One of the best genre fiction imprints to come along in recent years is the Hard Case Crime Fiction series, which revisits classic noir crime fiction novels of old and presents new works that offer present-day takes on the genre's conventions.
I love noir fiction, which I first caught on to back in the 90s, when a number of the Jim Thompson novels, such as The Grifters, The Getaway, and After Dark My Sweet, were filmed. I've since sounded the considerable depths of Patricia Highsmith, whose Talented Mr Ripley was filmed in the late-90s (I've yet to see it) and the brilliant Raymond Chandler. What I love most about noir crime fiction is that many people simply dismiss it as nothing more than low-brow diversion, yet these books have so much to offer. Highsmith, with Ripley and her other amoral protagonists, explores the problem of evil and the strange workings of criminal psychology. Chandler's eerie descriptions of murder scenes, especially in the Lady in the Lake, are unforgettable in their evocation of mood, place and the inner, secret meaning of things.
The Hard Case Crime series, although aimed at both crime fiction buffs and general readers, offers some books that approach the high quality of these authors. It also tweaks and pokes fun at the highbrow prejudice against the genre by packaging the books with calculatedly retro, erotically provocative artwork.
I read two from this series this year that were particularly good: Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block and Fright by Cornell Woolrich.
Lawrence Block has been active in crime fiction for almost half a century and he still publishes new work today. Lucky at Cards is from his early days and the Hard Case Crime publication of it marks its first wide release in 40 years.
The book is certainly a lost treasure. It is written in a tight, spare, misleadingly straightforward way and tells the story of Bill Maynard, a card mechanic who once made his living doing card tricks in magic shows and doing other, less innocent card tricks at poker games. He once tried to throw a poker game in Chicago and was severely thrashed for his troubles, cracking several teeth in the process. He fled the city within inches of his life, as the cliche goes, and hid in an unnamed, non-descript Midwestern US city to regroup, re-order and re-charge - and to get his teeth fixed:
If it hadn't been for the dentist, I would've headed on out of town. The guy had a two-room office on the main drag, and I saw him Monday and Wednesday and Friday of the first week I spent in town. It took him that long to cap a pair of incisors. It hurt like hell, but by the time he was through I was no longer afraid to smile in public.
That opening paragraph, as any good opening paragraph should, captures the tone of the novel: The "If if hadn't been for the dentist..." is a telltale of the unreliable narrator; it, along with the numbering of days he's been to the dentist and the admission the process "hurt like hell" seem to set a confessional tone, yet there's that last line about "no longer (being) afraid to smile in public." The tone is just a little too easy, a little too confiding and the mention of smiles sets off red flags: this is the oily manner of the con artist, who gets by on pleasant appearances and needs to be everyone's best friend in order for his schemes to work. Teeth also bite, in addition to adding an inviting glow to a smile.
We soon see that Bill has a weakness for felony. Bill lets slip to the dentist that he's into cards and the dentist invites him to a card game at his home. During the game, in a brilliantly described scene in the basement rec room of the dentist's comfortable post-war era home - you can almost see the magazine advertisements screaming that it "boasts all the modern conveniences" - Bill meets Joyce, the dentist's trophy wife, who soon figures out that Bill is a card cheat. They fall for each other and Bill is ensnared in an elaborate plot to bump off the dentist so that he and Joyce can take his money.
Yes, the "kill hubby for the bucks" story is a hoary cliche among crime scribes, but this is done so well, with so many twists and turns and knowing bits of irony about human nature, that the book is thoroughly enjoyable. I definitely recommend it as an introduction to crime fiction.
Cornell Woolrich is an interesting case. Although a prolific, highly successful writer in his day, he was haunted by alcoholism and various personal issues. He became a recluse and when one of his novels, The Bride Wore Black, was filmed by Francois Truffaut in 1968, he did not attend the premiere, although it was held in his home city of New York. Woolrich died later that year.
Woolrich's best known work is Rear Window, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s, with James Stewart and Grace Kelly starring. The Hitchcock movie still makes for impressive viewing. Although the Woolrich original doesn't read as well today, the continued renown of the movie keeps Woolrich's name in circulation.
Before reading Fright, my favorite Woolrich had been the tense, tightly constructed novella, Three O'Clock, in which a man is tied in a chair next to a ticking bomb set to go off at three o'clock and he has to figure a way out of his predicament before the bomb goes off.
Fright, the Woolrich novel re-printed this year by Hard Case, is, like Lucky at Cards, a lost gem. Although at times hampered by Woolrich's strained attempts at overblown, almost John Donne-like metaphors, the story is eerie and fascinating. A dashing young man on the make, Prescott Marshall, falls in love with Marjorie Worth, a beautiful society girl from an old money family. They are getting ready to marry, but there is a problem: Marshall is fond of the bottle and during one of his drinking bouts, described with a lurid, hallucinogenic eeriness that rivals anything in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, he has a fling with a girl who, when she finds out who he is and who he will soon be marrying, blackmails him.
He gives her money to keep her quiet, but she keeps returning for more. When she materializes wraith-like at his apartment on his wedding day he can't take it any more. In a sudden flash of impulse, he strangles her.
Minutes later, his best man knocks at the door and in a nail-bitingly horrific scene, Woolrich describes Marshall's frantic and agonized struggles to hide the body in a closet and then present a face of normalcy to his best man once he lets him into the room.
After enduring his wedding, and flashing back the whole time to the crime he has committed, Marshall forces his new wife to re-settle with him in a small town far from New York where he takes an office job and becomes convinced that a co-worker is a private investigator sent from New York to unmask him and expose his crime.
Fright is an incredible, even harrowing novel. But, its early, well-constructed promise suffers from trying to telescope its plot over too long a period. We follow Marshall's collapse point for point over several years as he commits various crimes to conceal his original felony and his pathetically submissive wife - whose credibility would be doubted by many contemporary readers - withers away in a town she loathes, far from her family and friends.
The opening section of the novel is a must-read and although the latter sections lose focus and become almost numbing in their repetition of Marshall's failures, there is a fascinating tension at work here. It is a tension between a very modern, knowing awareness of human frailty and fallibility and corruption and capacity for nihilistic violence on the one hand and a quaint, Victorian, Sunday school morality on the other. This Sunday school morality lends a self-righteous, suffocating oppressiveness to the later chapters, but at the same time, it seems to reflect the contradictions and conflicts in Woolrich's own life. His flight from the world into 35 years of seclusion - he apparently lived that whole time with only his mother for company (evidently he didn't allow her to read any of his books) - was fuelled by a number of factors: a failed marriage, continued bouts with alcoholism, as well as various other health problems that led to the amputation of one of his legs. Perhaps this morality was a way of making this daring and unusual book more palatable and marketable in more conservative times, but it also shows how Woolrich punished himself for never being able to bring together the fragments of his broken life.
Fright is more than just a powerful novel from a brilliant, but almost forgotten master. It is also the author's haunted, highly personal vision of the conflicts and drives in every human heart.
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