a certain fascination with twins, and this has resulted in multiple viewings of films such as Cheech and Chong’s The Corsican Brothers, Bette Davis in A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer, and how can I forget one of my all-time favourites,  the very creepy David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers. Dead Ringers is based on the true story of twin brothers Stewart and Cyril Marcus, and in the film version, the twins, extremely successful gynecologists both become involved with the same woman. And this leads me to The Investigation of Ariel Warning by Robert Kalich–a book written by an identical twin about identical twins who fall for the same femme fatale.

Adam and his identical twin brother, David Remler place an ad in The New York Times, and the plan is that they will share the services of an experienced screenplay writer–David needs an assistant and Adam hopes for a film treatment of his novel Confessions. This is all established on page one–along with the very confident applicant who begins, via e-mail, by describing her “thick, corn-colored hair” and her “exceptionally long legs.” That would be a deal breaker for me, but Adam and David plunge ahead and foolishly invite the applicant, Ariel Warning, into their lives initially for an interview. Of course, their collective decision to interview Ariel–along with an admission that they’re “intrigued” by her may have a great deal to do with the fact that they are both lonely, single vulnerable men. Adam, wallowing in self-pity, is still trying to get over the break-up of his long-term relationship, and David’s wife was killed a few years previously in a horse riding accident.

From the moment Ariel arrives for the interview, she is in control of the situation. There’s really no question of her being an ‘applicant’–instead it’s as though she’s establishing the perimeters of this three-cornered relationship, and this initial foray sets the stage for the dynamics of the relationship between Ariel, Adam, and David. She claims to be an expert on twins–the Remlers in particular:

“When I was at Kansas, I even did a term paper on you and Adam. comparing your novels. my professor balked. She said you two weren’t in the literary canon as of yet. But I insisted. I think what hit home was when I told her you were the only twins in literary history that are published novelists. That piqued my professor’s interest. Mine too.” Ariel said, smiling. “And I did another paper comparing your twin relationship with other identicals. I brought both papers with me,” she said, reaching for her shoulder bag. “They’re here somewhere,” and before a millisecond had passed, she was rummaging through her bag, expounding on the papers. “The truth is, I didn’t want to write a treatise dealing with how identicals share the same unconscious. That they know everything about each other from the time of their birth. Even before. But I believe it is like that. It is with you two, isn’t it? I mean the two of you know things about the other half that no one else could possibly know. Yet, still, for your entire lives both of you have felt incomplete. That’s true, isn’t it?” she asked, peering intently at us.

After this bizarre interview, Ariel gets the job. I was a bit surprised by this development as it seemed quite clear that Ariel was trouble–at best a twin groupie/fetishist with a penchant for BS–at worst a total psycho. I suppose the fact that she got the job–no questions asked–gave me the warning that she was being hired for her physical attributes rather than a proven, traceable resume. So with that in mind, it came as no surprise to find Ariel very quickly established as David’s girlfriend. 

Adam,  the book’s narrator, soon has cause to question the identity of Ariel Warning. A quick background check reveals that no such person exists. By this point, she’s elbowed her way into David and Adam’s lives, burrows in deep, and then she’s not so easy to get rid of. But when Ariel begins exhibiting some bizarre, violent behaviour, and makes some strange demands, bad things start happening to the people in the twins’ lives. Adam is forced to investigate even at the cost of losing his relationship with his brother.

The Investigation of Ariel Warning, an entertaining literary Chinese puzzle, is full of twists and turns, allusions to Shakespeare and replete with facts about twins. Primarily a mystery, the book also explores the emotional connections between twins and doesn’t quite fit neatly into any genre. The book also includes echoes of the highly controversial Peter Greenaway film A Zed and Two Noughts primarily through the Siamese twins, Bart and Albert Parker, former admirers of Ariel who now share a prostitute, so fans of Greenaway (me) should appreciate the nuances of this unusual, complex plot. While I struggled somewhat with Adam and David’s gullibility and periodic passivity when faced with Ariel’s atrocious behaviour, I throughly enjoyed the character of Margot Korman–a “creepy” woman according to David, but his track record when it comes to trusting people isn’t exactly reliable. Margot, who insists on sharing the salacious details of her sex life at the most inappropriate moment, joins forces with Adam to discover the truth about Ariel.

Review copy.

Osborne’s Revenge by Henry James

Emma recently read and blogged about one of my favourite Henry James novels, Washington Square, and I was motivated to return to one of my favourite authors. It was a matter of luck that I selected the short story, Osborne’s Revenge (1868), which clocks in at a mere 28 pages on my kindle, for the story is not only a perfect companion piece to Washington Square, but it’s also quintessential James.

The title indicates where the story will take us, but since this is Henry James, nothing is simple, and a great deal is submerged beneath that oh-so-polite behaviour. The story opens with the statement that “Philip Osborne and Robert Graham were intimate friends,” but to outsiders, the relationship is a “puzzle.”

Disinterested parties were at a loss to discover how Osborne had come to set his heart upon an insignificant, lounging invalid, who, in general company, talked in monosyllables, in a weak voice, and gave himself the airs of one whose nature had endowed with the right to be fastidious, without ever having done a stroke of work. Graham’s partisans, on the other hand, who were chiefly women (which, by the way, effectively relieves him from the accusation occasionally brought against him of being “effeminate”) were quite unable to penetrate the motives of his interest in a commonplace, hard-working lawyer, who addressed a charming woman as if he were exhorting a jury of grocers and undertakers, and viewed the universe as one vast “case.”

Following the advice of his physician, Graham is spending the summer at some medicinal springs in New York. Osborne hasn’t heard from his friend in some time when he finally receives a letter in which Graham confesses that he remains at the springs as he is “charmed” by a young woman he met there. From a mutual acquaintance, Osborne learns that Graham has fallen in love with a certain Miss Congreve, and that an announcement of an engagement was expected when a Mr Holland appeared at the resort and that Miss Congreve precipitously “transferred her favours” to the newcomer. According to the mutual acquaintance, the gossipy witness, Mrs Dodd, Graham is dying from a “broken heart.” Indeed, Graham seems to be shaken by the affair and shortly afterwards, he commits suicide.

Osborne doesn’t recover from his friend’s death and with some notion of revenge, he travels to Newport in order to seek out Miss Congreve….

This is a wonderful early Henry James short story, and as we so often see with this author, the main character (Osborne in this case) is actually outside of the main story–the failed love affair between Graham and Miss Congreve. All of the passion–the courtship, jealousy, despair and suicide have occurred off the pages, and instead we have Osborne left with the aftermath. Once again we see the passivity of Jamesian inaction, the complexities of human behaviour, motivation and psychology, and the turmoil of unexpressed emotion just underneath the surface of polite society.

How would Charlotte or Emily Bronte dealt with such a plot as Osborne’s Revenge? A rhetorical question, of course, but their pages would have included more passion, more action, and yet perhaps James’s subtle story is so exquisite because it’s fairly easy to step into the shoes of Osborne and hover around Miss Congreve as he tries to hate her, struggles with indecision and tries to make her pay for the death of his friend.

The Best American Mystery Stories of 2011

“They’ve got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up.”

A short story collection presents me with a dilemma. Which ones should I mention in the review? I inevitably land on those I liked the best or those that stuck out from the pack for one reason or another. This makes short story collections more difficult to review I think, but at the same time, they can also be infinitely rewarding as for this reader they act as a showcase for new authors. I discovered Jonathan Coe thanks to a short story collection, and so I approach a new collection as a way to collect fresh names.

The Best American Mystery Stories is a series that’s run now for 14 years. The 2011 edition brings Harlan Coben as the guest editor with Otto Penzler (and I’m a fan of Penzler’s for all he’s done for the crime/mystery genre) as series editor. Penzler gives what he states is “fair warning” that a mystery is not necessarily a detective story. Penzler argues:

I regard the detective story as one subgenre of a much bigger genre, which I define as any short work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or the plot.

Patricia Highsmith, of course, we think of as a mystery writer, so then the 2011 Best Mystery Collection, is not, and it’s a good thing, all detectives–although some detectives appear as well as a wide range of other characters in these pages. In Audacious by Brock Adams there’s a pickpocket, in Beth Ann Fennelly & Tom Franklin’s What His Hands had Been Waiting For there’s a couple of ranger types in a world I had, at first, some difficulty dating, and there’s a female serial killer in Lawrence Block’s Clean Slate. There are some big names here including a story from Joe Lansdale and a collaboration by Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane, a great Mike Hammer short story called A Long Time Dead.

Chewing over the stories, I’ve landed on some favourites which also happen to be by writers I’ve never read before, and Dennis McFadden’s Diamond Alley makes the short list. It’s a story told by a man who reminisces about his past,  and those memories include a young woman named Carol Siebenrock, a beautiful nubile girl who became the sex fantasy of every boy who attended the same high school. The author recalls how groups of boys organised Peeping Tom sessions at her remote country home. While this is all very familiar territory, in McFadden’s hands the story becomes sublime:

The year we were seniors in high school, a girl in our class was murdered, and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series. Which was the more momentous event? No contest, of course; how could a game,  a boys’ game at that, compete with the death of a classmate, a girl who was our friend? Yet somehow, despite our lip service to the contrary, these two happenings seemed to attain a shameful equality in our minds. And if anything, now that so many years have passed, Mazeroski rounding the bases in jubilation after his homer had vanquished the big,bad Yankees is more vivid in our memories than the image of  Carol Siebenrock, young, beautiful, and naked as seen from the darkness beyond her window.

The narrator describes that senior year in Harts Grove, Pennsylvania–a year of promise & hope , rampant sexual fantasies, and yet also a certain innocence that is smashed by Carol’s disappearance. The story charts the chilling appropriateness of her last comment to her male admirers, loss, collective guilt, and the passage of time. School all too frequently becomes the place where we first experience death of peers, and McFadden’s story captures all the nuances of the narrator’s experience as Carol passes from the real, the desired and the unattainable to the iconic.

Andrew Riconda’s Heart like a Balloon is one of the meanest contract killer short stories I’ve ever read, so it makes the short list for its one track nastiness which still managed to shock and surprise me. The story is told by Brian Rehill, a contractor/fixer of “dirty business“ who is meeting with Denny back in New York after an absence of three years:

We’d been friends of sorts until I did a favor for him to keep him out of jail. Subsequently he got leery of our association. Denny could deal with the blood on his hands as long as he didn’t have a daily reminder of it. Shit, it wasn’t all that much blood. And it wasn’t even like someone had been killed. That being said, I certainly didn’t mourn the loss of our friendship. I’d mainlined enough Dr. Phil while unemployed to recognize the toxic people in my life, and when this bastard broke wind, the room smelled of almonds and burned Legos.

After doing a “favour” for Denny, Brian suspects he was subtly blacklisted:

And even though I suspected Denny had quietly put a few bad words in for me here and there, after I did him his little favour, putting the kibosh on jobs I should’ve gotten, including a couple of big sheetrocking contracts that would’ve put me into a whole other tax bracket, I didn’t care now. This pariah’s subsequent relocation westward turned out to be the best move I’d ever made. And L.A., much to the bemusement of my condescending New Yorker mentality, turned out to be paradise–professionally, romantically, and even, god help me, spiritually (I hadn’t done anything I was ashamed of in nearly two years). I was even thinking about buying my first house, although I still needed to somehow come up with a big chunk for a downpayment. Somehow….

Well the ”somehow” is handed to Brian when Denny asks him for yet another favour–it’s a long story that begins, classically (and I see Dennis Farina in this role) saying, “there’s this guy…”. This ‘guy’ as it turns out, is Joe, the soon-to-be ex-husband of Denny’s mistress, Sucrete. The schmuck doesn’t get the message that the marriage is over, and loser that he is, he’s bugging Sucrete. Restraining orders haven’t worked, so Denny asks Brian to put a “permanent restraint” on Joe: “whatever you deem … most permanent.”

Anyway, that clip gives a sense of style and voice (both excellent) and the set-up….

Another favourite is a story written by Ed Gorman, Flying Solo, a story about two widowed cancer sufferers in their 60s who meet during chemo sessions. One man is retired cop Ralph and the other is Tom, a retired English teacher. Ralph has terminal prostate cancer and Tom has colon cancer. They begin scheduling chemo on the same days and watch films to pass the time:

The DVD players were small and you could set them up on a wheeled table right in front of your recliner while you were getting the juice . One day I brought season two of the Rockford Files , with James Garner. When I got about two minutes into the episode I heard Ralph sort of snicker.

“What’s so funny?”

“You. I should’ve figured your for a Garner type of guy.”

“What’s wrong with Garner?”

“He’s a wuss. Sort of femmy.”

“James Garner is sort of femmy?”

“Yeah. He’s always whining and bitching. You know, like a woman. I’m more of a Clint Eastwood fan myself.”

Ralph and Tom, in a what-do-we-have-to-lose way, decide to take the law into their own hands and improve the world a little bit with what time they have left. Author Ed Gorman wrote the story as “the result of sitting in chemo rooms for the past nine years dealing with [my] multiple myeloma.” Gorman captures the idea that for those dealing with chronic or terminal illness, sometimes a little empathy, a little recognition of the trials of others, goes a long way.

My copy courtesy of the publisher via netgalley and read on the kindle.

Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

“When you went to Florida, you took your fishing rod. For Manhattan, a rod of a different kind was called for.”

American crime author, Mickey Spillane created his iconic fictional flawed hero, Mike Hammer decades ago, and it’s nothing short of fantastic to see Hammer back, badder than ever, for this 2011 release. Over the years, Spillane produced a series of books featuring Hammer and his faithful sidekick, his long-term loyal secretary and lover, Velda. Many of these books made it to film (I, The Jury, My Gun is Quick, Kiss Me Deadly, The Girl Hunters just to name a few). When Spillane died in 2006, it seemed as though Hammer would die with him, but Spillane left several unfinished manuscripts behind, and in the week before his death he told his wife:

“When I’m gone, there’s going to be a treasure hunt around here. Take everything you find and give it to Max–he’ll know what to do with it.”

The ‘Max’ referred to by Spillane is another giant of American crime fiction, Max Allan Collins. Collins is the creator of a dazzling number of crime series featuring some marvellous characters including Eliot Ness, Dick Tracy, and my personal favourite, Quarry. If none of these sound familiar to you, try the film Road to Perdition based on the author’s book. In my opinion, Collins is Spillane’s natural successor in the world of American crime writing. Clearly Spillane saw Collins in that light, and trusted his abilities enough to leave him the incredible legacy of a bunch of unfinished manuscripts–manuscripts other writers (and many publishers) would kill to get their hands on. Max Allan Collins, by the way, was a long-term fan of Spillane’s and the two men later became friends.

This brings me back to Kiss Her Goodbye–the latest of Spillane’s manuscripts to make publication through Max’s creativity and understanding of just what Spillane was all about. Kiss Her Goodbye follows Dead Street, The Goliath Bone (Spillane was working on this novel right before his death), and The Big Bang–all Spillane/Collins collaborations. Hard Case Crime will publish The Consummata later this year (and you bet I’ll be reading it), and for lucky fans there may be more to come.

Spillane’s Kiss Her Goodbye came to Max as “plot, character notes, as well as a shorter false start.” Max eventually “combined, shaped, and expanded” two “partial manuscripts” into Kiss Her Goodbye. The result is a kick-ass, violent, Hammer novel which will make one of my top reads of 2011.

Kiss her Goodbye finds Hammer aging, recuperating, and very possibly mellowing in the Florida sunshine. It’s been about a year since the mob shoot-out that left Hammer badly wounded, but at least he was better off than his enemy, psychotic gangster, Sal Bonetti. Initially not expected to survive, Hammer’s recuperation has been long and painful, and even now he’s not what he once was.  

Hammer receives a phone call from New York homicide cop, Captain Bill Chambers that Hammer’s old mentor, retired cop Bill Doolan is dead. The official version is that Doolan, suffering from terminal cancer, has committed suicide, but Hammer doesn’t swallow that line. He flies to New York and begins digging into the circumstances of Doolan’s death. While it appears to be a clear-cut case of suicide, Hammer sniffs a few details that don’t add up. And then there’s every indication that Doolan was working on something just before he died….

When Hammer first arrives back in New York, he’s reluctant to be there, reluctant to be back in his old killing grounds and as far as New York’s concerned, he’s ready to “kiss her goodbye.” In spite of the fact that he’s recognised everywhere he goes, and that he’s such a New York fixture that Cohen’s Deli even names a sandwich after him (The Mike Hammer mile-high sandwich), Hammer isn’t happy to be back:

Now it was the city’s turn to pass in review and it did a lousy job. Nothing had changed. No sudden sense of deja vu–the smells were the same, the noise still grating, the people out there looking and waiting but never seeing anything at all. If they did, they sure as hell didn’t let anyone know about it.

While New York is essentially the same, Hammer isn’t. He suffers from aches and pains and still has a piece of a bullet lodged in his buttocks. Initially, he isn’t interested in returning to the world of New York crime: 

I’m not in it any more. I haven’t the slightest faintest fucking desire to get wrapped up in that bundle of bullshit again. I’ve done it, it’s past me. I’m retired.

For an example of the genre, it really doesn’t get any better than Kiss Her Goodbye. This explosive PI crime novel is firmly rooted in pulp, and while the story begins with a damaged Hammer, once he’s back in New York where he belongs, he gradually moves from alienation to thinking that  “I was getting the feeling that I was back in my own ballpark again.” He morphs from sleepy, invalided semi-retirement, aches and pains and pill-popping to hair-trigger, violent action. He’s a virtual killing machine.

Since this is a Hammer novel, there are some beautiful babes and also, believe it or not, some humour, Hammer style. As Pat tells Hammer:

As I recall, killing people and banging dames is where you excel, and sometimes there’s a blurring between the lines.

The women in Hammer’s life are a study in contrasts: there’s Chrome, a sultry South American singer who has a permanent gig at Club 52–the go-to-destination for coke and roman-style orgies, and there’s also the new assistant DA, shapely Angela Marshall:

She looked like a schoolteacher you were really afraid of and also wanted to jump.

While power-suited Angela sees Hammer as some sort of male anachronism, there’s a chemistry between the two:

To you,” I said, “I’m an exercise. A far-out, way-out exercise to test your inherent abilities and your well-honed skills. Until now, everything has gone your way, because you have that glossiness beautiful girls get on their way to being women–that smooth surface that makes guys slide right off them. But someplace, way back, somebody smart warned you to watch out for a guy who had sandpaper on his hands, and who wouldn’t slide off at all. You never thought you’d need that kind of guy, but baby, you do now.”

Hammer isn’t exactly what you’d call gallant with the women in his life. He’s too cynical and grounded in jaded realism for roses and chocolates:

Breakfast with a real doll can be damn exciting. They’re awake, showered, and manicured, and all the weapons are pointed right at whatever chump is dumb enough to be sitting across from them. To such dolls, the guy on the other end of the fork is the big, ripe, plum ready for the plucking, because that world of economic dominance he dwells in, whatever male aggression he possesses, are overshadowed by the two most basic hungers.

And finally, lest I give the wrong impression that the novel floats on action alone, there are some beautiful atmospheric passages:

Down on the street, the rain had let up. But a low rumble of thunder echoed across the city. There was an occasional dull glaze of cloud-hidden lightning in the south, and when the wind gusted past, I could smell more rain coming–the kind that was held above the buildings until it was soaked with debris and dust, and when it came down, it wouldn’t be a cleansing rain at all.

Hammer, back in New York, where he belongs…

My copy of Kiss Her Goodbye came courtesy of the publisher via netgalley

Build My Gallows High by Geoffrey Homes

“Money was something you could hold and count. Love? Hell, you could pick that up in a Mexican cafe when you needed it.”

If you read this blog, then you know that I am deranged when it comes to noir, and you’ll also know that I have this fixation on books made into film. So it shouldn’t come as a great shock that I am about to enthuse about a fantastic noir book Build My Gallows High by Geoffrey Homes. If the title does not sound familiar, then try Out of the Past. That’s the film version–starring the iconic Robert Mitchum as the main character in this doom-ridden tale of past sins, double-crossing rotten dames, greed and lust. Yes all the elements of a superb noir tale are here in Build My Gallows  High–a truly exceptional novel, published in 1946. So if you’re a noir fan, do yourself a favour and get a copy of this dark tale. You’ll thank me.

The novel opens with a sort of sticky sweetness that had me wondering whether or not I’d wasted my hard-earned cash, and yet at the same time, the cover photo held a certain dark promise. So I pushed on past the first initial pages which describe a gooey meeting between twenty-year-old Ann and forty-two-year-old “beat up around the edges” Red Bailey.

But all is not as it appears. Red Bailey, whose real name is Red Markham, is a man with a past. He’s the owner of the One Stop Service Station in Bridgeport–a small Northern California town located in the middle of nowhere. He’s lived in Bridgeport for years, and while he’s established a quiet life there, part of him always knew that the sins of the past would have to be paid for. The past arrives in the form of an unpleasant gun-toting hood named Stefanos who orders Red to accompany him to a casino in neighbouring Nevada.

Here Red meets casino owner, retired police chief, Guy Parker. As the two men hand a round of cards, Parker tell Red he wants to hire him for a job:

‘A pushover.’ Guy repeated. ‘Trip to New York. All expenses and five grand. You can’t kiss that off.’

‘Can’t I?’ Red fiddled with the cards waiting. He didn’t like the set-up, didn’t like it at all. Guy Parker didn’t play unless the deck was stacked.

Red initially refuses the job. He doesn’t want to get involved, but the problem is that he’s already involved, up to his neck. In order to ‘persuade’ Red, Parker introduces his woman, Mumsie McGonigle. Mumsie and Red have a history together.

About 11 years previously, Red was working in New York as a partner in a PI agency. He was hired by gangster, Walt Sterling to track down his girlfriend, Mumsie, who disappeared after shooting him and stealing $56,000. Red tracked Mumsie down to Acapulco. He was supposed to bring her and the money back to Sterling. But he didn’t, and the case ended with Red falling for a double-crossing dame and committing murder along the way.

So here’s Red, 11 years later, blackmailed into taking the job from Parker, Mumsie’s latest keeper. Bailey travels to New York suspecting that he’s about to be set up, but the problem is he doesn’t know just which direction the double-cross is coming from….

The novel follows Red in New York and Bridgeport trying to anticipate and dodge the double-cross while he recalls how he met Mumsie in the first place. Red is motivated to try and clear his past as he is now in love with Ann, the innocent young girl he leaves behind in Bridgeport. He imagines that if he weathers this double-cross or somehow evens the score, that’ll he will be free to move forward with a new life. In many ways he’s been in limbo for the past 11 years, waiting for this moment.

At 153 pages this is a slim but rich read full of great quotes and fantastic noir moments. At the heart of this dark tale are the moral choices made by Red–a man whose poor decisions have led to a one-way ticket to his doom. In one fascinating scene, Jim Caldwell, a rival for Ann’s affection is faced with a moral decision. The choice he makes, which is not self-serving, exemplifies why he isn’t a noir anti-hero.

The story also contrasts the two worlds of damp, claustrophobic New York–its brutal gangsters, crooked lawyers, and hard-working cabbies with the natural, open beauty of Bridgeport. While Mumsie and New Yorker, Meta Carson are women who seem created out of the shady environments in which they operate, Ann, however, springs from the good soil of Bridgeport.

In some ways, Red is tired of waiting for his past to catch up with him, and as a result part of him doesn’t fight his fate. At times he’s an onlooker to his own life with a vague curiosity to discover just how he is going to be double-crossed:

A tug grunted by, pushing a couple of barges loaded with freight cars. Over Brooklyn a searchlight stabbed with its finger at a cloud, found what it was looking for and went out. Red stood up. He was tired of answering questions. He was tired of asking himself questions. What was going to happen would happen and that was that. When you came right down to it, it didn’t matter much. It really didn’t matter at all. Even if he was a worthy citizen full of good deeds and honors, it wouldn’t matter.

And what about Mumsie, a femme fatale who shoots one lover and double crosses a few others? All the men in her life know that she’s trouble, but they just can’t resist her. Here’s Red remembering Mumsie:

At first he hadn’t loved her. Those weeks in Acapulco–the nights hot and still until a morning wind came along, the days bright with Mexican voices that were like cricket songs–he had wanted her as he wanted no other woman in his life. But he saw the imperfections–a smallness, a stinginess, a tendency to give grudgingly or not at all of everything but her body.

It was on the boat wallowing amiably north that he had stopped seeing clearly. Mumsie became something he made up–not a beautiful womam who put a slug in Whit Sterling’s belly. It had taken a good kick in the teeth to bring the true picture into focus.

The Old Maid by Edith Wharton

Several times in 2010 I told myself I’d get back to Edith Wharton. I didn’t. But after writing my Best of 2010 list, I decided it was about time I got back to the books and authors I’d intended to revisit. That’s the good thing about compiling a list; it made me face all the reading I didn’t do.

So back to Edith Wharton–one of my favourite American authors. I’ve read her biggies: Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, and a couple of others–including The Reef. It was time for something else, and I selected The Old Maid. Part of this selection rested on the 1939 Bette Davis film. I decided to read the book and then follow-up immediately with Bette. A good plan as it turns out.

The Old Maid is part of a series of four novellas intended by Wharton to depict Old New York in various decades: False Dawn (the 1840s), The Old Maid (the 1850s), The Spark (the 1860s), and New Year’s Day (the 1870s). Collectively these four novellas depict the codes and customs of New York society; these four novellas were published as  Old New York in 1924, but The Old Maid was written in 1921 and serialized in 1922. If you’ve read Edith Wharton before, you are familiar with the manner in which she places the individual in society–with characters sometimes trying to break the rules of society such as Countess Olenska in The Age of Innocence, or The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart–a spectator to the society she loathes and yet strives to be a part of. Thus in Wharton’s tales, what is often at stake is individualism vs. society. Perhaps that explains why The Custom of the Country’s opportunistic Undine Spragg is my all-time favourite Wharton female character.

The Old Maid is not an exception to Wharton’s premise–that society seems to be an organic being that will always further its own agenda with its members ready to winnow out the rebels for the collective good of society. The rebel in The Old Maid isn’t someone who fights against society’s rules, but rather someone who falls foul of socially acceptable behaviour and pays for it for the rest of her life.

The story opens with an introduction to the best families of New York society–in particular, the boringly respectable Ralstons:

In the old New York of the ‘thirties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. of these were the Ralstons. The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders, and shipchandlers. Those well-fed, slow-moving people, who seemed irritable any dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound.

A beautiful paragraph to start off a marvellous story. Then we are introduced to Delia Ralston née Lovell, “one of the handsomest and most popular young matrons.” Her self-satisfaction at her marriage to Jim Ralston, her pride in her beautiful home and her 2 perfect children is only occasionally troubled by “secret questioning” of the choices she made. Delia was once terribly in love with Clem Spender– “tolerant, reckless, indifferent to consequences,” he’s an unreliable, unpredictable member of New York society, so it’s probably a good thing he left and now lives permanently in Europe as an artist.

Delia’s peace of mind is shattered when her cousin, Charlotte Lovell begs for help. Charlotte is about to make an excellent, unexpected match with Jim Ralston’s cousin Joe.  Joe is Charlotte’s long-term suitor, but the courtship appeared to end when Charlotte was sent away for her health a few years before. She seemed relegated to the colourless life of spinsterhood, and this role is underscored by Charlotte’s devotion to a gaggle of poor children she tends in an old stable. Charlotte is particularly devoted to one orphan in particular, Clementina.

With the upcoming wedding, Joe Ralston asks his bride-to-be, Charlotte to abandon the children for fear of contagion. In desperation, Charlotte goes to Delia, and confessing that Clementina is her illegitimate baby, begs for Delia’s help and intervention.

That’s the opening premise of the story, and then the rest of the novella is concerned with the fallout: the relationships between Delia, Charlotte and Clementina.

The film version is moved ahead to the 1860s, and the Civil War plays a role in sanitizing some of the darker elements of Wharton’s tale. Clem Spender is portrayed as an aggrieved, depressed and rejected lover who impulsively enlists in the Union Army and is subsequently killed, and this death makes him a dead hero and takes away some awkward questions. I prefer Wharton’s byline: painful rehabilitation of Clem by a persistent, annoying relative. The film is structured around three weddings–beginning with Delia’s wedding to Jim Ralston, Charlotte’s wedding to Joe Ralston, and finally Clementina’s wedding.

The film shows Delia and Charlotte in conflict with each other over possession of Clementina (a peevish brat in the film version), and misses Wharton’s delicate positioning of society within the narrative. Whereas Charlotte (played by Bette Davis) comes out as the heroine–maligned and misjudged by all, in the novel Wharton seems to say that Delia’s actions are equally brave. By standing by Charlotte, Delia (whatever her motives are) also pays a price. The rest of New York society considers her a little eccentric, and eventually, by her later actions, Delia alienates her two children.

Wharton’s novella The Old Maid isn’t the story of two women who struggle for the love of a daughter, but the story of two women who want to exist within their society while breaking the rules of good conduct, and as such their choices are limited. Delia is at first motivated by her sense of what’s right and proper; she’s outraged and shocked by Charlotte’s secret, and yet she doesn’t thrown Charlotte to the wolves; she concocts a way for Charlotte and Clementina to stay together within the society they strive to remain a part of:

Social tolerance was not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class, they simply bowed to the ineluctable.

The film is well-worth catching–not just for the story and the excellent acting, but for an exercise in contrast.