Dan J. Marlowe: The Vengeance Man

In my review for Marlowe's Strongarm a while back, I mentioned the author's possible Jim Thompson influence due to a certain brief episode involving the disposal of a severed limb.

Well, in Marlowe's 1966 balls to the wall bardboiled smash and grab extravaganza, The Vengeance Man, that influence is on proudly lurid display.

Jim Wilson, the novel's protagonist, like Strongarm's Pete Karma, has an ongoing grudge against the world, or at least that part of the world visible to him from his small South Carolina town of Moline.

Unlike Karma, Wilson doesn't care for aliases. Right up front, you learn his name and the names of the people in his network of old high school friends whose tangled business and personal relationships supply the twisted backbone for this intense novel. Within the first twenty pages, he shoots dead Mona, his cheating wife, gets locked up and then is cleared of any wrong doing by a theatrically imperious lawyer reminiscent of Lou Ford's defence attorney near the conclusion of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside of Me. The lawyer argues at the coroner's inquest into the shooting that Wilson was armed because he had been doing his job collecting rents for a local landlord. The killing was an impulsive crime of passion in no way pre-meditated. Reluctantly, the jury buys this argument and Wilson is set free.

Once out of the slammer, Wilson sets about on his campaign of revenge against Harrington, Mona's father and onetime mayor of the town who still is a key political fixer and purveyor of lucrative town contracts. Wilson is a construction contractor and, in spite of recent events, Harrington resignedly lets Wilson have a coveted road paving contract. Is Harrington acknowledging a slight change in the local balance of power, or is he playing dead for some obscure, strategic reason? Wilson isn't sure. He also does some heavy extortion on Ludmilla, Mona's best friend from high school, threatening to unleash on the conservative small town raunchy pictures of she and Mona making out at a drunken party.

With these two aces in the hole, Wilson thinks he has it made. But does he? Other emerging political cronies in the area, stronger than Harrington, don't like Wilson's maneuverings and his cockiness. They want to bring him to heel. Also, Ludmilla has a few tricks of her own up her sleeveless dress and Wilson is soon under her control. They plot together to take control of their town and surrounding county. And is Wing, Wilson's best friend from high school and his partner in the construction company, really as affable and loyal as he appears to be?

The result is an intensely violent climax to a deeply amoral story with as morally ambiguous and ambivalent a protagonist as any hard boiled fan could want. And along the way, there are some Jim Thompson-esque filigrees, like a flashback to his youth when Wilson recalls the beatings he received at the hands of the uncle who brought him up and the brutal revenge he exacted upon this uncle with a dog whip. Also, Ludmilla has a passion for punching bag sex that would do any number of twisted Jim Thompson heroines proud.

Yet, in the midst of all of this mayhem, I have some misgivings. At least Thompson's books had extra layers of irony or psychological observation that elevated them far beyond their hard boiled genre origins into true classic status. Think of the creepy Oedipal undertones to the relationship between Roy and Lilly Dillon in The Grifters, or the greasy verbal circumlocutions and strategic triangulations which are the manifestations of Lou Ford's murderous evil in The Killer Inside of Me, or the Dantesque hell of the Kingdom of El Rey episode that concludes The Getaway, the only attempt ever in hardboiled to rocket a crime story plot beyond naturalistic action into the shadowy realm of metaphysical speculation.

Marlowe seems only to have picked up the heavy handed violence and kinky sex from Thompson and not these additional plot elements which actually made those horrific novels important. Sure, there are some passing observations in the novel about political corruption and the small mindedness of small towns, but these are commonplace ideas you can find anywhere. Marlowe simply imitated, or paid homage to Thompson. He didn't go beyond him, or perhaps, even didn't really understand his books. I guess in the end, that was why, in spite of its impressive plotting and action elements, I found The Vengeance Man a bit of a letdown, and even a little bit of a paper tiger.