Sideswipe: Charles Willeford (1987)

“Being without a wife gave a man a whole different way of looking at the world. And it looked even better now that he had a car to drive again. If it came to a toss-up, car or wife, most men, or at least the ones Stanley had known in Detroit, would certainly give up their wives.”

Sideswipe, Charles Willeford’s third Hoke Moseley novel, finds the Miami homicide detective under incredible strain, personally and professionally, and he decides to quit the force. While Hoke’s pals on the force, his very pregnant partner, Sanchez, and Bill Henderson, cover for Hoke and file for medical leave, Hoke decides he wants a simpler life. Yeah, right. He accepts a job managing his father’s apartment complex in Riviera Beach, and while Hoke initially imagines he’ll be on the beach and little troubled by tenants, the job soon turns into one annoying interruption after another.

But Hoke’s life is in the background, and in the foreground is a violent crime, still in the embryonic stages. …

Retired Michigan auto worker Stan and his wife Betsey moved to Florida a few years earlier. Betsey isn’t thrilled with the move and wants to be back in Michigan. There’s not exactly war afoot between them, but Betsey doesn’t like Stan under her feet all day, and the two of them lead separate lives. A terrible misunderstanding involving a neighbourhood child leads to Stan spending the night in jail, and here he meets a glib, smooth-talking career criminal, Troy Louden. Troy gives Stan a few tips, and in exchange, Stan promises to do a ‘favour’ for Louden. When Betsey departs for Michigan, Stan, feeling alone and betrayed by his wife and family, allows Troy to stay. One favour leads to another until Stan becomes an accomplice in a vicious armed robbery. Willeford’s brilliantly conceived creation of the psychopath, Troy Louden, adds a layer of dark humour. Troy is vicious, sick, and twisted–a shitshow about to happen. Using a handful of characters, Willeford shows us how Troy successfully dominates his pathetic criminal crew–a painter, a stripper and finally Stan. Troy Louden isn’t educated, and arguably isn’t that intelligent, but he possesses the psychopath’s understanding of how to manipulate:

I’m a professional criminal, what the shrinks call a criminal psychopath. What it means is, I know the difference between right and wrong and all that, but I don’t give a shit. That’s the official version. Most men in prison are psychopaths like me, and there are times when we don’t give a shit when we act impulsively. Ordinarily, I’m not impulsive because I always think a job out very carefully before I get around to doing it.

While the artist and disfigured stripper (wonder how that happened??) recruited by Troy comply with his demands out of fear, Troy seduces Stan into criminal activity:

“I’m a criminal psychopath so I’m not responsible for the things I do.“

“Does that mean you’re crazy? You don’t look crazy, Troy–I mean John.”

“Robert.”

“Robert. Of course, pulling that pistol on that man–“

“Let me finish, Pop. I don’t have time to into all the ramifications of my personality, it’s too complex. I’ve been tested again and again, and it always comes out the same: Psychopath. And because I’m a criminal, I’m also a criminal psychopath. You follow me?

“Yeah I think so, but if you aren’t crazy, what are you?”

“It’s what I told you already. I know the difference between good and bad, but it makes no difference to me. If I see the right thing to do and want to do it, I do it. If I see the wrong thing and want to do it, I do that, too.“

“You mean you can’t help yourself then?”

“Certainly I can. I’ll put it another way. I can help myself, but I don’t give a damn.”

“And because you don’t give a damn, you’re a criminal psychopath, is that it?”

“You’ve got it.“

“But why?”–Stanley made a sweeping movement with his arm–“don’t you give a damn?”

“Because I’m a criminal pyschopath. Maybe when they give you some tests, you might could be one too.“

Sideswipe is a marvellous entry in the Hoke Moseley saga. One of my favourite literary (or film) themes is how someone can lead a perfectly respectable life, never taking a step wrong, but then fate intervenes and suddenly that person, that life, is derailed. And it’s at that point, things always get interesting…. So derailment or sideswipe. … Stan’s moral seduction by Troy Louden is a perfect example of how one staid, retired, older man, once pried loose from his respectable life, spirals into an unfamiliar world. We follow Stan’s increasing, initially naïve involvement with Louden and also Hoke’s attempts to live a civilian life away from Miami Homicide. The violence, when it comes, is explosive and shocking. As I read this, there was one point when I asked myself if I found Stan’s actions credible. My initial response was ‘no,’ but Willeford had very carefully seeded a quirk in Stan’s behaviour which gives a glimpse at a pathological aspect of Stan’s personality. On the surface, we have this highly responsible citizen, an older man who has never put one foot wrong in his life, and yet he meets a career criminal and is so seduced by this man’s rhetoric that he abandons his way of life and goes to the dark side. So in the final assessment, yes, I could accept Stan’s choices and bad judgment–given his wife and son’s rejection, and that nasty quirk.

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More Better Deals: Joe R. Lansdale

“Some people pave a short way to hell.”

In Joe Lansdale’s hard-boiled noir novel, More Better Deals, it’s Texas in the 60s and Ed, a used car salesman makes a marginal living pushing junkers on a used car lot. There are a few tricks of the trade: moving the odometer back, blacking tires, plugging holes in the transmission. But a deal’s a deal, and Ed doesn’t have trouble sleeping nights even though he knows most of the customers have been ripped off. Boss Smiling Dave, “about two hundred and fifty pounds of lard on a five-foot frame mounted on tiny feet, had a cheap pistol”  in his desk just in case any of the customers think they have a complaint. Smiling Dave’s advice:

Don’t grow a conscience., Ed. It’s bad for your bank account. You know what they say. Buyer beware, and better you fucked than me.

Customers are suckers, and every sale presents an opportunity to screw someone over and grab a commission. It’s a marginal life, and Ed’s in a rut. His mother, a bitter alcoholic wreck, thinks that Ed can do better since he can ‘pass’ for white, so there’s nagging pressure to improve his life and the life of his sister. And one day the opportunity for Ed to get ahead comes knocking in the shape of a cheap blonde who’s behind on her car payments.

Ed tries to repo a red Cadillac and runs right into Nancy Craig, a “blond in a cheap out-of-the-bottle way.” Barely dressed, cocktail in hand, she invites Ed inside her home and claims that her abusive husband, a travelling encyclopedia salesman is on the road, presumably with the Cadillac. Nancy, hardly an oppressed housewife, oozes sex and availability; “she could make Billy Graham pull down his pants and jack off in five o’clock traffic.” Nancy and her husband own a run-down drive-in and a pet cemetery, and to Ed, it’s a sweet deal; get the blonde, the drive-in and the cemetery. Frank, Nancy’s gorilla of a husband is in the way of that plan of course, but a few sweaty hot sexual encounters later and Ed signs on for murder.

Nancy is a bad woman, but that doesn’t stop Ed. Since he’s ok with ripping off customers, he’s apparently also unperturbed by Nancy’s explanation of how to run a pet cemetery.

Be honest with you, Ed, what we found out is digging a hole is work. So we mound the dirt up a little, scrape some here or there and make it look like a grave, then we take the beloved off in the woods and throw it in a ditch somewhere.

That would be a hint to make a run for it, but Ed is too wrapped up in the hot sex to hear alarm bells. 

It may sound as though More Better Deals is a typical noir novel–perhaps it even sounds like something you’ve read before: the bad blonde, an inconvenient husband, and a murder plot. In the hands of Joe Lansdale, however, this book is something special. A simple debt collection launches our narrator into hell–he may think he’s landing a sweet deal, but in this tale of greed, lust and murder, just who is screwing who is up for grabs. Lansdale laces this tale with some wonderful touches, violent cops, crude sex and a narrator who’s bad but not as bad as he needs to be. For Lansdale fans, I think this is one of his best, and for anyone who’d like to read a hardboiled noir novel, go no further.

They throw the switch and the devil is showing you your hotel room.

Review copy

I Married a Dead Man: Cornell Woolrich (1948)

Helen, 8 months pregnant, penniless and abandoned, boards the sleeper train. She’s hit rock bottom, and fruitless attempts to contact the father of her child result only in an envelope containing a 5 dollar bill and a one-way ticket from New York to San Francisco. Even though there’s no note, the message is clear.

Once on the train, she meets a young couple, happy, very much in-love, Patrice and Hugh Hazzard, who are travelling to Hugh’s family. They’ve yet to meet Patrice. Patrice is also pregnant, and stuck travelling in an over-crowded train together, Patrice generously befriends Helen. Even though Helen doesn’t share her story, it’s clear that she’s down on her luck. A terrible accident occurs, and Patrice, Hugh and their unborn baby are killed while Helen survives. Thanks to the fact that Helen had tried on, and was still wearing Patrice’s ring when the accident happened, Helen wakes up in hospital and discovers that due to a mix-up everyone thinks she’s Patrice.

Helen isn’t a bad person, and she doesn’t intentionally set out to deceive anyone. But Hugh’s parents have arranged for a private room for the daughter-in-law (now with a baby) they never met. Along with the private room come flowers and baskets of fruit. With just 17 cents to her name, Helen, drugged up to the eyeballs, finds it easier to go along with the case of mistaken identity.

But one thing leads to another, and Helen is taken to the Hazzard home. Surrounded with the loving, affluent family Helen doesn’t have, she goes along with the deception mainly for her son’s sake. Soon she’s in so deep, it’s impossible to say where this will end. Hugh’s parents have already been devastated by their son’s death, but they carry on knowing that they have a grandson. The story isn’t just about Helen anymore: she has other people to consider–people who will be brokenhearted again.

It’s not easy to step into someone else’s shoes and Helen makes a couple of errors; no one seems to notice–except for Hugh’s brother Bill who isn’t as blinded by grief as his parents. Then the louse who abandoned pregnant Helen, smelling money, reappears like a wolf hunting his prey.

The book starts slowly and it’s not until chapter 4 and the train trip that things take off, but then the book takes shape. In this noir tale, Helen’s life looks bleak but then Fate takes a hand with the death of Patrice, Hugh and their baby. Helen steps into Patrice’s shoes, but it’s an uneasy existence, and it seems just a matter of time before events comes crashing down on Helen. And Fate seems to deal Helen a cruel hand once again–giving her what she thought she wanted back in New York.

And here’s a fantastic quote about Fate–always central to noir:

What makes you stop, when you have stopped, just where you have stopped? What is it, what? Is it something, or is it nothing? Why not a yard short, why not a yard more? Why just there, where you are, and nowhere else?

Some say: It’s just blind chance, and if you hadn’t stopped there, you would have stopped at the next place. Your story would have been different then. You weave your own story as you go along.

But others say: You could not have stopped any place else but this even if you wanted to. It was decreed, it was ordered, you were meant to stop at this spot, and no other. Your story is there waiting for you, it has been waiting for you there a hundred years, long before you were born, and you cannot change a comma of it. Everything you do, you have to do. You are the twig, and the water you float on swept you here. You are the leaf and the breeze you were borne on blew you here. This is your story, and you cannot escape it; you are only the player, not the stage manager. Or so some say.

For this reader, Helen isn’t a particularly interesting character, but the plot is fantastic; when we meet Helen, she’s beaten down by life. The train wreck appears to flip Helen’s fortunes, but it seems unsavoury that anyone would profit from the death of a young married couple and their unborn child. Helen is never comfortable with the deception, she’s not a grifter looking for an easy buck–she’s waiting for the ax to drop. Again. 

The Things Men Do: James Hadley Chase.

“For the first time since I married her I was sharply aware that she was in the way.”

In James Hadley Chase’s dark noir novel, The Things Men Do, it’s post WWII London. Garage owner, Harry Collins is struggling to make ends meet. His business isn’t going well, and he’s buried in bills. The garage is in the wrong part of time and there’s few customers. If things don’t pick up soon, Harry will have to close shop and move on.

Out on a call late one night, Harry breaks his rule of stopping to pick up hitchhikers. But the attractive, sexy young woman, a damsel in distress standing next to a non functional car, doesn’t exactly fit the hitchhiker-type description. So Harry stops and picks up the woman. Gloria turns out to be, or so she claims, a successful lingerie designer. While all the alarm bells go off in our heads, Harry’s lust takes over.

Harry is a married man. He lives above the garage with his wife Ann, and she’s the sort of woman who doesn’t complain and who goes without new clothes in order to prop up her man. When Gloria enters the picture and begins telling Harry that there are plenty of ways to make money, Harry begins to keep secrets from his wife. Then Gloria invites Harry to a party at her flat so that he can discuss a business opportunity.

Harry steps deeper and deeper into deceit. He lies to his wife and his best army buddy Bill, but even beyond that, he lies to himself. It’s clear to the reader that Gloria is a part of a honey trap, and even after Harry meets Gloria’s clearly criminal friends, he finds excuses to go to her flat and talk to her ….

They looked as if they had just stepped out of a Humphrey Bogart gangster picture: the car, the clothes, they way they spilled out of the car leaving the doors hanging open, was nearest thing to Hollywood I’d seen off the movies.

The Things Men Do is a slow burn. I wasn’t that impressed with the novel until after the halfway point. It seemed fairly standard fare with the plot leading the reader down a very well worn path: the goodie two shoes wife who puts up with anything to keep her man happy, the dupe led by lust to his own doom etc. But something in the novel shifts flips when Harry takes action, and the book’s final tense scenes are dark and relentless as Harry rolls towards his fate. Harry makes references to his WWII experiences and his ability to kill. In his mind he’s gone “soft” in civvie street, but that marshmallow patina is shed as Harry seeks revenge.  Yes some people are bad, but then there are others who are evil. Greed, lust, violence tangle to deliver a powerful ending.

The French cover is the best in my opinion. 

Rendezvous in Black: Cornell Woolrich

“For me, she thought wryly, but without complaint, all life is a tunnel; a long, never-ending tunnel, which has no other end.”

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black is a relentlessly bleak, cold, dark tale of revenge. Its powerful, ceaseless bleakness resides in a killer’s uncompromising mission: revenge yes, but it’s revenge involving innocents and driven by complete mercilessness.

It’s May the 31st, and Johnny Marr is waiting outside of a drugstore in the town square, as he does every night, for his long-time girlfriend Dorothy. Dorothy and Johnny have been in love since the ages of 7 and 8; they’ve always been a couple, and they cannot imagine a world in which the other does not exist. Lack of money led to them putting off their wedding for years, but now the date is planned. It will be a June wedding:

They would have been married long ago; last June, the June before, the very first June that he was a man and she was grown up girl. Why hadn’t they? What’s the one thing that always interferes, more than any other? Money. First no job at all. Then a job so small it wasn’t even big enough for one, let alone for two. 

The work-related death of Johnny Marr’s father led to a small pay-off from the railroad. It’s not much money and by the time the lawyer takes almost half, it’s even less, but it’s still enough for Johnny and Dorothy to set a date.

The book’s first pages establish several main themes: there’s the unexpected consequences of murder and how one person’s callous indifference ricochets throughout the universe. The idea of wasted time is another theme which is juxtaposed, in intriguing contrast, with timelessness. Other characters in the book struggle with the fact that they’ve ‘wasted’ time, and also time plays a huge role in the crimes. Another main theme is the powerless of the individual when faced with Big Business or dazzling wealth. The small man will always stay small and powerless because that’s the way the world is organised. Money rises up; it doesn’t trickle down. The fact that Johnny’s father was killed through negligence, has allowed a few thousand to come Johnny’s way. Yes the money was almost split 50:50 with the lawyer, but to Johnny, the money is a miracle. Finally, Johnny, an “average” man, an underdog, has managed to move ahead a little in the world and finally he can marry Dorothy.

But in this noir novel, fate intervenes and snatches Dorothy away in a freak accident. At first Johnny just hangs around in the town square, still waiting for Dorothy. A little kindness is occasionally shown to Johnny but he becomes a curiosity and then a spectacle. Finally a cop “brutally” tells Johnny to move on, and with a few pokes of the nightstick, Johnny ambles off:

Maybe the cop should have let him stand there, should have let him alone. He hadn’t been hurting anybody , until then.  

Johnny Marr, driven insane by grief, assumes various identities and finds out who is ‘responsible’ (in his mind) for Dorothy’s death. He draws up a death list. On May 31st of each year, one by one, a man whose name is on the list will lose the woman he loves the most: a wife, a mistress, a girlfriend, a daughter … it doesn’t matter to Johnny who the victims are as long as their deaths causes irreparable damage to the men left behind: they will feel the same pain that he endures.

Detective Cameron, another unassuming, almost invisible man, realizes that something isn’t right when the first death occurs. By the third, he knows he’s on the trail of a maniac who has a death list. He doesn’t know the identity of the killer; the only thing he knows for certain is that the next death will occur on the 31st.

Money only has power over the sane mind. Maniacs don’t have motives. I could call it revenge, but even that wouldn’t be correct, because where the injury has been unintentional or unknowing, revenge can be reasoned with, turned aside. About the closest I can get to it would be a revenge-mania.

Woolrich eases us into the darkness easily at first. The first murder is fait accompli, and the second murder with its unexpected consequences form their own sort of rough justice. But the subsequent crimes are malicious, evil and enacted with maximum cruelty. I’m not talking gore here–I’m talking about cold, calculated vicious retribution calculated to cause maximum suffering. The novel is particularly bleak when considering that 5 people who had nothing to do with Dorothy’s death  but who are connected with 5 men (ONE of whom MAY be responsible) will pay the ultimate price. Unlike Fate, Marr’s retribution isn’t random; it’s directed and deliberate, forming its own nihilistic ball of hate, taking aim at innocents. Nonetheless, the cosmic unfairness of Johnny’s selection and relentless pursuit mirrors Fate in a distorted, warped way.

My Modern Library copy includes a bio of Woolrich as well as a brief section describing the relationship Woolrich had with a woman that mirrors Marr’s (without all the murders):

A “sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard, and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years towards me .. that has hung over me all my life.”

The Executioner Weeps: Frédéric Dard (1956)

“She’d sprung from the night, just for me.”

Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint continues to impress with The Executioner Weeps from Frédéric Dard. This latest Dard novel follows on the heels of Bird in a Cage, The Wicked Go to Hell, and Crush. The King of Fools is due to be released in the US in September, 2017.

In The Executioner Weeps, Daniel, a successful French artist is in Spain on a working holiday when late one night, on a remote lonely road, his car hits a beautiful young woman. She has no identification, no luggage–except for a now crushed violin. Daniel suspects that this young woman may possibly have thrown herself under the car. Since he’s miles from civilization and the woman’s injuries are fairly superficial, Daniel decides to take her back to Casa Patricio, a modest beachside hotel located near Barcelona, and proceed from there. When the woman wakes up, she’s suffering from amnesia.

For the first half of the book, Daniel spends time trying to discover the woman’s identity. He knows that her first name begins with M, and together they try various M names on for size. Eventually as shards of memory return, the woman settles on Marianne which she is sure is her name. Thrown together by circumstance, it isn’t long before Daniel falls in love with Marianne–even though common sense should tell him otherwise.

I was living the dream that all men have of loving a woman without a past.

He contacts the French embassy, the police, every institution he can think of, but everyone is disinterested in Marianne’s plight and Daniel’s dilemma. The consensus seems to be that someone will eventually come looking for this stunning young woman…

Daniel’s dilemma deepens when he receives a letter concerning an upcoming exhibition is America. He decides to stop waiting for something to happen and using the labels in Marianne’s clothing, he sets out to discover her past himself. Soon he wishes he hadn’t.

This is as much of the plot in this splendid, tightly written noir that I’m going to reveal. The tale begins with a central mystery–the identity of the young woman–Daniel spends half the novel trying to discover the truth and half the novel trying to evade it. The plot, with its sense of creeping dread and impending doom, raises many questions about the nature of love: idealisation, self-deceit, corruption and the love object. Is Daniel protecting Marianne or is he protecting his ideal?

Significantly Daniel decides to paint a portrait of Marianne:

What I set out to show was what I could see in her. She surrendered slowly, easing herself out of her own personality to become what I wanted her to be. I no longer separated my creation from my model. I took a human being and spread it out on a surface that had no limits. 

But when the painting is finished, Daniel is disturbed by the results:

From a painterly point of view, it was first rate. Yet I didn’t like it, because with this particular canvas something strange had happened. I had succeeded in capturing Marianne’s most unguarded expression so well that I could read her character better in my painting than in her face. Now, in the come-hither look in her eye with which she stared at me I detected a bizarre glint which quite disconcerted me. There was a sparkle in it which didn’t seem to belong with the rest of her: it encapsulated a level of sustained attentiveness which was almost disturbing in its intensity.  

The truth, when Daniel finally discovers it, is devastating, and every step he takes just draws him into a sticky web from which there is no escape. There’s a thematic connection here to Vertigo in the way the author explores just how far we will go to maintain fictional narratives that feed our desires and egos.

For  those interested, here’s my Dard order of preference so far:

The Executioner Weeps

The Wicked Go to Hell

Bird in a Cage

Crush

Review copy

Translated by David Coward

But a Short Time to Live: James Hadley Chase (1951)

“There are some girls, Harry, who are no good.”

James Hadley Chase’s wonderful noir novel, But A Short Time to Live, is set in dreary post WWII London. Harry Ricks is one of several photographers employed by a failing business to take photos of people in the street, and it’s his job to try to make a sale. It’s depressing work with a very low success rate, and Harry is struggling to make a living. This is how the book opens just after Harry snaps a photograph of a woman passing by:

The fat woman smiled self-consciously at Harry as he gave her the card. It was a pity, he thought that she had let herself go. Her uncared for hair straggled from under a hat that didn’t suit her, her eyes were heavy and tired, and there was a shine on her face that made you think she had just this moment finished cooking a stodgy, uninteresting meal.

It’s the end of a long day, and Harry is in the Duke of Wellington having a pint when he notices a stunning woman drinking whisky with a much older, fat and unpleasant man. Harry’s first impression is that while the woman is beautiful, the situation indicates that there’s some funny business afoot.

Her companion wasn’t the polished Stewart Granger type Harry expected to see, but a short, fat elderly man whose face was the colour of port wine and who was as near being intoxicated as made no difference.

A few hours later, a series of events leads Harry to taking the woman in the pub, Clair, home to her very large, expensive flat. While everyone else still feels the belt-tightening of the war, Clair seems immune to deprivation: her flat is well-stocked with whisky. She claims she’s a model, drives a sports car, dresses in expensive clothing and Harry desperate to avoid some nasty conclusions about Clair’s behaviour,and ignoring “how hard she looked,” believes every word she says. …

Some of the characters in the book, even though they are astonished that Harry would land such a woman, admire Clair, but Harry’s best friend and roommate, Ron, warns against getting mixed up with Clair. Ron, a tragic figure, who has had bad experiences with what he calls “glamour girls” warns Harry that these relationships never work out for the “poor mug who marries them.”

There’s another great character here–Mooney, a strange, shady figure, who starts out in the book as Harry’s employer. Mooney is lazy, unambitious  and happy to sail on the talent of others. Later in the book, Mooney’s more exploitative side takes over as he starts using Harry, but by the time the tale ends, Mooney reveals more character than we thought he had:

If you’re not settled in a job by the time you’re forty, it’s curtains. Watch that. You’ve got to be fixed up by forty, kid. Don’t forget. it’s important. No one wants a man when he’s over forty these days.

Clair is the dominant partner in the relationship with Harry. Everything runs the way she wants: what she spends, where they live, who they see. Harry makes a few objections, but he’s weak when it comes to Clair. In this story of doomed love, Harry has plenty of warnings about Clair; he sees things, he’s told things, but he keeps on … committed and devoted to the end of the road.

But A Short Time to Live follows the trajectory of Harry and Clair’s relationship, and the book took a number of unexpected twists and turns as this troubled couple try to (and seem to) elude fate. This is an excellent noir tale, set in a dreary post WWII London, peopled with spivs, prostitutes and cheap entertainment; it’s a story oozing with desperation and darkness spiraling towards its inevitable end.

This is the first James Hadley Chase novel I’ve read set in England. It’s available for mere pennies in the US. My kindle version has a few typos but nothing that inhibited readability.

 

The Burglar: David Goodis (1953)

“Look at the way he moves around. This is a trace artist. It’s a very special gift. One in a million has it. Like a mind reader, a dealer in some kind of magic.”

The Library of America edition of five noir novels by David Goodis (1917-1967) is not only a compendium made for noir fans, but it is also an acknowledgment of this author’s contribution to the genre. Many of Goodis’s novels have been long-out-of-print, and if you can dig up used copies, some of the titles fetch a pretty price. For this volume, The Library of America has included:

Dark Passage

Nightfall

The Burglar

The Moon and the Gutter

Street of No Return

To sweeten the deal, all five of these titles have been made into films. Earlier this year, I wrote a post on Dark Passage. It’s a tremendous novel–a story that explores the plight of an innocent man who went to jail for a crime he didn’t commit. This story was made into an unforgettable film which featured the iconic Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Burglar is another winner from Goodis, and if you love noir fiction, then do yourself a favour and read this. It combines elements of the inescapable reach of fate, the heist, the lam, and the femme fatale, and the result is one of the darkest noir tales I’ve read in a long time.

The Burglar drops us right in the action by beginning with a “foolproof” burglary which takes place in a mansion. The burglar of the title is Nathaniel Harbin–a 34-year-old man who has made this his career–not by intention, but by fate. The story finds him the head of a gang of 4, and together they make a successful, tight team. Harbin is the brains behind the operation. He picks the jobs and methodically makes the preparations.

He had never been caught and despite the constant jeopardy he had never been forced into a really tight corner. The way he operated was quiet and slow, very slow, always unarmed, always artistic without knowing or interested in knowing that it was artistic, always accurate with it and always extremely unhappy with it.

The other members of the gang are: Blaylock, a nervous man in his 40s who’s been to prison and swears he won’t go back, Dohmer who’s not too swift in the brain department but has his uses as muscle, and the waif-like blonde Gladden, whose job is to case the joints the gang target for robbery. Gladden is the daughter of Harbin’s dead mentor, Gerald–the man who saved Harbin from starvation and taught him the trade. A strange relationship exists between Gladden and Harbin–“something about it was unnatural.” He feels responsible for her, and yet while Harbin is deeply troubled by his relationship to Gladden, he can’t define why and he can’t get rid of her.

Glow from a streetlamp far back came through the rear window, came floating in to settle on Gladden’s yellow hair and part of her face. The glow showed the skinny lines of her face, the yellow of her eyes, the thin line of her throat. She sat there and looked at Harbin and he saw her skinniness, this tangible proof of her lack of weight, and in his mind he told himself she weighed tons and tons and it all hung as from a rope around his neck.

Goodis takes us inside the heist with an incredibly tense scene. The goal for the gang is $100,000 in emeralds (worth over $845,000 in today’s terms). The heist goes smoothly… well almost… but after the heist things start to unravel. That’s as much of the plot of this incredibly dark tale as I’m going to reveal. But I will say that things don’t unravel in quite the usual way. The tension never stops and when the violence explodes, Goodis writes with a raw, shocking intensity.

Here’s a scene with Gladden and Harbin sitting inside a bar that’s dimly and eerily lit with green bulbs:

He leaned back in his chair, his head to one side a little as he studied the pale green glow on the top of Gladden’s head.

“Always,” he said, “after we do a job you get dreamy like this. The haul doesn’t seem to interest you.”

Gladden said nothing. She smiled at something far away. “The haul,” he said, “becomes a secondary thing with you. What comes first?”

“The dreamy feeling,” Gladden slumped languidly, “Like going back. Like resting on a soft pillow that you can’t see. Way back there.”

“Where?”

“Where we were when we were young.”

“We’re young now,” he said.

“Are we?” Her tall glass was lifted, her chin magnified through the rum and soda and glass. “We’re half in the grave.”

“You’re bored,” Harbin said. 

“I’ve been bored since I was born.”  

The characters in The Burglar operate in a twilight life that exists outside of society. Harbin’s gang is composed of losers who don’t have regular jobs or normal lives and the constraints demanded by their profession bring a heavy price. Together they operate as a family, and they are fairly successful, but it’s when those relationships chafe and begin to unravel that the trouble begins. Goodis shows the sliding scale of morality here, and as Harbin and his gang enter a maze of miscaluation and deception, they run headlong into true evil. Harbin’s sense of being trapped by fate is illustrated through his memory of being 16 “with lifted thumb begging for a ride” and right at the brink of death when he was picked up by seasoned burglar Gerald and taught the trade. There’s the sense that fate took Harbin for an 18-year-long ride and now he’s back at the point of his death, the point of his life right where Gerald intervened.  

As the situation unravels and Harbin tries to repair the damage, interpersonal relations underscore repetition, and foreshadowing reinforces the inescapable nature of fate. Written with an underlying yet overpowering sense of doom, this tale’s haunting conclusion has to be one of the most memorable in the genre. Mystery writer Ed Gorman said that “David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes,” and after reading The Burglar, I see what he means.

I’m hoping that The Library of America has a second Goodis volume in the works….

Review copy courtesy of the publisher

The Grifters: Jim Thompson (1963)

Perhaps watching the film version of The Killer Inside Me drove my interest when earlier this year I decided to hold a Jim Thompson noirfest. It was time to dust off those copies and actually read them, so I committed to seven novels, and whittled down the reading list to:

The Killer Inside Me

Savage Night

A Hell of a Woman

A Swell-Looking Dame

The Getaway 

Pop 1280

And this brings me to The Grifters. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m fascinated by the book-film connection, and this (and curiosity) influenced my Thompson noirfest choices (still have to read After Dark My Sweet). I saw the film version of The Grifters some years back, and while this didn’t cloud my reading, scenes from the film flooded back as I read the novel.  

The protagonist of The Grifters is Roy Dillon. Any relation to Frank Dillon from A Hell of a Woman? The two men must be related in author Jim Thompson’s mind as both Roy and Frank Dillon are restless and on constant vigil for the next buck. That said, Roy Dillon is far more successful than job-shifting, small time salesman Frank, but there again, Roy has selected a goal in life and stuck to it: the short-con.

The Grifters begins by dropping us right in the action as young Roy Dillon stumbles out of a small shop, staggering from a blow to the stomach. Roy just worked the twenties–a short-con grift in which the grifter cons the shopkeeper by presenting a twenty-dollar bill in exchange for purchasing a small item. After getting his change for the twenty, then Roy produces–seemingly by surprise the change after all–and then asks for his twenty back, so in theory, if Roy manages to catch the shopkeeper off guard, he will leave the shop with almost an extra twenty in his pocket. On this day, however, the shopkeeper’s son, who doesn’t seem too swift in the brain department, catches on to the grift and lands a bat in Roy’s stomach.

As it turns out this is a pivotal event in twenty-five-year-old Roy’s criminal career. He’s been immensely successful up to this point mainly due to some crucial lessons early in the game from a seasoned grifter named Mintz:

There were two highly essential details of grifting which Mintz did not explain to his pupil. One of them defied explanation. It was an acquired trait, something each man had to do on his own and in his own way; i.e., retaining a high degree of anonymity while remaining in circulation. You couldn’t disguise yourself, naturally. It was more a matter of not doing anything. Of avoiding any mannerism, any expression, any tone or pattern of speech, any posture or gesture or walk–anything at all that might be remembered.

That’s lesson number one.  Lesson number two is to keep on the move. Here’s Mintz:

New York wasn’t a big city, he said. It just had a lot of people in it, and they were crammed into a relatively small area. And no, you didn’t help your odds much by getting out of jampacked Manhattan and into other boroughs. Not only did you keep bumping into the same people, people who worked in Manhattan and lived in Astoria, Jackson Heights, etcetera, but you were more conspicuous there. Easier to be spotted by the fools. “and, kid, a blind man could spot you. Look at that haircut! look at that fancy wristwatch, and them three-tone sports shoes! Why don’t you wear a black eye-patch, too, and a mouthful of gold teeth?”

According to Mintz, there’s one exception to the constant on-the-move option:

“You can usually play a fairly long stand in Los Angeles, because it ain’t just one town. It’s a county full of towns, dozens of ’em. And with traffic so bad and a lousy transportation system, the people don’t mix around like they do in New York. But”–he wagged a finger severely–“but that still doesn’t mean you can run wild, kid. You’re a grifter, see? A thief. You’ve got no home and no friends, and no visible means of support. And you damned well better not ever forget it.”

Now Roy is a kid with brains, and he’s reasoned that being a grifter constantly on the move is an easy way to eat up any capital gained, so he moves to Los Angeles where he basically leads a double life. He is a salesman and has been with the same firm and rented the same drab Grosvenor-Carlton hotel apartment for years, and while it’s a gig in which he earns peanuts, he supplements his income with grifting. That supplement adds up to over fifty thousand dollars which is stuffed inside some cheesy clown pictures that hang on his wall:

For his first year in Los Angeles, he was strictly a square john. An independent salesman calling on small businessmen. Gliding back into the grift, he remained a salesman. And he was still one now. He had a credit rating and a bank account. He was acquainted with literally hundreds of people who would attest to the excellence of his character. 

Sometimes they were required to do just that, when suspicion threatened to build into a police matter. But, naturally, he never called upon the same ones twice; and it didn’t happen often anyway. Security gave him self-assurance. Security and self-assurance had bred a high degree of skill.  

Roy’s life changes radically when his mother, Lilly, a woman who’s a mere 13 years older than Roy shows up in Los Angeles. Lilly is bad news–for one thing she works for mob bookie Bobo Justus and then again Roy has some serious mummy issues. Lilly’s job involves travelling around the country betting large sums of money to lower the odds on longshots. Normally Lilly wouldn’t be welcome in Roy’s life–after all they haven’t seen one another for years, but when Lilly arrives, she finds Roy dying from internal injuries, and she uses her mob connections to get him the best medical care. 

As Roy recuperates, Lilly meets his girlfriend, Myra, long-term grifter and part-time prostitute, and while the two women instantly dislike one another, the truth is that they’re made from the same rotten mould, and now they square off over Roy…. 

The double life–a sort of splitting–in which the individual leads both a legal and a secret illegal life is the sort of thing we see in The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, and it’s when these two lives collide that Thompson’s characters experience trouble. Roy has kept the fact his real passion, grifting, from Myra, and yet Myra, who isn’t all that she appears to be, knows a fellow grifter when she sees one, and she has a good idea that Roy could be the long-term grift partner she’s been looking for.

As the story plays out, there’s the sense that these three characters are drawn to one another–almost against their will–in a savage dance of self-destruction. The Grifters is a story of insatiable appetites, and none of the three characters can give up a way of life that feeds those hungers–Lilly can’t stop working for the mob, Roy can’t give up the grift, and Myra can’t stop dreaming of the long-term con of a lifetime. These damaged characters are driven by passion for money–money which offers the sort of security that a harsh society has failed to provide any other way. Only money gives them the confidence, assurance, and security they crave, but unfortunately in The Grifters, these appetites collide. There’s even the fourth character whose insatiable appetite is literally just that–concentration camp survivor Carol tries to stuff herself with food to fill the space left by human cruelty.

Author Jim Thompson picked up the short-con from ‘Airplane Red’ Brown at the Hotel Texas in 1920s when working as a hotel bellboy. Airplane Red was one of those fascinating individuals who drifted through Thompson’s life and left a permanent impression.

Here’s one final quote about Lilly, married and pregnant at age thirteen and widowed by fourteen :

Settling down in Baltimore, she found lucrative and undemanding employment as a B-girl. Or, more accurately, it was undemanding as far as she was concerned. Lilly Dillon wasn’t putting out for anyone; not, at least, for a few bucks or drinks. Her nominal heartlessness often disgruntled the customers, but it drew the favorable attention of her employers. After all, the world was full of bimboes, tramps who could be had for a grin or a gin. But a smart kid, a doll who not only had looks and class, but was also smart–well, that kind of kid you could use.

They used her, in increasingly responsible capacities. As a managing hostess, as a recruiter for a chain of establishments, as a spotter of sticky-fingered and bungling employees; as courier, liaison officer, fingerwoman; as a collector and disburser. And so on up the ladder … or should one say down? The money poured in, but little of the shower settled on her son.

L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (Rockstar Games)

One of the features I really like about the Kindle (apart from the free classics) is the way stories, novellas, and novels not published anywhere else find their way onto this device. Example: I came across L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories for the princely sum of 99 cents. How could I not buy this?

Ok, so what do you get for your 99 cents?

That Girl by Megan Abbott

See the Woman by Lawrence Block

Naked Angel by Joe R. Lansdale

Black Dahlia and White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates

School for Murder by Francine Prose

What’s in a Name by Jonathan Santlofer

Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski

Postwar Room by Andrew Vachss

Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, wrote the introduction which explains that Rockstar Games “set out to create a classic noir experience,” and that LA Noire puts the player “into the shoes of Cole Phelps” former Marine now a member of LAPD. In addition to creating the game, Rockstar Games also “invite[d] some of the most acclaimed living practitioners of the noir storytelling art … to each write a new short story inspired by the world of LA Noire.” Some of the stories, apparently, are inspired by cases in the game.

I’m a Megan Abbott fan, so I was happy to see her included, and her story, The Girl is a female-centric tale that focuses on the tawdry side of Hollywood. I’ve read all of Abbott’s novels, btw, and The Song is You is my favourite. The Song is You was inspired by the real-life, unsolved disappearance of actress Jean Spangler. It’s a bitterly haunting novel, and I found myself thinking about it as I read The Girl. The Girl is set in a “famous” LA house, and I know which house inspired Abbott here. It’s a “Mayan fortress made of ferroconcrete blocks stacked like teeth.”

The protagonist of the story is an actress called June. She doesn’t have much of a career, but she’s married to a gangster named Guy, and this career move has removed some of the desperation from June’s life. June’s agent tells her that she’ll meet Huston at the party:

“Key Largo. The part’s perfect for you.”

“Claire Trevor’s got it sewn up between her thighs,” June said softly, looking up at the house from the open door of the agent’s middling car. “Ten years, every bed I land in is still warm from her.”

“She’s not married to Guy,” the agent pointed out.

“You see how far that’s got me,” June said.

Ok, this is a Hollywood party of the movers and shakers, the power people of Tinseltown. June has already admitted that she’s slept around to get parts. What else is she willing to do?

The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and June shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.

Working counter girl, working  as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.

She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’s seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.

So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, is she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.

I am a fan of Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series, so it wasn’t too surprising that another favourite story came from this author. Lansdale’s story, Naked Angel, is about patrolman Adam Coats who finds a dead body frozen inside a huge block of ice.

Downtown at the morgue the night attendant, Bowen, greeted him with a little wave from behind his desk. Bowen was wearing a white smock covered in red splotches that looked like blood but weren’t. There was a messy meatball sandwich on a brown paper wrapper in front of him, half-eaten. He had a pulp-Western magazine in his hands. He laid it on the desk and showed Coats some teeth.

I wasn’t sure which was worse–thinking that the morgue attendant’s smock was covered in blood or realising that he was eating a messy meatball sandwich a few feet away from the stiffs.

Another favourite I’m going to mention is Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski. This is the story of Bill Shelton, an underpaid Los Angeles surveyor who thinks he gets lucky when he picks up a waitress named Bonnie. Wait. I’ll revise that. She picks him up. Bad sign. A few dates and a little tongue hockey later, Bill’s ready to do whatever it takes to get Bonnie out of trouble.

These are classic noir tales: the easy pick-up femme fatale, affairs torched by lust, greed and ambition, and our characters lured by opportunity only to be tricked by fate. Some of these short stories have the feel that they could be fleshed out into novellas, but hey for 99 cents, I’m not bitching.  And if you want the low-down on the other stories, knock yourself out and spring for a copy.