Block on . . .

Though I genuinely did enjoy nearly all the work that went into assembling, publishing, and promoting The Getaway Car (aside, perhaps from a few permissions wrangles), the aspect of the whole process that I'll always be happiest about is the sense that my work added some pleasure to the world. Let's be clear: nearly all the pleasure offered by The Getaway Car was the work of Donald Westlake. I wouldn't begin to argue otherwise. But I will gladly take credit for doing the work of turning his work--ephemeral and occasional as it was--into something that's easy to get, and that was easy to bring to the attention of his fans, many of whom had never known these many thousands of words of his writing existed. That will always make me happy.

Recently there's been another, wholly unexpected effect, one that I won't claim any actual credit for but am glad to have played a small part in generating: inspired, he says, by The Getaway Car, for which he wrote a foreword, Lawrence Block has just assembled and published a collection of his own nonfiction writing about his career and the work of other writers. Titled The Crime of Our Lives, it's just been published, and it's full of great stuff. Block has long been a garrulous commenter on his own books, supplying forewords and head notes and afterwords to collections and new editions, pieces that are always funny, but at the same time serious about the work of writing and the way that a moment in a writer's life and career becomes crystallized in a particular book or story. For this collection, however, we get, not so much Block the host, but Block the guest: it mostly consists of his introductions for and articles about his peers, mentors, friends, and colleagues in the writing world, from the expected (Chandler, Hammett, Spillane, and, of course, Westlake) to the more surprising (Poe, Joseph Conrad). Each one is pure Block: idiosyncratic, anecdotal, personal, and wholly engaged with the craft and job of writing.

If all goes well, I'll be interviewing Larry about the collection soon for the new crime site The Life Sentence, so I won't go into much more detail here, but I can't close without quoting a couple of the pieces. First, for their sheer goofy humor, here are the first lines of an introduction to a collection of Ed Gorman short stories:

Ed Gorman is a terrific writer, and you're going to have a wonderful time reading these stories.

Now what?

That's seventeen words. Pete Crowther, who asked me to write this introduction, has given me to understand that introductions to the volumes he publishes run in the neighborhood of a thousand words. That's not a bad neighborhood, you wouldn't be afraid to wander there after dark, but the seventeen words I've written leave me with nine hundred and eighty-seven words to write, and what am I going to write to take up the slack? I mean, I've already said everything I really have to say on the subject. Here are some stories. Read them, and leave me alone. What else is there to say?

Well, I'll think of something. I am, after all, a professional writer.

No surprise: he does.

Here he is offering a take on a question that Westlake, too, pondered: Why did Dashiell Hammett burn out so quickly?

I wonder if an answer might not lurk in the one scene in The Maltese Falcon not to be found in the Huston screenplay. In it, Spade recounts at length the seemingly pointless story of a man named Flitcraft, who left his home and family and disappeared after nearly being killed by a beam falling from a construction site. By the time Spade succeeded in finding him, the man had re-created essentially the same middle-class life in another cit with another family. Spade explains:

But that's the part I always liked. he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

A beam fell and Dashiell Hammett taught himself to be a writer. Then no more beams fell, and he adjusted himself to that.

And, finally, here the opening of his obituary for his longtime friend Donald Westlake, written the day after Westlake's death, at the request of the Mystery Writers of America:

When the phone call came and brought the bad news, one of the first things that came to mind was John O'Hara's line: "George Gershwin died yesterday, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

Go get the book. You'll enjoy it.

{As for The Life Sentence: it's well worth checking out. I'm one of many members of its advisory board, though I deserve credit thus far for nothing but encouragement, so the recommendation is genuine: this week kicked off with an interview of the always interesting Laura Lippmann by site founder Lisa Levy, and much, much more is promised in the coming weeks.}

Westlake on Hammett and The Thin Man

The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany began with a single essay, "The Hardboiled Dicks," which Westlake originally delivered as a talk at the Smithsonian on May 13, 1982. It's an extended look at Westlake's chosen genre--interestingly, at a branch of it that he barely bothered with a writer, the detective novel--and it reveals Westlake to be a careful, attentive reader and a thoughtful critic of his fellow writers. Even now that it's been surrounded by another 65,000 or so words of Westlake's writing in what will eventually become the book, it remains a standout, full of history, analysis, and opinion, all backed up by extensive quotations from the writers in question.

Over the weekend, while I was making my final edits to the manuscript before turning it in, I found myself particularly drawn to Westlake's thoughts on Hammett. No writer was a more obvious influence on Westlake's style in the early years, which makes his acute analysis of Hammett's relationship to his material, as seen by reading between the lines of The Thin Man (1934), particularly interesting.

Westlake's essay traces the movement of hardboiled fiction from its roots in some sort of actual experience through its increasing stylization and eventual shift into ritual and pastiche. (Had Tarantino been making films in 1982, Westlake could have used him as an oblique example.) Hammett he locates at that point on the arc when experience (which Hammett had with the Pinkertons) was beginning to give way--and his argument is that Hammett knew it and didn't want any part of it. The Thin Man, he claims, is Hammett's exhausted riposte:. After quoting a scene where a low-level hood gets beat up for no explicable reason, Westlake writes,

This sequence doesn't come out of anything, and it doesn't lead to anything. Its only reason for existing at all is to show that Nick doesn't know what's going on any more, he's become a visitor to the scene he used to live in. And when I say Nick, I mean Hammett.

Hammett was a major writer, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the texture in his writing comes so very much from himself. Writing inside an action genre, where subtleties of character and milieu are not primary considerations, he nevertheless was, word by word and sentence by sentence, subtle and many-layered, both allusive and elusive, delicate and aloof among all the smashing fists and crashing guns. He put himself in his writing, and that makes The Thin Man a very strange read, in that singular way that The Tempest is strange; inside the story, the writer can be seen, preparing his departure.

As Hammett's own experience of hardboiled characters faded into the past, Westlake argues, he was unwilling to take the next step, into the baroque and ritualistic and stagily imitative--that would be left to Chandler. (Whom Westlake never thought much of.) In the Library of America edition of Hammett's novels, there's a quote from an interview tucked away in the notes that backs up Westlake:

I stopped writing because I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Westlake sees the result--which he elsewhere included among his ten favorite books in the genre--as an unusual thing for the genre: not a disappointed, or cynical, or world-weary book, but a sad one:

You notice also the passing reference to literature that will or will not last. The Thin Man is a very sad book, made even sadder by how bravely and smilingly the narrator hides his sadness. Hammett is not leaving the hardboiled detective story. The genre is leaving him.

My interest piqued, I re-read the novel for the first time in a dozen years. And whereas the first time I read it, I saw it as a slightly cockeyed comedy, a slightly less fizzy kin to the William Powell-Myrna Loy version, this time I couldn't help but see what Westlake saw: it's a novel about confusion, where everyone expects Nick Charles, returned to New York and (reluctantly) to detecting after seven years away, to step right in and be the detective he was, to know things the way he used to know them . . . while all around him is oddity and incomprehensible behavior and incompetence and uncertainty. Friends aren't friends, while enemies aren't even worthy of the name; the closest Nick comes to camaraderie (Nora aside) is when a gangster he once sent up the river insists on reminiscing a bit--at least those memories are honest.

This is what good criticism does: it makes it hard to read a book the same way you read it before you encountered the critic's take on it. I would have read The Thin Man again eventually, but would I have seen in it the sense of dislocation and loss that Westlake showed me? The book ends with the expected closure, but it's closure rooted largely in conjecture, which Nora finds frustrating. She wants to know for sure, and she wants to know what will happen to the people left behind by the murders. Nick replies:

"Nothing new. They'll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn't round out anybody's life except the murdered's and sometimes the murderer.

"That may be," Nora said, "but it's all pretty unsatisfactory."

The first time I read the book, I took that as one final joke, an expression of Nora's ever-amused, ever curious arm's-length relationship to Nick's work, and to crime itself. Now I read it as Westlake did: as a hand waved in irritated farewell. How can I not?

If you like Westlake, you're going to like this book, folks. I'm really proud of it, and I'm champing at the bit. A year. That's all we've got to wait now!

A rule for used book shopping

{Photo by rocketlass of marginal commentary in the University of Chicago Library's copy of Richard Stark's Plunder Squad.}

The paperback editions of the Nero Wolfe novels that Bantam published in their Nero Wolfe Library in the 1990s all carry introductions by contemporary crime writers. For the most part, those introductions, while well-meaning, do little but remind us of the vast number of relatively cozy crime writers working at that time--almost none to my taste, but not out of place introducing Wolfe. Nearly all the introductions explain how the writer first came to the Wolfe stories, then, as I've done here many a time, point out some of the reasons they endure. Wholly inoffensive, but far from essential, in other words.

Robert Crais's introduction to Before Midnight, however, deserves to be preserved. That's not because of any particular insight he offers into Rex Stout, and not even because he mentions Donald Westlake and Richard Stark. No, it's because his story of first encountering Wolfe is great fun. As a young man living in Baton Rouge, Crais haunted a used bookstore,

a grungy, dirty, seedy kind of place, but I discovered Chandler there, as well as Ted Mark and Donald Westlake and Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark. A paperback cost nineteen cents. If it had no cover, it cost a dime. I had gone through the Chandlers and was working on the Hammetts and I walked into the little store that day very much wanting a copy of Red Harvest. The stacks were divided by category (western, mystery, science fiction, etc.) but were rarely alphabetized, so if you wanted a particular author, you had to look through all the mysteries, ofttimes a tedious process. There was only a single copy of Red Harvest, and some yo-yo had written BITE ME across the cover in green ink, so that ended that. I won't buy a book with BITE ME on the cover. Not even for half price.

A good rule, and one that led him to pick up the next book that looked of interest, which happened to be by Rex Stout. Sorry, Hammett. If only you'd attracted a better class of reader . . . (and if people are writing BITE ME on Hammett, good god, what must they be writing on Jim Thompson? Or--shudder--Mickey Spillane?)

Entering October Country

{Photos by rocketlass.}

It’s time.

Time to venture to October Country, which Ray Bradbury, in one of his familiar cascades of definition, described as,

that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain . . .

Time for hot cider and inexplicably cold rooms, for fireplaces and scratching . . . of branches? . . . at the window, for the night closing in so early, so early that you’re unexpectedly home alone for a few hours after dark before your spouse returns . . and the house, creaking and cracking, knows it; and the wind, howling and hissing, knows it; and your cats, suddenly skittish, know it.

October Country doesn’t require belief. If it did, I’d be on the other side of the line, looking in, myself. All it requires is susceptibility, a lack--however temporary--of active disbelief. We’ve all jumped when startled; October Country merely asks us to slow that jump, to savor it.

In the introduction to an anthology of scary stories he edited in 1944, Creeps by Night, Dashiell Hammett laid out what a proper visitor to October Country should bring with him in him:

To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability and willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to skull with shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely in the same way--though hardly to the same extent--that having to take ether in a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in ghosts, you can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak semblance of the sensation you would experience on being told there was a bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up wrapped in a sheet jump out at you. If you believe in werewolves, then it can make little difference to you, except perhaps academically, whether your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a Cicero muscle-man. To the truly superstitious, the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”

The effectiveness of the sort of stories that we are here concerned with depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel--if not actually believe--that they can but should not happen.

Throughout this month, let us choose the position of Hammett’s ideal reader--susceptible to the uncanny precisely because during the daylight hours we believe it has an opposite, that the world can be kenned. For on a dark autumn night, it’s hard to disagree with Dr. Johnson’s take on the topic:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

Bring on the ghosts.

"My father was all hell for people talking as they should talk."

{Photo by Flickr user Marxchivist. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

I slip into the vulgate every once in a while--an affectation I only half-understand. There I am speaking impeccable English and suddenly I lingo it up.

That's James M. Cain, interviewed by David L. Zinsser for the Paris Review in January of 1977, nine months before his death at age eighty-five. The interview is full of interesting nuggets about his background and vocation, with side notes along the way about style and other writers.

The son of a college president and professor of English, Cain came to novel-writing late, after several years of working in newspapers and magazines. He started out working at the American Mercury for H. L. Mencken (who, we learn, never read Alice in Wonderland, which Cain, apparently serious, calls "the greatest novel in the English language"). A few years later, after a spell in the "lung house" to recover from tuberculosis, Cain moved to New York and started working for the World. His account of how he landed that job--on the wings of a glowing recommendation from Mencken--is amusing:

I suggested a job where I would just sit around and think up articles, ideas. I said I knew articles didn't grow on trees. . . . I went on like this, with [Walter] Lippmann staring at me while I tried ot talk myself into a job. I knew I was getting somewhere in a direction altogether different, that he was listening to what I had to say, and though disregarding it, he was meditating. I thought, What the hell is with this guy? He interrupted to ask if I had any specimens of my writing. Writing, I thought, what has writing got to do with it? I was still talking about thinking up articles. Later, when we got to be easy friends, I asked him about this first interview and he said, I began to realize as I listened to you talk, that none of your infinitives were split, all of your pronouns were correct, and that none of your pariciples dangled. That was true. I talked the way my father had beat into me; he was a shot for style, and that's what got me the job.

Yet by listening to the way people actually talked, Cain the novelist became an expert chronicler of the American vernacular.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in the interview, however, comes when Zinsser asks Cain about Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the two writers with whom he is most often grouped. Cain replies,

I read a few pages of Dashiell Hammett, that's all. And Chandler. Well, I tried. That book about a bald, old man with two nympho daughters. That's all right. I kept reading. Then it turned out the old man raises orchids. That's too good. When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either.

I'll admit to being surprised that Cain wasn't a fan of Hammett; I would have expected the brutal executioner's justice of Red Harvest at least to have appealed to him. His response to Chandler, on the other hand, makes sense: in the Cain novels I've read, darkness emerges from resolutely ordinary circumstances and characters, to which the almost gothic trappings of some of Chandler's best work would be entirely foreign. The producer of the film of The Postman Always Rings Twice had it right when he told Cain,

What I like about your books--they're about dumb people that I know and that I bump into in the parking lot. I can believe them and you put them into interesting situations.

Like almost everything else in the Paris Review Interviews, Volume One, in which it's collected, the whole interview is worth reading--I haven't even gotten to Cain's explanation of how the idea for Double Indemnity originated in a lingerie ad that carried a key typo in the slogan, "If These Sizes Are Too big, Take a Tuck in Them." If you're looking for a way to help out our new president in his efforts to drag our ailing economy out of the lung house, you could do worse than wandering to your local bookstore at lunch and picking up a copy.