Checking the Police Blotter

Given that I've just returned from a trip, and I know better than to travel without a Hard Case Crime novel or two, it's time for a Crime Novel Roundup!

A couple of months ago, I mentioned how much I was enjoying the early pages of Robert Terrall's Kill Now, Pay Later (1960), which is rife with exchanges like this one:

"A very nice-looking dish was waiting for him. Dark hair, glasses. She had a raincoat on that was too big for her, and she kept it on."

"No wonder," I said. "It was my raincoat, and all she had on underneath was one of my drip-dry shirts."

"Now you tell me."

I quoted a bunch of other favorite bits in my earlier post. Though it was a lot of fun--I laughed out loud several times--Kill Now, Pay Later was ultimately a bit disappointing--I kept waiting for the pile of deaths and very bad things to matter to someone, but they never really do. The whole remains extremely light, reminding me a bit of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai books, where the crime seems to exist only to enable the drinking and the wry commentary. But maybe I'm being unfair: I came to Kill Now, Pay Later straight from a couple of Lawrence Block novels, where consequence and culpability are never far from the foreground; had I brought to the book a different set of expectations, maybe I would have been able to fully settle in and enjoy it.

The other crime novels I read that same weekend, Cornell Woolrich's Fright (1950) and Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938), both hinge on unexpected turning points in otherwise ordinary lives--but that's where the similarities end. Woolrich's novel is about a man who accidentally kills a woman who attempts to blackmail him on the eve of his wedding. In the ensuing years, while remaining in some ways completely sane, the man's ever-deepening paranoia drives him to commit hideous acts. Fright is a straightforward crime novel, a study of a weak character deformed by circumstance, and while it lags at times, Woolrich's chilling accounts of his protagonist's coldly violent attempts to cover his tracks pretty much compensate for any longueurs.

Simenon, on the other hand, plunges the reader right into insanity, as his protagonist, Kees Popinga, after discovering that the company he's worked for all his life is bankrupt, throws up his middle-class life completely. He kills a woman, then another, and he's soon on the run from the police, yawing between arguing with himself that all he needs to do is find a sympathetic person to listen to his story and positing himself as a near-Nietzschean superman, beyond all petty social strictures. Simenon's study of curdled normality is unsettling, yet at the same time often grotesquely funny: Popinga is an incompetent, intolerable megalomaniac, and as he sinks further and further into paranoia, his plight becomes cartoonishly ridiculous; what began as a character study ends as a bizarre social comedy.

Megalomania serves as a good transition to Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Slide (2007), as it's the defining trait of Slide's best character. A follow-up to their great Bust (2006), Slide follows the two survivors from that book's band of incompetents, Irish-American slut Angela Petrakos and nasty, murderous, pathologically self-regarding businessman Max Fisher. In Bust, Bruen and Starr achieved something rare and impressive: they set a half-dozen or so distinct characters loose in pursuit of various ends, and succeeded--without undercutting any individual characters' motivations--in bringing them all together in a spectacularly complicated, satisfying, and funny plot. Bust was nasty and violent and deeply misanthropic, and it was one of the best crime novels I've read in recent years.

Slide, though a lot of fun, reads like a slighter sibling: aside from Max Fisher--who, having become a crack-addicted drug dealer, has renamed himself The M.A.X.--the other characters are less vibrant than those of the first novel, and their desires less intricately intertwined. The M.A.X., however, is so funny that he almost singlehandedly redeems the book: his mixture of arrogance, incompetence, and brutality are hideously hilarious. An example, taken nearly at random:

He put the Glock down the waistband of his trousers, in the small of his back, and went, "Ouch." Jesus, it was cold. Did he have time to warm it up? Could you microwave a gun? And it pressed against his bum sacroiliac, shit. He took the piece out, got his black suede jacket. It had that expensive cut, you saw it, you whistled, it said taste and platinum card. Yeah, after today, it was platinum or bust baby.

I'll close with the best crime novel I've read in recent months: David Goodis's The Wounded and the Slain (1955). A thumbnail description sounds formulaic to the point of offensiveness: trying to salvage their failing marriage, a couple vacations in Jamaica--but the husband drunkenly kills a man in the Kingston slums, and the repercussions force the pair to re-evaluate themselves and their relationship. Yet the book works. The man's struggles with alcoholism, guilt, and failure are believable and compelling, while his wife--despite some strikingly dated references to frigidity--by the novel's end has been presented as an independent actor, more than the equal of her husband in decisiveness and action. It's a nice reminder that while noir features more than its share of misogyny, it also is the source of some female characters who are far stronger than the men who surround them--and not all of them are femme fatales.

Anyone else putting The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps on their Christmas list?

To begin the weekend, some beginnings

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In the wake of the long, involved Austerity Britain, I've felt the need for its opposite: books that are petite and circumscribed i their intent, but no less potent--bursts of intensity rather than drawn-out explorations. So I've pillaged my bookshelves for narrow-spined volumes, and for the past few days I've carried half a dozen books with me on the train every day, blazing through one and then choosing another. I think that's the form my whole weekend is likely to take.

Coincidentally, the first couple I've read have had fabulous openings, the sort that instantly establish an unforgettable tone and, were you to read them in a bookstore, would send you straight to the cash register to buy the book so you can enjoy the rest of it on your back steps with a martini.

The first paragraphs of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) don't feature Miss Brodie, the book's unforgettable central character, whom in the supplementary materials to the HarperPerennial edition Hal Hager describes as

fascinatingly complex, idealistic, self-deluded, vulnerable, vital, romantic, preposterous, lonely, gregarious, outspoken, [and] solipsistic

--to which I'd have to add "inadvertently malevolent," or even "slightly sinister." They do, however, establish a singular mood and prose rhythm--attentive and matter-of-fact, yet subtly ironic about the world of rules and conventions portrayed--that drew me right in:

The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

The girls could not take off their panama hats because this was not far from the school gates and hatlessness was an offense. Certain departures from the proper set of the hat on the head were overlooked in the case of fourth-form girls and upwards so long as nobody wore their hat at an angle. But there were other subtle variants from the ordinary rule of wearing the brim turned up at the back and down at the front. The five girls, standing very close to each other because of the boys, wore their hats each with a definite difference.

Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938) opens in a totally different register. Crime novels, perhaps more than any others, need to declare their tone at the start. The lurid cover, after all, has already told us roughly what to expect inside: bad behavior--possibly stretching to murder--and most likely some sex and consequences. The question is how we'll get it, and what the author's relationship to the contents will be. Will he, like Chandler or Graham Greene, create for us a fallen world suffering the consequences of its rot? Will we get the matter-of-fact, crime-as-workplace approach of Donald Westlake? Perhaps the story will be filtered through the knowing perseverance of a Lawrence Block narrator?

Simenon, in the opening paragraphs of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, announces, loudly, that we will be dealing with inexorable fate, and an ordinary man caught up in its brutal machinery:

As far as Kees Popinga was personally concerned, it shoudl be admitted that at eight in the evening there was still time: his fate, among others, had yet to be sealed. But time for what? And what else could he have done other than what he did do, convinced as he was that his actions were of no more consequence than during the thousands and thousands of days that had gone before?

He would have shrugged in disbelief had someone told him that his life was about to change radically, that the photograph on the side table showing him standing in the middle of his family, with one hand casually resting on the back of a chair, would soon be printed in every newspaper across Europe.

A nice touch, from the former newspaperman Simenon, the transfiguration of the utterly ordinary family photo into a frightening talisman of dark renown.

I was going to stop with two, but then I picked up Gregoire Bouillier's odd little memoir, The Mystery Guest: An Account (2004), which I read a couple of nights ago, and couldn't resist sharing its deliberately casual and opaque first page, too:

It was the day Michel Leiris died. This would have been late September 1990, or maybe the very beginning of October, the date escapes me (whatever it was I can always look it up later on); in any case it was a Sunday, because I was at home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket the way I often would when I was alone. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for back then, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes . . . I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and why go hunting for new material? I didn't want any trouble.

Deceptive in so many ways, that opening frankly invites us to conspire with Bouillier--to acquiesce to his pretense that there's still time for him to clarify the date--and offers, in exchange, it seems, so much. He's seen enough? Enough to last two hundred years before he has to rejoin the living? What could possibly be next?

The answer, though, turns out to be both more pedestrian than you would expect--a mysteriously ended love affair--and yet strangely interesting, even comforting, regardless. Like the others I've written about today, The Mystery Guest is a modest book, but its pleasures and rewards are genuine, and I hope to write more about it soon. For now, I'll close by saying that Bouillier lives up to the implicit credo in the following statement about dreams:

The significance of a dream, we're told, has less to do with its overt drama than with the details; a long time ago it struck me that the same was true of real life, of what passes among us for real life.

Paying attention to the details: the novelist's art in brief.

Enjoy the weekend, and remember to raise a glass to the labor movement. We'll never pay them back enough for what they've given us.

Reading Simenon in an airport

I've written before about the difficulty of selecting books to carry on a trip, and yesterday I decided that I may need to add a new categorical consideration to my pre-trip book packing: I should always pack a slim and claustrophobic novel to read in case of airport delays.

The needs of an airport reader, after all, are different from those of an airplane reader. The oppressive open-endedness of an airport delay also argues for the short novel over the epic or Victorian: unlike plane reading, which is conducted in full knowledge of its end point, airport delay reading should, if the reader wishes to stay sane, inherently reinforce the idea that he and his fellow passengers will surely be leaving soon, O'Hare's vagaries and incompetencies be damned. And the more claustrophobic and involving the narrative, the better, as few places are less conducive to reading than an airport full of delayed passengers; poetry won't long survive the blither-blather of CNN, the fuckery of Fox, and the soul-sucking cell-phone addictions of business types. A perfect airport delay novel will seamlessly trade the oppressiveness of the modern lounge for its own form of oppressiveness, escaped only at the turning of the last page--at which point, if the stars have aligned, your plane will be ready.

All of which leads to my nomination of Hesperus Press and the matchless New York Review of Books Classics line as the official publishers of airport delays. All of Hesperus's titles would fit the first criterion, as would a number of the NYRB's, while both lists are thick with murky foreign settings, eerie tales, and hideous crimes conducted under cover of darkness (or, in the case of Ivy Compton-Burnett, the thinnest veneer of politeness). Now if only I can get all the Hudson News stores to agree with me, the world of the airport will be a much better--if far more sinister--place.

Yesterday, trapped by rain at La Guardia, I occupied myself with Hesperus Press's recent translation of Georges Simenon's Three Crimes (1938). Simenon has been enjoying an English-language renaissance lately through the help of both of the aforementioned presses, and Three Crimes could be the model airport delay book: it's only 125 pages long, thoroughly sordid, and just fragmented and disjointed enough to require real attention. Three Crimes tells the story of a pair of men, friends of Simenon in his youth, who later committed violent murders, one man of his wife and mistress, the other of his mistress, his mother, and his former Jesuit confessor. There is almost no plotting to the book; Simenon is far less interested in the how of a murder than in the unfathomable skein of whys that led to it. So he opens with details of the murders, then slips back into his energetically dissipated youth in Liege and his adventures--which range from teenage seductions to vague black magic--with the murderers-to-be, in search of the roots of their crimes:

Why? How? Where should one begin, since there is no beginning, nor any other link, over the years and across space, between three crimes, between five or six deaths and between a handful of the living, except for myself?

I seem to hear Danse's voice, in the strange Court of the Assizes in Liege, pounding out the words, "When I was four years old my mother took me to the countryside, and there, in a farmyard, I saw a man killing a sow, first with a hammer, and then by slitting its throat. . . . "

When he was four years old, I did not know him; I wasn't even born. What is more, I wasn't there when, forty years later, in a small house in the French countryside, he killed his mother and his mistress in exactly the same way he had one seen a sow being killed.

. . . .

Three crimes! It's easily said. But before them?

The novel is formed around, and returns obsessively to, the fact of Simenon's once-close connection to the murderers and the question of why he, having shared with them so many of the same adventures and vices, did not like them become a killer. Ostensibly, he is glad to have been spared that outcome and is truly marveling at the workings of fate--but at least a hint of disappointment at his comparatively ordinary life seeps through. Any lifelong student of what is found creeping around under rocks is bound to wonder about the seductions of that life; it's hard not to see Simenon throughout Three Crimes imagining himself as murderer--maybe even, in the unwritten spaces between lines and pages, wondering about who his victims, unwittingly saved, might have been. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Simenon is wistful about that road less traveled by, but his mind does turn regularly in that direction:

I belonged to the most respectable newspaper in the town and I was the youngest of the journalists. I still recall that, for the first official dinner that I attended, I borrowed not a dinner jacket, which I considered common, but a gray morning coat, and I am not sure if I didn't wear with it a white tie and gloves the colour of fresh butter.

Well, some time after that, during a grand lunch, which was, I think, given the title of a lunch for the Fervent City, I suddenly stood up at the table of honour, where I happened to be with my colleagues, and spoke out loudly and clearly: "I'm clearing off! It's bloody boring!"

After which there was an immense void. When I woke up I was in my bed, with a heavy head thumping like a drum. A little later I found my mother sobbing and my brother looking at me in horror.

"What's happened?" I asked in a casual tone.

"Don't you know that some neighbours picked you up from the doorstep at six o'clock in the morning, and that three people were needed to carry you to your bed?"

No, I didn't know. And I examined with astonishment an enormous dagger, which had been found, it seemed, in the pocket of my gabardine.

"What have you done?"

How did I know? They could have declared that I had killed someone and I would have believed it.

But for all its probing of the psychological and social roots of murder, Three Crimes is at its best in its scenes, like that one, of Simenon's youthful escapades, sordid and reckless, which he retails with verve and relish. He tells in detail what he learns about what happened during that "immense void," for example:

And I learned that I had arrived at the newspaper office, without my hat, and with a broken walking stick in my hand, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and that I vomited with all my might. The boss took care of me and tried to make me drink some hot coffee, in the usual way. But what is worse than that I hurled the coffee at his head, yelling, "You're a great coward and you betrayed me! That's exactly what you are! I know what I'm saying!"

Now [the next day] he just waits for me, as is only right. He starts by firing me. Then he calls me back, because he is a nice man and informs me that he will give it a try again with me, but that I won't be sent to banquets any more.

At this point, a colleague rings me up.

"Are you better? Did you find your dancing girl?"

"My dancing girl?"

"It would be a good idea to drop by the Trianon to apologise . . . "

In his ability to wed late-night stories of drink and dissipation with the closely observed details of grotesque crimes, Simenon comes across as a sort of unholy mix of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Powell, William Roughead, and Michael Lesy. Which, now that I think about it, would also serve as a good description of Luc Sante, whose article about Simenon in the current issue of Bookforum is a good place to learn more about Simenon and his four-hundred-book oeuvre.

[By the way, both Hesperus and the NYRB Classics have blogs that are worth checking out.]