Pulp Fiction
By Walter Kirn
Crime Novels
Volume I: American Noir
of the 1930's and 40's.
990 pp. New York:
The Library of America.
$35.
Volume II: American Noir of
the 1950's.
892 pp. New York:
The Library of America.
$35.
Crime novels are not the same as detective novels. It is an important
difference. Though police officers and detectives usually appear in them, crime
novels follow the crook, the perpetrator, and cast the good guys in secondary
roles. The crucial mystery is not Whodunnit? but Why did he do it? and Will he
get away with it? Detective novels exploit the reader's desire for justice to
be done, for truth to triumph, but crime novels play on an even deeper longing
for justice to be evaded and postponed. If detective novels engage the superego
-- that upright adult who values law and order -- crime novels speak to the id,
the inner delinquent who values nothing but his own dark appetites. What crime
writers know, and what gives their writing power, is that no matter how
monstrous the criminal or how repugnant his crime, part of the reader will hope
he gets away with it.
Americans love an underdog, even if (especially if?) it's rabid. In
''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' (1934), by James M. Cain, the opening novel
in the Library of America's new two-volume collection of classic noir, the
narrator is Frank Chambers, a brawny drifter who shows up one day at a roadside
diner somewhere in anonymous California and wastes no time seducing the owner's
bored wife. Frank's entrance evokes the hobo of the 1930's -- when men of no
fixed address roamed the roads -- as succinctly as anything in Steinbeck:
''They threw me off the hay truck about noon.'' Cain, like other writers in the
collection, held strong left-wing views, and his picture of the Depression is
subtly class conscious. Cora, the femme fatale who plots with Frank to kill her
''greasy'' Greek husband, is obsessed with issues of racial inferiority and
social mobility. Her biggest fear is that her dark complexion will cause her to
be mistaken for a ''Mex,'' and when Frank invites her to hit the road with him
and live the easy life, she balks, with fatal consequences for all involved.
Sexually, Frank and Cora are a pair, but philosophically they are a toxic
mismatch: the bum who wants out of the system for good, and the social climber
hungry for a leg up. As such, what destroys them is not the justice system,
which Cain portrays as a pawn of big financial interests, but Cora getting
pregnant by Frank and Frank's unconscious rebellion against fatherhood. In the
typical mid-century crime novel, particularly those written before the 1950's,
Freud's shadow is at least as long as Marx's.
Horace McCoy's ''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' (1935) follows another
pair of doomed outsiders, Robert and Gloria. Hollywood extras who can't get
roles because they don't fit the profiles at central casting, the pair sign up
for a dance marathon that McCoy makes a metaphor for rampant capitalism. The
dance contest turns on greed and sensationalism, a lurid whirligig, run by
criminals, that draws a crowd of creepy retirees and vain celebrities. McCoy's
infernal machine of a narrative is sheer mad genius and devilishly simple --
the sort of image a writer finds once, if that, and spends the rest of his life
brooding over. Though the story, like so many others in the collection, is
basically a countdown to destruction, it has a uniquely droning beat. It's the
telltale heart played out with horns and cymbals.
As the editor, Robert Polito, makes clear in his helpful thumbnail
biographies of the authors, American crime writers like McCoy were often
one-hit wonders -- and not a few of them had no hits. Grubbing along at
newspaper jobs, plugging away doing piecework for the pulps and churning out
cheap amusement for the movie studios, they were laborers, not artists. Their
working lives account for their left-leaning politics as well as their stripped
and square esthetics. Above all else, they wrote stories. They turned out
plots. Style was a function of getting from start to finish, from gunshot
through cover-up to punishment, by the quickest, boldest, means possible.
Hemingway was an influence certainly, but industrial writing -- writing at
speed for pay, that is -- was the pre-eminent molder of sentences.
Edward Anderson, reporter, hobo, contributor to True Detective and
screenwriter, published his masterpiece, ''Thieves Like Us,'' in 1937. Of all
the novels Polito has chosen, this is by far the bluntest and the saddest, a
heartbreaking American primitive. Like a W.P.A. mural devoted to bank robbers,
the scenes are heraldic and dumbly chronological. A gang assembles. They rob,
hide, get drunk, argue, disperse, reunite and rob again. The hardest part of
their job (and it's a job, all right, as specialized, yet finally as mundane,
as driving a truck or sorting mail) isn't getting away with the money but
holding on to it. Bowie, the youngest, least hardened robber, finds a
girlfriend along the way and even dreams of making it in the straight world,
while T-Dub and Chicamaw, his scarred partners, just stumble unconsciously from
score to score, their only ambition to escape arrest. Every time they amass
enough cash to bankroll the lush retirement they claim to want, they
reflexively throw it away or lose it. As the men toodle on from bank job to
bank job, so deeply self-deluding they are almost cheerful, the reader starts
feeling the dread that they refuse to feel, absorbing the apprehension that
they laugh off. Anderson's outlaws are holy fools dead set on trying their luck
until it breaks. In a novel of simplistic socialism that repeatedly equates
property with theft (bankers and lawyers are ''thieves like us''), what makes
the gang members different from normal folk is their need to keep toiling until
it kills them. The novel also has the single best noir nugget of hard-boiled
imagery I've ever come across: ''Bowie felt like his eyes were wired
together.''
''The Big Clock'' (1946), by Kenneth Fearing, about a self-hating
publishing executive framed for the murder of his boss's mistress, and ''I
Married a Dead Man'' (1948) by Cornell Woolrich, a contrived little tale of
mistaken identity, feel decidedly minor and gimmicky, works of commerce that
aren't quite works of art. Woolrich's is the more memorable novel, chiefly for
its guilty, hushed, miserable lullaby of an opening (''I don't know what the
game was. I only know its name; they call it life. I'm not sure how it should
be played. No one ever told me. No one ever tells anybody. I only know we must
have played it wrong. We broke some rule or another along the way, and never
knew it at the time''). ''The Big Clock'' has a long ingenious chase scene and,
for a crime novel, an unusually brightly lighted setting: corporate New York.
The strangest novel in either volume is William Lindsay Gresham's
''Nightmare Alley,'' published in 1946. Long and misshapen, its middle section
swollen with half-baked chunks of sadistic spectacle, the book tells the story
of a carnival ''mentalist'' bent on perfecting and expanding his act. For fans
of vaudeville and magic, the book is a treasure trove of trade secrets. In
chapters named after different Tarot cards, we learn how small-time mind
readers work (a partner in the audience flashes signals), how disembodied hands
and faces materialize during seances (the medium uses a retractable metal rod)
and how -- allegedly -- alcoholic drifters are transformed into sideshow geeks
eager to bite the heads off live chickens (by starving the poor men for
liquor). Gresham's subculture of freaks and con men is nauseatingly
pessimistic, mostly because it thrives on the presumption that everyone in the
audience is an idiot and everyone on stage a psychopath. ''The world is mine!''
shouts Stan, the cynical clairvoyant. ''I've got 'em across a barrel and I can
shake 'em loose from whatever I want. The geek has his whisky. The rest of them
drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope.'' Stan's journey
from huckster to spiritualist ''minister'' to utterly degraded human worm is
wild, cartoonish and all the more repulsive for
Gresham's lapses into awkward prose, crude psychology and tasteless
action. Fiction doesn't go any lower than when Stan kneels down to lick the
polish off his evil female analyst's toenails or the scene inside a morgue
where he gawks at a stripper's corpse.
The narrator of ''The Killer Inside Me,'' the Jim Thompson classic
published in 1952, is a Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford, a backslapping
good old boy on the outside, a one-man inquisition on the inside. He puts out
cigars on the backs of beggars' hands, shoots up bottled testosterone from his
dead father's medical bag and spends his idle bachelor evenings reading
textbooks on abnormal psychology. When Ford feels his murderous ''sickness''
coming on, he starts to needle people with cliches, lending terrible credence
to the notion that violence, at its psychic root, is verbal: '' 'Another thing
about the weather,' I said. 'Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything.
But maybe it's better that way. Every cloud has a silver lining, at least
that's the way I figure it. I mean, if we didn't have the rain, we wouldn't have
the rainbows, now would we?' ''
In the pantheon of great American characters, Lou Ford stands in
something like perfect opposition to Huckleberry Finn. His folksiness is a form
of hostility and his salt-of-the-earth pose is poisonously alkaline. Anti-American
isn't the word; there isn't a single plank in the platform of traditional
heartland optimism that Ford's adventures don't reduce to sawdust. When he
gives the girl next door a solid spanking, she comes back, drooling, for more.
When the son of a struggling immigrant businessman comes to him for avuncular
advice, Ford kills him and makes it look a suicide. But most disturbingly of
all, Ford puts the lie to the comfy modern notion that self-awareness brings
self-mastery. Telling his story from hell, already dead, Ford is his own
omniscient audience, retracing every step in his decline, every vector of rage
and resentment.
The four remaining novels are something of a letdown after Thompson.
Three of them -- ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' (1955) by Patricia Highsmith,
''Pick-Up'' (1955) by Charles Willeford and ''Down There'' (1956) by David
Goodis -- center on underachieving single men who have consciously walked out
on the establishment. These dropouts are to 50's crime writers what drifters
and hobos were to 30's authors. Highsmith's Ripley is a chameleon and a
sycophant, an opportunistic social parasite lacking even fixed sexuality.
Because he has no backbone, no identity, he can wiggle through even the
tightest jams. Goodis's Eddie is a barroom pianist who gave up a promising
concert career out of disgust for the music world's corruption. His story is
somber, an extended mood piece whose swerves into criminality seem
nonessential. Finally, there is Willeford's Harry Jordan, a painter with formal
academic training who finances his heavy drinking by frying burgers in greasy
spoons. Harry takes up with Helen Meredith, another drunk, and after surviving
a few failed suicide pacts, the couple check into a public mental hospital,
hoping for a miracle. They don't get one. The tale could be called an emotional
roller coaster, except that it has no upswings; it's sheer free fall. In the
novel's gimmicky next-to-last sentence we learn that Harry is black, as if this
matters. The damned are all the same color: hellfire red.
''The Real Cool
Killers'' (1959) by Chester Himes is set in Harlem and stars two black
policemen, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. The action is slapstick,
preposterously violent -- Hieronymus Bosch meets Miles Davis. What makes this a
crime novel, not a detective novel, is Coffin Ed and Grave Digger's method of
seeking justice: shooting people, busting heads and extracting confessions
through intimidation. In Himes's Harlem -- a Hobbesian wilderness cordoned off
by rich Caucasians -- detective work is not about assembling clues but about
beating the truth out of people, issuing threats and making good on threats,
walking tall and refusing to be lied to. Police brutality isn't an issue for
Himes; he is not a writer who brakes for social niceties. ''The Real Cool
Killers,'' like most superior crime novels, does not propose to change society
or even to advance the art of fiction. Those are side effects. Crime novels
tell stories. They are guilty pleasures for the guilty minded.
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