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.
Showing posts with label Dan J. Marlowe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan J. Marlowe. Show all posts
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Dan J. Marlowe: Strongarm
Dan. J Marlowe was a prolific author of hardboiled and noir fiction throughout the late 1950s until the 1970s. Like Raymond Chandler, he got into the writing game relatively late in life, publishing his first novel at age 45. He wrote tough, hard prose and packed a lot of intense action into his relatively brief novels.
His most famous novels were Strongarm, Vengeance Man and The Name of the Game is Death, all paperback originals written for Fawcett's Gold Medal series in the early Sixties.
I recently read Marlowe's 1963 novel Strongarm in a Black Lizard paperback edition from 1988 and it's pretty powerful stuff. It's also densely packed stuff, a novel about ready to explode with its multiple plot twists and frenetic energy. Yet the book is compelling reading and entertaining, even though in the end all the plot tangles sort themselves out in a denouement just a little too pat for my taste.
Strongarm is the tale of Pete Karma, which isn't really the protagonist's name. This narrator, in a prodigious showcase of unreliability, uses two pseudonyms that are known to the reader and many more that aren't revealed and never does give out his "real name" - a storytelling conceit from Marlowe that sounds great in theory but in reality only adds an extra layer of complexity to an already dangerously overloaded fuse box of a book.
Karma is a hard man, already bitter from harsh war service in Korea and even more bitter from being double crossed by a sleazebag lawyer working for Steve Risko, a heavy weight political fixer and all time classic SOB who hijacked a state politics machine once ran by Karma's father. Risko, through the scuzzy lawyer, sees that Karma takes a fall for a murder he didn't commit.
Karma is thrown into prison, and with the aid of some fellow inmates involved with the syndicate that he meets while inside, breaks out.
He goes into hiding and takes a job as a bartender at a Mob-operated night club in Detroit. Here, he works under the name Pete Karma and falls in lust with the beautiful and curvaceous Lynn, a hostess at the club.
At the outset of the book, Karma finds out that one of Risko's men will be passing through town with a big stash of money and he decides to take some payback for the trouble Risko has caused him. He drives out on the turnpike, tailing the car driven by the money courier. Suddenly, the car collides with another car that has gone out of control. A fiery crash ensues, yet Karma is able to extricate a briefcase from the wreckage, albeit with a severed arm handcuffed to it - a brilliantly macabre touch that at least puts the opening of the novel well into the disturbing gray zone territory only mapped by that most hardboiled of the hardboiled writers: Jim Thompson.
Unfortunately for Karma, there were witnesses to the crash and when a fuzzy yet all too easily identifiable picture of him turns up in the papers, he has to take the briefcase full of money and run. Lynn, who only knows the tiniest fragment of Karma's complicated history, insists on joining him. In a strange and redundant plot twist, Karma is also later joined by Gussie, Lynn's cousin. But in the strangest and most redundant of all plot twists in this novel of filigreed and serpentine convolutions and involutions, Karma learns the briefcase also contains oilskin envelopes containing "plans" for some kind of atomic device. It turns out the briefcase wasn't from Risko's man at all, but was from the car that had gone out of control and collided with him. The car had been driven by a Soviet agent who had been on a run delivering the money and plans to his fellow travelers.
I've tried to lay out the plot in a straight line, as the opening chapters unfold in a series of flashbacks that bit by bit reveal the past of this mystery man who will only call himself Pete Karma. These early chapters, especially the ones dealing with the car crash, Karma's retrieving of the brief case crammed with money and atomic secrets and his disposal of the severed arm - one of the many strong arms alluded to in the book's title - are brilliant and contain many passages of great hardboiled writing. But then, the book goes off the rails when the Cold War plot is ramped up - a completely needless distraction when Marlowe's thirst for revenge against Risko would have been enough to carry a whole series of novels, never mind just one. I also found Karma's relationship with Lynn tedious and I'm never entirely sure why cousin Gussie had to be involved at all.
Yet, as I said, there are brilliant passages of writing here all the same and more than enough action scenes and convincing hardboiled dialogue to make Strongarm a powerful novel and well worth reading if you are a student of hardboiled crime fiction. I'm curious about Marlowe's other books and hope that some day I'll be able to track a few of them down.
His most famous novels were Strongarm, Vengeance Man and The Name of the Game is Death, all paperback originals written for Fawcett's Gold Medal series in the early Sixties.
I recently read Marlowe's 1963 novel Strongarm in a Black Lizard paperback edition from 1988 and it's pretty powerful stuff. It's also densely packed stuff, a novel about ready to explode with its multiple plot twists and frenetic energy. Yet the book is compelling reading and entertaining, even though in the end all the plot tangles sort themselves out in a denouement just a little too pat for my taste.
Strongarm is the tale of Pete Karma, which isn't really the protagonist's name. This narrator, in a prodigious showcase of unreliability, uses two pseudonyms that are known to the reader and many more that aren't revealed and never does give out his "real name" - a storytelling conceit from Marlowe that sounds great in theory but in reality only adds an extra layer of complexity to an already dangerously overloaded fuse box of a book.
Karma is a hard man, already bitter from harsh war service in Korea and even more bitter from being double crossed by a sleazebag lawyer working for Steve Risko, a heavy weight political fixer and all time classic SOB who hijacked a state politics machine once ran by Karma's father. Risko, through the scuzzy lawyer, sees that Karma takes a fall for a murder he didn't commit.
Karma is thrown into prison, and with the aid of some fellow inmates involved with the syndicate that he meets while inside, breaks out.
He goes into hiding and takes a job as a bartender at a Mob-operated night club in Detroit. Here, he works under the name Pete Karma and falls in lust with the beautiful and curvaceous Lynn, a hostess at the club.
At the outset of the book, Karma finds out that one of Risko's men will be passing through town with a big stash of money and he decides to take some payback for the trouble Risko has caused him. He drives out on the turnpike, tailing the car driven by the money courier. Suddenly, the car collides with another car that has gone out of control. A fiery crash ensues, yet Karma is able to extricate a briefcase from the wreckage, albeit with a severed arm handcuffed to it - a brilliantly macabre touch that at least puts the opening of the novel well into the disturbing gray zone territory only mapped by that most hardboiled of the hardboiled writers: Jim Thompson.
Unfortunately for Karma, there were witnesses to the crash and when a fuzzy yet all too easily identifiable picture of him turns up in the papers, he has to take the briefcase full of money and run. Lynn, who only knows the tiniest fragment of Karma's complicated history, insists on joining him. In a strange and redundant plot twist, Karma is also later joined by Gussie, Lynn's cousin. But in the strangest and most redundant of all plot twists in this novel of filigreed and serpentine convolutions and involutions, Karma learns the briefcase also contains oilskin envelopes containing "plans" for some kind of atomic device. It turns out the briefcase wasn't from Risko's man at all, but was from the car that had gone out of control and collided with him. The car had been driven by a Soviet agent who had been on a run delivering the money and plans to his fellow travelers.
I've tried to lay out the plot in a straight line, as the opening chapters unfold in a series of flashbacks that bit by bit reveal the past of this mystery man who will only call himself Pete Karma. These early chapters, especially the ones dealing with the car crash, Karma's retrieving of the brief case crammed with money and atomic secrets and his disposal of the severed arm - one of the many strong arms alluded to in the book's title - are brilliant and contain many passages of great hardboiled writing. But then, the book goes off the rails when the Cold War plot is ramped up - a completely needless distraction when Marlowe's thirst for revenge against Risko would have been enough to carry a whole series of novels, never mind just one. I also found Karma's relationship with Lynn tedious and I'm never entirely sure why cousin Gussie had to be involved at all.
Yet, as I said, there are brilliant passages of writing here all the same and more than enough action scenes and convincing hardboiled dialogue to make Strongarm a powerful novel and well worth reading if you are a student of hardboiled crime fiction. I'm curious about Marlowe's other books and hope that some day I'll be able to track a few of them down.
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