Murder Can Be Fun Library

NOIR CITY #2: TREES OF CEMENT

2010-01-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

The Asphalt Jungle by W.R. Burnett (1949)

One of my pet theories is that nothing beats a good movie for solidifying an author's reputation. Would Hammett be so revered if they'd only made The Maltese Falcon twice? Would Chandler be, well, Chandler without a string of memorable screen Marlowes? And where would Mario Puzo be without Martin Scorsese?

W.R. Brunett pretty much torpedoes this theory. One critic noted, "More good movies have been made from W.R. Burnett's novels than Fydor Dostoyevsky's." Burnett's first novel, Little Caesar, became the seminal gangster movie that made Edward G. Robinson a star. High Sierra was memorably filmed with Bogart. And The Asphalt Jungle was not only filmed by Huston, starred Bogart, and launched the career of certain big-titted blond, it was also the first modern caper movie.

Three big movies and pfft. All this cinematic credibility hasn't meant jack in publishing royalties for the Burnett estate; the last edition of The Asphalt Jungle was in 2002. Which is too bad. Burnett was the "Boswell of Noir City," the premier chronicler of the intersection between the underworld and ostensibly respectable society in urban America during the mid-20th century. His writing was terse, low key, and subtly minimalistic. There may not be a lot of shooting or psychodrama in his books, but I defy you to put one down.

The Asphalt Jungle is a bonafide noir classic. It is an early, if not the first modern caper novel, a seldom-surpassed depiction of a carefully assembled gang of criminals acting in unison to take down a large institution. At the center is "Professor" Erwin Riemenschneider, a master thief recently released from prison. He has a plan to take a local jewelry store for $500,000. But while his plan may be foolproof, it's no match for chance, venality and human fallibility.

His hand-picked team are more than up to the job: Bellini, the safe-cracker turned family man, and Dix, the job muscle who dreams of going back home. Unfortunately Emmerich, the hot-shot shady lawyer who's supposed to arrange to fence the jewels, has blown his wad and then some on some fancy red-head. He has no fence, just an utterly half-baked plan to run off with all the jewels.

The job goes off as planned, but the jewels are barely out of the safe before fate intervenes. A chance encounter with a night watchman and an accidentally discharged gun fatally injures Bellini. Emmerich's attempt to grab the jewels fails, but he does manage to wing Dix in the process. This little scuffle gets the cops on his tail. He later kills himself when his little redhead realizes that being his alibi could get her in trouble.

After lying low a few days, Dix and the Professor go their separate ways. The Professor manages to find a cabbie who will drive him to Cleveland and safety. Unfortunately, he is done in by a personal weakness that "...caught him in a trap as a cheese catches a mouse." At a meal break at a roadside diner, he is distracted by his personal passion: a young girl. As he dawdles around flirting with her, he is spotted by a few motor cops and immediately arrested.

Dix is the only one to make it...sorta. His pathetically devoted chippy girlfriend Doll manages to drive him back to the family homestead down south. But things are going pretty bad on the old homestead; in fact, his family's had to sell the family farm and move into some dump in town. But by then, Dix is so delirious for his wounds he can't quite grasp this, and he dies before fully understanding that you can't go home again.

I'm betting no one's going to be getting away with any jewels either when The Asphalt Jungle screens at the Castro on January 24th.

NOIR CITY #1: DON'T STOP NOW!

2009-12-31T17:50:00.000-08:00

He Ran All the Way by Sam Ross (1947)

Someone once described the classic noir plot as a man gradually realizing that he's fucked. Well, He Ran All the Way's Nick Robey is way ahead on this game. The novel opens with him having a full-on expressionistic nightmare of him playing himself in craps--and losing.

Yes, Nick is filled with a sense of foreboding. He convinced the stick-up he's planning with his pal Al is doomed And it is. It winds up with a cop dead, Al in jail (singing the tune "Nick did it!") and Nick himself on the run.

As long as Nick is in motion, the novel has a pleasantly sweaty kinetic energy emphasized by Ross's staccato style. "He couldn't afford to make a mistake. He couldn't afford to take chances." Unfortunately, rather than careening about Chicago like the hottest pinball in town, things grind to a screeching halt out of The Desperate Hours.

Realizing "...he had no way of getting anywhere and he had no place to go," Nick picks up 19-yr. old Peg Dobbs at the beach and convinces her to take him home. Oddly enough, her pathologically post war nuclear family raise nary an eyebrow over their daughter bringing home an obviously agitated and armed lunatic. But even though they seem quite amenable to letting him hang around the house for a few days with the housing shortage and all, he panics, pulls his gun and takes the whole lot of them hostage.

The next 200 pages of the parents freaking, Peg sympathizing, and Junior smart-assing are pretty dull. You want to scream at Nick, "Move, man, move!!!!" There's even a Flitcraft sequence where for no real reason Mr. Dobbs tells Nick that a man's dreams shouldn't come true because when they do, "you feel a little more hollow inside."

This doesn't stop Nick from ultimately tossing the seven-out of his dreams. He gets a screwball idea for Peg to buy a car and drive him to the coast. She comes through with the car, but faced with his increasingly irrational behavior, she embraces him--and fatally stabs him in the back with a handy kitchen knife.

Ultimately, the novel is done in by by the lengthy hostage sequence. However, the prospect of having a screen presence like John Garfield ranting and raving and screaming at the elder Dobbs, smacking Junior, fondling Peg (a young Shelly Winters? Mmmm...) and sweating over the tastefully-furnished Dobbs home does have enormous cinematic potential.

We'll see if this potential is realized on January 26th when He Ran All the Way screens at the Castro.

NOIR CITY IS COMING!!

2009-12-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's almost January, which can only mean one thing around here: Noir City! From January 22 through the 31st, when the lights go down in San Francisco's Castro theater, the theater will be enveloped by our favorite shade of black: Film Noir! This year's festival features 24 films (15 not available on DVD!) on the theme of "Lust and Larceny." Each double bill (and in Noir City, every bill is a double bill) will feature one film with the theme of lust, one with the theme of larceny. Who says you can't have it both ways?

As always, I will attempt to review/discuss all the books the films are based on. There are 10 in the line-up this year, ranging from The Postman Always Rings Twice to A Place in the Sun , which had its genesis in Dreiser's An American Tragedy. And I guarantee I'm not going to let the 700+ pages of the latter deter me.

Coming soon: Sam Ross's He Ran All the Way.

DAMN VIGILANTES

2009-09-30T22:12:00.000-07:00

Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction by Bradley Mengel (McFarland, 2009)

Ever since reading the cover blurb of The Destroyer #23: Child's Play ("Who would think of booby-trapping a frisbee?"), I've been fascinated by what I call Men's Action/Adventure paperback series of the '70s (MAA70 for short): The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Death Merchant, The Butcher, and their many violent imitators. Not that I actually read the damn things; most are dull, if not downright unreadable. It's the peculiar package: the neatly number titles, the bizarrely-named protagonists, the blazing violent covers, and the mind boggling body counts. I just love having them lined up neatly on my shelves.

I have been waiting for a book like Serial Vigilantes for 30 years. MAA70 are the male analog of romance novels. Critics ignore them. Respectable bookstores don't carry them. Information of any sort about them is almost impossible to come by.

As a bibliography alone, Serial Vigilantes fills a gaping void. It has the scoop on more than 130 series from Able Team to Z-Comm. Each entry describes the series hero and premise, gives a complete list of titles through 2008, and unmasks many of the writers lurking behind pen names like "Stuart Jason" and "Nick Carter." It's decently written, nicely organized, neatly presented, and seems pretty comprehensive. It's earned a spot on my reference book shelf. To think, all those years I thought Michael Avallone wrote the early Butchers...I'm sorry, Mike

But I can and must kvetch about details. First, the term "serial vigilantes." I hate it. Although it accurately describes guys like the early Executioner, the Lone Wolf, and a whole passel of Death Wish-like gun-toting goofballs, just as many of the subgenre's so-called "vigilantes," including mainstays like Nick Carter and my beloved Destroyer are agents clandestinely working for the government. What self-respecting vigilante takes orders, much less pulls down a civil service paycheck? Me, I'm sticking with MAA70, with "action" being a code word for one of the sub-genre's most prominent features: excessive gratuitous violence.

Mengel's history of the sub-genre is also pretty sketchy. I will spare you my lengthy rant about the pre-history of the sub-genre. Just let me say that I see a lot more Tarzan, James Bond, and Mickey Spillane and a lot less Doc Savage than Mengel does. He also makes no comment about how or why the sub-genre seemed to take a strong martial turn around 1980, with mercenary vs. terrorist supplanting man vs. Mafia as the conflict of choice. Since I frankly don't care about these later series, it's no big deal. But I do wonder.

My biggest gripe, however, is personal. For many years I have been on a quest for the worst MAA70 series. Is it The Hitman? Gannon? The Lone Wolf? Alas, Serial Vigilantes is utterly uncritical. It treats these abuses of the reader's endurance with every bit as much respect as the excellent Destroyer, the Ur-Executioner, and the always-good Revenger. I suppose neutrality is good in a reference book. But I did have my hopes.

At least I know I only have 100 more series to check out!

THE ULTIMATE HANGOVER

2009-09-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

Hangover Square: A Tale of Darkest Earl Court by Patrick Hamilton (1941)

Until recently, Patrick Hamilton was a mainstay of "forgotten novelists" lists, touted by a distinguished group including J.B. Priestly, Doris Lessing, and Nick Hornby. Many of his best books have finally slipped back in print over the last few years, only to be marketed to the minor British novelist crowd. In noir circles, he's best known for the plays that were the basis for the films Rope and Gaslight.

Which is too bad, because Hangover Square is truly one of the great noir novels. The grim setting--a London neighborhood of dank rooming houses, cheap hotels, greasy coffee shops and, above all, seedy pubs on the very eve of World War Two--oozes with dark atmosphere. It was a world Hamilton knew intimately. A life long hard drinker (one of his bios was entitled Through a Glass Darkly), he was a Boswell of the barroom, unsurpassed at capturing the boredom, loneliness and above all, the hopelessness of the habitual public drinker.

At the center of Hangover Square is George Harvey Bone, a large, weak, and amiable man in his mid-30s. He is desperately in love with Netta Longdon. Alas, not only is his love unrequited, Netta is a femme fatale of a sort that gives the rest of the subspecies a bad name. Vicious, cruel, and utterly self-absorbed, she is described as looking "...like a Byron beauty, but inside, she was a fish." She is at a center of a crowd that even George recognizes to be a "Drunken, lazy, impecunious, neurotic, arrogant pub crawling cheap lot of swine." Yet George can't bear to tear himself away, putting up with an endless stream of humiliations in the forlorn hope that maybe somehow, someday, Netta would care. Not that she ever will. She only tosses George an occasional bone of civil treatment because he does have his uses: an ever-handy stooge, a reliable source of small loans, the possessor of tenuous connections that may further her "acting" career.

There is no shortage of darkness and desperation in George's plight, and doom is just around the corner. But Hangover Square is more than a beer-sodden take on Of Human Bondage. Periodically and without warning, a loud "Crack!" sounds in George's head. He snaps into a "dead mood," a fugue-like state (that is completely unrelated to schizophrenia) where he continues to act more or less normally. But when he snaps out of it, he has no idea what he's been up to. It just happens that during these "dead moods," he's planning to kill Netta Longdon. In the true noir tradition, every time things are looking up for George--he's cutting down on the drink, he's not hanging around with Netta, he's breaking free of his dead-end life--Crack!

Any list of best noir novels that doesn't include Hangover Square is merely joking.

TRUE SLEAZE DETECTIVE

2009-09-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

True Crime Detective Magazines 1924-1969 by Eric Godtland, edited by Dian Hansen (Taschen, 2008)

A a long time lover of True Detective magazine and its many imitators (and one of the few to notice its passing), I've been waiting for years for an even half-assed history of the genre. And, with the publication of True Crime Detective Magazines, I'm still waiting.

Not that there isn't a whole lot to love about this lavish volume. For Taschen books, pictures are the thing. And there is no shortage of eye candy here. The book is loaded with some 400+ drool worthy reproductions of detective magazine covers. It begs for coffee table display.

The text, however, is another matter. Granted, the image-heavy format and Taschen's policy of printing the text in English, French, and German doesn't give the writers much to work with. But even allowing for these tight constraints, the "history" presented herein is sketchy, scatter shot, and from what I can tell, frequently inaccurate. The authors seem to have been so distracted by the chapters on bondage covers and "girls smoking" covers (??) they appear to have spent little time actually reading the damn things. As painful an experience as this may be, sometimes a writer's gotta take one for his audience.

An even bigger gripe is 1969 cut-off. Why, my god, why? This is when things were getting really interesting ironically. The wave of sleaze they describe as engulfing the magazines in the 1960s didn't really hit until the 1970s. During the disco decade, every cover was a tasteless tableau of a woman about to come to a painful, violent, and frequently sexually sadistic end. Blurbs promised to reveal the truth about the "Mutilation Murder of Palm Beach's Millionaire Homo" of "When You're Done, Stack Her With the Others." They were truly documents of a nation seemingly going insane.

Luckily, there is something more than pretty pictures. Almost as an afterthought, they include "I Was a True Detective Editor" by Marc Gerald, wherein Mr. Gerald describes his memorable first job out of college in 1989. This article about the almost-final days of the crime magazines is worth the price of admission alone.

It's sad that even Canada's really crappy crime magazines have gotten a real book (True Crime, True North) while the land that invented the damn things (all praise St. Bernarr MacFadden!) has to make do with this. But it does look so nice on my coffee table....

GETTING BURIED DEEPLY

2009-08-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd by Jana Bommersbach (Simon & Shuster, 1992)

Megan Abbot's next book, Bury Me Deep, is loosely based on the 1931 Winne Ruth Judd "Trunk Murders" (not, as one or two pinheads suggested, the Brighton Trunk Murders.) Naturally, this sent me scurrying to my library to do a little background reading.

The first book on the case, 1973's Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders, is little more than as assemblage of newspaper clippings tediously re-written into narrative form. Definitely not worth the bother. Bommersbach's book is definitely the one to get, and as a read it goes done painlessly. But accurately? That remains to be seen.

First, the facts. Winnie Ruth Judd was a 26-yr old medical typist trying to may a go of it in Phoenix in 1931. For friends, she had x-ray tech Agnes LeRoi and TB patient Hedwig Samuelson. For fun, she had big-wheel lumberman Jack Halloran. And she did have a husband, but he was conveniently out-of-state looking for work and played no role in subsequent events.

On the night of October 26th, Judd visited her pals. There was an altercation caused, Judd later claimed, by her introducing Halloran to a woman with a arrested case of syphilis. Two days later, her erstwhile friends were found in a pair of leaky trunks in the checkroom at Los Angeles's Union Station; Samuelson's body had been cut into four pieces to fit. Judd was quickly arrested. In a trial that can only be described as "unusual," she was convicted of LeRoi's murder and sentenced to death. She was ultimately found insane and remanded to a state mental hospital. She would escaped seven times over the next 30 years (once staying AWOL for seven years) before being finally paroled in 1971

Bommersbach makes a good case for the investigation being flawed, the trial unfair, and the whole process skewed by official efforts to protect Halloran. But to protect him from scandal, or prosecution? Bommersbach has her explanations; in fact, she has two. Unfortunately, her solutions are as problematical as the prosecution's. To run them down, they are:

Single Woman Theory: Acting entirely alone, Winne Ruth Judd shot her two friends, did her own chopping and stuffing, and then put a bullet in her hand to make it look like self defense. This is the official prosecution theory.
That Nasty Man: Jumped by her two friends, Judd somehow wrested the gun away after sustaining a bullet wound in the hand and proceeded to kill them in "self defense." She summoned loverboy Halloran, who arranged to have the bodies loaded in trunks. This is Judd's personal story.
The Second Gunman: There was another gunman who shot one, or possibly both, of the women, leaving Judd entirely innocent.

All are flawed. Although it isn't as hard to chop up a body as Bommersbach makes out, she does make a good case that Judd's hand was injured before the bodies went in the trunks. Dissecting assistance is probable. But Judd's self-defense claim flys in the face of physical evidence. LeRoi was killed by a single shot to the head fired at extremely close range. But would Halloran, a businessman with ready access to trucks that could easily transport the bodies out into the desert, bring in a second witness to chop up Samuelson and then send the injured and no doubt thoroughly rattled Judd on a lengthy, idiotically conceived trip with no clear plan to get rid of the evidence?

The second gunman theory is simply silly. Not only does this beg why Judd would spend the rest of her life screaming self defense, the only basis is the early news stories that had the women being killed by different guns. Where Bommersbach sees evidence of a sinister conspiracy protecting important men, I see another screw-up by know-it-all newshounds.

My theory is that Judd sneaked into the house, shot LeRoi and then brawled a bit with Samuelson before shooting her. If she did have some post-mortem help, I think it was a third party that lacked access to more convenient methods of body disposal. But who... and why?

It is with keen anticipation that I await Ms. Abbott's novelization (and hopefully, rationalization) of these events.

ALL CHOKED UP

2009-06-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

Autoerotic Fatalities by Hazelwood, Dietz, & Burgess (Lexington Books, 1983)

Recent events in Thailand inspired me to dust off my copy of this transgressive classic from the '80s and skim the good parts. Aimed at a professional audience of the hardworking souls who have to clean-up the medical and legal aftermath of these mishaps, the writing is dry and matter-of-factual, but never dense or dull. After reading this, you could one-up the Bangkok police.

The book is based on a a study of more than 100 cases, with a generous number described in detail in the text. There are common elements. The victims are almost invariably male. They are generally found nude save for a few articles of women's clothing and/or bondage gear. Typically, "the victim hid this sexual activity from family and friends." But it's not just classic autoerotic asphyxiation; the authors delve into cases involving a floor buffer, home-made electrodes, and household refrigerants. While the famous "Love Bug" case is only alluded to, not discussed in detail, there is no shortage of cases illustrating other novel expressions of the human sexual instinct.

The bulk are, of course, autoerotic asphxiations. My personal favorite was about a 19-year old man who was visiting his fiance's family. After dinner, he begged out of a shopping trip. After they all left, he stripped down, shoved a corncob into his rectum, and filled a shallow hole in the backyard with water. He wallowed in his improvised bog until he was thoroughly covered with mud and then proceeded to hang himself from a fence. But as happens so often, he got carried away and wound up asphyxiating himself. When his fiancee and family return home to make the horrifying discovery, one can only imagine that their shock was tinged with a slight sense of relief that the marriage was off.

There are dozens of others in here that are almost equally novel. After reading this book, Mr. Carradine's apparent misadventure starts to look not only far from unusual, but decidedly unoriginal.

DONALD WESTLAKE #2: THE FIRST WESTLAKIAN STORY

2009-05-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

Most of Westlake's early stories appeared in the digest-sized mystery magazines that came and went during the 1950s. Although emminently readable, they weren't particularily Westlakian. "Arrest" (Manhunt, 1/58) was a decent, albeit typical atmospheric killer-waiting-for-the-cops story. "Everybody Killed Sylvia" (Mystery Digest 5/58) was an uneven, undistiguished PI caper with a few comic touches. "The Ledge Bit" (Mystery Digest 9-10/59) had an actor trying to revive his career by playing "suicidal" on hotel ledge; alas, the hotel he chose lacked this vital architectural feature.

For the first touches of that inimitable Westlake style, we must turn to the November 1959 issue of the Guilty Detective Story Magazine. Published by a schlocky Massachusetts-based outfit, Guilty (and its sister magazine Trapped) were far more interesting than they had any right to be. Although their contents were dominated by the hack work of burnt-out pulp writers, the editors preferred JD stories (touching relics of the days when the biggest threat to Western civilization was a teenager with a zip gun) to the standard vitrified Mike Hammer clones. They also published a surprising number (not large, just surprising) of good stories, including early work from Lawrence Block, Harlan Ellison, and of course, Westlake.

"The Knife Fighter" is a bouncy, lightly-written vignette about Al, an ordinary looking teenager who provokes a philosophical confrontation with three JDs. "...let's say we get into an argument...and we decided to settle it with knives," he tells them. "What would it prove?" Using reverse psychology, he manipulates the leader of the trio into an alley for one-on-one action. The action is short and quick. After he wipes his knife off, he walks out of the alley, sadly telling the dead boy's companions, "You can't prove a thing with a knife." He walks down the street and decides to head for the Upper West Side because "he needed more action tonight...[and] there were some real mean guys up there." The Sharks and Jets were never this much fun.

Next up: the most unusual Westlake book you'll never read.

DONALD WESTLAKE #1

2009-05-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

Donald Westlake's passing this past December inspired a large number of respectful obituaries, fond tributes, and humorous anecdotes. And justifiably so; he was a true master of the genre who could have used his prodigious output to shake the MWA for three Grandmaster Awards: one for Donald Westlake, one for Richard Stark, and one for a the goofy pen name he could have used for the Dortmunder books. It would have been a joke that I'm sure he would have enjoyed hugely

The closest I have to a Westlake anecdote is more about editorial myopia. Back in 1997, when Westlake brought back Parker (yippie!) in Comeback, I was doing a very small amount of freelance writing for a would-be Details. I pitched my editor what I still think is my best-ever book review idea: an "interview" with the monosyllabic Parker that would end with him breaking my arm or something. He said no. "Too obscure" were his very words.

Two weeks later, Comeback received a full page review in that renowned journal of the obscure and idiosyncratic, Time.

However, there is much Westlake that is truly "too obscure" for all but the fanatics. Next up: a look at some of his earliest stories.

ESCAPE FROM NOIR CITY #2

2009-05-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Belatedly wrapping up the Noir City...

The Unsuspected: The atmosphere on the screen trumps the novel, but the the convoluted plot did not translate well. Presumably, key expository scenes wound up on the cutting room floor. I was the only person in the theater who could actually explain it.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is beyond a reasonable doubt not adapted from Grafton's novel.

Two O'Clock Courage is a heavily streamlined, but reasonably faithful adaptation of Burgess's novel with a surprising amount of B-movie charm.

The Harder They Fall: A great flick from a great novel that I really should re-read. But those who look upon this as an accurate depiction of the Primo Carnera story should be advised that liberties were taken. Legitimately or not, Carnera did KO Jack Sharkey for the title, boxed for four years after losing his title, and went on to a long and successful career in wrestling.

The Sweet Smell of Success was, as always, a success. I even managed to restrain myself from shouting "There's Frank Rosolino," although I did twitch. The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river!

Next up: an even more belated Donald Westlake tribute!

ESCAPE FROM NOIR CITY #1

2009-02-16T20:56:00.000-08:00

I'm back from Noir City. Even after two weeks, I'm still a little bleary from seeing 22 films in 10 days. But it was worth it, especially the night I got to surreptitiously sit behind Miss Noir City (at right.) Now that's a cinematic experience that you'll never have in your "home" theater!.

Obviously, I didn't make my goal of blogging (or even reading) every novel. I never even made it to James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit (filmed as Scarlet Street) or Samuel Fuller's Dark Page (Scandal Sheet) and didn't get around to re-visiting Budd Schulberg's wonderful The Harder They Fall or Hemingway's "The Killers." I did get about 1/4 of the way through Tiffany Thayer's One Woman (Chicago Deadline) before throwing in the towel. I'd already seen the movie, which was shaping up to be a reasonable adaptation and welcome condensation of the too-long novel.

Now for the rehash:

Wicked as They Come: great flick, decent adaptation of Ballinger's Portrait in Smoke. They ditched the cheap skip tracer (no problem), but inexplicably shifted the action to London for no apparent reason. Arlene Dahl is suitably vicious.

While the City Sleeps: the business end of the novel is handled well, with the contenders reduced to a more manageable trio, and the plot follows the book closely. My only gripe is that the cool Freudian seductive mother and kinky killer son are replaced with a Reader's Digest-style weak mother and JD son. C'mon, it's about handkerchiefs and underwear!

Big Clock: Very nifty flick that does justice to the novel. Of course, the homosexual subplots have been all but erased, but attentive viewers can spot some vestigial mincing. Kudos to scripter John "Cuban Pineapples" Latimer for actually coming up with a more logical end for Janoth!

to be continued....

NOIR CITY #7: DOUBTFUL

2009-01-27T14:49:00.001-08:00

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt by C. W. Grafton (1950)

I have more than a reasonable doubt that Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is actually the basis for the 1956 movie of the same name (which was certainly Fritz Lang's last American movie.) But I read the ting anyway, so what the hell.

Undoubtedly, C.W. Grafton's most significant contribution to the mystery genre was siring a daughter who grew up to pen whodunnits like D is For Dipshit. However Grafton pere, a practicing lawyer, wrote a handfull of mystery novels that are well regarded in some circles, of which Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the most noirish. More a legal thriller than traditional mystery, it does have its moments.

Jess London is a rookie lawyer working for his sister's unscrupulous husband Mitch Sothern. After a party at Sothern's place which features much group singing and even more drinking, London returns to retrieve his hat. He overhears a bitter fight. Sothern is leaving his pregnant sister, and using London's job with his firm to blackmail her into a quiet divorce. After the sister exits to the hospital, London bursts into the room and clubs Sothern over the head with a substantial cigarette lighter with the usual results.

The next day, Sothern confesses to police. Suspecting he's covering for his sister, they don't believe him. But London discovers Sothern has framed him for dereliction of duty and possibly for a disbarrable offense. At this point, the story stumbles and takes on the dull tedium of a bad hangover and meanders along for 150 or so pages as the police gradually decide they may have been too hasty discounting London's confession. Only the occasional bit of pre-war color (can you believe teenagers going out on a Saturday night to park, drink whiskey, and singing "Down By the Old Mill Stream"?) brightens the tedium.

Interest returns when London is finally indicted. The prosecution has motive, opportunity, and no shortage of witnesses placing London near the scene. So London decides to defend himself and insists on starting the trial the next day!

The sneaky legal maneuvering, the legal rock throwing between counsel, and the clever way that London dismantles the prosecution's seemingly overwhelming case dispel the lingering hangover. It may not be real, but Grafton, a practicing lawyer, makes it nicely realistic. In the end London gets off, but in a lightly noirish twist, loses the girl when she realizes that he's just sold the court a dog & pony show.

Sources inform me that the film is about a man who frames himself for murder so his ultimate vindication be a critique of capitol punishment. Unfortunately, a key witness dies before the show can begin! It sure doesn't sound like Grafton's novel. But we shall judge for ourselves when Beyond a Reasonable Doubt screens at the Castro on Saturday, January 31.

NOIR CITY #6: SUCCESS!

2009-01-19T19:32:00.000-08:00

"The Sweet Smell of Success" by Ernest Lehman (1950)

Unlike most of the Noir City films, I have seen The Sweet Smell of Success multiple times and recommend it wholeheartedly. Such is my devotion to this noir I own both VHS and DVD copies despite the fact I have never owned a TV. As far as I'm concerned, this is the movie.

The source material ain't too bad either. Co-screen writer Ernest Lehman's novelette originally appeared in 1950 in Cosmopolitan (then a very much different magazine.) It opens with poor press agent Sidney Wallace listen to his mother kvetch about the seamy nature of her boy's chosen profession. Even his brother would rather work his way through college in a steam laundry than accept the cheerfully proffered proceeds of press agentry because there people "...work standing up--never on our knees."

Sidney doesn't disagree. He notes "...there was nothing I was not prepared to do, no level to which I would not descend..." to get his clients in the Winchell-like Harvey Hunsecker's column. In fact, he's just done a nice little favor for Hunsecker. To break up the romance of Hunsekcer's chihuahua-girl little sister Susan and crooner Steve Dallas, Sidney has placed a blind items accusing Dallas of marijuana usage and Communist sympathies in two other Broadway columns.

Dallas's career is derailed. Alas, Susan announces she's still going to marry him. A surprisingly sweaty Hunsecker is not pleased. With a few twinges of guilt, Sidney has to enact plan B, planting a few marijuana cigarettes in Steve's pocket and arranging a meet with a heavy handed member of New York's Finest. Listening to a drunk in a bar describe the results made even Sidney sick. But alas, it's all for naught. Sidney finds out, much like his cinematic counterpart, that little girls do learn many valuable lessons from their incest-minded big brothers.

It's a great little story, with cool atmosphere. Sidney describes one bar being:

...crowded with people like myself, who never went home if there was till someplace to go. Home is where the music stops, the floor show ends, the lights go on, and you are only you again.

Fans of the film will delight in many of the great subplots that made it to the screen almost unaltered, most notably Sidney's slimy way of "getting" the old comedian into Hunsecker's column. But Hunsecker himself is almost a shadow of the Lancaster character, who may pervade the novelette but has preciously little stage time. And those looking for dialog on the order of "You're dead. Go get yourself buried" or even "Match me, Sidney" are doomed to disappointment. The acid in the dialog was provided by pinko playwright Clifford Odets, who also apparently restructured the story to amplify the themes to infinity. The Sweet Smell of Success is that rarest of birds: a pretty good story that got made into a great picture.

I certainly am planning to see The Sweet Smell of Success for the umpteenth time on February 1st at the Castro.

Noir City Notes: Spoilage!

2009-01-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

A few people have commented (both virtually and to-my-facially) about my propensity for violating one of the cardinal rules of the mystery genre: revealing the ending. As a long-time advocate of not matching wits with twits like Hercule Poirot, I personally am never bothered by knowing whodunnit beforehand. The joy should be as much in the journey as the destination. It takes more that a clever ending to redeem a crappy book.

Nonetheless, I am aware that there are some readers bothered by this sort of thing. Point well taken. Normally, I would refrain (and will) refrain from spilling the beans if there are worthwhile beans to spill. But this assumes that someone, after reading this blog, is actually going to go out and read one of these books. I am far more interested in writing about books that most people are never going to read, either due to an excess of common sense or a lack of rarefied access. Not telling how a book ends in the former case is pointless and in the latter assholish.

My Noir City project is a special case. I'm not so much writing about the books themselves but the books as source material for films. OK, maybe here or there I'm spoiling a nice little literary surprise, but for the most part I've been suffering so you won't yet will still being able to cluck to your friends as you walk out of the Castro, "The book had a much better ending." As anyone who's ever read a book and seen the movie knows, any relationship between what you read and what you see is almost coincidental.

Next up: "The Sweet Smell of Success."

NOIR CITY #5: CONKED!

2009-01-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

Two O'clock Courage by Gelett Burgess (1934)

Gelett Burgess is perhaps the most unlikely writer on this list. Not only is he patently not noir, he isn't even a mystery guy. He first made a splash in 1890s San Francisco as one of the founders of The Lark, a magazine with an unusual format that was widely celebrated in literary circles. In other words, he was the Dave Eggers of fin de siecle San Francisco. His biggest hits were the Goops and that damn Purple Cow verse.

Nonetheless, he did turn out a few mysteries in his later years, not without commercial success. Two O'clock Courage was filmed twice, first in 1936 as Two In the Dark and then again in 1945 under the original book title in the version to be screened at Noir City 7.

It's not that the set-up is lacking in noir potential. A man finds himself on a dark city street in the grips of amnesia. He has no idea who he is, where he is, or how he got there. All he knows is his brown suit is covered with blood and his pockets are empty save for several $100 bills and a gun. He quickly figures out he's the mysterious "Man in the Brown Suit" sought by police in connection with the shooting of wealthy theater owner John Saxon. But all that ensues is manifestly not noir. Burgess's style is baroque and flowery and the story is devoid of any real tension or desperation.

It's a mild little mystery of the sort I imagine was immensely popular in its day but is now intensely dull. There is no shortage of suspects who were all but stumbling over one another at the murder scene, an ostensibly lonely mansion. There's the plagiarist playwright Saxon was blackmailing, a young actress he was manipulating, an eccentric violinist he'd cheated, the chauffeur he fired, and of course, the protagonist, who was heard shouting, "I'll kill you, you dirty cur!" in Saxon's study shortly before the shooting. In an out of left field development the real shooter turns out to be the mother of an actress he'd in the parlance of the day, "wronged." So much for fair play.

The path to this revelation is pretty tortuous. Action is minimal and cheap coincidences are rife. Much of the exposition is via witness statements and transcripts obligingly printed verbatim in the paper to be read by the characters. Mr. X ultimately figures out that he was in fact a playwright who was selling a play to Saxon. The "You dirty cur!" was a line in his play and his "pistol" was a water-shooting model (groan!) he'd used as a prop for this dramatic reading.

In fact, Two O'clock Courage brings to mind one of my favorite non-noir mystery writers, Harry Stephen Keeler. Often characterized (unfairly, IMHO) as the wost mystery writer ever, Keeler wrote sprawling mysteries with style, plots, and narrative structures ostensibly similar to Two O'clock Courage. But Keeler took things to such extremes that these flaws become utterly surreal and totally fascinating. Were Keeler to have authored Two O'clock Courage, he would have larded the plot with dozens of interlocking coincidences, each more outrageous than the last, interpolated a few of his old short stories (relevant or not), tossed in a circus freak or two, and resolved the mystery with an acrobatic midget lowered from an autogyro or perhaps a rare genetic disorder that only made it look like Saxon had been shot. Whether Keeler was an eccentric genius mocking this sort of mystery, or a deranged hack trying to write one and failing in a most interesting way, the results would have been sublime. It's no coincidence that my copy of Two O'clock Courage was printed by Surinam Turtle Press, a subsidiary of Keeler-publishers extraordinaire Ramble House.

We'll find out what kind of noir they can make out of this pig's ear when the 1945 version of Two O'Clock Courage screens on Saturday afternoon, January 31 at the Castro.

NOIR CITY #4: SMOKED

2008-12-30T21:28:00.001-08:00

Portrait in Smoke by Bill Ballinger (1950)

Bill Ballinger is one of those writers who slipped through the cracks. Not good enough to remain perpetually in print, not hip enough for cult rediscovery, he nonetheless churned out a surprising number of excellent noir novels that beat the tar out of many of his far-more-celebrated contemporaries. Portrait in Smoke, the basis for the 1956 British noir Wicked as the Come, is a case in point. Ballinger uses his trademark clever plotting and multiple-point of view narrative to paint a suspenseful portrait of a femme fatal guaranteed to get a rise out of even the jaded.

It all sounds pretty Laura. Danny April is a cheap little collection agent working Chicago's crummier neighborhoods who stumbles across a 10-year old photo of Krassy Almauniski winning the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest. Instantly smitten, he sets out to run her down. He's so obsessed at one point he calls up 367 moving companies looking for the one with blue trucks with a white stripe. Ultimately, he traces her from the stockyards through secretarial school, stints as ad agency secretary, executive mistress, war hero widow, and ultimately runs her down as the very bored wife of a very old, very wealthy banker.

But the kicker is that the story of Danny's search alternates with sections telling Krassy's real story. The scrappy little striver of Danny's delusion is a hardboiled schemer climbing the socioeconomic ladder on her back, legs spread, teeth gritted, and claws fully extended. Her first fiancee found himself bankrupt and almost indicted as Krassy siphoned off his life's savings. From the ad executive, she extracted a 45 G settlement. And Danny stumbles into her life just when she needs a fall guy for her ultimate scheme.

No fool, Danny poses as a white shoe bookie to worm his way into Krassy's life (and bed!). But the joke turns out to be on him when she shoots her Daddy Browning and leaves Danny holding the bag (figuratively) and the gun (literally). Danny's no dope, and he does get away, but he now knows the score. Krassy's cavorting on the French Rivera while he waits for the cops to knock on his door.

Wicked as They Come screens Saturday, January 24th at the Castro Theater with Arlene Dahl (who played you-know-who) in person.

Noir City #3: Clocked!

2008-12-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing (1946)

No quibbles about this one. Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock is a fixture on 100 best-noir novel lists, and is perhaps the perfect man-hunting-for-himself novel. It's the only book worth remembering poet-turned-novelist Fearing for, but it is one hell of a good reason. Everything about this book (pardon me) meshes.

Protaganist George Stroud is a "smug, self-satisfied, smart alecky... rubber stamp executive" for Janoth Enterprises, publishers of a Newsways, a Time-like newsweekly. How smug? Stroud is sleeping with Pauline Delos, megalomaniac publisher Earl Janoth's bi-sexual mistress. How self-satisfied? Stroud keeps an overnight bag and a bottle of scotch at a nearby residential hotel for those frequent "late nights at the office" when he can't make it home to the wife and kid.

The inevitable shit-storm, however, is not the usual shit-storm. One night, Stroud and Janoth see each other near Delos's place. Janoth doesn't recognize Stroud, but upstairs he mocks Delos for this one at least being a man. Delos responds by calling the mighty publisher "a carbon copy of a fairy gorilla" and claiming Janoth's right-hand man, Steve Hagen, yearns for him in a most unconventional way. Janoth retaliates by "accidentally" hitting her over the head with a decanter. Five times.

Janoth and Hagen put their heads together and quickly figure out that the "mystery man" is the only thing tying Janoth to Delos's murder. They mobilize the resources of Janoth Enterprises to "neutralize" this threat. Guess who's the lucky underling tapped to spearhead this no-expenses barred effort?

Stroud is more than up for scheming to avoid being ground up by what he calls "The Big Clock," the novel's symbol for fate and the system that inevitably grinds up all. (I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Fearing is a former Time staffer.) But the suspense mounts as the investigation's momentum smashes through his subterfuges. Tension peaks with minions excitedly informing Stroud that a witness has spotted the "mystery man" going into the Janoth building, and all exits are guarded. Fighting/brown nosing to the end, Stroud announces he won't leave the building until they run their man down. The floor-by-floor search begins, and ends with The Big Clock tolling, not for Stroud, but for Janoth. Stroud is saved--and goes back to being the same bastard he was before. Now that's noir!

It takes more than a few cute camera angles for a movie to live up to this book. We'll find out how the 1948 version of The Big Clock fares when it screens Thursday, January 29th at the Castro Theater.

MY KINDA BALLGAME

2008-11-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862-2007 by Robert M. Gorman & David Weeks (MacFarland, 2008)

It's books like this that make me realise that yes, it really is a wonderful world. Extensive, exhaustive, obsessive and authoritative without being dull, boring or pedantic, this is my kind of reference book. Messrs. Gorman and Weeks are university librarians and card-carrying SABR members who have combined their passion with their profession to uncover as many baseball-related fatality as possible, from Carl May's fatal beaning of Ray Chapman to a toddler getting hit by a thrown bat at the playground.

A must for the coffee tables of the sardonic, they classify the deaths into 13 broad categories such as beanings, on field collisions, and "Fan Fatalities From Falls, Risky Behavior, and Violence." Each category is broken down according to level (majors, minors, amateurs). In all, almost 1,000 deaths are covered. Although the longest write-ups are reserved for the small number of major league incidents, the minor-leaguers merit a page or so each, and even the sandlot players get a few lines. Although the writing is neutral in the reference book tradition, it's pleasantly readable and informative. Sometimes, you just gotta let the facts speak for themselves, especially when you're writing about the surprising number of guys killed by their own foul tips.

As long-time Murder Can Be Fun readers know, sports deaths is a particular passion of mine. Over the years, I've amassed a fairly thick file on the subject. But in going through my notes, I can find but six minor league fatalities. They found 16: 9 beanings, one chest pitch, one other thrown ball, three on-field collisions, and one lightning strike! Best trivia: two of the beanings took place at Winnipeg's Sherburn Park!

However, comprehensive is not a synonym for completel. I do have two significant cases that aren't in the book. Frankly, I'm surprised they missed the 1964 incident at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, where a bunch of Little Leaguers were chewed up by the escalator, one fatally so. (see MCBF #18 for full details). The other is a little more obscure. On June 21, 1904, Grove Thomas, catcher of the Babcock Baseball Club of Johnstown, PA took a foul tip in the chest that killed him almost instantly in game with the Indiana Normal (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania) nine. My source, Baseball's Greatest Tragedy by Bob McGarigle, claims it was the first actual on-field death, although DatBP clearly disproves this.

But this isn't even a quibble, just a few minor details that will undoubtedly make it into the next edition. As if anyone who reads this blog is going to wait. As is, this book is essential.

NOIR CITY #2: THE UNSUSPECTED

2008-11-12T20:40:00.000-08:00

The Ususpected by Charlotte Armstrong (1945)

Judging strictly by the cover art, I've always pigeonholed Charlotte Armstrong in the Had-I-But-Known school--Mignon Eberhart plus a few IQ points, perhaps, or Mary Roberts Rinehart minus the brooding mansion. Hardly the stuff of which noir is made.

And judging from The Unsuspected, the eponymous basis for the 1947 Michael Curitz film, I haven't been missing much.

The premise, albeit uninspiring, is not without hope. Rosaleen Wright, secretary to Luther "Grandy" Grandison, a noirish stage/screen director, has committed suicide under suspicious circumstances: hanging herself at her desk in the middle of the workday! Her cousin Jane and fiancee Francis smell a rat. Her "suicide note" was copied from a book of old Scottish trials. They suspect Rosaleen stumbled on Grandy's scheme to bilk to fortune of Mathilda, one of his two wards. In search of evidence, they infiltrate the Grandison compound: Jane as secretary, Francis as the conveniently missing-at-sea Mathilda's "secret husband." If this all sounds familiar, you've been reading your Woolrich!

Alas, unlike Mr. W., Ms. Armstrong's gift is for taking bad melodrama and making it worse. Mathilda quickly re-enters the picture (apparently she couldn't be bothered to radio the news of her dramatic rescue) but only makes a muted fuss over her "husband." Meanwhile, Grandy manipulates his wards as he continues his evil plot. Unfortunately, his other ward Althea (the one without $$) tells Francis that one detail that implicates him. Grandy quickly arranges an "accident" for her and attempts to have Francis tossed into a municipal garbage incinerator. Unfortunately for cynics, Mathilda plunges into the garbage pit and forestalls this most dramatic of ends. And yes, one character tells Francis that they needn't have gone through all this fuss "...if only you'd known."

It's actually a lot worse than it sounds. Armstrong leaves out huge chunks of interesting stuff like how Francis ingratiates himself into Grandy's home. Hell, she doesn't even include the text of the "suicide note." Although Grandy does have the makings of an interesting noir heavy and the garbage pit has its cinematic possibilities, this is one case where the movie can't help but to be better than the book.

"The Unsuspected" screens at the Castro Theater on Friday, January 30.

NOIR CITY #1: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS

2008-11-05T20:12:00.000-08:00

The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein (Dell, 1953)

The basis for Fitz Lang's 1956 film While the City Sleeps, Einstein's The Bloody Spur has a small reputation for being one of the first serial killer novels. Alas, the serial killer plays second fiddle to a bunch of typically larger-than-life characters battling for corporate glory written with more than a casual eye towards the bestseller list.

The action starts with the death of the Executive Director of the Kyne Newspaper publishing empire. The donnybrook between his potential successors (the flagship paper's editor, the photo service head, the feature syndicate director, and the wire service chief) over the job starts at the funeral and doesn't let up over 250 pages of corporate infighting, journalistic scheming, sexual shenanigans, and metaphorical throat-cutting. Only two things save this from being an ink-stained rehash of Executive Suite: the vividly realized mid-century newspaper office background, and the occasional chapter from the point of view of the William Heirens-style "Lipstick Killer" who's terrorizing the city to the great joy of the Kyne circulation department.

The "Lipstick Killer" is Robert Manners, a 20-year old college student with severe Oedipal issues as only a character in a 1953 novel can have. He has graduated from breaking into women's apartments to steal their soiled handkerchiefs and used panties and defecate on their floors to strangling and stabbing them. On the wall of one victim, he ensures his immortality by scrawling in lipstick "Help me for God's sake." A handful of delightfully noirish chapters follow Manners about his rounds: stalking his victims, going on bad dates, having an excruciating discussion with his mother about her handkerchiefs and underwear, and most memorably, his finally flight from pursuers through a subway tunnel. He looks down at his feet and sees a fragment of newspaper headline: "Stalks Killer." Most cinematic!

Sadly, Manners barely appears in the last quarter of the book as the little matter of corporate succession is not-so memorably settled. The book works out to 90% corporate and 10% killer, but I'm betting the film is going to come in at a 50/50 split.

While the City Sleep screens at Noir City on January 28th.

EN ROUTE TO NOIR CITY

2008-10-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

Each year, I spend part of my vacation at Noir City, San Francisco's annual orgy of all things dark and cinematic. The 2009 festival is scheduled at the Castro Theater for January 23 through February 1 and will feature 23 films, none of which will end happily. I fully expect to emerge from the theater on the 1st with a good start on a case of noir-induced color blindness.

The schedule for the 2009 festival doesn't appear to have been officially released yet. But, thanks to a well-place bribe, I have obtained an advance copy. And while I am not about to divulge the details (those Film Noir Foundation guys can play rough!), the theme is newspapers, there are plenty of 'B' flicks, and it's given me a start for my next project. .

Of the 23 films in the festival, at least 11 are adapted from published short stories and novels.
A few are well known, but many are familiar only to the habitues of Kayo Books. And some come from the pens of authors that, to put it mildly, are not normally associated with anything noir. .

I've always been obsessed with novels-into-noir. So in the coming weeks, I will be blogging about as many of the books of Noir City 7 as I can. I already have a line on nine of them. With any luck at all, I should be able to nail all eleven before the New Year, giving us plenty of time to cogitate before the dark cinematic pool engulfs us all.

JAMES CRUMLEY RIP

2008-09-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

James Crumley, one of the great ones, died a few days ago. I was introduced to him at the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore by the old owner who knew exactly what to recommend to "those lunatics who read Jim Thompson." He handed me a copy of The Wrong Case opened to page 5. The narrator describes witnessing a purse snatching from his office window that ended with the thief struck by one car and dragged a half block by another. "I had never realized purse snatching was such a dangerous crime..." Sold!

Crumley's probably best known for The Last Good Kiss and its immortal opening line:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

And things only get better when the aforesaid Mr. Trahearne happily finds himself in a car "'...wandering around America with an alcoholic bulldog, a seedy private dick, and a working quart of Wild Turkey.'" How can anyone resist?

Sadly, Crumley only wrote a handfull of books. They all slide down well and pack a whallop, but like fine whiskey, deserve to be slowly and carefully savored.

IRRESISTIBLE BLOOD LUST

2008-07-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

Blood Lust #1: Irresistible by Michael Bates (Bantam, 1994)

I've been hooked on the Blood Lust series of sex & shock young adult horror novels since reading a post on "What YAs shouldn't Read" back in the glory days of Usenet. Well, Publisher's Weekly "Gleefully recommends this slick combination of macabre softcore porn and whiny schadenfreude..." and so do I.

Irresistible is as good a place to start as any. "Irresistible" is a perfume clandestinely distributed to the popular set by the inevitable revenge-crazed nerd. Alas for the recipients, this product works far to well. A few drops triggers a bodice-ripping, restraining-order inspiring passion. A whole bottle, well, the cheerleader that tried that wound up partially devoured by her "bad boy" date.

And that's just the start of the fun. The just as inevitable nice girl finds the boy of her dreams so hopelessly devoted to her he Hitchcocks a cheerleader in the shower (25 times!) for saying something mean about her and then breaks another rah-rah's neck for good measure. The double funeral is marred by an passionate couple sneaking behind a monument! To quote our heroine's thoughts, it's "...totally twisted to be having fun while two of your friends were being buried!"

The scent-crazed youngsters stop at nothing, not even necrophilia, right up to the pleasingly unresolved ending. Subsequent volumes (seven, I believe) mine similar suburban horrors with equally surreal results. Kids today just have it way too easy....

DIME A DANCE

2008-07-02T19:57:00.001-07:00

The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercial Recreation and City Life by Paul Cressey (University of Chicago Press, 1932. 2008 reprint)

This is perhaps my Ur book, a combination guaranteed to satisfy both my Cornell Woolrich induced taxi-dance hall obsession and my jones for gritty ethnography. I pre-ordered it over a year ago. And it was worth every minute of the wait.

The Taxi-Dance Hall is the gem of the “Sociology Noir” sub-genre centered at the University of Chicago from 1915 to 1935. For the uninitiated, taxi-dance halls were common in large cities between the world wars. Men paid women dance hall employees a dime for the pleasure of a 90-second dance, with the hall and the hostess splitting the take. For various legal and public relations reasons, the halls advertised themselves as “dance academies” and called the dancers “instructors.” However, little instruction was expected or given. As one dancer said, “You don’t have to know how to dance anyway.”

Although Cressey is a bit of a blue-nose who finds his subject “demoralizing,” he doesn’t let this keep him from presenting an unflinching, keenly observed portrait of the Chicago taxi-dance hall circa 1928. Via extensive case studies, interviews, and even historical, economic and geographic analysis, he captures the personality of the customers and dancers and the atmosphere of their norish milieu.

The customers as a rag-tag mix of immigrants (especially Filipinos) out to meet “immodest” American women, slummers checking out the other half, young bucks learning how to kick up their heels, older men and “the dwarfed, maimed, and pockmarked.” Surprisingly, many were just looking for dancing or companionship and attention from young woman. As one middle-aged man said, “Who wants to dance with an old woman? [it] makes me tired before I start.” But others were out for a whole lot more. No serious taxi-dancer lacked for after-work “dates,” where they matched wits with “the fish” in what Cressey calls “the sex game.”

The dancers themselves tended to be native born locals from broken or instable homes. Cressey divides them into four groups: “nice girls,” who were well-behaved or simply inexperienced; “smart girls,” who worked their dates with expertise; “never-miss girls,” who were really part time prostitutes; and, “sensual dancers” whose dance floor antics (vertical lapdancing?) “functions as a utility for her patrons.” Yes, there was plenty of exploitation in the taxi-dance hall scene, but as Cressey makes clear, it was a two way street.

Ultimately, Cressey concludes that the taxi-dance hall is not a cause, but a symptom. Its patrons are “a panorama of the maladjustments of urban life.” The halls themselves are “testimony to the inadequacies of present day life for its patrons” that nonetheless meets a need, however imperfectly. He calls for regulation and reform, not repression, an attitude that didn’t play too well back in those days. The disreputable nature of this book (originally submitted as his thesis) cut off his academic career at the knees. But I bet it’s this disreputable nature that has this book back in print more than 75 years after the fact, while its more respectable cousins are left to the ironists. This is the real noir.

I WAS A DRUNK FOR THE FBI

2008-06-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

The Big Decision: The Story of Matt Cevetic, Counterspy by Matt Cvetic (self published circa 1959)

Matt Cevetic was the "I" in the "I Was a Communist For the FBI" franchise of the '50s which went from a series of "as told to" articles in The Saturday Evening Post to a film (nominated for the documentary Oscar despite the fact it was a narrative film starring Frank Lovejoy!) and a radio show starring Dana Andrews. A mild mannered civil servent, Cvetic was recruited by the FBI in the early '40s to keep tabs on CPUSA's Pittsburgh franchise. They canned him in 1950 for his alleged erratic, alcohol-fueled behavior. He nonetheless spent the next several years as a successful "professional witness" for the HUAC and related concerns until the fad ran its course.

Little of this appears in The Big Decision, the self-published memior by an apparently embittred former media darling. As Cvetic tells it, all he really wanted to do was join Army Intelligence. But the FBI played on his fear of THE RED KNOCK--the dreaded sound of Red fists pounding on the door of every loyal American the morning after the Big Takeover (!). He knew it meant sacrifices. Not only would he not go on the FBI payroll until he was a full-fledged Party member, he couldn't tell a soul--he would risk "savage Communist reprisals in the form of brain washing (?), torture, or even death at the hands of vicious Red inquisitors," no doubt in a secret torture chamber in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh.

He drove his friends away with his regular spouting of the ever-changing Party Line. His wife left him: "I'm not going to have people point at me and say: There goes a Commie's wife." His father stopped talking to him. His brothers hated him. Only his long suffering, albeit bewildered mother continued to accept him. Even love eluded him--a promising relationship with a waitress at the local beanery ended when her father told him "I'd rather see my daughter 6 feet under than married to a Communist skunk like you." And naturally, Cvetic was too American to engage in any immoral dalliance with an of his fairer Party Comrades. "Those scheming Reds with their loose morals sickened me." You'd think the FBI would prefer unattached recruits for this kind of work.

As Cvetic tells it, life in the Party is no piece of cake. The Party may not have a monopoly on paranoia, but don't tell them that. Accusing one another of being an FBI informant is a standard past time. Leaving was frowned upon--Cvetic is always alluding to the suspicious "suicides" of former members and suspected informants. And the things the "Red lice" say, like "when the Communist Revolution starts... I'm sure as hell going to enjoy torturing and butchering the clergy and tossing their bodies in the Ohio River"--it's enough to make any good, loyal American like counterspy Cvetic puke! (Luckily, he doesn't) Even the Soviets weren't to happy with their stateside vanguard. One Russian Red confided in Cvetic that 90% of the American Communists would need to be liquidated after the revolution--"If their own country can't trust them how can we?" So much for getting in on the ground floor

It's pretty hard to take Cvetic seriously. For someone infiltrating a supposedly ruthless, violent organization, stunts like living in a hotel under an assumed name near party HQ or sneaking off to take Communion seem like the recipe for a short career. And Cvetic never quite explains what horrible crimes and vital intelligence he's uncovering. It's not like he's in some secret cell--he has an office in Party HQ in downtown Pittsburgh! But to listen to him tell it, his testimony sent dozens of Reds to jail, making our lives safe for apple pie and the installment plan.

It's all great kitsch in the J. Edgar Hoover tradition of breathless exposes of Commies In Your Back Yard. But it would be nice to know the real story.

BUSTED TO THE M.A.X.!

2008-06-02T20:40:00.000-07:00

Bust by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Hard Case, 2006)
Slide by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Hard Case, 2007)

Jason Starr has long been my pick of the younger-than-me noir crowd for his rare ability to bring classic noir sensibilities to unabashedly modern settings. Hard Case Crime is currently my favorite paperback publisher. Nor were my high expectations for this fortuitous combo disappointed. In Bust, Starr takes that hoary old plot of husband killing wife to run off with secretary to previously unexplored levels of perversity. Wife Diedre is so appalling you hope the plot succeeds; husband Max is so odiously upscale you hope he gets caught. And enhanced secretary Angela, who’s only in it for the money, ensures comedy of the darkest variety when she refers Max to a “hitman:” her too-psycho-for-the-IRA paddywhacking boyfriend. A series of completely unexpected (albeit predictably bloody plot twists) set the stage for the sequel Slide. Max reinvents himself as “The M.A.X.,” the lamest crack dealer ever! Angela imports an even bigger Irish psycho who dreams of eclipsing Ted Bundy! The only thing piling up faster than the bodies are the noir-shout outs. I’m sure I missed plenty, but Willeford is all over the place, and if I’m not mistaken, that’s co-author Ken Bruen (now high on my to-be read list) reflexively falling victim to an abortive Rolling Stones kidnapping plot. I can hardly wait for the next sequel, Max, to hit the shelves of Kayo Books.

THE REAL TITICUT FOLLIES

2008-05-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

Screw: A Guard's View of Bridgewater State Hospital by Tom Ryan (South End Press, 1981)

Frederick Wiseman's Titicutt Follies is the only film in American history banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security. A 1967 verite documentary chronicling the less than stellar conditions prevailing at a Massachusetts state hospital for the criminally insane, a judge put the kibosh on it ostensibly on the grounds that it invaded the inmate's privacy.

As a Wiseman fan since seeing High School in high school, I rushed out to see TF when the ban finally expired in 1992. It was a great film, but the hospital didn't come across as the snake pit I'd expected from the press clippings. Perhaps I'm jaded. For the real horrorshow, you'll have to turn to Screw.

Ryan was a psychology student working with Bridgewater inmates who took the job in 1974 to check up on the abuse stories he was hearing. And neither he (nor I!) was disappointed. The picture he paints of Bridgewater is of a combined human warehouse and open sewer. His fellow "COs" were the flowers of Dorchester and South Boston manhood. They cheered the hospital's modern therapeutic methods ("...a lobotomy. That what should be done to all these maggots") and criticized its failings ("Counselors, hah! It's do-gooders that wreck this place"). So socially conscious were these guardians of the sick that some spent their off hours drilling with a chapter of the Minutemen. Patients were locked in cells without toilets or sinks. Doctors were virtually nonexistent; drugs were dispensed by nurses. Beatings were common, and not of the COs. Ryan himself got in trouble with his comrades for refusing to join in on a 10-1 affair. So much for camaraderie.

Needless to say, patients failed to thrive in this environment. One ripped open his cheeks. Another, mocked by the guards, plucked out one of his eyes. A few days later, he plucked out the other . And then he plucked out his glass eyes! Ryan admits that things got better when the old hospital closed and they moved to a new facility. But not that much. Ryan ended his correctional career after 18 months and one witnessed beating too many.

It's something to consider whenever someone rants about "getting off" via the insanity defense.

MOTHER LOVE

2008-05-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Big Love by Florence Aadland with Tedd Thomey (Lancer, 1961)

"There's one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn." This line opens The Big Love, the true story of the then 48-year old Errol Flynn's affair with 15-year old Beverly Aadland as told by her mother Florence. Imagine Day of the Locust as told by a "Mommie Dearest;" it’s the ultimate testament to stage mothering run amok.

Of course, Florence denies being one of those Hollywood mothers, even though she had little Beverly modeling at six months and taking singing and dancing lessons at two. Fortunately for mother and daughter alike, Beverley had looks and talent. She was on the cover of Collier's before she was five, and made her first movie in first grade. And Florence proudly noted, "For the first 15 years of her life, I kept that girl in a cellophane bag."

Then Errol Flynn noticed the new leggy blonde the Universal lot. Before you could say "Robin Hood," the aging swashbuckler had the underage ingenue up at his lodge to "read for a part in a play." Florence wistfully wrote, "It must have been quite a scene...in front of the fireplace, the two of them alone together." And, pray tell, how did dearest Mama know? Florence gushingly points out that Beverly "...told me everything she did with Errol Flynn. And in detail, because she and I love details and get a kick out of things like that."

Sadly, Errol died just weeks after announcing the engagement at Beverly's 17th birthday. Cut-off from the Flynn estate, the Aadlands's life quickly degenerated into chaos that ended with Florence convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and losing custody of Beverly. But regrets? Florence had none. She wouldn't have deprived her "baby" of those two precious years with Errol for anything. The Big Love ends with Florence proud of her daughter's new nightclub act and confident of a successful appeal of her conviction and ultimate victory over the scandal mongers.

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Beverly ultimately left Hollywood for a quiet suburban life as a wife and mother. But Florence only spiraled further out of control. A hopeless alcoholic, she died of alcohol poisoning six years later. Her end came as a surprise no one, least of all those who have read The Big Love.

VACATION CONSIDERATIONS

2008-04-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

Like most of you, I was first exposed to Sinclair Lewis via a forced reading of Main Street. (OK, maybe for you it was Babbitt) in high school. Unlike Ethan Frome, various plays, The Grapes of Wrath, and other force-fed works, I really liked it. I have voluntarily been working my way down the hierarchy of Lewis's novels with pleasure ever since. Not even Bethel Merriday has put me off on my quest. Where to next? World So Wide? Cass Timberlane?

Dodsworth was #5 on my list. Either the greatest of his lesser novels or the least of his great novels (behind Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry). it's a personal favorite. The title character is Zenith automobile manufacturer Samuel Dodsworth who sells his plant to take an extended tour of Europe with his wife Fran. Surprisingly, it's the go-getting Dodsworth that is the good guy; Lewis aims most of his barbs as Fran's mid-life crisis and pathetic tempts to re-invent herself as a expatriate ingenue.

But my favorite part is the travel stuff. I truly believe that travel is among the most overrated of human activities, and Lewis has has many delightfully unkind things to say about this odd obsession. To wit:

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of travelling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which the never do... They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work crossword puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity. These things the Dodsworths discovered though, like most of the world, they never admitted to them.

And my favorite:

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business...then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.

So, where are you planning to go on your summer vacation?

HALF PULPED

2008-03-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage, 2007)

One of the first things you learn as a writer is to write for your intended audience, especially if you're getting paid for it. Thus, when I reviewed The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps here a few months ago, I felt the need to assume I was advising naifs for whom John Travolta epitomizes pulp fiction.

Now I don't.

The Big Book is not a great anthology--it's a great package. It's so god damned big (1,100+ pages), authentic (the stories, cover art, and interior illustrations all from real pulps!) and, like the pulps themselves, cheap (only $25!), it's hard not to get your money's worth.

But I do need to bitch about the editing. Otto Penzler may be Mr. Mysterious Press, but he's pretty far down on my list of potential pulp anthology editors. (I bet he doesn't even trail bits of pulp paper behind him when he walks.) Despite the 1,100 pages, there a surprising lack of variety on the contributor's list. While plenty of big names are missing, several authors are represented by two stories, and Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Erle Stanley Gardner have three each! And not one by Robert Leslie Bellem? It's just not right.

My biggest gripe, however, is the inclusion of an entire damned novel by Carroll John Daly. As Penzler points out, you can't not include Daly in this sort of anthology. He literally wrote the first hardboiled detective story, and was as big as Hammett back in the day. But the years have not been kind to him. His stuff is virtually unreadable today. (Not surprisingly, his biggest fan was the equally talented Mickey Spillane.) A short story (and yes, he wrote many) would have been painful enough. A full novel is not only sadistic, it takes up space that could have been enjoyably devoted to any one of a dozen writers.

But even after you skip the Chandler stories you already read, skim the second-rate Hammett stuff, and carefully avoid soiling yourself with the Daly novel, you're still left with more than 700 pages of some pretty good pulp fiction. If my copy hadn't been free, I would have bought one.

ALMOST ALL THE WAY

2008-03-24T20:25:00.000-07:00

All the Way by Charles Williams (Dell, 1958)

Books have always come first with me. Much of the film portion of my media diet consists of movies adapted from favored books. No matter how many print silk purses I’ve seen rendered as cinematic sows’ ears, I can’t resist reading the book and seeing the movie.

Thus, when I saw The Third Voice on the schedule for last January’s Noir City Festival, I immediately brushed off my copy of the book it was based on, Charles William’s All the Way. For those yet to be initiated into the dusty world of mid-20th century paperback originals, Williams was one of the big names, penning a an excellent series of tough, literate suspense novels (mostly set in south Florida) that ultimately made it into hard covers. If he’d had a series character he could have been John D. MacDonald; if he’d gone crazy, he could have been Jim Thompson. Instead, he’s forever doomed to be on the verge of “rediscovery.”

All the Way is vintage Williams. Secretary Marian Forsyth built her boss/lover Harris Chapman into a big shot. Unfortunately, once he’s in the chips, Chapman signs his death warrant by throwing her over for a younger “professional virgin.” Forsyth goes shopping for an accomplice and winds up with the narrator, Jerry Forbes. But unlike every other “woman scorned” noir you’ve read, she’s ready, even eager to do the big job herself. Forbes’s part is to pose as Chapman. He’s supposed to drain the bank and brokerage accounts and make it look like Chapman had gone nuts and taken a one way rowboat trip with a concrete flamingo (metaphor alert!) and a dead call girl. And it works! They get away with the money, not that they live happily ever after, but heck, that’s noir for you.

It plays equally well on the big screen. The only black & white Cinescope movie I’ve ever seen, The Third Voice is great movie and an amazingly faithful adaptation—up to a point. For the 77 minutes, it’s All the Way on the screen. The action’s been relocated from south Florida to Mexico and some sub-plots and scenes steam-lined out, but it’s essentially the same. Even a lot of the dialog originated at William’s typewriter, not the screenwriter’s. Unfortunately, it’s a 79-minute film. It slams you over the head with a hackneyed ending that comes up so suddenly it’s like they ran out of film.

Hell. At least they got it 95% right.

WELCOME BACK, MR. BREMER

2008-02-21T19:53:00.000-08:00

An Assassin's Diary by Arthur Bremer (Harpers, 1973)

On November 9th of last year, Arthur Bremer was released from prison. He had been serving a 53-year sentence for shooting and paralyzing George Wallace as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination at a Maryland shopping mall in 1972.

What better time to re-visit Mr. Bremer's magnum opus?

An Assassin's Diary is a delightful relic from those wonderfully tasteless days before Son of Sam laws and civil suits killed the commercial potential of would-be-writings of would-be killers. It reprints the portion of Bremer's diary found after his arrest: 13 entries over a six-week period prior to the shooting. (The first 148 pages were reportedly found in 1980 but remain unpublished.) It's dreary, garbled, and poorly written, and only breaks the 100-page barrier courtesy of a layout really heavy on the white space. And of course, it's utterly essential.

Bremer was the apocryphal "lone nut" of the '60s who turned assassin strictly for the publicity. His diary chronicles his wanderings through New York, Ottawa, and Michigan, at first in pursuit of Nixon before tight security forced him to switch to Wallace. (He frets over the lesser newsworthiness of his back-up target.) For the most part, it's a dreary record of cheap motels and crummy restaurants, sparked occasional gems like "The [maid] doesn't like me because I left my toe nails on the run at the foot of my bed." The New York City sequences are especially Travis Bickle-ian; he makes a point of mentioning how he never leaves his room without his gun. Small wonder that his story reportedly was part of the inspiration for "Taxi Driver."

The highlight of the diary is his trip to a massage parlor in New York. In an excruciatingly painful scene, the "masseuse" attempts (unsuccessfully) to relieve him manually as Bremer pathetically attempts to get a whole lot more for his $48. She explains they have rules against that sort of thing. He later notes, "The first person I held a conversation with in three months was a near-naked girl rubbing my erect penis and she wouldn't let me put it through her."

Mr. Bremer is now living in a halfway house. Let us wish him more satisfactory conclusions in all his future endeavors.