Articles of Note

Two recent articles on crime fiction really impressed me, and I wanted to applaud their authors and call attention to the essays, if you haven't had the pleasure of reading them lately.

First is Dan Luft's essay on Max Allan Collins, "The Nolan Series: Part 1," which appeared over at The Violent World of Parker. Luft examines Collins' series character, the professional thief Nolan, and considers the first three books in the series (Bait Money, Blood Money, and Mourn the Living), Collins' influences, and the pros and cons of each of the novels. Here's a taste:

The first book in Collins’s series, Bait Money, owes its plot and pace to many crime writers of the ’50s and ’60s. It begins with Nolan stuck in a room recuperating from a bullet wound in his side. This could be a nod to Dan J. Marlowe’s The Name of the Game is Death, which Collins had certainly read growing up. The next big scene has Nolan walking alone in the rain sizing up a hired thug that might just be tougher than he is. The ponderous scene plays quite a bit like the opening chapter to Peter Rabe’s The Out is Death. Collins isn’t using just Stark for inspiration, he’s using the generation of crime writers he grew up reading.

It's a supremely badass and well-informed critical essay, very thoughtful and insightful into Collins' work. I'm greatly looking forward to Pt. 2 of Dan's essay.

Second is Ethan Iverson's epic multi-part piece, "I Was Looking for Charles Willeford." Iverson is not only the amazing pianist behind The Bad Plus, but he's one heck of a great noir scholar. If you're a crime fiction fan, you owe it to yourself to browse the backlog of his blog and check out all he has to offer. His latest piece is a three-part investigation into the life and work of Charles Willeford. The first part is "Nothing is Inchoate, or, "When Did You Get Interested in Abused Children, Helen?"" which considers Willeford's novels. Second part is an interview with Willeford biographer Don Herron," which I had the pleasure of helping transcribe this conversation. Part three is an Interview with Ray Banks. If you're like me, after reading these you'll be driven to bust out your Willeford books and re-read them, or to catch up on the ones you still haven't read.

Great work Dan and Ethan, truly a pleasure to read these articles.

Charles Willeford on Words and Writing

“I joined writer’s clubs, short story classes, where we sat around and read each other’s efforts. It was terrible. It was a never-ending run on a runaway treadmill. The more I tried to conform to the formula the more hopeless it all appeared. I lost all hope; I reached the point where I no longer cared what people thought about my writing. And that is when I began to write.

“I wrote for ten years before I sold a line. During this period I discovered encouragement, many times, is a lot worse than discouragement. Only by reaching the depths of depression can you find the courage to go on.”

–Charles Willeford, “Writing as an Art”

"Fake I.D." by Jason Starr (No Exit, 2000/Hard Case Crime, 2009)

Beyond the alienated, sociopathic Private Eyes and infectious Femme Fatales, there are several other reoccurring character types that are equally symbolic of the brooding, desperate sensibility of noir. Of course there are those Average Joes and Janes that are thrown into the belly of the criminal underworld whom Cornell Woolrich loved to write about. Goodis’ Dark Passage also fits this mold, with a protagonist who, in order to prove his innocence, must first become guilty himself. Then there are the losers who can’t get out from behind the eight-ball: whether on the straight and narrow or walking the crooked path, they are perpetually doomed. Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up and Richard Hallas’ You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up focus on characters like this. Then you have the psychopathic narrators of Jim Thompson, who drag you into their warped perceptions and nefarious desires.

It is these last two types that Jason Starr merges in Fake I.D., originally published in the UK by No Exit Press in 2000 and released for the first time in the US by Hard Case Crime in 2009. Tommy Russo is the bouncer of a small New York bar whose main kicks are occasional one-night stands with girls he meets at the bar and even less frequent wins at the track. A wannabe actor, even his agent has given up hope for him. Tommy gets a discount on his closet-sized studio apartment by working as the super, but even still he can barely make rent, what with the gambling debts and losses piling up like a mountain of garbage. He used to be able to count on his boss for advances on his salary, but not anymore.

Things aren’t exactly looking up for Tommy when the smelly Pete from Yonkers knocks on his car window one morning at the track. He and some buddies are pooling money to buy their own racehorse, and they need one more guy. After thinking it over, Pete decides he wants in. The problem? He needs $10,000. The solution? Rob the safe at his bar, which is overflowing with Super Bowl bets. But with his bad luck, Tommy’s dreams have little chance of coming true.

Fake I.D. unfolds like a slowly burning cigarette forgotten at the end of the night: when the ashes finally consume everything that remains, even they too must fall to the floor and disintegrate into nothingness. Like some gutter-Sisyphus, Tommy’s life is a cycle that goes nowhere, just from his apartment to the track to the bar and back to his apartment, where it all starts again. Starr contrasts Russo’s chronically dismal existence with his pipedreams of acting fame and horse-race winnings. An incurable dreamer, Russo’s fantasies are corrupted only by his desperation. The more he loses, the less he wants. It gets so bad that even a role in a dog food commercial seems like the first step through heaven’s gates.

Debased desires are just the first sign of his psychological breakdown. Much like the murderous sheriffs in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me or Pop. 1280 whose overly rational thought processes belie their growing instability, Russo’s plans become increasingly rash and half-baked. But to see it through his eyes, he’s in control of the entire world and nothing could ever grow wrong. More than an actor, Russo becomes an author who, just like Thompson’s sheriffs, sets into motion his own master-narrative, which casts him as the supreme winner. He sets up convenient frames for the police, performs a grand snow job on his boss, and whitewashes himself of his own guilt.

One of the underlying questions of noir literature is whether the world is really against the protagonist, or is perhaps they bring it upon themselves. Often, as in Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street, the answer lies somewhere in between: the main character knowingly enters a situation in which he will face temptation, but that doesn’t mean he’ll admit it to himself. This same subconscious desire for destruction fuels Tommy Russo, whose life – all things considered – isn’t too bad at all. He meets a great girl, one who even loans him $100 when he asks, and all he can think to do is rob her in her sleep and run away. At the racetrack, he may pretend he’s buying a ticket to win, but in reality he’s knowingly buying a ticket to lose. And in his more clearheaded moments, he’ll even admit as much. He knows there’s a racket and that the house always wins, yet somehow he thinks he can beat the system and come out on top. He thinks that he can get out from behind the giant eight-ball of life that is always in the way.

Quintessential noir to the extreme, Fake I.D. shows that the thematic underpinnings of classic authors such as Thompson and Goodis are just as relevant to today’s world as they were fifty years ago. People still dream, people still fail. Some get up and try again. And some, like Tommy Russo, just keep digging themselves an even deeper grave.

Hard Case Crime has generously posted the first chapter online, but here are a few of my favorite quotes from the novel.

“I guess it was the story of my life – when I had a good thing going I always found a way to screw it up.”

“I was so hungry I think I might’ve sucked in some bacon strips through my nose.”

“I gave him another solid right in the gut, then I walked out, taking a handful of French fries out of the rack on my way out.”

“I’m codependent. I like to be with sick, fucked-up women because I’m sick and fucked up myself.”

“I got up and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, first thinking about how great I looked, then thinking about how the cops weren’t going to catch me.”

"Pick-Up" by Charles Willeford (Beacon Books 1955/Black Lizard 1990)

“I’m pretty much of a failure in life, Helen. Does it matter to you?”

“No. Nothing matters to me.” Her voice had a resigned quality and yet it was quietly confident. There was a tragic look in her brown eyes, but her mouth was smiling. It was the smile of a little girl who knows a secret and isn’t going to tell it. I held her hand in mine. It was a tiny, almost pudgy band, soft and warm and trusting. We finished our drinks.

That’s the sort of one-two punch Charles Willeford delivers again and again in Pick-Up (Beacon Books, 1955). First, a sobering dose of existentialism, concentrated into a solid brick of reality that hurts to swallow, then he follows it up with an enigmatic description that belies the surface simplicity of the text. Just what is that smile on her face? Who is this walking female contradiction, at once a world-weary lush and a small child, and who lives for love and yet loves because there is nothing left to live for. And if the man is a failure, why does he even continue to try, even if all he tries for is death?

Coming after a collection of poetry (Proletarian Laughter in 1948) and Willeford’s debut novel High Priest of California (1953), Pick-Up follows the doomed trajectory of a pair of alcoholics who meet in a bar and find they share a common sense of futility weighted down by dashed dreams and hopeless futures. Harry Jordan is an aspiring artist who spent World War II painting murals instead of fighting, and who afterwards taught when he lost confidence in his own work, and ultimately gave up teaching when he lost faith in his students. Helen Meredith drank her way out of a staid, middle-class existence ruled by constraining morality, an overbearing mother, and a husband she didn’t love. Neither does Harry show much concern for his wife and child on the other side of the country. Disappointed by the past and unconcerned with the future, Harry and Helen join to drink away the days in desolate companionship.

But then, something like love develops between them. A love that spurs them back to life as much as it hurtles them towards death. Unable to live apart from one another, even long enough to work a job, they realize that the real problem is that they are unable to live. Acting on a suicide pact, they soon realize that are also unable to die. So, the two of them continue to wallow in life’s wasteland of nothingness, all the while hoping and searching for a way out – permanently.

Willeford shares with David Goodis an affinity for characters stuck ‘down there’ – for whom the gutter and the mire are like cozy fixtures to come home to. But it’s important to recognize that these authors aren’t slumming, or dragging their pens through the mud for the sake of dirtying the page. Far from it – they strip away the distractions and complacencies and obligations give life the illusion of order and purpose in order to get to the heart of the matter: to find that common strain of uncertainty that we all have to deal with. Nor is there anything grimy about their prose: there is never the sense that they are exploiting their characters for the sake of shocking sheltered readers. And instead of gutter lingo, their books are filled with the lamentations of those who can no longer cry for themselves or ask for help from others. They speak to no one, yet they speak for everyone, and therein lies the paradox. In screaming loneliness, Pick-Up manages bring us together.

Those who have read Pick-Up are well aware that the last two lines of the novel throw you for a loop that makes you start back at the beginning and re-think all you have just read. I struggled with whether or not to discuss those lines on this blog, because on the one hand I think they merit a discussion, yet on the other hand to reveal them would to spoil Willeford’s carefully crafted novel. In the end, I have decided against it and will leave the novel’s finale a secret. As William Denton notes on RARA-AVIS, “You could analyze Pick-Up with and without the last two lines, and it'd work perfectly both ways. Neither version is better than the other.” I agree, and would only add that what I think Willeford is doing is challenging not only the pervasive archetypes of the hardboiled genre, but also our preconceptions as readers. In the end, I don’t think he’s being antagonistic at all, but instead wants to remind us how universal despair really is.

Pick-Up is currently out of print, though used copies of the 1990 Black Lizard reprint can be found for decent prices. Munseys has made available a free e-text of the book. Those looking for more information on Charles Willeford should check out Mike White’s thoroughly researched essay “Madness in the 20th Century” over at Cahiers du Cinemart. Don Herron also has a nice piece called “Collecting Charles Willeford.” Dennis McMillan also runs an informative site, which includes a nice introduction by Maura McMillan. Lee Goldberg also has a fascinating blog post about a once thought lost manuscript by Willeford. For a complete bibliography, check out RARA-AVIS.

And now for some quotes from the book:

“The Great American Tradition: You can do anything you think you can do! All Americans believe in it. What a joke that is!”

“His large brown eyes, fixed and staring, were two dark mirrors that seemed to hold my image without interest, without curiosity, or at most, with an impersonal interest, the way one is interested in a dead, dry starfish, found on the beach.”

“As far as I was concerned the world we existed on was an overly-large, stinking cinder, a spinning, useless clinker. My life meant nothing to me and I wanted to go to sleep forever and forget about it.”

“Any premise which bases its salvation on blind belief alone is bound to be wrong, I felt. It isn’t fair to those who find it impossible to believe, those who have to be convinced, shown, who believe in nothing but the truth.”