Megan Abbott and Henry James

Long long overdue, I know, for any fan of crime fiction, but I finally have gotten around to reading Megan Abbott. I decided to start at the beginning, with her first book, DIE A LITTLE, from 2005.  As most readers of contemporary noir probably know, it's set in 1950's era Los Angeles and its world is the outer fringes of Hollywood. Of course it's superbly written and thoroughly researched - no surprise there.  Period detail is captured beautifully.  But what struck me most about the book is how to a remarkable extent Megan Abbott captures the workings of a mind that doesn't know itself.  Lora, the main character, is quite repressed.  She's someone cut-off from the core of herself and doesn't want to acknowledge what that core might be, what darkness may lurk there.   

What is Lora capable of?  She doesn't want to know. The reader certainly doesn't know, at least at first, and the book needs time to reveal her, peel away at her.  Layer by layer, the onion is unpeeled.  That Lora herself is telling the story, showing you things about her mind and personality that she herself doesn't realize, is one of the things that makes this  book fascinating. It's all in the telling. This is not a noir with lots of action and surface violence.  The plot is actually slow to boil.  A character's glance at someone else at a party, a particular gesture, what's left unsaid, are the keys here. When you talk about noir like this, it's common to say it has echoes of Cain, Chandler, James Ellroy (the usual suspects) - and this does - but along with these noir masters, this book has a quality very unlike most noir, something elusive and ambiguous.  It has a quality that reminded me of an entirely different writer, someone with no connection to noir at all.

Indeed, Lora, with all her repression and her way of elucidating around a topic without stating outright what she means, reminded me of nothing so much as a Henry James character.  Strange, but true. DIE A LITTLE inhabits a world entirely different than James' typically rarified sphere and has nothing to do with ghosts or children, but Lora's level of repression and self-obliviousness, her refusal to look at herself, reminded me of the governess narrator in THE TURN OF THE SCREW.  Repressed rage simmers.  The desire to protect has rarely seemed so creepy and downright dangerous.  And as in so many Henry James tales, so much of DIE A LITTLE'S drama occurs in the narrator's mind, just under the visible surface of life.   It's up to the reader to see what the narrator can't see or refuses to see, and it's because of Megan Abbot's supple technique that the reader can see, clearly, what the very person telling the story doesn't.  Remarkable.

This has to be the first time I was reading a crime novel where at one and the same time I thought about James M. Cain and Henry James.  Two different ways of writing, two different ways of looking at the world and the way people interact with the world, that you wouldn't think could be fused so smoothly.  But Megan Abbott fuses them.  In DIE A LITTLE she writes something you could actually call Jamesian Noir.



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WORD FOR WORD REEL TALKS

It's time again for the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival.  That means each Monday night for the next ten weeks, there'll be a free film at dusk in Bryant Park.  And as I have for the last three years, I'll be hosting Word for Word Reel Talks in the park.  For an hour or so before each film, I'll be talking about the movie with one or two film aficionados.  This year's guests will include the film writer and academic Foster Hirsch and crime novelist Wallace Stroby.  Our discussions on each movie roam far and wide, from back story to historical perspective to anything juicy - fact, gossip, rumor.  Who directed, who starred, who wrote, who edited, who composed the score, who fought on the set, who had affairs, who did drugs or drank too much, etc....It's all open for discussion.  

 

The films showing this year are varied, and to be honest, some of the films on the program I like more than others. (I don't pick them, by the way; the sponsor of the festival, HBO, chooses the films each summer). But no matter what the film, whether we love them or not, we always have a good time discussing them.

Audience participation encouraged.

Here's the list of films showing this year.

 

JUNE 17- TOOTSIE (Sony/Columbia) (1982) 116 Min. Panavision

 

JUNE 24- INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Paramount) (1956)  80 Min. SuperScope

JULY 1- FRENZY (Universal) (1972) 116 Min.

JULY 8- WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Warner Bros.) (1971) 98 Min.

JULY 15- HUSH… HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (Fox) (1964) 133 Min.

JULY 22- THE AFRICAN QUEEN (Paramount) (1951) 105 Min.

 

JULY 29- A FOREIGN AFFAIR (Universal) (1948) 116 Min.

 

AUGUST 5- NORMA RAE (Fox) (1979)  113 Min. Panavision

 

AUGUST 12- THE WOMEN (Warner Bros) (1939) 132 Min.

AUGUST 19- E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (Universal) (1982) 115 Min.

 For more information about the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival, you can go to the Bryant Park website at http://www.bryantpark.org/plan-your-visit/filmfestival.html.

 

 

 

 

THE MYSTERY OF THE COSMOS

When a great novelist, and a funny playful one at that, writes a book that uses the detective novel form, you know that it's not going to be a conventional genre piece.  That's the case with Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's COSMOS, published in 1965.  It's a fascinating book that turns the mystery novel on its head while telling a tale of possible crimes, many clues, and two neurotic detectives.  Anyone who likes mysteries and who's looking for something that will take you unexpected places should pick it up and give it a try.  Anyone who just likes good original fiction should give it a try.

Want to hear more about it?  I wrote an essay about COSMOS for Criminal Element, and you can check out here: Wrapped Up in the Mystery of Cosmos

GANGSTER CINEMA: BRITISH STYLE

 

The British bring their own distinct flavor to the gangster film genre.  I've written a piece about one of the best British gangster films ever made, THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, over at Criminal Element. You can click here to read it: The Long Good Friday.

NOIR at the BAR IV NYC

It's Noir at the Bar time again soon in New York City.  That means a whole crew of crime writers reading from their works and a whole bunch of booze to lubricate the proceedings.  I'll be taking part for the first time and the list of writers who'll be participating is truly something else.  Jedidiah Ayres, Dennis Tafoya, Reed Farrel Coleman, Rob W. Hart, Dana C. Kabel, Keith Gilman, Jim Baker, Justin Porter, Todd Robinson, Josh Bazell, and Keiran Shea will all be there reading. 

Swing by for a night of great fiction, the enjoyable darkness that is noir. 

The place: Shade Bar in Greenwich Village. The date: Sunday May 26h. The event's starting time: 6PM sharp.

Did I mention (I think I did) there'll be lots of drinking?

FIERCE BITCHES

In my last post here, I was talking about the fun I had reading Jake Hinkson's THE POSTHUMOUS MAN, a superb noir novella.  Continuing on in the novella vein, I moved on after Hinkson's book to Jedidah Ayres' FIERCE BITCHES. I'd pre-ordered it from Crime Factory Publications in Australia, intrigued by the advance stuff I read about it - how ferocious it is, how original, how well-written. Hadn't read Ayres' previous book, A F*CKLOAD OF SHORTS, so though eager to get into FIERCE BITCHES (if I can say that) I didn't know what to expect. Well, it's always nice when the build-up is not only met but actually exceeded by the reading experience.

If there is such a thing as hallucinatory noir, FIERCE BITCHES is it.  Beginning in a hell-hole of a desert town in Mexico, the book takes you on a wild journey.  In the short time it takes to read, you cover a lot of territory. There are pimps, derelict fugitives, and a number of very interesting whores. I won't say much more because to say too much is to spoil the pleasure of unpredictability this book holds.   Suffice to say it's a very condensed and visual book and has some scenes of absolutely phantasmagorical violence. Even at its most violent, though, it is written in beautiful terse prose - it's one of those books where I reread several passages just to enjoy the sound and rhythm again.   Ayres is in total control of what he's doing throughout.  I don't really want to compare it to anything because it is its own thing, no question, but like many a terrific work, it has echoes of other great stuff - the town of Politoburg reminds me a bit of the hellish place Jim Thompson's two characters end up in THE GETAWAY, and there's a Cormac McCarthy feel at times to the Biblical fury and righteousness of the violence. But damn! If you're comparing any book to a Cormac McCarthy novel, not much more needs to be said. FIERCE BITCHES is bleak yet beautiful and shot through with bloody threads of dark humor.  

What can I say?   Yet another very strong novella.  In crime fiction, anyway, seems like a hell of a good time for them.

SHORT BUT NOT SWEET

There's so much good recent noir around that it gets difficult sometimes to choose what to read next.  But I've had a lot of fun recently reading novella-length noirs by contemporary practitioners of the form who are really good.  One was by Jake Hinkson, his novella THE POSTHUMOUS MAN. This is pure, one hundred per cent proof, kick you in the guts noir. There's not a single wasted word in the novella, which starts out with the main character Elliot on his way to the hospital after a suicide attempt. He "dies" for a few minutes, but then the doctors manage to bring him back to life, and it's all downhill from there for him as a nurse at the hospital lures him into getting involved in a scheme to steal  an entire Oxycontin shipment headed to the hospital.  A lot is packed into its short length but the pacing is absolutely perfect and the character development full.  Elliot's tour through a garbage dump site where he has to dispose of some particularly important "merchandise" is like a tour through hell, yet at times darkly funny.  This is a book Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford could have written - as noir goes, that good.   Can't wait to read Hinkson's first novel, HELL ON CHURCH STREET, which like THE POSTHUMOUS MAN is set in Arkansas, a place Hinkson clearly knows well.