The Magician’s Wife by James M. Cain

While James M. Cain will always be remembered for Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, there are quite a few lesser-known works well worth reading. Last year, Hard Case Crime published a lost Cain novel, The Cocktail Waitress, and now Mysterious Press has resurrected a number of obscure Cain titles:

• Sinful Woman
• Root of His Evil
• Galatea
• Mignon
• Jealous Woman
• Rainbow’s End
• The Institute
• Cloud Nine
• The Enchanted Isle
• The Moth
• The Magician’s Wife

Most of these titles have been out-of-print, and these novels are now available in e-format for the first time.

The Magician’s Wife opens with Clay Lockwood, the confident, affluent owner of Grants, a meat-packing business, stopping at Portico, a Maryland branch of a chain of restaurants. While he appears to be just another customer, he’s there thanks to a lucrative deal selling corned beef to the Portico chain and wants to make sure that the cooks handle the pre-cooked meat correctly. Lockwood notices one of the waitresses, a very attractive woman named Sally Alexis, and they square off in a meeting laced with attraction, desire, and sexual innuendo. Since this is noir fiction, it should come as no surprise that Sally and Lockwood begin a torrid, explosive affair that night. One night in the sack, and Lockwood is ready to call the preacher to seal the deal. But there’s a hitch: Sally is married and has a small child. Her husband, a small-time magician, has made his current stage assistant his latest mistress, and the marriage has been sour for some time.

Since Lockwood is a very affluent man with all the material things in life that he wants, he’s more than ready for Sally to divorce her deadbeat husband, take her kid and move in to his swanky apartment with him. Permanently. But Sally isn’t so hot on the idea. See there’s the matter of a few million dollars, and a couple of bodies are in the way of Sally and the money that she thinks is rightfully hers….

It showed through, like the blue on a corpse’s fingernails, what she was hoping for. What she means to do, perhaps. If she gets help.

Sally is, of course, a classic noir femme fatale–sexy, manipulative, cunning, and she’s also more than a little unhinged. Not that that makes her any less attractive to Lockwood, who has a real problem when it comes to dealing with women. When Sally goes too far one evening, Lockwood decides to move on to calmer pastures. Unfortunately, once Sally has her teeth in a man, she doesn’t let go easily.

The Magician’s Wife is not Cain’s finest work, so I don’t want to claim that, but as a Cain fan, it was one of those books I couldn’t pass up. One of the enjoyable aspects of the story is the way in which Cain makes it clear that a femme fatale may be dangerous, explosive and destructive, but all those negative qualities are magnified when she hooks up with a malleable man with weak morality or issues of one sort or another. Lockwood is a case in point. Any sane man would run from Sally’s kind of trouble, but Lockwood’s ego gets in the way–for a while at least. And it’s perfect that Cain created Lockwood as the owner of the meat-packing plant. There’s something not quite healthy about his carnivorous appetite. He aggressively seeks out contracts for meat, and he’s equally aggressive in his lustful approaches to Sally–even though his common sense tells him to end the relationship.

That vanity was his trouble, inflamed by obsessive desire; that was his great source of strength, the element in his nature that drove him ahead in business, riding all the obstacles down, could also be his weakness; that this giddy twin sister of pride could have a soft underbelly, loving praise above everything else, especially this girl’s praise, and dreading her phony scorn.

Cain creates an interesting cast of characters for this book; there’s Sally’s husband The Great Alexis aka Alec Gorsuch, the heir to the Gorsuch fortune who works as a two-bit magician at the Lilac Flamingo and his cheap tarty assistant, Busty Buster. There’s also Sally’s mother, artist Grace Simone. I can’t give away too much of the plot here, but there’s a development between Lockwood and Grace Simone that didn’t quite gel for me, but after finishing the book and chewing the story over, I came to the conclusion that the ultimate femme fatale is arguably one who comes in disguise. I had to reread the last line several times and ask myself who got what they wanted in the end….

Review copy

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

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

“From now on, you’re going to wear mink, baby.”

No Orchids for Miss Blandish  (1939) by James Hadley Chase has been on the reading radar for some time. I saw the film version in 2010 and then Emma, from Book Around the Corner reviewed the book here. After seeing the film version, and reading the controversy about the book, I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. The book is far darker, far more unpleasant, so if you like your crime books bleak, nasty and downright unsavoury, then you might want to check out No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

The story begins with a couple of cheap crooks, Bailey and Old Sam, stopping at a gas station on the way to Kansas City. Old Sam is sleeping, so Bailey, worried about money and even contemplating robbing a bank if things don’t look up soon, steps inside the diner for a Scotch. Bailey and Old Sam form an ad-hoc gang with a sleaze ball named Riley as the brains of the operation. It’s slim pickings for these trio of bottom-feeders. The lucrative jobs are too big and complex for their slipshod 3 man operation, and that leave the petty jobs that don’t yield much. It seems to be a lucky break when tipster fat Heinie, a “leg man for a society rag that ran blackmail on the side” waddles into the diner and mentions that multi millionaire Blandish is throwing a party for his daughter’s 24th birthday. Her gift will be the family diamonds and after the party at the Blandish mansion, she’ll move on to the Golden Slipper nightclub with her boyfriend, Jerry MacGowan. Bailey keys onto the fact that the couple and the diamond necklace will be alone and vulnerable. Heinie warns him off any thoughts of knocking off the necklace as Bailey and Riley ”aren’t big enough to handle a job like that.”  But to Bailey, the job sounds like a cinch: Waylay a society dame and her cream puff escort then grab the diamonds. Simple.

Bailey takes the idea to Riley, the head of the gang, and a man in Bailey’s opinion who spends “too much time in the sack with that broad of his,” a cheap, mouthy striptease dancer named Anna. The plan is to go to The Golden Slipper while Miss Blandish is slumming and then follow the couple, waylaying them along the route, and making a fast smash and grab. But the plan goes wrong and morphs into a kidnapping, and then bad luck sends members of the vicious Grisson gang into their path….

The Grisson gang, considered by other crooks as “good third-raters,“ is led by Ma Grisson–a tough as nails, “big, grossly fat and lumpy“  woman  who sounds as clever, mean and evil as the FBI fabricated-for-the-media version of Ma Barker. (This can’t be coincidence as the author, James Hadley Chase was supposedly influenced by the tale of the Barker Gang when he wrote No Orchids for Miss Blandish.) Ma Grisson sees the Blandish heiress as means of becoming the “richest, the most powerful, and the most wanted public enemies of Kansas City.” In other words, the Blandish girl is a ticket out of the small-time, and with a prize like that Ma Grisson is willing to take some risks.

Some of the novel includes the dynamics between the various gang members. There’s an unlicensed alcoholic doctor, “Doc” who comes in handy when the boys need stitching up, Eddie who “wouldn’t have been bad looking, but” for the cast in his eye, Flynn, Woppy and finally Ma’s son, the dysfunctional, psychotic, and none too clean Slim Grisson, the man with a taste for knives.

He was tall, reedy and pasty-faced. His loose, half-open mouth, his vacant, glassy eyes made him look idiotic, but a ruthless, inhuman spirit hid behind the idiot’s mask.

Slim Grisson’s background was typical of a pathological killer. He had always been lazy at school, refusing to take the least interest in book work. He began early to want money. He was sadistic and several times had been caught torturing animals. By the time he was eighteen, he had begun to develop homicidal tendencies. By then, his mental equipment had degenerated. There were times when he would be normal to the point of being quick-witted, but most times he behaved like an idiot.

Slim is barely held in check by his mother who “refused to believe that there was anything wrong with him.” So there’s an inherent, festering sore in the gang’s power structure: Slim is out-of-control and yet his mother refuses to reign him in. It’s with the introduction of Miss Blandish into the equation that the power balance within the gang changes.

More gangs have come to grief through a woman than through the cops.

The novel’s violence is swift, merciless and sadistic. The 1948 film version of the novel played like some sort of deranged love story, and that glamoured up what’s really at play here. After all, there are some things worse than death….

James Hadley Chase (real name René Brabazon Raymond) was British but chose to set this, his first novel in America, a country he’d yet to visit. Now to the question of versions:  Chase revised the novel in 1961, and I have two versions: a kindle version and a print version which are quite different. The kindle version, originally from Harlequin books, refers to television and Slim being a television addict (“He never grew tired of watching the moving pictures on the twenty-one inch screen.“) The kindle version says 1939 on the front but the Harlequin edition was published in 1951.  The out-of-place reference to televisions in the 1930s is absent in my Bruin Crimeworks edition, and the Amazon description of this book says it’s the 1961 updated version, but inside the book there’s a page “note to the reader“ which says that this version is “yet a further update” to the 1961 update. So how many versions are there?

The revised print version from Bruin Crimeworks is even nastier (read “embellished,” and here’s just a taste–a scene which isn’t so detailed in the earlier kindle version. BTW, I blotted out the victim’s name in order to not spoil the plot suspense for potential readers:

“I’m giving it to you there,” Slim said, pricking the shuddering flesh with his knife. “Right in the guts, *****, and you’re going to take a mighty long time to croak. I know just where to stick you.”

“Come on, Slim! You wouldn’t do that to me. I’m a stand up guy, don’t I keep telling you? You know me. You ain’t gonna cut me like that. No! Slim! …No!… For Christ’s sake…Jesus, God…Don’t do me, Slim!”

Slim, still grinning, held the knife-point just below *****’s navel and put his weight on the handle. The knife went in slowly as if it were going into butter. ***** drew his lips back. His mouth opened. There was a long hiss of expelled breath as he stood there. Tears sprang from his eyes. Slim stepped back, leaving the black hilt of the knife growing out of ***** like a horrible malformation. ***** began to give low, quavering cries. His knees were buckling but the cord held him up so that the blade slowly cut deeper inside him.

Slim sat on the grass a few feet away and gave himself a cigarette. He pushed his hat over his eyes and squinted at *****.

“Take your time, Pal. We ain’t in a hurry.” He gave him a crooked smile as his fingers traced the sky. “Ain’t them clouds pretty?”

And here’s the same scene in the kindle version:

Slim looked over at ***** who shut his eyes. A horrible croaking sound came from him. Slim cleaned his knife by driving it into the ground. The he straightened.

“*****…” he said softly.

****** opened his eyes.

“Don’t kill me, Slim.” he panted. “Gimme a break! Don’t kill me!”

Slim grinned. The moving slowly through the patch of sunlight, he approached the cringing man.

The book has been made into two film versions: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) and The Grissom Gang (1971). Pick your poison.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich

In the excellent, perceptive introduction to Cornell Woolrich’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945), Woolrich’s biographer, Francis Nevins gives an overview of the author’s life and career. There are some  great quotes about Woolrich’s work here, but I can’t include them all, so here’s just one:

All we can do about this nightmare world is to create, if we can, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while lovers go on living, and Woolrich is a master of portraying the corrosion of a relationship. Although he often wrote about the horrors both love and lovelessness can inspire, there are very few irredeemably evil characters in his stories. For if one loves or needs love, or is at the brink of destruction, Woolrich identifies with that person no matter how dark his or her dark side.

Nevins explains that although Woolrich (1903-68) “knew overwhelming financial and critical success [but] his life remained a wretched mess.” Woolrich, a homosexual who tried marriage once, lived with his mother for a great deal of his life, but after her death in 1957, he was a recluse–miserable from the sounds of it–while he struggled with diabetes and alcoholism. Woolrich also seems to have a death obsession. Perhaps that’s not quite the right term I’m looking for, but certainly he had an awareness that death waits in the wings for all of us, and that life, to a great extent is an attempt to avoid or deny the inevitable.  I think that’s a fairly normal realisation for those who live with chronic disease, but Woolrich seemed to be aware of the inescapable nature of death even as a child, and that knowledge of imminent death seems to have found its way into Night Has a Thousand Eyes–a story in which an obsession with death so plagues two of the characters that in an attempt to avoid Fate they rush headlong to meet their deaths before Death can come for them.

The story begins with an earnest young New York homicide detective named Tom Shawn walking along the river as he does every night after work:

You can’t dream in a bus, with your fellows all around you. And so-every night he walked along the river, going home. Every night about one, a little after. Anything you keep doing like that, if you keep doing it long enough, suddenly one time something happens. Something that counts, something that matters, something that changes the whole rest of your life. And you forget all the other times that went before it, and just remember that once.

Woolrich sets up his story immediately with the idea of permanence, predictability and routine, and this is a brilliant move as these elements of life are those about to be challenged and even, perhaps, eradicated by Fate.

Tom is a good, honest, and hard-working young man who is grounded in reality. That night in the park, he comes across some money discarded on the ground. Once again, character is fate. A lesser man would pocket the money and chalk the find up to luck, but Tom is curious. He follows a money trail which leads to an expensive handbag and a diamond wristwatch, and eventually he finds Jean, a distressed, wealthy young woman, beautiful, of course, who is about to commit suicide. He saves the woman, and in the emotional aftermath, she tells a strange tale involving her father.

Jean Reid and her debonair, handsome father are extremely wealthy New Yorkers who lead an enviable life, but all that ‘good fortune’ is apparently swept away when psychic predictions surrounding the Reids begin to come horribly true. After Mr. Reid’s death is predicted, he becomes fixated on the date. Paralyzed with fear, he loses all his confidence, undergoes a frightening personality change, and holed up in his mansion, he can no longer function.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes is an iconic tale which deals with issues of Fate and Predestination. In creating the Reids, Woolrich offers us two characters who have the best that life has to offer: looks, confidence, money, power, intelligence and good health. The Reids are the sort of people who make their own destinies–or so they think. When confronted with a power that seems to erode their worldly position, Jean and her father are rendered helpless for the first time in their lives. They are reduced to the same sort of powerlessness felt by their impoverished, plain, dull and worn-out maid, and suddenly, money and prestige mean nothing. It’s not simply that Mr. Reid is terrified of his own death (and that is definitely his ostensible, palatable fear), but it’s also that their entire value system no longer exists. Their money or connections cannot help them avoid the horrible Fate predicted for Mr. Reid by a shady psychic, and there’s the subtle issue of privilege bowing to a greater power underlying the tale. The novel doesn’t spend a great deal of time on character–although many of the secondary characters are great sideshow creations. The psychic is a particularly interesting character as with his sort of gift, you’d expect some sort of enlightened individual, but when Woolrich pulls back the layers of deceit on this character, we find a shrivelled, unpleasant, bitter little man. Primarily, however, this is a plot-driven story which builds with incredible tension that keeps this story rolling to the last page. Unlike Black Wings Has My Angel, Night Has a Thousand Eyes has an archaic feel which grounds the novel firmly in its times.

I recognized that the focus of this pall of fear and grief that hung over me was not the catastrophe itself or even the loss that it had wrought; it was the fact of having been forewarned against it. There was a curious sort of clammy terror in that, there was horror, there was-I don’t know what. There was a nightmare feeling heavy upon me, and not even the fact that the destructive climax was already past and no longer still ahead could lessen it any.

Review copy from Open Road Media

The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain

“Not every man’s death is a crime.”

It’s the sort of scenario we readers dream of … a “lost” novel found and brought to publication, but that is exactly what happened with The Cocktail Waitress, the “Lost Final” novel by James M. Cain. Published by Hard Case Crime, the novel includes an afterword by Charles Ardai in which he describes how he found the novel and the role of Max Allan Collins in the hunt. Crime fans owe a huge debt to Charles and Max for their continued contributions to the crime genre.

The Cocktail Waitress is narrated by Joan Medford, a shapely young “corn-husk blonde,” widow, and we meet her on the day of her husband’s funeral which happens to be the same day she lands a job as a cocktail waitress. Joan needs this job badly as she has no money, her Hyattsville house in a suburb of Washington DC is on the brink of foreclosure, and the utilities have been disconnected. Joan’s marriage to Ron wasn’t happy, and their life together ended when a very drunk Ron drove the car at 2 in the morning and met his death in a fatal crash.  

Things look bleak for Joan. Her hostile, barren, accusatory sister-in-law, Ethel, has agreed to take Joan’s small son, Tad, until Joan gets on her feet, but Joan knows that Ethel considers her an unfit mother and that’s she’s looking for any excuse to keep Tad permanently. But when good things happen to Joan, they happen fast. Although she has no experience, thanks to police sergeant Young, she lands a job at the Garden of Roses. So what if she has to wear a skimpy outfit? So what if the male customers think that Joan sells something on the side? Joan makes it clear that she’s not for sale. Well at least she’s not for sale unless she gets that flashy diamond hardware, third finger, left hand.

It’s on the day of her husband’s funeral, the first day on her new job as a cocktail waitress, that Joan meets the two men who play significant roles in the next stage of her life: Tom, the studly driver from the undertakers (who insists that Joan “blew him a kiss,” as he left her at her doorstep after the funeral), and the very wealthy Earl K. White–an older man who suffers from a touchy case of angina….

Joan is a very interesting, strange character. We know little of her past, but some facts roll out as the story unfolds.  She’s estranged from her family, and we learn from Joan “my mother hated me and my father cut me off.” Joan has to fight to survive, and while she tells her story in a seemingly straight-forward fashion, can we believe her version of events?

Did I put an extra sway in my step as I walked away, to make my hips jog and my bottom twitch? I may have. I know I unbuttoned an extra button on my blouse before turning around, tray in hand.

“Joan, there is something I’m curious to ask you”

I rejoined him at his table, and swapped a full bowl of Fritos for the half-full bowl in front of him. It was no more than I’d done at any of the dozen other tables at the bar. But perhaps I bent slightly lower doing it than was absolutely necessary. “What’s that, Mr. White?”

“Earl, please.”

“I’d feel too familiar.”

“Please.”

“Earl, then.”

“I…”

“What is it? What do you want to ask me?”

“I’m not usually tongue-tied, Joan, I just find myself somewhat distracted at the moment.”
I smiled and lowered my gaze, and said softly: “Pleasantly, I hope?”
“Most pleasantly.”

“But all the same, I don’t want to make it hard for us to have a conversation, Mr. –Earl.” I fastened up the lowest open button on my blouse. “Better?” 

That quote is a good example of the author’s style–no flashy prose style & everything seems fairly straightforward. The kicker to this novel is that there’s more than one way to read The Cocktail Waitress. You can read it straight, and believe every word that comes out of Joan’s somewhat prim and proper mouth, or you can start to question her as an unreliable narrator. If you take the first road, you’re going to read a meat-and-potatoes story, nothing fancy here. But, if you take the second facta non verba approach, then the novel’s power and intelligence hit you after you turn the last page, and slowly you’ll find yourself unravelling Joan’s narration with chilling results. There were a couple of times that Joan chose actions that seemed out of character but by the story’s conclusions, it all comes together in a sinister sort of way.

According to the afterword, Cain struggled with this novel for some time, and Charles Ardai, editor and founder of Hard Case Crime discusses finding the manuscript, its various drafts, and the way Cain experimented with various narrative voices. Cain took a chance writing The Cocktail Waitress through Joan’s voice, but its very boldness makes for a bigger payoff.

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette

“It was the rich that interested her, and she went only where there was money.”

Fatale is the third crime novel I’ve read by French author Jean-Patrick Manchette, and I’d rank it above  The Prone Gunman and below 3 To Kill. This copy, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, is one of New York Review Books Classics–a publisher who consistently brings excellent titles to the market.

Fatale is a bit of a switch as its protagonist is female, a professional killer named Aimée. That may or may not be her real name as she uses several throughout the course of this short novel. We know just what she’s capable of when, on the second page, she blasts a man with a shotgun. After completing her kill, she quietly and quickly leaves town on a train, using the privacy of a railway carriage to metamorphosize into her next act when she pops up in the dreary little town of Bléville. Here she poses as an affluent young widow interested in purchasing a large local property from the pompous realtor, Lindquist. Within hours she manages to worm her way into Bléville’s ‘best’ society. With her looks and her money, all doors open to her.

Invited to whist games, the opening of the fish market, cocktail parties, a baptism and to other small-town social events, it takes Aimée no time at all to gather information and to sniff out the local dirt as she works out who is willing to pay for a contract-killer-for-hire. She seems to have landed in a viper’s nest of intrigue, adultery, and shady business deals. The town has a very clear social stratification with the plebs as a large, faceless mass who go about their work and their daily lives minding their own business. It’s the upper crusties that interest Aimée.

There’s only one person of any substance who appears to exist outside of the town’s social clique and that’s Baron Jules. He is either an eccentric or a lunatic (depending on your goodwill), and he admits that he’s been spying on the residents and keeping records of their activities for decades. This makes him a very dangerous man. Baron Jules has just been released from some sort of clinic, and he’s intent on annoying the town’s wealthy citizens. The Baron makes an unwelcome appearance at the opening of the fish market, upsetting the Tobies–the pharmacist and his wife, and the owners of the bookshop, the Rougneux.

The realtor broke off. He was staring at something that his interlocutors could not see, somewhere in the crowd. He pursed his lips.

“Shit!” he exclaimed, and coming from him the profanity was startling. “Shit! That lunatic!”

The Rougneux, the Tobies, and senior manager Moutet all turned around at his words and scrutinized the crowd. Their attitudes bespoke anxiety and disgust. Aimée turned around too, her eyebrows slightly raised, and surveyed the gathering without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Sinistrat was all smiles. He lit a Craven A with a Zippo lighter.

“I don’t see anything,” said Madame Rougneux.

“No! No!!” responded Lindquist. “He was there–outside.”

“I don’t see him.”

“He’s not there now. He must have gone off to plan more mischief.”

“It’s simply outrageous,” said Rougneux. “I don’t understand how they could have let him out. Those doctors are idiots. Their clinics are a joke.” He spluttered after every sentence. He seemed mean, and pleased with himself.

“They are all drug addicts, leftists, and that sort of thing,” said Tobie.

“Next time they ought to put him in an asylum,” said Mme Tobie.

“Be that as it may,” said Sinistrat, “don’t count on me to have him locked up.”

Later the realtor Lindquist, who already counts Aimée as someone who can be trusted for the solidarity of class interests notes that the local doctor, Sinistrat, has “nerve” showing up at the fish market opening. According to Lindquist, Sinistrat is a “sort of nihilist” who “votes for that Trotskyite Krivine.” Again this establishes the stratification of Bléville’s society: the masses on the bottom, and then the fiercely maintained layers of the bourgeoisie. Funnily enough while the new fish market is supposed to be “capable of toppling the barriers of social class,” the inauguration event seems designed to reinforce boundaries. This is just one of many examples of bourgeoise double-speak found in the novel.

A nod is given to the idea of politics as a meaningless form of expression–rather as one might select one perfume over another. We are told that there are two newspapers in Bléville:

One of them championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology.

Author Jean-Patrick Manchette, who is largely credited with reviving the crime genre in France was an admirer of Guy Debord and Situationist Theory, and we can see both The Society of the Spectacle and its détournement in the way Aimée, an assassin for-hire who appears to operate without an explicit political motive but for money alone, exploits capitalism by executing the wealthy. Capitalism eats itself.

In some ways Aimée seems to have sprung from the society she both feeds off of and destroys–one capitalist at a time. We know little of her past (although some information is revealed about how she got into the biz), and we know little of her motivations. We do, however, see her feeding greedily, and making a mess, as she guzzles on sauerkraut following a kill. Yet before a kill, she’s all business, eating very little, reading crime novels, and taking fencing and martial arts classes. It’s in her relationship with the very possibly insane Baron Jules that Aimée loses her bearings.  Perhaps this is because he blurs the lines of the classes and Aimée is confused by him:

“When I break this decanter of mine,” he said, “I’ll replace it with one with advertising on it.” He held out one of the glasses to Aimée, who reached for it with one hand as she continued toweling her hair with the other. “I am very interested in promotional items and free gifts,” continued the baron. “Also in trash. I have no income, you see, and a man with no income is bound to take a great interest in free gifts and trash.” He took a sip of brandy and clicked his tongue appreciatively. “Given the present state of the world, don’t you know, with the increase of constant capital as compared with variable capital, a whole stratum of the poor is bound to be unemployed and live off free gifts and trash, and occasionally off various government subsidies. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I am not sure,” said Aimée.

There is some dark humour here–some found in the marvellous character of the misanthrope Baron Jules–a man who despises the bourgeoise of his community, but apart from punching out the bishop and urinating in inappropriate places in order to spoil their parties, he seems unsure of how to handle his contempt for the corrupt class he’s a part of. Then there’s the plaque inscribed with the words “Keep Your Town Clean” which seems an ironic call to action for Aimée as this is exactly what she does best. It’s interesting that the title is Fatale rather than Femme Fatale, but then Aimée is disinterested in sex, rebuffing advances and using her gender as a means of disarming both her prey and her clients.

There’s an afterword by Jean Echenoz placed at the end of the book. It’s placed there for a reason, and it’s best read after finishing this slim volume.

Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin

One good reason for readers to blog is to pick up book tips, and this exact scenario occurred recently when I visited Kevin’s blog and noted that no less than two other bloggers: Kim and Max both recommended Michael Dibdin’s Dirty Tricks (and yes it’s been made into a television film!). Kim compared Dirty Tricks to Henry Sutton’s Get Me Out of Here, and since that book was one of my favourite reads of 2011, that sealed the deal.

Dirty Tricks is narrated by a forty-year-old Oxford EFL teacher who pedals his “tenth-hand push-bike” from his shared flat in the slums of East Oxford to his pathetically underpaid job at the Oxford International Language College. It’s here that the narrator meets a married couple, the upwardly mobile and socially pretentious Parsons, accountant Dennis, “a wine bore of stupendous proportions,” and his sexually rapacious, PE teacher wife, Karen–a pencil-thin woman with a “large, predatory mouth, like the front-end grille on a cheap flashy motor.” After feeding Dennis’s wine snobbery, the narrator finds himself invited to a dinner party at the Parsons’ suburban home with the “lumpenbourgeoisie,” and he embarks on a sordid affair with Karen in which the biggest thrill comes not from orgasm but from the thrill of blatant coupling right under Dennis’s nose. After rubbing elbows with members of the consumer-driven middle-class, the narrator gets a taste of the good life, and following a holiday with the Parsons in a villa in the Dordogne, he decides it’s about time he moved up in the world…..

I wanted the lifestyle which other people of my age and education enjoyed but which I had forfeited because of the wayward direction given my life by the humanistic propaganda I was exposed to in my youth.  I didn’t crave fabulous riches or meaningless wealth, I simply wanted my due.

And just how Dibdin’s unnamed sociopathic protagonist decides to get his “due” is the subject of the novel, and since the tale is told by an unreliable narrator of classic proportions who refuses to play by society’s rules, Dirty Tricks is both transgressive and darkly comic.  The opening paragraphs of Dirty Tricks resembles a confession, but it’s not of course; this is a justification:

First of all, let me just say that everything I am going to tell you is the complete and absolute truth. Well yes, I would say that, wouldn’t I? And since I’ve just sworn an oath to this effect, it might seem pointless to offer further assurances, particularly since I can’t back them up. I can’t call witnesses, I can’t produce evidence. All I can do is tell you my story. You’re either going to believe me or you’re not.

Nevertheless, I am going to tell you the truth. Not because I’m incapable of lying. On the contrary, my story is riddled with deceptions, evasions, slanders and falsifications of every kind, as you will see. Nor do I expect you to believe me because my bearing is sincere and my words plausible. Such things might influence the judges of my own country, where people still pretend to believe in the essential niceness of the human race–or at least pretend to pretend.

Thus begins the narrator’s hilarious confessional narrative in which he explains and justifies his actions. He tells us his side of this sordid tale of adultery, murder, and social-climbing while waffling on the precise version of events until he creates one he intends to stick to.  Part of the reason the novel works so well is that all of the characters are unpleasant, and when the homicidal EFL teacher, a seething mass of envy with a self-admitted “yen for married women” is unleashed in suburbia, the results are explosively funny and wicked. Dibdin takes us deftly into the mind of the sociopathic narrator, and here he is applying grandiosity to murder

It is striking that at a time when just about every other human value has been called into question, the value of life is still universally accepted as an absolute. Despite this, I have no qualms about admitting to men of your culture and experience that the demise of Dennis Parsons seemed to me to be jolly desirable.

With this narrator, Dibdin creates an awful human being who’s always full of unpleasant surprises and whose base actions are unspeakably low and self-serving. Now matter how awful the narrator is, I found myself laughing out loud at his twisted, sick thinking. Just when I thought the narrator had sunk to his lowest behaviour, there were endless disgraceful actions in store.

I’ve always made a point of borrowing money from women early in the relationship so as to give them a hold over me. It also helps when the time comes to break off the affair, because you can talk about the money instead of feelings and love and messy, painful stuff like that.

In true sociopathic style, the narrator ambushes the reader with his twisted logic. Here he is discussing the past of one of his EFL students, Garcia:

Trish had given me a brief account of the allegations against him, but just to be on the safe side I phoned Amnesty International, posing as a researcher for a TV current affairs programme. Their response was unequivocal, a detailed catalogue of union leaders, students, newspaper editors, civil rights workers,  Jews, feminists, priests and intellectuals tortured and murdered, a whole politico-socio-economic subgroup targeted and taken out. I was dismayed. With a record like that, Garcia might well regard the menial task I had to offer him as beneath his dignity.

In this extremely entertaining novel, our narrator leaves a trail of revenge, death and disaster and yet always sees himself as the victim–a simple man who merely tried to turn his life around, and as the crimes rack up, his justifications become more complex, skewed and hilariously wicked. Author Michael Dibdin’s journey into the mind of a sociopath would be chilling if not for the humour, and for this reader the very best parts of this terrific novel occur when the narrator mimics the emotional responses he knows society expects of him.

For Kim’s review, go here. Kim also liked Henry Sutton’s Get Me Out of Here.

Nightfall by David Goodis

“All in all, it was one of those extremely unfortunate circumstances, and it had started on a day when it simply hadn’t been his turn to draw good cards. He could have died on that day or on the day following or the week following. He could have died on any of those several hundred days in the months between then and now, so what it actually amounted to was the fact that all this time he had been living on a rain check and it was only a question of how long it would take until payday arrived.” 

American author David Goodis (1917-1967) wrote a number of noir novels, some of which were made into film, and curiously all five titles in the recently released Library of America edition of Goodis’s work made it to the screen. This is, of course, perfect for my film-book obsession, so it should come as no surprise that I’m reading my way through this collection.

Nightfall is the second novel in the Library of America edition, and it follows Dark Passage. In Dark Passage, an innocent man, framed for the murder of his wife, escapes from San Quentin and runs headlong into a woman who is interested in his case and offers to help him.  Nightfall is the story of another innocent man–a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he’s been running ever since….

The novel is set in Manhattan and begins on a hot sticky night when a man named Vanning, a commercial artist, decides to go out of his apartment and have a drink or two. As it turns out, this is a big mistake. Vanning is a man on the run, a man who’s running away from some very nasty and determined people who think he has $300,000 from a Seattle bank robbery. Vanning knows the bank robbers won’t give up when there’s $300,000 at stake, and he knows it’s just a matter of time before they catch up to him.  

Also on Vanning’s tail is seasoned cop, Fraser, a man who’s losing sleep at night because he can’t see Vanning as a bank robber:

The record says the man’s a bank robber. A murderer. It adds and it checks and it figures. They’ve got witnesses, they’ve got fingerprints, they’ve got a ton of logical deduction that puts him in dead center. And what I’ve got is a mental block.

Fraser just can’t place Vanning as the hardened hood at the center of a nationwide manhunt, and Fraser has made a study of Vanning:

It’s the best shadow job I’ve ever done. Know every move he makes. Got it down to a point where I can leave him at night and pick him up when he walks out in the morning. I know what he eats for lunch, what kind of shaving cream he uses, how much money he makes with the art work. I know everything, everything except what I need to know.

To Fraser, Vanning is a “paradox.” He leads a quiet life, puts in a full day’s work and minds his own business. Did Vanning, a former navy officer with no previous record, simply go off the rails one day, participate in a bold bank robbery and commit murder along the way? Fraser’s job, with a coordinated effort with the police departments in Denver and Seattle, is to trail Vanning in New York and find the missing $300,000. Fraser is under pressure to deliver something–Vanning with the money is the preferred choice, but with the clock ticking, it looks as though Fraser will be hauling in Vanning–with or without the money. Something just doesn’t fit right with Fraser, and at the back of his mind he has nagging doubts about Vanning’s guilt.

I know Vanning. For months now I’ve been walking behind him, watching every move he makes. I’ve been in his room when he wasn’t there, when I knew it would take him a half-hour to finish a restaurant meal. I’ve been with Vanning hour after hour, day after day. I’ve been living his life. can’t you see? I know him. I know him. I” And the rest of it came out in a low tone , rapid and strained–”I understand him.”

One night, when Fraser returns home to his wife after thinking that Vanning is tucked up safely in bed, Vanning breaks his habits and decides to go to a bar for a drink. A shapely blonde starts giving Vanning the eye, and they leave the bar together. Has fate swung in Vanning’s favour? Has he met a decent, kind woman, or does she have another game afoot?Here’s Vanning in a flashback moment, and this gives a great example of Goodis’s style–a style that isn’t shy of the repetition of words, and a style that picks up momentum giving the sense of rising tensions and a nightmarish sequence of events.

There was a pale blue automobile, a convertible. That was a logical color, that pale blue, logical for the start of it, because it had started out in a pale, quiet way, the pale blue convertible cruising along peacefully, the Colorado mountainside so calm and pretty, the sky so contented, all of this scene pale blue in a nice even sort of style. And then red came into it, glaring red, the hood and fenders of the smashed station wagon, the hard gray of the boulder against which the wrecked car was resting, the hard gray turning into black, the black of the revolver, the black remaining as more colors moved in. The green of the hotel room, the orange carpet, or maybe it wasn’t orange–it could have been purple, a lot of these colors could have been other colors–but the one color about which there was no mistake was black. Because black was the color of a gun, a dull black, a complete black, and through a whirl of all the colors coming together in a pool gone wild, the black gun came into his hand and he held it there for a time impossible to measure, and then he pointed the black gun and he pulled the trigger and he killed a man.

Nightfall shows the bleak realities of life on the run, and how even the simple things are unattainable or fraught with danger. Vanning longs for a normal life, and it’s this longing that leads him to make a mistake. Of particular interest in this novel is the relationship between Fraser and Vanning–it’s as though the two men are on opposite sides of the same mirror. Fraser identifies so well with Vanning that he’s convinced he’s following an innocent man–even though all the evidence screams otherwise.

Of the three Goodis novels read so far, I’d rank them in this order: The Burglar, Dark Passage, Nightfall. Review copy from publisher.

Night and the City by Gerald Kersh

“How does that Fabian fellow live, then?”

“On show. He’d go without food to buy you a cigar for three shillings. Actually, he lives on a woman. He thinks nobody knows. Everybody knows. And he’s always running, and hurrying….He works harder doing nothing than I do, getting my living.”

The film Night and the City is one of my  favourite noirs. Max reviewed the book Night and the City just over a year ago, and I knew I had to read it. As soon as I finished it, I picked it back up & reread it. That should give you an idea of how much I enjoyed it, but it goes beyond enjoyment into the realm of fascination. I’m going to add that the film (actually I can think of two versions) bears only a marginal resemblance to the book. Director Jules Dassin, a former member of the communist party, was sent to Britain to make the film in a vain attempt to avoid Hollywood blacklisting, and he was advised at the time by studio executive Zanuck that this would probably be the last film he would be able to make for Hollywood. Dassin never had time to read the book before making the film. Author Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was, apparently angry about the Jules Dassin film adaptation, but he did quip that he was the highest paid writer as he was paid 40,000 pounds for the rights to the book, and that translated, he argued, to 10,000 per word for the title.

It’s London, Coronation year, 1937. Harry Fabian, a London pimp  with a shady connection to the white slave trade, lives off prostitute Zoë. Fabian is a real piece of work. While the film shows Harry Fabian as a not-entirely-unsympathetic American (played with extraordinary skill by Richard Widmark), Kersh’s Fabian is a cheap, nasty cockney who is so imbued with American gangster lore, that he sports a fake American accent, dresses like an American and pretends he’s an affluent songwriter who has spent most of his life “in the states.” He fools no one except himself and a couple of women who seem to fall for his dubious charms. Fabian is flashy rather than good-looking: 

He was a little man, no more than thirty years old, excessively small-boned and narrow between the shoulders. He had a large head, perched on a neck no thicker than a big man’s forearm, and a great deal of fine hair dressed in the style affected by Johnny Weissmuller. His face was pale; too wide between the ears and too narrow at the chin–a face like a wedge. He looked a man with a good capacity for hatred. His eyes did not match. The left was large and watery, and it continually wavered and blinked with a flickering of whitish lashes; but the right was smaller, harder, steadier, and more of a concentrated blue. Out of this eye he watched you. When he wanted to look dangerous, he simply closed his left eye, slamming the eyelid down like a shutter with an effort that twisted up the whole left-had side of his face. He had a nose like the beak of a sparrow: that, together with his upper lip, which was pressed out of sight, and his lower jaw, which protruded like the head of a chopper, gave him an air of insolence, spite and malevolent calculation. He dressed far too well. There was a quality of savagery about his clothes–hatred in the relentless grip of his collar, malice in the vicious little knot of his tie, defiant acquisitiveness in the skin-tight fit of his coat–his whole body snarled with vindictive triumph over the memory of many dead years of shabbiness.

So we learn about Fabian’s character through his clothes. Is Fabian a dangerous character? No, not really, unless you are weaker, gullible, or happen to believe in him on one level or another. The first part of the book concentrates on establishing Fabian’s character as he gets a haircut and wanders into the London netherworld–wasting time with a penny slot peep show and a rifle range before he goes looking for Figler. Figler is one of the book’s many great characters–a wheeler-dealer who survives by constant business deals that net relatively little but still manage to keep him afloat on a life raft of constant, but meagre, cash flow. Figler will never be a rich man, while Fabian, who has visions of Monte Carlo dancing in his head, longs for the sort of riches that he will never get and the sort of glamorous high-society world that would reject him even if he got his foot in the door.

Fabian has a plan to promote all-in wrestling and wants to open a gym. Lacking the necessary money, he goes to Figler for the bankroll, but Figler, a savvy businessman tells Fabian that he’ll go 50-50 which translates to a 100 pounds a piece. One incredible section of the book details Figler’s frantic, yet determined efforts to stockpile his share of the money by juggling various business transactions. Fabian, however, the man with the big plans, and an active imagination in all the wrong ways, returns home to his goose that lays the golden egg–prostitute Zoë.

It’s a bold move on Kersh’s part to make such a repulsive creature as Harry Fabian, “born in a slum, bred in the gutters, versed in the tortuous geography of the night world and familiar with every rathole in West one and West Central,“ his protagonist, and as the book continues Fabian, who is vile from the beginning of the book, sinks to even lower depths by the time the last page is turned. Everything about Fabian is twisted: he has great ideas but lacks the ambition to carry them through. Any effort he puts forth into achieving his plans is executed in the most corrupted fashion, so when he wants 100 pounds to start his gym, he looks no further than Zoë, and it’s through his relationship with Zoë that Fabian is his most repulsive.

While Night and the City explores Fabian’s ambition to become a wrestling promoter, the novel also follows the moral trajectory of two other characters, Helen and Adam. Helen is  an unemployed typist who is unable to pay the rent when she’s persuaded by Vi to begin some dubious employment at The Silver Fox, a sleazy nightclub in a Soho cellar. The Silver Fox is run by 60-year-old Phil Nosseross “hard as nails, slippery as a wagonload of eels; an extraordinarily tough and wily little man who looked as if he had got away with things for which other men would have gone to prison for life.” His Achilles’ heel is his twenty-year-old wife, Mary, a former prostitute “with stupid blue eyes as large as walnuts.” The girls at The Silver Fox are paid on commission with the goal of fleecing the male customers through the purchase of overpriced booze, cigarettes and flowers. If they want to make more money, they can privately prostitute themselves and collect even more. One of the incredible aspects of this incredible book is the dizzying flow of money: some people can hang on to it, and for some people, it’s like holding mercury in their hands. Both Fabian and Vi cannot possess money without spending it. Vi’s money supply swells from a night at The Silver Fox, but disappears by day as her vanity drives her to buy shoes that don’t fit and with any money left over she raids the local Woolworths for useless trinkets. Fabian also has this affliction to blow any money in his pocket. Several marvellous passages follow the frenetic flow of money from those who cannot hold it to those who hoard it. But just as Vi and Fabian cannot allow a pound to rest quietly in their pockets, both Helen and Adam can save. The Silver Fox becomes a crucible for morality–you either leave throughly corrupted or run screaming for fresh air.

Night and the City is an incredibly atmospheric novel replete with unforgettable descriptions of the dives & characters of 30s Soho. There’s Bagrag’s Cellar “a dragnet through which the undercurrent of night life continually filters” and whose customers are “addicts to all known crimes and vices … enslaved by appetites so vile that even textbooks never mention them” and here’s minor character, Anna Siberia:

Imagine the death mask of Julius Caesar, plastered with rouge, and stuck with a pair of eyes as small, as flat, and as bright as newly cut cross sections of .38 caliber bullets; marked with eyebrows that ran together in a straight black bar: and surmounted by a million diabolical black hairs that sprang in a nightmarish cascade up out of her skull, like a dark fountain of accumulated wickedness squeezed out by the pressure of her corsets.

In this brilliantly dark noir, Kersh takes the reader on a sordid journey through the grubby underbelly of 1930s Soho. Fabian, one of the rats who pours out from the sewers, is poised on the brink of self-destruction, but believes he’s about to hit the big time…finally. Are there good people here? Yes, and we get a glimpse of a few as they wallow in the mire–some, like Adam, try to escape, and some, like Helen are just sucked down even further….

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip Dick

“The effect of property on the human soul.”

I always told myself that the first Philip Dick novel I read would be Blade Runner. The film version (sometimes given the label sci-fi noir) makes my top film list, and I’ve had a copy of the book on a shelf for years. Recently, however, I came across Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, a novel Dick completed in 1960 . The novel was initially rejected by publishers and was finally published posthumously in 1986.

As the title suggests, the book is set in Oakland, California.  It’s the late 1950s and the tale focuses on the dark ambiguous relationship between two men: 58-year-old car mechanic Jim Fergessen and the much younger used car salesman, Al Miller. Jim has recently discovered that he has a heart problem, and haunted by nightmares that he’ll die under the hood of a car, he puts his shop and the used car lot next door that he rents to Al up for sale. When the novel begins, Jim arrives at work with the intention of telling Al that he’s sold the garage and the car lot for $35,000. It sold faster and easier than he expected, and although Jim doesn’t care what the buyer plans to do with the land, his biggest concern is how Al will take the news:

No, he won’t make a big scene, he thought. Maybe one of those glances, out of the corner of his glasses. And grin while he puffs on his cigarette. And he won’t say anything; I’ll have to do the talking. He’ll get me to talk more than I want to.

Al and Jim have a symbiotic relationship with Al relying on Jim to help fix up the junkers that Al sells on his lot, and Al helping Jim with some of the heavy work involved in car repair. Al isn’t happy at the news of the sale as it’s likely that he’ll be turfed out when his lease is up, and he only makes a marginal living as it is–without Jim’s services, he’ll probably sink. While the news of the sale leaves an awkwardness between the men, it causes explosive reactions in the men’s wives. Jim’s Greek wife, Lydia thinks that Al takes advantage of Jim and envies his success, and Al’s wife Julie, believes Jim “owes” her husband and should ‘gift’ him the car lot.

A major development occurs when successful record company owner, Chris Harman stops by to see Jim. Harman hears about the sale and pushes Jim to invest in a new development in Marin County. Jim, who’d convinced himself that he was looking forward to retirement, suddenly sees his $35,000 as a way of leveraging up the social scale and being “part of the new world,” and meanwhile Al is convinced that Harman is taking Jim for a ride. From this point, there’s an increasing sense of paranoia in both Al and Jim which is fueled by their wives and by certain incidents. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how Dick shows different realities for his two main characters. This is accomplished in several ways: Al becomes suspicious of Harman’s motives and tries to warn Jim. In turn,  Jim becomes suspicious of Al’s motives. Who is correct? When we begin to attribute specific motivations to the behaviour of others, our interpretations of their actions tend to seem real, but are they really? Philip Dick’s tale is so cleverly written that it is entirely possible to read the story in a couple of different ways. 

Another fascinating aspect of the tale is the parallel realities of the white and the black worlds that co-exist but are still mostly separate. Al and his wife rent a $35 a month apartment in a “non-exclusive neighbourhood” (which is a euphemism for saying the building is not ‘whites only’). Al likes his black neighbours and enjoys their company, but the apartment is continually in danger of being condemned:

Sometimes shorts in the walls kept the power off for several days. When Julie ironed, the wall heated up too hot to be touched. All of the people in the building believed that eventually the building would be burned to the ground, but most of them were out of it during the day, and they seemed to believe that because of that they were somehow safe.

Several black characters see Harman as a dangerous man. Are they correct? Since they operate in a parallel society, do they see a different side of his behaviour?

Neither Al nor Jim are particularly likeable characters. Jim, a fan of Joe McCarthy and Nixon, is a flaming racist, full of inchoate rage, and Al is a crook disguised as a used car salesman. Here’s Jim on his customers:

It’s fine for them, he said to himself. I kept their cars going. They can call me any time, day or night; they know I’ll always come and tow them in and fix them where they are, broken down at the side of the road. They don’t have to belong to A.A.A. even, because they have me. And I never cheated them or did work that didn’t need to be done. So naturally, he thought, they’ll be unhappy to hear I’m quitting. They know they’ll have to go to one of those new garages where everything’s clean, no grease anywhere, and some punk comes out in a white suit with a clipboard and fountain pen, smiling. And they tell him what’s wrong and he writes it down. And some union mechanic shows up later in the day with one finger stuck up his ass and leisurely works on their car. And every minute they’re paying. That slip goes into that machine, and it keeps count. They’re paying while he’s on the crapper or drinking a cup of coffee or talking on the phone or to some other customer. It’ll cost them three or four times as much.

Thinking that, he felt anger at them, for being willing to pay all that to some lazy union mechanic they never saw and didn’t know. If they can pay all that, why can’t they pay it to me? he asked himself. I never charged no seven dollars an hour. Somebody else’ll get it. 

Al will do anything to get a sale and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to dump a junker on someone. He doesn’t hesitate to fiddle with the odometer, and he also ”re-groove [s] tires“

If the guy so much as backs over a hot match, the tires’ll blow. But he thinks he’s getting a set of good tires, so he goes ahead and buys the car when he otherwise might not. It’s part of the business; everybody, or nearly everybody, does it. You have to move your stock. The main thing is to have a story that’ll explain everything. If you can’t get a car started, you always say it’s out of gas. If a window won’t roll up or down, you say the car just came in this morning and your boy hasn’t had a chance to go over it yet. You have to be able to come back. If the customer notices that the mat is worn from wear, you say the car was driven by a woman who wore high-heeled shoes. If the seat covers are torn up from wear, maybe from kids, you say the owner had a pet dog he took with him, and in a week the dog’s nails did it. You always give a story. 

 While the  novel explores Jim’s denial of mortality through his decision to use his new capital to become one of those “enterprising men,” simultaneously the plot follows Al’s idea to also leverage the sale as a way for him to get ahead in life:

My whole life, he told himself, my whole future, depends on it. Can I do it? I have to. I owe it to Julie, and to myself; in fact, to my family. I can’t wait any longer; I can’t go on drifting like this. This is opportunity knocking, this guy Chris Harman; this is the way it’s been set up and if I ignore it I’ll never be given another chance. That’s the way it always is.

It’s very difficult to slot Humpty Dumpty in Oakland into any neat genre category. It’s not exactly crime fiction–although crime lurks under the surface of the narrative. Ultimately I’d argue that this is noir fiction–a bleak tale in which the fate of two flawed characters synergistically manufacture their own destruction in an ever-expanding cycle of paranoia:

Boldness, he thought. You have to be bold. Even ruthless. Or otherwise they’ll get you. They’re always in wait, trying to pull you down to their level; naturally when you get up there they resent it. They envy. You ignore that, however. Like Nixon does; he stands and sneers when they insult him, throw rocks, even spit. Risks his life.

Finally there’s even a snide little aside about writers of science-fiction: “It must be easy to write that stuff; they must bat it out.”