
Radiating with noir-ish overtones, A Noose for the Desperado fits right in there with the classical Gold Medal crime novels of the early 1950s. Clifton Adams melancholic writing reminds of David Goodis, at many points. Tall is as self-loathing as any of Goodis’ protagonists, and he is obsessed with increasingly nihilistic impulses the more he gives himself over to the criminal element. “Nothingness” and “no future” are frequent preoccupations that only depress Tall more and more. Nothing signals Tall’s downward spiral more than this realization, which would be right at home in Goodis’ Down There: “Then it hit me that maybe I could feel the day coming when I would look around me and discover how far down I had gone.”

A gripping, action and suspense filled Western, A Noose for the Desperado is even better than The Desperado. I’d put it up there as one of my favorite Gold Medal novels of any genre. And considering this novel’s affinity with noir, it comes as no surprise that Clifton Adams also wrote some terrific sounding crime novels, two of which are called Whom Gods Destroy and Death’s Sweet Song. I haven’t read them, but Bill Crider is enthusiastic about them in this essay he wrote for Mystery File.
Some particularly noir-ish quotes from the book:
“Her dark eyes were full of hell, and when she flashed her white teeth in a grin you got the idea that she would like to sink them into your throat.”
“It was a nightmare of screams and smoke, and men wandering aimlessly with bullet holes in them like lost souls in limbo.”
“I felt completely lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness.”
“Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.”
Nicely done. You get at the essentials (character, tone, style) without dwelling on the plot. The year 1951 also places the novel in that period of the darkest Hollywood noir films.
ReplyDeleteWell, having read both, I agree with Donald E. Westlake, who said the second book was inferior. Mainly because it's trying to finish a story he already finished, and redeem a man he made it clear the first time can't be redeemed, or at least can't turn back from the path he's taken. There are no believable relationships in the book, nobody who sticks in the mind the way Pappy Garrett does. To be honest, all I remember from the second book is him getting shaved, and realizing his eyes remind him of a hunted wolf he saw once. There's good writing in it, as there is in all Adams' work I've read, but it doesn't really hang together, and the ending is a cop-out. I think Adams, writing westerns, felt a real conflict in his loyalties--he believes in the law, but identifies more with outlaws. I think he wrote books like this trying to work that out, and never quite got there.
ReplyDelete