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The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)

Charles felt dirty, he was aware inside himself of a mass of damp and sticky innards. (p.202)

The Reprieve is the second novel in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy. It is a long, panoramic account of the lives of some 130 characters during the fateful week in September 1938 when all Europe held its breath as Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia and spark a continent-wide war in order to ‘liberate’ the Sudeten Germans.

At the last minute, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier persuaded the Czech government to cede to Nazi Germany Czechoslovakia’s western border regions, containing not only many ethnic Germans, but all her defences and much of her industry. Hitler accepted this deal, the threat of an armed confrontation disappeared, and all Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

Hence the book’s title – The Reprieve. This epic betrayal bought the western democracies exactly one year’s remission, until Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 began the Second World War in Europe.

The Reprieve is drastically different from its predecessor, The Age of Reason. That book had a cast of seven or eight characters but essentially rotated around the plight of one central figure – the depressive philosophy professor, Mathieu Delarue, who was trying to find the money to pay for his mistress’s abortion. It covered just two days and was divided into chapters, 18 to be precise, each of which began in a new scene or setting, in the conventional manner. The Reprieve, by contrast, is much longer and divided into seven very long sections, one covering each day from Friday 23 September to Friday 30 September.

But The Reprieve is massively different from a traditional novel – indeed it is a form of experimental novel – in two key respects:

  1. It has an enormous cast of characters, some from its predecessor, The Age of Reason, but most entirely new. And they are in locations all across France, as well as Germany, England and Spain. There are even scenes depicting the leading politicians of the day as they handled the negotiations about Czechoslovakia – Daladier, Chamberlain and even Hitler himself (we even get to see some of Hitler’s dreams!) So there is an astonishingly large number and wide breadth of characterisation.
  2. And, most distinctively, it jumps between the settings of the different characters, between conversations between characters, and even between characters’ thoughts – with no warning, sometimes in successive paragraphs (easy enough to grasp), sometimes in successive sentences (you need your wits about you) and sometimes in the same sentence. The same sentence can begin describing the thoughts of a character in Morocco and end by describing another in Paris, or Munich or a Czech village. Some sentences jump between multiple consciousnesses.

I found this technique absolutely riveting. It makes reading into a parlour game, a Where’s Wally challenge, a test of the reader’s alertness. I suppose it is also meant to give a panoramic impression of the age, and of the very weird intense atmosphere which united the inhabitants of the entire population of Europe as probably never before, with everyone huddled round their radios or snapped up the latest editions of newspapers to find out whether we were going to war. Thus, again and again throughout the long dense text, characters’ thoughts and feelings and impressions overlap and intermingle.

Sartre sometimes uses James Joyce’s technique of associating certain phrases with certain settings or characters, to evoke their mood or consciousness – but mostly you have to be very alert throughout as it is often only one word which reveals that the text has now jumped from one character to a completely different one – is now in the desert, on the beach, in the city streets, on a plane – and which of its huge cast of characters we are now following.

Generally, all these new characters have one or a few longish (a page, maybe) sections in which to establish their situation and character – after which brief introduction the text freely switches to them at a moment’s notice, for a paragraph, for a few sentences, or even for a few words embedded in a sentence about other characters. Occasionally, what have been established as key words or phrases are blended together in kind of poetic rhapsodies, in fugues which counterpoint a whole host of characters and destinies into webs of words.

Chamberlain was asleep, Mathieu was asleep, the Kabyle put the ladder against the charabanc, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and scrambled up without holding onto the rungs. Ivich was asleep, Daniel swung his legs out of bed, a bell echoed in his head, Pierre looked at the pink and black soles of the Kabyle’s feet.

I found this ‘simultaneous method’ quite spellbinding.

Lunch-time! they had entered the blinding tunnel of mid-day: outside – the sky, white with heat; outside – the dead, white roads, no man’s land, and war: behind the closed shutters, they sat stifling in the heat, Daniel put his napkin on his knees, Hannequin tied his napkin round his neck, Brunet took the paper napkin from the table, Jeannine wheeled Charles into the large and almost empty dining-room with its smudgy windows… (p.101)

I like its profusion, its variety and its sense of the diversity of life!

A happy side-effect of this approach is that the lengthy – the really, really long passages in The Age of Reason in which Mathieu or Daniel or Boris dwelt on the emptiness of their lives, the meaningless of existence and in which they obsessed about the ugliness of their bodies and of everyone else’s bodies, and generally marinaded in disgust and revulsion at life — these are all a lot less in evidence and, when they do occur, are pared back to the bone. Some such passages are still attached to Mathieu, Brunet and a few others, but the overall effect it is far less self-indulgently solipsistic and self-pitying than in the first novel.

Instead of focusing in to create a stickily claustrophobic effect, the text is continually exploding out in multiple directions, jumping across numerous locations, invoking a big cast, creating a sense of openness, breadth, fecundity.

This greater objectivity is indicated in a small but telling moment when Mathieu (35) is telling Odette about the ugly sister of a student of his, Ivich (18), who he’s snogged a few times and might be in a relationship with, is detailing her list of psychological quirks (hates being touched, hates summer, hates her own appearance etc) and, having heard all about it, Odette briskly thinks, ‘A good spanking is what she wants’ (p.23).

And I couldn’t help thinking that a good spanking and being told to grow up is what most of the characters in The Age of Reason wanted.

The characters in order of appearance

I set off imagining it would be a relatively straightforward task to name and give brief thumbnail descriptions of the characters, but soon ran into problems.

Should I include characters who aren’t named or make only fleeting entrances, like the unnamed Arab who puts Maud’s suitcase on the bus roof, or the unnamed steward on the liner, or the unnamed lady sitting next to Hannequin on the train or the unnamed lady who gets Zézette’s signature for a feminist peace petition in the street etc?

Or should I go to the other extreme and only include characters who have substantial speaking parts and whose lives we get to know a bit? I compromised by listing every named character, no matter how brief their appearance.

  • Godesberg, Germany The old gentleman, key to the negotiations, who is revealed to be Neville Chamberlain. Nevile Henderson (British Ambassador to Berlin), Sir Horace Wilson (special emissary from Chamberlain to Hitler). Later attended by Woodhouse.
  • Pravnitz, Czechoslovakia Milan Hlinka, former woodcutter, now schoolteacher of a Sudeten town which is being taken over by the Czech Nazis, is sheltering in his house with his pregnant schoolteacher wife, Anna, and a child, Marikka, sent there by their concerned parents. In the house opposite live the Jägerschmitts, a German family who had fled a few days earlier as a result of Czech persecution, but now return in triumph, knowing that Hitler is about to triumph and that their – the Gis the cermans’ – day has come.
  • South of France Mathieu Delarue is on holiday at Juans-les-Pins with his brother, Jacques, and his comely wife, Odette. In The Age of Reason Jacques gave Mathieu a common-sense lecture about it being time he grew up and assumed his responsibilities, so now Jacques is the mouthpiece for the bourgeois view that the whole crisis is the fault of the Czechs, who are refusing to see reason and must bow down to Herr Hitler’s very reasonable demands (p.92, 95, 96, 178).
  • Paris Maurice is a young, strong working class member of the Communist Party, walking the streets with his shallow girlfriend, Zézette. They bump into Brunet, the tall, strong, mature Communist, one-time friend of Mathieu and inspiration to younger party members (who we know from The Age of Reason). (Brunet bumps into Joseph Mercier, Professor of Natural History, a momentary encounter seen by both.) Later Maurice makes love to Zézette in a hotel bedroom next to Philippe’s room. Next day he leads a protest at the Gare de l’Est, talks to Simon, and Dubech and Laurent. Maurice is mobilised along with Dornier and Bébert. 
  • Paris Stephen Hartley, New York journalist, getting his secretary/wife Sylvia to organise a berth on the last boat leaving France.
  • A sanatorium at Berck-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais Charles is crippled by some disease, has to lie prone on a trolley, refers to able people as ‘the stand-ups’, is cared for by sentimental nurse Jeannine, resents ‘the little Dorliac woman’ who gives the nurses generous tips. On the day of the move he is attended by Madame Louise and finds himself in the transport train next to the irritating practical joker Blanchard.
  • Marseilles Sheep farmer Gros-Louis has come to Marseilles looking for a job. He hitches up with an unnamed Negro for a spell. He meets Mario and Starace, the sailors, they take him to a bar to meet prostitute Daisy, get him drunk, and beat him up down a back alley. Next morning, still bloody, he tries to get work at a depot, but Ribadeau the foreman points out to him that he’s been called up.
  • Rural France Daniel (the suave homosexual from The Age of Reason) is on holiday with his new wife, heavily pregnant Marcelle, one-time lover of Mathieu. He hates the countryside. He despises Marcelle. He is longing for a war to break out and rescue him from his predicament.

‘Oh God, if only war would come!’ A thunderbolt which would shatter this smooth-faced world, plough the countryside into a quagmire, dig shell-holes in the fields, and fashion these flat monotonous lands into the likeness of a storm-tossed sea.’ (p.42)

  • Staying at their hotel is a retired colonel, M. de Lestrange. The hotel-keeper’s son, Émile.
  • Marrakesh, Morocco Supercilious Pierre is on holiday having an affair with Maud Dassignies, a member of Baby’s Lady Orchestra. He despises her. On the boat home, she shares a cramped 3rd class cabin with other band members France, Ruby and Doucette and two unnamed women.
  • Paris Pitteaux is editor of a review named The Pacifist (p.125). His secretary, Irène, lets a young tearaway, Philippe Grésigne into his office to see him. The suggestion is that the boy is a rent boy and Pitteaux had some kind of sex with him, now the boy wants more money. Later Pitteaux is called to the house of General Lacaze, who is Philippe’s step-father, husband of Mme Lacaze, where he meets M. Jardies a mental specialist. Philippe has left a note, stolen 10,000 Francs and run away to make some grand pacifist gesture. The General holds Pitteaux responsible. Philippe goes to see a forger to forge him a passport, stays the night in a cheap hotel and hears Maurice making love to Zézette next door. — Irène lectures her kid brother René who is being mobilised. — Philippe falls asleep in a cafe owned by M. and Mme Cazin. The waiter is Felix.
  • Paris Armand Viguier, 80 years old, is dead. He lies stretched out on his bed among his luxury belongings while Sartre speculates poetically about his life dissipating into the objects around him, into an infinite future etc. He body is attended by a nurse, until an elderly relative, Madame Verchoux, arrives. Mme Lieutier asks the butcher in the shop opposite, M. Désiré, about M. Viguier, joined by Mme Bonnetain. –55
  • Marseilles Sarah, the plump placid friend of Mathieu’s from The Age of Reason, has come south to see her husband, Gomez, with their small son, Pablo who glamorises his father’s warriorhood. For a year earlier Gomez had simply walked out of their Paris apartment, headed to Spain and joined the Republican army. Now he has a week’s leave. Sarah she calls to them to come and hear the Negro singing in the street, the same one Gros-Louis had hung out with for a while earlier.
  • Crévilly, France Daddy Croulard, the old soldier, is instructed by the gendarmerie lieutenant to stick up posters round town calling for the mobilisation of all French adult men. Maublanc, a peasant, along with Chapin, Tournus, Cauchios, Simeon, Poulaille, Fraigneau drive their oxen and carts to the nearest barracks as a result of the mobilisation notices they’d read. Louisa Corneille, sister of the level-crossing guard, fiancée of Jean Matrat, watches them pass. Conversation between Madame Reboulier, Marie, Stephanie the tobacconist’s wife, Jeanne Fraigneau. Later Mother Tremblin, Jeanne, Ursule, the Clapot sisters, Little Rose… — 79
  • Paris A Jewish exile from Austria, Schalom, asks help from Georges Levy, then has a long interview with M. Birnenschatz, who we see wave off his pretty daughter, Ella. Then M. Birnenschatz’s talks to one of his staff, Weiss, who has been called up. Weiss says he is sticking up for Jews but Birnenschatz, although he is a Jewish refugee from Cracow, refuses to acknowledge his Jewishness, insists he is a Frenchman first and foremost.
  • Paris One-eyed Pascal is selling irises and buttercups at the Quai de Passy and watches the stream of cars packed with household goods, of families fleeing Paris.
  • Saint-Flour, France François Hannequin, pharmacist, tells his wife, Espérance Dieulafoy, that he is being mobilised and she fusses about the shirts and socks and boots he’ll need to pack. They meet Madame Calvé and Marie, Charlot the ticket collector and M. Pineau the notary.
  • France Jean Servier is a worker reading the sports page of the newspaper. Lucien Rénier finishes his lunch. François Destutt is a laboratory assistant at the Institut Derrien. René Malleville. Pierre Charnier.— 96
  • England Dawburn, journalist for the Morning Post attends a press conference given by an exhausted Chamberlain.
  • France Georges, a particularly feeble, ill, weak man, puts up with his querulous wife, goes in to see his baby daughter and – with typically Sartrean gloom – foresees her futile life, growing up weak and sickly like him, scorned by his schoolmates, feebly suffering, pointlessly struggling through her wretched existence.
  • Paris Maubert and Thérèse have fun tearing down mobilisation posters from the walls. –101
  • A hotel lobby in Paris Boris and Lola, who we know from The Age of Reason, watch numerous guests packing up and fleeing Paris e.g. Madame Delarive and overhear the conversation of a widow and a beribboned old man blaming the Popular Front and the ‘reds’ for arming Spain in 1936 instead of preparing to confront Herr Hitler.
  • A Paris brothel Philippe, determined to be a pacifist hero and do something significant, gets drunk and ends up in a brothel, where he is tended by kindly Negro prostitute, Flossie, who shows him to her friend,
  • The French government Daladier, Sarrault, Bonnet, Champetier de Ribes, Reynaud, 
  • London Fred watches Mr Chamberlain walk by and feels cheered.
  • Berlin Sportpalast The centrepiece of the Monday 26 September chapter is Hitler giving his speech about Czechoslovakia in which we are shown lots of characters across Europe tuning in, listening and reacting, including Karl, a devoted Nazi.
  • Round a radio are Germaine Chabrol and his wife.
  • Barcelona Gomez listens to the broadcast with comrades Herrera and Tilquin.
  • A bar in Paris where Bruno translates Hitler’s speech to the landlord, the Marseillais, the man from the north, Chomis, Charlier.
  • Mathieu’s flat in Paris His concierge, Madame Garinet.
  • Laon, France Ivich, back in her bourgeois home realises she rather likes her father, the Russian exile M. Serguine. –126
  • A nightclub in Paris Irène is being pestered to have sex by boyfriend Marc, who has been called up. Suddenly she sees Philippe, the boy everyone is looking for, being tended by a handsome Negress. When he leaves, Irène pursues him. Philippe shouts ‘Down with the war,’ is promptly beaten up, and is rescued by Mathieu. Irène begs him to help her take the half-conscious Philippe back to her flat. Being French, they go to bed. Being French, Mathieu has a long soliloquy about being, being in the flesh, being inside someone, being inside another person’s body, mind, memory. And so on.
  • Munich Jan Masaryk, Czech government representative at Munich, is left no option by Daladier and Chamberlain but to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler. This scene is intercut with a completely different scene in which Ivich is angrily losing her virginity to an unnamed man, and hating every second of it – effectively being raped. So that a woman being raped is counterpointed with Czechoslovakia being betrayed and handed over to Hitler.

The interplay of characters, phrases and perceptions overlapping one character into another, is never totally incomprehensible (as it often is in the grand-daddy of this kind of experimentalism, James Joyce) and gives a wonderfully musical sense of counterpoint, of melodies or rhythms interweaving and interplaying. I found it immensely enjoyable.

Aloneness, freedom and decision

Sartre’s more thoughtful characters are oppressed by their self-awareness. They are always horrifyingly aware of themselves looking at themselves, barely able to keep up the pretence of existence, always at risk of drowning in an oppressive flood of impressions, of things.

I come upon nothing but my own self. Scarcely that: a succession of small impulses, darting centrifugally here and there, but no focus. And yet there is a focus: that focus is my self, and the horror lies there. (p.114)

Being a self is horrific in Sartre’s worldview.

And what prompts this nauseous sense of existing in the various characters, is the oppressive extent to which, at so many points, they feel utterly abandoned, adrift, alone.

Mathieu stopped and gazed up at it. A quite ordinary and unprivileged sky. And myself a nondescript entity beneath that vast indifferent arc. (p.296)

This is a key psychological basis of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. Every adult human is completely alone and completely free – no ties bind us, only what we choose. Everyone must decide for themselves, without ‘bad faith’ i.e. without blaming circumstances or upbringing or this or that political or cultural situation. Our decisions make us who we are, but we can only fully grasp this, and the crushing responsibility it brings, once we have psychologically experienced our terrible aloneness.

  • ‘We are now alone.’ (p.6) Milan
  • He felt alone (p.9) Milan
  • ‘Now we are quite alone.’ (p.10) Milan
  • A man felt isolated (p.13) Maurice
  • Daniel thought: ‘I am alone’. (p.43) Daniel
  • At the moment he was alone. (p.96) Maurice
  • … they are alone upon the earth.. (p.99) Pierre on the Arabs
  • Gros-Louis was glad of their company, but he still felt solitary. (p.135)
  • … she was quite alone… (p.140) Maud, as she masturbates the captain of the liner
  • He was no longer alone (p.159) Philippe in the boarding house
  • For the moment he was there, an innocent, ugly little boy with a diminutive shadow at his feet, alone in the world… (p.196)
  • So you are quite alone?’ ‘Quite.’ He repeated: ‘Quite alone in the world.’ (p.209) Charles talking to Catherine in the evacuation train
  • The Moroccan climbed over the cracked soil of Spain, he thought of Tangier, and he felt alone. (p.220) Soon afterwards the Moroccan is shot dead by a Belgian
  • He was alone in the night, so small and solitary, he knew and understood nothing, like a man about to die. (p.250) Gros-Louis, the illiterate peasant
  • There was no longer anyone in the world but Karl and his Führer. The Führer was speaking in front of a large swastika’d standard, he was speaking to Karl, and to him alone. (p.271)
  • She turned to her mother, to Ivy: but they had receded. She could still see them but not touch them. Paris also had drifted out of reach, the light from the windows fell dead upon the carpet. Contacts between things and people were imperceptibly disintegrating, she was alone in the world with that voice. (p.273) [Ella]
  • He was alone on this bridge, alone in the world, accountable to no man. (p.308) [Mathieu]
  • I’m alone in the street, surrounded by sleeping people, ignored by everyone. (p.310)  [Irene]
  • She felt utterly alone. (p.360) [Maud after peace is declared]

At some point or other, all the characters realise their solitude, alone on the surface of a friendless planet, confronting their futures, their destinies completely unaided.

A man alone, forgotten, devoured by darkness, confronted that fragile eternity. (p.297)

In Sartre’s philosophy, we are each of us completely free, utterly free to make decisions according to our own sense of values – and our decisions therefore define us. And the responsibility, the implications of this radical, total freedom, is crushing.

  • ‘I am free,’ he said suddenly. And his joy shrivelled into horror. (p.299)
  • I am free, he said to himself, and his mouth was dry… Freedom is exile, and I cam condemned to be free. (p.308)
  • I shall be my own witness, I am accountable to no one but myself. (p.337)

If there are any character developments (and for the most part there aren’t: Boris hates Lola, Ivich hates Mathieu, Daniel hates Mathieu etc) the two main ones are:

  1. Mathieu with a start realises he is free, but realises that the nature of that ‘freedom’ is completely unlike what he expected: he expected a sense of deliverance and joy, but instead he experiences terror and physical anxiety. He is free to do anything. (In fact, of course, he doesn’t do much; he sleeps with Irène and volunteers for the army. Big deal.)
  2. Daniel has a religious conversion. Being French, and so Catholic, this is expressed in the same language of extremity, the same hysterical exaggeration, as the other characters’ ‘existential’ musings. To be precise, Daniel becomes aware of being seen, not by a human, but by some unknown see-er who can see right into his soul. And that fixes his mobile tremulous over-intelligent personality. It fixes and transfixes him. It objectifies him. He experiences a massive relief.

Sarte Bullshit bingo

As with The Age of Reason, I began chuckling every time I read characteristic Sartrean key words – despair, anguish etc – and burst out laughing whenever one of his stricken characters had another outbreak of Weltschmerz and nausea – like the numerous episodes where Mathieu and Daniel, in particular, are likely to completely lose their sense of themselves and become pure looks, observing but empty consciousnesses, at one with the surrounding objects, their futures foreknown, foretold, suspended, empty, futile etc etc.

Key terms in Sartre Bullshit Bingo would have to include:

  • nauseam, vomit, slime, sick, disgust, contempt, revulsion, anguish, hate, despise, horror, dismal, white (as in the blinding white glare of the noonday sun), insect (people routinely feel like one; Hitler is described as having an insect face)

Prose poetry

You might not expect it from his reputation, but Sartre is a surprisingly poetic writer. A lot of the rhapsody is negative (slime and vomit and bodily functions) or describes rather esoteric psychological insights into the nature of death, destiny, and his persistent hallucination that the objects around us are watching us, respond to our thoughts, embody our moods.

But in other places, especially in the many descriptions of the sea associated with the Mathieu sections, Sartre is a swift and vivid writer of pure prose poetry.

Odette returned with a smile. It wasn’t the conventional smile that he expected, but a special smile just for him; in one instant the sea had reappeared, the lightly heaving sea, the Chinese shadows speeding across the water, the green aloes and the green pine-needles that carpeted the ground, the stippled shadows of the tall pines, the dense white heat, the smell of resin, all the richness of a September morning at Juan-les-Pins. (p.94)

Summary

Le Sursis is well worth reading:

  1. As a vivid picture of the atmosphere of France, and to some extent the rest of Europe, during that turbulent week in September 1938.
  2. As a fiction in its own right, especially the experimental use of a vast cast of characters whose thoughts and actions blend into each other in such an arresting challenging way.
  3. As an insight into the psychological basis of existentialism, which comes across as the codification of the very peculiar psychological states experienced by its inventor, M. Jean-Paul Sartre who suffers an oppressive sense of self-consciousness, which veers from feeling so emptied-out that he becomes simply a seeing object, a stone which perceives, through to the other extreme of becoming so exquisitely over-sensitive to the suffocating existence of the world around him, and of his own strangling self-consciousness, that he wants to stop it, to cease being so self-conscious, to become as senseless as a stone. Hence the passage where Mathieu looks over the parapet of the Pont-Neuf in Paris and wants to jump into the Seine (pp.308-309), to cease, imagining himself already dead, imagining himself in the past tense (and so on and so on).

Above all, though, it is a good indicator of the wretchedly demoralised state of French culture in the late 1930s which goes a long way to explaining why France surrendered so easily when she was finally attacked by the Nazis in June 1940 – surrendered and quickly set up the Vichy regime which enthusiastically collaborated with the Germans.

Mathieu, Boris, Daniel, Ivich, Philippe – they all lack backbone, spine, a real sense of purpose. When the test came, they all collapsed like a pack of cards. The book is a powerful portrait of a demoralised nation.

Credit

Le Sursis by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1945. This translation by Eric Sutton was published as The Reprieve by Hamish Hamilton in 1947. The Reprieve was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1961. All references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback reprint, which I bought 40 years ago for 85p.

Related links

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

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by Simon on August 23, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 23, 2017

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Dark Voyage by Alan Furst (2004)

Furst has written 14 historical espionage novels, generally set in Eastern Europe, Russia or the Balkans, set towards the end of the 1930s and going on into the early years of the Second World War.

This, the eighth in the series, marks a notable change of location by being set, not in the hotels, cafés and bars of continental Europe, but aboard an old tramp steamer chuntering along the coast of North Africa. Although it is frequently in port, with cafés and intrigue, the predominantly maritime setting is unique in Furst’s oeuvre, and makes for an interesting and stimulating change.

The plot

Eric DeHaan is 41, the weathered captain of the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion Line, plying its trade around the Mediterranean. While docked in Tangiers in April 1941, he is called to a meeting in a local restaurant, to find the owner of the Line – Wim Terhouven – along with Marius Hoek, the woman artist Juffrouw Wilhelm, and Commander Hendryck Leiden of the Royal Dutch navy all waiting for him. Without much in the way of choice he is drafted into the Royal Dutch Navy (based in London since the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940) with the rank of Lieutenant Commander (p.15).

So now he is working for the Allied cause. His contact for missions will be Wilhelm who, as an artist, is given more freedom than many men. Back on board ship we begin to get to know the large and varied crew (of about 40):

  • Johannes Ratter, patch over the eye he lost in an accident (p.24)
  • Stas Kovacz the Polish engineer, stooped and bearlike (p.62)
  • Mr Ali, the gentlemanly wireless operator
  • ‘Patapouf’, the plump assistant cook (p.63)
  • Van Dyck, the bosun, in charge of loading the cargo, strongest man DeHaan’s ever met (p.102)
  • Able Seaman Amado
  • Kees
  • Ruysdal
  • Vandermeer

DeHaan is ordered to repaint the ship and reflag it to impersonate a Spanish steamer of the same size, the Santa Rosa. Safer for cruising round the Spanish end of the Med. Able Seaman Amado will, when necessary, pretend to be captain. (This is the cue for a fascinating account of how the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War caused fights on Spanish ships around the world, including the one Amado was lucky to escape from, pp.39-40.)

Wilhelm passes on instructions for the ship to sail to Rio de Oro bay, where they pick up a detachment of British commandos, commanded by one Major Sims, trim and tense (p.43). The mission is to ferry the commandos to Cape Bon, where they will go ashore and attack the ship-spotting base there, which seems to be using some kind of new technology which can track and monitor passing ships, even in the thickest fog. Something to do with infra-red, which DeHaan has never heard of.

They drop the commandos, return to the ship and some time later hear bangs and bullets. Obviously a firefight. When they see a flashing torch from the shore DeHaan and his crew go back in small boats to pick up the survivors. He has to trek quite a way through desert, stony gulches and wadis to find the battered survivor of the firefight – Major Sims is missing presumed dead, and there are several badly wounded. There’s another confused firefight on the trek back to the shore in which the plump cook ‘Patapouf’ is killed. But the commandos have captured some of the German equipment, are gotten safely back aboard ship, and it steams to the safety of British-held Alexandria.

2. In Admiralty Service

In Alexandria DeHaan is ordered to report to a caricature British officer, all red face and handlebar moustache, who insists on being called ‘Dickie’ (p.92). Then on to another Brit officer who shows him a cable from the Hyperion Line. From now on he is under direct British control. They are loaded to the brim with munitions, with two Hurricane fighter planes on deck and provided with a (Jewish) doctor, Dr Shtern (p.103), before being lined up in a small convoy of freighters escorted by a destroyer, HMS Covington, off towards Crete, which has just been attacked by the Germans in a daring airborne invasion (started 20 May 1941).

The Noordendam experiences engine trouble – fixed by the tough Polish engineer – but meaning they are left behind by the others. When they join them and dock in the only port not in German hands, Sphakia, they’ve barely begun unloading when they’re attacked by German Ju87s, Stukas. The first three planes are destroyed by the destroyer’s heavy cannon, but then DeHaan finds himself on his knees in the ruined bridge, bleeding, covered in glass and half deaf. There was a direct hit on the freighter next to them which has wrecked the bridge of the Noordendam.

Cut to five days later and DeHaan, still alive, is back in Alexandria. They unloaded at Crete and sailed back, wrecked but still seaworthy. Next thing we know DeHaan is in Algeciras, Spain, where he’s been ordered to meet another British officer, Commander Hallowes. The next mission is to sail to the Baltic with a cargo of radio antennas, masts and equipment, designed to help set up a listening station up there. Precise details will be sent him by courier.

June 1. Back in Tangier DeHaan hooks up with Hoek, who is his local contact. Then with Yacoub, a local fixer, an Arab nationalist. And finally the courier, a young nervous Brit who hands over typed instructions on the mission: sail to Lisbon, collect cargo, sail to coast of Sweden, rendezvous with Allied ship.

3. Ports of call

Maria Bromen is a Russian journalist (like several previous Furst characters). She’d interviewed DeHaan years earlier in Rotterdam. Now she learns he’s in Tangier and arranges a meeting where she begs him to take her on board ship to freedom. She has travelled this far south incognito, on the run from Russian agents, presumably the NKVD, because she refused to play ball with them. Because DeHaan has a heart of gold, he agrees, getting Van Dyck to navigate the ship’s cutter into the more derelict docks of Tangier and then tracking her down to a set of sheds in a horrible wasteland, to collect her.

The voyage from Tangier to Lisbon is uneventful, livened up by the screening of a knackered version of a Jimmy Cagney movie the first mate picked up in the souk. At Lisbon, DeHaan gives Maria money and watches her walk down the gangplank, regretfully, and out of his life. Good luck. Then he goes to see the ship’s agent, a nervous Portuguese who is fronting for the mission and not happy about it. The agent hands over the fake papers which officially claim the ship is carrying sardines, and then scuttles off.

On the way back to the ship, DeHaan is called over by a Brit in a car, calling himself Mr Brown. Now, throughout the previous 200 pages we have periodically caught up with the movements of one S. Kolb and learned that he is a British agent who has been spirited at great trouble out of Germany and down here to Lisbon. Now Brown informs DeHaan that the British want him to take Kolb on the trip to the Baltic. It is hinted that DeHaan has no choice, so he agrees.

The crew load the crates, full of aerials, as well as guns and Lord knows what, and off they steam north along the coast of Portugal and France. Two incidents: a fire starts in one of the holds, oily rags apparently igniting the cab of one of the lorries. DeHaan spots it and he and the crew manage to put it out before the whole thing explodes, but the officers angrily discuss the possibility of sabotage and many suspect the odd little man Kolb. Throw him overboard, they say. And, close to the coast of Sweden, they witness a full blown air raid with searchlights, ack ack guns and swooping dive bombers attacking a naval base. But sail by it unscathed.

4. Baltic harbours

The last 70 pages of the novel. Will they make it to the rendezvous safely? Will they manage to get rid of the contraband cargo? Is Kolb some kind of spy who’ll sabotage everything? Will the ship make it safely to Ireland, its next destination? What will become of DeHaan and Broman’s love affair? It’s all set up quite nicely to keep the reader hooked. The sea. The black night. The suspense:

The Noordendam ran dark now. And silent – bell system turned off, crew ordered to be quiet, engine rumbling at dead-slow speed on a flat sea. A mile off the port beam, one fishing village, a few dim lights in the haze, then nothing, only night on a deserted coast. (p.240)

They do rendezvous successfully, with a smelly old fishing boat, the Ulla, its skipper co-operating with a Scottish commando and a man DeHaan chats to, a British scientist, the one who is going to erect the aerials and create an Allied listening post, here on the barren, deserted south Sweden coast. After repeat trips back and forth, all the cargo is unloaded and the empty Noordendam turns and sets sail for Malmö, there to pick up a legitimate cargo.

Until they are intercepted by a German patrol boat, M-56, searchlight and heavy duty cannon. The efficient keen Nazi captain, sub-Lieutenant Schumpel (p.256) insists on coming aboard and quickly sees through all their subterfuges, realising the terrified Amado is not the captain, that the ship is not the Spanish Santa Anna, not believing DeHaan’s story about smuggling booze, suspecting something much more incriminating. So he orders them to sail towards the nearest German port, closely shadowed by the gunship, and with himself and 6 or 7 Nazi soldiers distributed through the crew room, radio room and engine room to supervise.

These closing forty pages rise to the tension of a genuine action thriller. Without DeHaan’s prompting, his crew take on the Nazis – the cabin boy and a sailor jumping the Nazi commander and stabbing him to death, while the bosun knocks another goon out. In the radio room they capture the terrified stripling put in charge of the radio. In the engine room they find the chief engineer has already killed one German and tied up the other.

After reviewing the options (ram the German boat? – No, it would dodge and fire enough shells to sink them) DeHaan and his officers decide to ‘make smoke’, closing the air flaps on the furnaces to generate clouds of thick black smoke. At the same time they begin to veer away from the German-ordered course, and radio garbled messages to the Germans that they have engine trouble – the ship is on fire – going to fetch the commandant – abandon ship – and almost make it out of range of the gunboat when it finally starts firing shells.

The third one hits the stern, but above the water line. Impossible to steam West, that’s what the M-56 and cruising spotter planes will expect. Has to be East, towards Latvia and Russia. In the early hours of 22 June 1941 they approach the port of Liepaja. They are ushered in by Russian patrol boats, then met by a harassed official, partly expecting to be arrested, maybe spend the war in a camp.

What they don’t know is that at midnight Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Now a tramp steamer which has been helping the British is a heroic ally of the Soviet people. Relieved, DeHaan and crew then learn they are being dragooned into a convoy of all available shipping evacuating people from the port. A ramshackle collection including a ballet company, various police officers, soldiers and so on, along with a grand piano and miscellaneous military equipment, cram the Noordendam‘s decks.

The accompanying destroyers blow their hooters and, as they hear and can even see fighting erupting around the harbour, the convoy steams out to sea, heading north past the Gulf of Riga, then East towards Kronstandt. Through mine fields where they lose some boats. Then are attacked by German bombers, strings of them. Finally a chain of bombs explodes aboard the Noordendam, crippling the engines and severing the steering equipment. As the rest of the convoy steers East, the ragbag of soldiers and civilians packed into the Noordendam collect the dead and cover them, treat the wounded, and watch the ship drift helplessly north towards the shore of Finland. Eventually it crashes gently into rocks on a low, unmarked island off the coast.

And here, eerily and mysteriously and abruptly, the novel ends. By this stage I think we are meant to find the ship itself has become a legend. Furst has subtly built up the picture of it as a floating world, a universe to itself, with a crew gathered from all the nations – Arabs, Greeks, German communists, Spanish survivors, Polish anti-fascists, the sturdy DeHaan himself.

Like these later Furst novels it doesn’t end tragically, as the harsh WW2 milieu suggests – it ends dreamily, vaguely, romantically. It ends like a Shakespeare romance, on a note of wistful mystery, confirming the way in which – despite the occasional shootouts and deaths, these novels are essentially romances.

They searched for her, some time later, once the war in that part of the world had quietened down…They asked the people who lived along that rockbound coast, fishermen mostly, if they’d seen her, and some said they had, while others just shook their heads or shrugged. But, in the end, they found nothing, and she was never seen again. (Last sentences, p.309)

Sensual sex

I associate these later Furst novels with slinky, sensual, stockings-slipping-off sex as much as clandestine meetings in exotic capitals and intense firefights. The last two novels in particular seem to have acquired a formulaic rhythm: puzzling encounters with ‘agents’ and/or violent action > comfortingly sensual sex.

Throughout the text are sprinkled DeHaan’s memories of his brief affair with Arlette in Paris. Smelling hashish in a Tangier back street transports reminds him of the time he and Arletta tried the drug and ended up making passionate love, ‘ferocious and wildly chaotic’ (p.6).

On the way to drop the commandos, DeHaan remembers more Arlette:

At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. (p.49)

Immediately following the hair-raising raid on Cap Bon, the text jumps to DeHaan in bed with Demetria, a woman he picks up at a party back at Alexandria:

Freed of her daily life, and a stiff linen suit, her underwear buried somewhere in the rumpled sheets of the hotel bed, she lay back in her flesh, luxuriant, legs comfortably apart – the colour the French called rose de dessous casually revealed, and smoked with great pleasure. (p.85)

The odd character, Kolb, whose narrative periodically intersperses the main, ship-board one, spends his first few sections hanging round in a safe room in Hamburg, waiting for news of how he’s going to be exfiltrated. His only contact with the outside world is a large German woman, Fräulein Lena. He imagines her big body only held in place by an elaborate arrangement of corsets and stays. Finally he makes his move, on her next visit plying her with sticky apricot brandy, and discovering that:

God, she was as lonely as he was, soon enough strutting round the room in those very corsets – pink, however, not black – that had set his imagination alight. And, he did not have to dismantle them, as he’d feared, she did that herself while he watched with hungry eyes. And soon enough, he was to learn that secret depravities did lurk – the same ones shared by humanity the world over but never mind, they were new and pink that night, and slowly and thoroughly explored. (p.125)

From the moment DeHaan takes the Russian journalist Maria Bromen on board (she sleeps in the first mate’s cabin, while the latter doubles up with another officer) he lusts after her. When he says goodbye at Lisbon part of him is torn. So when she returns at Lisbon and is taken back on board, it isn’t long until she asks to borrow a book to read, and they find themselves standing very close together in his tiny cabin.

For a time they stood apart, arms by their sides, then he settled his hands on her hips and she moved towards him, just enough so that he could feel the tips of her breasts beneath the sweater. (p.222)

She asks him to turn off the light. He turns to find her stripped down to her panties. They both jump into bed. Etc. After that there are many scenes with one of them in bed and the other looking soulfully out the porthole at the grey ocean, worrying about the future in these troubled times; exactly as Marie-Galante or Serebin stood at windows looking out over Paris or Istanbul or Bucharest worrying about the troubled future.

This scene, emblematic of wistful regrets, recurs again and again, giving the novels their special mood of sensual nostalgia.

Datestamps, telegraphese and subtitles

Many of the sections start with the date, like a journal entry, sometimes with the exact time, like a ship’s log – a standard thriller procedure. More specific to Furst is the habit of omitting verbs from sentences or clauses, to make them feel more punchy and immediate – a kind of telegraphese. And, where the narrative voice or dialogue is often clipped and elliptical, Furst will often give the interpretive thoughts of one of the characters – generally the main protagonist, in this case Captain DeHaan – in italics. All three habits are exemplified in this clip:

6 June, 0820. Hotel Alhadar.
Hard to find, in an alley off an alley, grim and dirty and cheap. The desk clerk sat behind a wire cage, worry beads in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and beneath his tasseled fez, a mean eye – who the hell are you? (p.173)

Repeats

Furst enjoys repeating the same characters or settings over different novels.

  • The Café Heininger is the setting for a famous shootout in the first book and is mentioned in every one of the succeeding novels. Here DeHaan remembers it as the setting for  his last night in Paris with his beloved Arlette (pp.137-139)
  • When Maria Sambon tells DeHaan some of her backstory, she mentions trying to write short stories, in the manner of Babel, no, more like Serebin (p.224). Ilya Serebin is the fictional hero of the previous novel in the series, Blood of Victory.

The recurrence of some characters in the early, genuinely scary and threatening novels about the KGB and its murderous activities in Eastern Europe (and Civil War Spain) added to the sense of menace, the sense of a web of spies and assassins across Europe who the characters couldn’t escape.

But as the series has become softer and more sensual, with a lot more descriptions of fine food and ladies in stockings, the recurrence of minor characters has begun to have the opposite effect, and made the series seem more cartoony, somehow profoundly unserious. The recurrence of the Café Heininger has become an in-joke, like something in an episode of The Simpsons.

Credit

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst was published in 2004 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All quotes and references are to the 2005 Phoenix paperback edition.

 Related links

The Night Soldiers novels

1988 Night Soldiers –  An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.
1991 Dark Star – The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)
1995 The Polish Officer – A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.
1996 The World at Night – A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)
1999 Red Gold – Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)
2000 Kingdom of Shadows – Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.
2003 Blood of Victory – Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)
2004 Dark Voyage – In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)
2006 The Foreign Correspondent
2008 The Spies of Warsaw
2010 Spies of the Balkans
2012 Mission to Paris
2014 Midnight in Europe
2016 A Hero in France

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The Third Man by Graham Greene (1949)

Harry had always known the ropes… (p.103)

Graham Greene collaborated with Carol Reed, the celebrated British film director, twice. Once on an adaptation of his 1935 story The Basement Room. The film version of this was released in 1948 as The Fallen Idol.

Reed’s producer, Sir Alexander Korda, wanted the pair to follow up as quickly as possible and suggested a film set in post-war Vienna. Greene visited the city with Reed and progressed from sketches and treatments to writing a 100-page novella to act as the basis of the screenplay. In the preface to published editions he says it was ‘never intended to be more than raw material for a picture’. He explains that he wanted a surplus of material to create the mood and background for the director, for the dialogue they would be writing, and to have a reservoir of images and text to draw on in tricky script conferences. Interesting way to proceed.

The novella, much work later, became the movie The Third Man, released in 1949 and regularly described as one of the greatest films of the 20th century, maybe the best British film ever. To cash in on the popularity of both films the novella was published in 1950 in a volume along with the short story, The Basement Room.

The Third Man (novella)

There are numerous differences between novella and movie, which are listed in the Wikipedia or BFI articles, below. The most famous is the ending. In the novella Martins and the girl walk off arm in arm, promising some kind of happy ending. In the movie Reed held out for his famous shot of the girl walking the length of the wintry avenue at the cemetery and straight past Martins who lights a cigarette and, in the final dismissive gesture of the film, tosses away the match.

For me the key difference is the nationality of the two lead characters. In the novella both the protagonist, Rollo Martins, the writer of pulp Westerns, and the elusive central figure, the racketeer Harry Lime, are English. Not only English, they both went to the same private school. In the film version they are both Americans played by Joseph Cotten (Martins) and Orson Welles (Harry Lime).

English public school

It is a revelation to see how the English provenance of the lead characters in the novella and this shared public school friendship, changes the feel of the whole story: it seems posher and narrower. It means that at regular intervals Martins drops in memories of Harry at jolly public school, or just uses memories of school playing fields and school boys etc, all of which create a rather exclusive, very English vibe.

‘I met him my first term at school. I can see the place. I can see the notice board and what was on it. I can hear the bell ringing. He was a year older and knew the ropes. He put me wise to a lot of things…’
‘Was he clever at school?’
‘Not the way they wanted him to be. But what things he did think up! He was a wonderful planner. I was far better at subjects like History and English than Harry, but I was a hopeless mug when it came to carrying out  his plans.’ (1986 Penguin paperback edition p.24)

Do American thrillers worry about a character’s school days? Do Hammett or Chandler? No. This is one of the ways the novella feels smaller. And because it adverts quite frequently back to jolly schooldays, it also has a childish thread. Countless books and articles have been written about how Greene’s generation of writers was peculiarly haunted by their public school days, maybe because they were raised to conform to late-Victorian standards and then went out to take part in the mid-twentieth century which was harrowingly unlike anything they’d been led to expect.

In Auden and Isherwood and Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh and Betjeman there is a constant nostalgia for childhood and the reassuring certainties of their school days. They nearly all reverted to the Christianity of their childhoods. As Calloway, the police inspector, reveals the nature of Lime’s crimes to his old schoolfriend

a world for Martins had certainly come to an end, a world of easy friendship, hero-worship, confidence that had begun twenty years before in a school corridor. Every memory – afternoons in the long grass, the illegitimate shoots on Brickworth Common, the dreams, the walks – were simultaneously tainted… (p.82)

This schoolboy theme emphasises that the characters – like so many English public schoolboys, apparently – never seem to have grown up. They still think in terms of the house master’s pep talk, the team spirit, and rebelling against silly insular rules. Was Martins Harry’s fag? Did he go and warm the toilet seat for him on winter mornings? The narrator, the policeman Calloway, notes of Martins, that he

has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worships Lime… [After Lime’s funeral] Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year old face. (First page)

Now he could tell that it was Harry, by the clothes, by the attitude like that of a boy asleep in the grass at a playing-field’s edge, on a hot summer afternoon. (p.43)

… two happy young men with the intelligent faces of sixth-formers.. (p.68)

[Harry] stood with his back to the door as the car swung upwards, and smiled back at Rollo Martins, who could remember him in just such a secluded corner of the school-quad, saying, ‘I’ve learned a way to get out at night. It’s absolutely safe. You are the only one I’m letting in on it.’ For the first time Rollo Martins looked back through the years without admiration, as he thought: He’s never grown up. (p.104)

[Harry] gave  his boyish conspiratorial smile. (p.104)

‘The school-quad’. The narrowness of this shared public school heritage in a way lays the ground for the narrowness of Greene’s imaginative vision. He is, as ever, beady-eyed and critical, zeroing in on the seedy and sordid about his characters: the ill-fitting toupée of the man Lime sends to look after Martins, the wide forehead and large mouth and small, stocky figure of Anna (Harry’s girlfriend), the super-clean Dr Winkler ‘creaking among his crucifixes.’ (p.52). Everywhere is dirty, shabby, claustrophobic, disappointing.

The literary mix-up

This is exemplified, though in a comic spirit, in a central issue of both novella and movie, the mix-up over Martins’ name. Rollo Martins writes pulp Westerns under the pen-name of Buck Dexter. It so happens that a famous literary writer named Benjamin Dexter is expected by the British Council in Vienna the same day Rollo arrives.

Martins stumbles into this misunderstanding, responding to his pen-name Dexter at the airport, and then milks it in order to be put up in a nice hotel and given pocket money by the Council, thus allowing him to pursue his investigations. But it is a very English joke, giving rise to continual little ironies and confusions, the kind of thing the tightly-wrapped English find hilarious, because it is about social embarrassments.

This mix-up results in Martins having to address a British Council literary meeting, a scene of downright farce played all out for laughs. But I also found it noticeable for the age and dowdiness of the English audience, waiting with ‘sad patience’ and who give ‘low subservient laughter’ as he autographs their books. ‘Little half-sentences of delight and compliment were dropped like curtsies.’ (pp.68-72) How stuffy. How crabbed. How English they are, and the scene is.

American open air

Contrast all this with the movie, set alight by its virile charismatic American stars, brash and confident that their country owns the world. Even the fact that both are, in their ways, defeated, can’t efface the memory of Lime’s superb arrogance and how handsome Martins is as he talks to Anna. Films are about images.

The fact that Martins and Lime were at school together is kept in the film, but it wasn’t a jolly English public school, it now has to be ‘a school’, an American school.

‘When I was 14 he taught me the three-card trick. That’s growing up fast.’ (The film)

Instead of arrested emotional development, instead of the implicit snobbery, the smallness and the stuffiness that come from the English side, Lime and Martins now sound like they have more in common with Damon Runyon or Raymond Chandler, they sound cool, and this change of tone liberates the movie to give the missing Lime his romantic, mythical quality. It may be the best British movie ever made but that’s hugely down to the power and freedom of its American stars and the glamour they bring.

Greeneland

On the up side, it’s the stuffiness of the novella, its English small-mindedness, which underpins Greene’s worldview and makes possible his characteristically acute obervations, the details and the tiny ironies which make the novella particularly enjoyable.

One light, in a heavily beaded shade, left them in semi-darkness, fumbling for door handles. (p.52)

It wasn’t a beautiful face – that was the trouble. It was a face to live with, day in, day out. A face for wear. (p.62)

A small child came up to his informant and pulled at his hand. ‘Papa, Papa.’ He wore a wool cap on his head, like a gnome; his face was pinched and blue with cold. (p.65)

Very Greene: crisp short sentences describing an acutely observed moment – poverty and misery (pinched and blue) mixed with the incongruous or grotesque (like a gnome). In fact, in the following paragraphs the small child becomes a demon as it points at Martins and describes in German the argument he saw him having with the dead man, until everybody in the crowd thinks Martins is the murderer.

The Third Man

The title, incidentally, comes from the mystery at the heart of the story. Pulp fiction author Rollo Martins arrives in Vienna to find that the friend who invited him over, Harry Lime, has been run over and killed. With the curiosity of a professional writer, Martins sets out to meet the witnesses and quickly discovers a discrepancy: three people claim to have seen Harry run over and killed – his friend Koch standing by him on one side of the street, the American Cooler on the other side of the street, and the driver of the jeep which hit him. They all claim that two of them carried Harry’s body inside.

But Martins talks to the owner of the flat next to Harry’s who heard the accident, rushed to the window, looked down and saw three men carrying the body. Both the other witnesses deny the existence of this third man. So – who is the third man? Because it is a verbal form, the novella is able to really build up this theme by repeating the phrase wholesale, much more so than in the movie, which is able to convey so much more with looks, angles, music.

It takes most of the novella, and the movie, for Martins to conclusively prove the third man was Lime himself, who has faked his own death because the authorities are getting too close to him and his illegal rackets.

Greene despair

Thankfully, Greene’s penchant for hammering the reader with editorialising about the horror of the human condition, the preachiness which is so insistent in a novel like The Heart of the Matter, is almost completely absent from the novella. His dismal views about human nature or modern society are mostly implicit in the storyline or characters, a blessèd relief. Although there are a handful of exceptions which show the preacher-man lurking behind the scriptwriter, just ready to resume his lecturing…

The third stiff whisky fumed into Martins’ brain, and he remembered the girl in Amsterdam, the girl in Paris: loneliness moved along the crowded pavement at his side. (p.60)

He was in the mood for violence, and the snowy road heaved like a lake and set his mind on a new course towards sorrow, eternal love, renunciation. (p.85)

Oooh getting close. Peeping out from behind the curtains. And then, towards the end of the text, the preacher does spring out at the reader brandishing a handful of Moral Truths.

For the first time Rollo Martins looked back through the years without admiration, as he thought: He’s never grown up. Marlowe’s devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth. (p.104)

And we nearly get away without any of the Catholic voodoo which is, of course, a feature of most of Greene’s fiction. Almost, but not quite, because right at the end Greene does make Lime a Catholic. Having realised Lime is a monster of amoral egotism, Martins accuses him:

‘You used to be a Catholic.’
‘Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I’m not hurting anyone’s soul by what I do. The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils,’ he added with that odd touch of genuine pity. (p.106)

(Pity, as we know from the long lecture which is The Heart of The Matter, is one of mankind’s worst traits. Apparently.) ,

Making Harry a Catholic, in fact making any of his characters a Catholic, lets Greene give the impression his story has an added dimension, a supernatural aura not available to mere mortal novelists and most of us secular readers. It feels too much like deploying religion as a rhetorical tool to heighten the horror, to give the reader a thrilling theological frisson. A rhetorical device, which he deploys pretty relentlessly, to add ‘depth’ to what are, in the end, totally secular stories.

Summary

This is a great, quick read, alive with Greene’s strengths: creating a strong sense of place, quickly sketching in believable sympathetic characters, a consistent eye for vivid, telling detail, a dry sense of irony, with none – well, hardly any – of the tiresome lectures about human nature and the Catholic hoodoo which mar a lot of his other books.

Related links

The movie

Trailer for the movie.

PS Allan Quatermain

Of all the things in the world to compare the labyrinth of sewers under Vienna’s street with, Greene compares it with the underground river which flows to the lost city of Milosis in the Henry Rider Haggard’s novel Allan Quatermain. Which is the second time he references it in so many books, as he also mentions it in The Heart of The Matter, where Quatermain is Scobie’s childhood hero.

Greene’s books

  • The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
  • The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)
  • Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)
  • Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
  • It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
  • England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
  • A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
  • Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
  • The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
  • The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
  • The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
  • The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
  • The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
  • The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
  • The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
  • Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
  • The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
  • Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
  • Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
  • A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
  • The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
  • Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
  • The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
  • The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
  • Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
  • The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.
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by Simon on November 11, 2014  •  Permalink
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Little Caesar by WR Burnett (1929)

Rico was a simple man. He loved but three things: himself, his hair and his gun. He took excellent care of all three. (p.22)

Apparently one of the pioneering gangster novels, which was then turned into the ‘first’ gangster movie.

William Riley Burnet was a civil servant in Ohio where he wrote over 100 short stories and five novels, all unpublished, before moving to Chicago at the age of 28, getting a job in a seedy hotel where he came into close contact with hoodlums, nightclub performers, boxers, all the colourful underworld, and drew from it to write this, his breakthrough novel.

Little Caesar propelled him to fame and to a successful career as a novelist and screenwriter: he wrote some 38 novels, the best known of which are probably High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle, and worked on some 50 movie scripts, from the noir adaptation of Graham Greene’s This Gun For Hire in 1942 through to adventure classics of my generation like The Great Escape and Ice Station Zebra (1968).

Little Caesar

The plot is simple. Chicago, New Year’s Eve, a small gang of hoodlums led by sleek fat Sam Vettori, who has picked up the short violent Rico to be lieutenant, plan the armed robbery of a night club, the Casa Alvarado. Vettori found Rico, ‘an unknown Yougstown wop’, brought him to the big city and into his gang but, as a result of the robbery, Rico triumphs in the battle of wills and makes himself leader of the gang. He has a devoted follower in Otero, the Greek, and his ally, the Valentino-handsome ‘Gentleman’ Joe Massara, who acts as the inside man on their jobs. All of them are doubtful about cowardly Tony Passa the driver who, after crashing the getaway car, holes up with his mother and threatens to talk to understanding Father McConagha. Which is why Rico gets Bat Corelli to drive down and shoots him dead on the steps of the cathedral…

Supporting cast

The dynamics of these core characters, the basic plot (the rise and fall of a gangster) are fairly interesting but what’s more striking is the portrayal of the wider network of people they’re involved in: a net, a web, presumably based on the characters Burnett observed in his Chicago hotel. It’s their range, the fullness of this vision of gangster society, which gives the book its persuasiveness.

  • Bat Carillo, once a light heavyweight then leader of one of Vettori’s gangs of hooligans
  • Blackie Avezzano who manages Sam’s garage and is a sneak
  • The Big Boy, overall gang leader, higher than Vettori (James Michael O’Doul)
  • Blondy Belle ‘the swellest woman in Little Italy’, ‘big, healthy and lascivious’
  • Bugs Liska, Steve Gollancz’s lieutenant
  • Captain Courtney, the police captain Rico is foolish enough to shoot dead
  • Carillo who works at their nightclub and drives the ‘can’ from which Rico shoots down Tony on the steps of the cathedral
  • Chesty, doorman of Sam Vettori’s club
  • DeVoss, manager of the Bronze Peacock, the nightclub where ‘Gentleman’ Joe works as a dancer who dances with older rich women for money
  • Tony’s mother who disapproves of his hoodlum friends
  • Father McConagha who offers Tony sanctuary
  • Little Arnie (Arnold Worch) ‘ran the biggest gambling joint on the North Side’
  • Jew Mike, has his joint trashed by Rico’s men, tougher replica of his boss, Little Arnie
  • Jim Flaherty, amiable plain clothes policeman
  • ‘Gentleman’ Joe Massara, good-looking dancer, dragged into crime, ends up serving life
  • Joe Pavlovsky, drove the car which tried to hit Rico
  • Joe Peeper, ‘Arnie’s boy’, a stool pigeon or spy for Rico in Arnie’s gang
  • Joe Sansone, ‘a stickler for clothes’
  • Kid Bean ‘a Sicilian dark as a negro’
  • Kid Burg clears out after Little Arnie’s fall
  • Killer Pepi and his woman Blue Jay; Killer and Kid Bean rob 25 filling stations in 2 weeks
  • Kips Berger, sold his failing gambling den to Little Arnie
  • Limpy John, ‘they bumped him off’
  • Ma Magdalena the fence and her son Arrigo who keep a fruit store
  • Monk De Angelo, former gang leader
  • Olga Stassoff, a beautiful dancer, Joe’s girlfriend
  • Ottavio Vettori, 21 and already famous as a gunman
  • Pete Montana, gangster controls vast swathe of the North Side (Pietro Fontano)
  • Pippy Coke, one of the Detroit assassins who tried to shoot Rico
  • Rico (Cesare Bandello)
  • Ritz Colonna, Pete Montana’s lieutenant
  • Sam Vettori, fat gangster boss who takes in Rico and is overthrown by him (and eventually hanged)
  • Seal Skin, Otero’s old lady
  • Scabby
  • The Sheeny, unlicensed doctor
  • Spike Rieger, policeman, assistant to Flaherty
  • Squint Maschke, one of Little Arnie’s three lieutenants, scrams
  • Mr Jack Willoughby the millionaire, might back Joe in a show

Elements of the text

This is a short book (158 pages), largely because there’s relatively little description, and almost no psychology or characterisation. There are maybe six places in the text where Burnett stops to describe or analyse a character in more detail or to situate the action. For the most part this sort of thing is omitted, and certainly doesn’t appear until well into the text. For the first 30 pages or so it is nothing but action and dialogue, throwing you right into the mix.

Rico lived at a tension. His nervous system was geared up to such a pitch that he was never sleepy, never felt the desire to relax, was always keenly alive. He did not average over five hours sleep a night and as soon as he opened  his eyes he was awake. When he sat in a chair he never thrust out his feet and lolled, but sat rigi and alert. He walked, ate, took his pleasures in the same manner. What distinguished him from his associates was his inability to live in the present. He was like a man on a long train journey to a promised land. To him the present was but a dingy way-station; he had his eyes on the end of the journey. This is the mental attitude of a man destined for success. But the resultant tension had its drawbacks. He was subject to periodid slumps. His energy would suddenly disappear; he would lose interest in everything and for several days would sleep twelve to fifteen hours at a stretch. This was a dangerous weakness, and Rico was aware of it and feared it. (p.71)

As you can see, nothing special about the prose. Functional. Which might be why either Burnett or his editor decided to keep this kind of thing to a minimum. Instead, for the most part the story is told through dialogue, as in a movie. And the dialogue is crammed with gangster slang. On one page there’s more thieves’ patois than in a whole Dashiell Hammett novel. Hammett’s books are, on the whole, about people outside the criminal milieu, who enter it, who explore it, but who aren’t part of it, ditto Chandler. By contrast, this novel is deeply immersed in the mind-set, the psychology, the dialogue and the vocabulary of 1920s Chicago gangsters.

1920s gangster slang

  • beat it = depart
  • beefing = complaining, beef = complaint 87
  • berries = dollars 107
  • bird = man 116 – not, as in English slang, a young woman
  • bracelets = handcuffs 117
  • do it up brown = do it properly
  • to get brushed = hit by bullets, shot
  • bull = policeman
  • bump off = kill
  • bunk = rubbish, short for bunkum 101
  • burg = the city in this case Chicago108
  • can = car
  • can it = shut up
  • chin = to chat 140
  • a cinch = an easy or obvious thing 137
  • crack/wisecrack = joke, often insulting 144
  • cush = money
  • cut = percentage of the take on a job
  • dick = policeman
  • dope = information, story, situation
  • double-cross = betray
  • dump = home 106
  • gat = gun 133
  • graft = illegal business
  • (give the) go-by = get rid of, kick out 144
  • the goods = the right stuff, the real McCoy 104
  • gyp = deceive or cheat 87
  • harness = smart clothes 108
  • hit the hay = go to bed 87
  • hit the pipe = smoke drugs (opium? marijuana?) 112
  • hook = to steal 135
  • hop = drugs, morphine
  • jack = the money, specially the loot 12
  • Jane = woman
  • joint = gambling or rinking establishment 104
  • lead = bullets as in ‘ a hunk of lead’ 100
  • lit up = smartly dressed 108
  • monkey suit = evening dress 108
  • mosey = go away, flee 109
  • mug = face as in ‘mug-shot’ = portrait photograph
  • nut = head, as in ‘you’re off your nut’ 96
  • pinch = arrest 117
  • piker = vagrant, loser 110
  • give somewhere or someone the once-over = visit in order to examine, check out 104
  • pop, as in ‘pop him’ – kill someone 128
  • go press the bricks = take a walk 89
  • plugging = shooting
  • roll = wad of cash 135
  • the grand rush = big confrontation, shootout 92
  • spring = release someone from prison 122
  • on the square = straight, honest 109
  • stogie = cheap cigar 125
  • the racket = life of crime
  • red = (red) cent, as in ‘didn’t have a red’ 110
  • rig you up = give you clothes to wear 106
  • the ropes = how things are done
  • rod = gun 95
  • a rush = shootout, violent event 108
  • sap = idiot 97
  • to say a mouthful = tell the truth, put it in a nutshell 104
  • put the skids under = betray 97
  • skirt = woman
  • spill the beans, spill the works = tell secrets, talk about what should be kept secret 126
  • spill it = talk
  • split = arrangement, agreement
  • squawk = spill the beans, confess, to the police 126
  • stand = hold-up
  • stir = prison 106
  • the wrong steer = to be misinformed 103
  • stringing = lying to, ‘someone been stringing you’ 96
  • swells = rich people
  • talk turkey = serious conversation 102
  • that’s the talk = you said a good thing
  • tickler = moustache 139
  • on the up and up = on the right side of, OK 103
  • wised up = in the know, aware of the news 127
  • yaps = crooks, killers 95
  • yegg = small-time crook 109

Dapper

Burnett notes people’s clothes very thoroughly. Rico himself is very proud of his appearance and careful what he wears.

Rico was wearing a big ulster like Joe’s and a derby also like Joe’s. He had on fawn-coloured spats drawn over pointed patent-leather shoes; and a diamond horseshoe pin sparkled in a red, green and white striped necktie. (1974 Kaye & Ward hardback edition, p.60)

Rico unbuttoned his ulster to display his finery. He had on one of his striped suits. It was dead black with a narrow pink stripe. The colour scheme was further complicated by a pale blue shirt and an orange and white striped tie adorned with the ruby pin. (p.79)

Jazz

There’s a jazz band playing almost permanently in the bar under the room where the gang make their plans. It counterpoints their dialogue and double-crossing. It’s amazing the speed with which jazz – generally credited as coming into existence around 1917 – spread completely throughout urban America to become the soundtrack to the 1920s. Even tone-deaf Rico likes it.

Rico had no ear for music; he couldn’t even whistle, or distinguish one tune from another. But he liked rhythm. There was somthing straightforward and primitive about jazz rhythms that impressed him. (p.72)

Movie

The book was an overnight sensation, a million-seller. It was snapped up by Warner Brothers film studio and made into a film starring Douglas Fairbanks Junior as handsome Joe Massara, and giving Edward G Robinson his breakthrough role as the vicious little gangster. ‘The picturization of one of America’s greatest novels.’

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by Simon on October 14, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 14, 2014

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Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (1936)

Cain wasn’t pleased at being lumped in with other ‘hard-boiled’ writers of the 20s and 30s.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort. (Preface to Double Indemnity)

And that he certainly does. Double Indemnity was his second book after the blisteringly intense The Postman Always Rings Twice, appearing as a magazine serialisation in 1936, then in a collection of novellas, only published as a stand-alone book in 1943.

As in Postman you are immediately gripped by the urgency and immediacy of the first-person voice, here of a fast-talking insurance salesman called Huff. On the first page he calls on a prospective client whose servant asks the nature of the call.

‘And what’s the business?’
‘Personal.’
Getting in is the tough part of my job, and you don’t tip what you came for till you get where it counts… It was one of those spots you get in. If I said some more about ‘personal’ I would be making a mystery of it and that’s bad. If I said what I really wanted, I would be laying myself open to what every insurance agent dreads, that she would come back and say, ‘Not in’. If I said I’d wait, I would be making myself look small, and that never helped a sale yet. To move this stuff, you’ve got to get in. Once you’re in, they’ve got to listen to you, and you can pretty near rate an agent by how quick he gets to the family sofa, with his hat on one side of him and his dope sheets on the other. (Chapter 1)

No slang, no shooting. The ‘hard-boiledness’ stems from the psychology of the character: his unrelenting calculatingness, scanning all the angles, perceiving and using others as tools to his end, assuming everyone else is doing the same. It is the war of all against all, as Marx described capitalism. No sentiment, just a predator scheming his next move. Later there’s a femme fatale and a murder then a load of complications. But the tone of heartlessness, amorality, anything for a buck, is there from the first lines. Strip away Mom and Apple Pie and this is, and was sidely seen at the time as being, the American Way. That unbridled capitalism turns people back into savages.

Femme fatale

Both the women in these books feature in the Wikipedia article defining a femme fatale as an attractive woman who seduces a man into committing a crime/murder. This is truer of Phyllis Nirdlinger in Indemnity, who persuades insurance salesman Walter Huff to put a life policy on her husband then murder him. Sure, she’s got a babelicious body etc which she uses to sway him, but it’s more that she presents an opening, a willing partner, to something he’s been incubating after 15 long years in the insurance business ie the perfect insurance scam.

Is she a femme fatale? She’s certainly given a rather melodramatic speech.

‘There’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness…’ (Ch 2)

(These books are odd. At one moment they’re heartless, cruel indictments of man’s inhumanity masquerading in an everyman tone, and the next they’re grand operas. Phyllis’s speech is like a tragic aria.)

Feminist criticism would suggest that Cora and Phyllis represent one of the crudest stereotypes of the female, an age-old cliché of the woman who represents the desired and the taboo, that once you give into her sexual wiles you are lured all unwary over the boundary of morality into a World of Crime. A honey trap. The desired deceiver.

It’s true in both novels the first-person narrator is the man, and the woman is seen as a siren, powerful through her sex appeal, who is the proximate cause of a murder. Both only exist through the male text. Neither have defining agency. But neither Cora nor Phyllis is a siren luring the unwitting. Both Chambers and Huff are hardly innocent, are already criminals or have been planning crime for a long time.

In fact, from one angle, the woman in these novels is surprisingly equal with the men, in the sense that they are equally amoral and greedy and murderous. They conspire on about the same level and they are both as physically involved in the murder, Cora getting badly battered in the fake car crash, Phyllis lumbering along with her husband’s corpse on her back as in a nightmare. The only real difference is that, being written from the man’s point of view, the novels convey a very powerful (in Postman overwhelmingly powerful) sense of the man’s sexual attraction to his partner. But there is no doubting the intensity of Cora’s sexual attraction to Frank, or of Phyllis’s cunning deployment of her sexuality to co-opt Huff into her schemes. The novels could theoretically be rewritten from the woman’s point of view giving her at least parity.

The unsung hero

The sex-driven duo may fuel the first part of these novels, but the second half strongly involves the Antagonist, the figure who threatens all their plans, who threatens, quite simply, to expose them as murderers. In Postman it’s Stickett the District Prosecutor (though his role is counterbalanced by the smart defence lawyer Katz); in Indemnity it’s Huff’s boss at the insurance company, Keyes, who makes Huff’s (and the reader’s) blood run cold by slowly piecing together what really happened while all the time Huff has to pretend to be helping to uncover his own crime.

This is where both novels make their impact – the blood-chilling descriptions of the murder itself are bad enough, but both novels then score with the tremendous tension of watching the Antagonist know the Protagonist is guilty, telling him he knows he’s guilty, and then trying to prove it. Their pursuit, their detective work, their thoroughness makes the Protagonist’s heart miss a beat, and the immediate visceral first-person narrative means ours do, too.

The lights began to look funny in front of my eyes… He was all wrong on how it was done, but he was so near right it made my lips turn numb just to listen to him… My legs felt funny and my ears rang, but my eyes kept staring at the dark, and my mind kept pounding on it, what I was going to do. I didn’t know. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t even get drunk. (Ch 8)

Morality

Cain’s books really are directly and immediately about sex and murder in a way surprisingly few of, say, Dashiell Hammett’s are; Hammett’s are about fiendishly cunning investigations of often convoluted events or, as in The Glass Key, generate scores of pages of continually shifting theorising around a death which remains a mystery, at the core of the text.

In Cain there is no mystery and no pages of theorising. It is an adrenaline-fuelled, straightahead, no-nonsense narrative of a murder inspired by the illicit sexual attraction between the murderers and the dreadful consequences, the fear, the guilt and the reprisals. It is hard-boiled. It is noir.

It is, in fact, not really so immoral as contemporaries worried. In both the bad guy loses and is punished. The murderer Frank Chambers loses the sexpot who inspired him, Cora, in a car crash and then is convicted and hanged for murder. Huff discovers Phyllis had killed before and was simply using him to bump off her  husband, he is nearly shot dead by her, confesses to Keyes, is packed off for everyone’s convenience on a foreign cruise under a different name, where he meets her again like the avenging angel, they make a bizarre suicide pact and leap from the ship to their deaths.

Ie Justice is done, if not by man’s feeble justice system, then by the gods.

Movie versions

Made into a famois film noir,  directed by Billy Wilder with a screenplay part-written by Raymond Chandler, and starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. The rather florid ending is notably rewritten to become a simpler, more tense encounter in her house where the lovers-turned-haters pull guns on each other and both shoot.

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by Simon on October 13, 2014  •  Permalink
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https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/double-indemnity-james-m-cain/

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1934)

Very short, only 116 pages in this modern Orion edition. A first person narrative, told by 24 year-old drifter Frank Chambers, this is a dazzling, blistering, feverishly compelling novella, that rare thing, a book which I literally couldn’t put down but read from end to end in an intense two-hour sitting.

Now this feels like hard-boiled writing. Chandler is a dandy, with his romantic lead, Marlowe, and his wonderfully inventive style. Hammett’s milieu includes surprisingly educated, middle class people – the rich sect followers in Dain, all the cast of Falcon are educated types and his writing is often surprisingly mannered.

Postman is hard-core lowlife, written from the point of view of a hustler, a drifter, a small-time crook with a long record of stealing and violence. We are thrust immediately into his limited worldview where he is always looking for the next con and we never escape this airless, hopelessly constricted world. By contrast Hammett or Chandler’s protagonists fly like eagles in a world of order, rationality and bourgeois manners. Ned Beaumont is continually making small bows or being kind to old Mrs Madvig. No-one is kind in Postman. It is a hustler’s-eye view of the world.

I caught a ride to San Bernadino. It’s a railroad town, and I was going to hop a freight east. But I didn’t do it. I ran into a guy in a poolroom, and began playing him one ball in the side. He was the greatest job in the way of a sucker that God ever turned out, because he had a friend that could really play. The only trouble with him was, he couldn’t play good enough. I hung around with the pair of them a couple of weeks, and took $250 off them, all they had, and then I had to beat it out of town quick. (Chapter 6)

Plot

Chambers hitches down the road to a diner-cum-garage and immediately starts conning the owner, Nick Papadakis. Papadakis offers him the job of mechanic and the second he sees Nick’s wife, Cora, he is hit by lust. Not love. Hard, physical lust, so hard it makes him throw up his dinner. By quick stages he seduces Cora who is sick of her husband. She won a beauty pageant in Iowa and came out to California to make her rep, but like so many others failed in movies and quickly ended up working in a hash bar, and when the Greek proposed to her, was grateful to escape.

Two small town losers with pitifully tragic yearnings to escape their cages. They have sex in his bedroom, in the car on the way back from shopping trips, hard physical sex. No wonder the book ran into trouble with the censors and was banned in some states. From their wish to be together quickly evolves the idea of killing the Greek.

They try it one night by her sapping him in the bath, then pushing him under to make him drown, while Frank stands guard outside the closed diner. It is a nailbitingly tense scene and at exactly the wrong moment a motorbike cop comes along and pulls in. They do the coshing but then chicken out of the drowning, make it look like an accident. While Nick is in hospital they have sex every night in the big marriage bed. Then the Greek comes home and Cora is overcome with disgust and Frank abruptly leaves, hitching down the line, pulling cons in towns, hustling punters at pool.

But Fate, a Greek tragic Destiny, intervenes to make Nick spot Frank in the street and beg him to come back, insisting – unwittingly – on his own death, for now Frank and Cora, reunited, their lust rekindled, make a more elaborate plan to kill Nick, and go through with it, with a whole string of unforeseen consequences…

The Law

While keeping Chambers’ low-life perspective, a big chunk of the second half of the book consists of the court case against the couple. Anyone with any childish view that the Law is about finding Justice would be quickly disabused: here the Law is a playground for two sharp lawyers to exploit the full complexities of the case simply to win. To emphasise the game element, Cain has the guilty couple’s lawyers making a $100 bet with the prosecution attorney, a bet he triumphantly wins and which means more to him than his fee.

The case against revolves around the revelation that Nick had taken out $10,000 life insurance just days before his murder. For the prosecution this looks childishly simple; buy life insurance for husband; kill him; claim life insurance. Frank is thunderstruck, he knew nothing about it; he and Cora are in a cleft stick because they can’t say, We knew nothing about the insurance when we murdered him. But their lawyer, Katz, pulls a rabbit out the hat by showing that the life insurance was simply an extension of an existing policy which a fast-talking salesman persuaded Nick to take out without his wife’s knowledge; and then, more complicatedly, discovering that Nick had policies on the property and business with numerous insurance companies, manages to persuade them that it will be cheaper to settle their payouts among themselves and drop the law suit. At which Cora and Frank walk free, a striking example of the way the impenetrable machinations of white-collar people casually control the destinies of powerless blue-collar people.

Can you hear me knocking?

Aparently there’s debate about what the title actually means since there is no postman anywhere in the book. In an interview Cain said the postman knocks once for a letter, which requires no reply, but twice for a telegram, which requires and signature and generally brings bad news. Alternatively, it could simply be that Death, or Fate or Destiny, comes calling twice.

Frank manages to escape justice in the court case and there is a honeymoon period where he and Cora adapt to life after Nick’s murder. This is not without its own tribulations as a) when she goes to see her ailing mother, Frank immediately lights out for a week down south and has a wild affair with a woman who invites him to go away altogether, hunting big game cats in South America (!) b) the dick Katz employed to take a statement from Cora that, yes, they had planned Nick’s murder, which was then suppressed as part of Katz’s complicated legal scheme to save them – this dick pops up with the transcript and tries to blackmail them.

But despite this danger from without, and a hard series of scenes after Cora finds out Frank has been unfaithful to her, despite these setbacks, they both feel some Fate or Destiny has bound them together and, after Cora tells Frank she is pregnant with his child, the novel almost concludes with a joyous carefree scene of them taking a day at the ocean, bathing in the warm water under a clear sky, carefree and happy.

Until the postman rings for the second time.

Hot writing

Puts Hammett and Chandler in the shade. Chandler is a dandy. Hammett’s style, as I’ve pointed out in another post, is completely external and turns his characters into robots. This fierce, fast first-person narrative throws us straight into the mind of this small-time crim and rivets us there, in his quick exploitative worldview, in his animal sexuality.

‘Cora. You can call me that if you want to.’…
‘Cora. Sure. And how about calling me Frank?’
She came over and began helping me with the wind wing. She was so close I could smell her. I shot it right close to her ear, almost in a whisper. ‘How come you married this Greek, anyway?’
She jumped like I had cut her with a whip. ‘Is that any of your business?’
‘Yeah. Plenty.’
‘Here’s your wind wing.’
‘Thanks.’
I went out. I had what I wanted. I had socked one in under her guard, and socked it in deep, so it hurt. From now on, it would be business between her and me. She might not say yes, but she wouldn’t stall me. She knew what I meant, and she knew I had her number. (Chapter 2)

No fancy underworld slang, no thieves’ patois, no horseplay with guns, no shootouts. This novel makes all of Hammett and Chandler look stagey and contrived. In his famous essay on Murder Chandler says Hammett returned murder to the people who actually comitted it, a comment I found hard to understand when I read Hammett’s books; something like The Dain Curse reads like an extremely contrived TV miniseries, with its elaborate backstory about the man who took the rap for a murder he didn’t commit, escapes from Devil’s Island, gets involved in a weird religious sect in San Francisco, with everyone pretending to be someone else and contriving elaborate plans for murder, staged suicides, blackmail, faking robberies and so on and so on.

Here, a cunning lowlife falls for a hot babe and they murder her husband to get him out of the way but are caught out by the Law. The return of Fate at the end adds a spookily convincing Greek tragic air to the whole thing, but this – not Hammett or Chandler – feels like it’s staring American Crime in the face in all its simplicity and stupidity.

Movie versions

So intense and powerful is the narrative line it has been adapted seven times for the movies, two plays and an opera. The 1981 movie with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange had an electric affect on my generation, but buffs reckon the 1946 version starring Lana Turner and John Garfield is the best.

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by Simon on October 13, 2014  •  Permalink
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The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934)

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You made it up. There aren’t any people like that. What’s the matter with them? Are they the first of a new race of monsters?’
‘I just tell you what happens; I don’t explain it.’ (p.100)

After four novels of hard-faced, no-nonsense brutality and cunning (as well as the fifty or so short stories he wrote from 1922 to 34 or so) who’d have that expected Hammett’s fifth (and final) novel would be a comedy, and a genuinely funny one at that.

It’s a return to the first-person narrator (as in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) but instead of hard-bitten cops, this one belongs to Nick Charles who is an affable forty-one year-old ex-detective who lazes round in top hotels on the money of his charming and loaded wife, Nora, going to parties and drinking almost continually.

He is reluctantly dragged back into the detective business when the daughter of a former client turns up (Dorothy Wynant), helplessly drunk, her mother (Mimi) is revealed as a violent hysteric, her stepfather (Jorgensen) tries to hit on her and the aforementioned client (eccentric inventor Howard Wynant) is implicated in shooting his secretary (Julia Wolf) to death and, to cap it all, a hoodlum sent by a former client, bursts in to their luxury hotel room and tries to shoot him. It’s the she secretary shooting that becomes the core of a standard murder mystery.

Whodunnit? Nick has to find out and the text consists of decreasing amount of action and increasing amounts of theory-spinning as all the characters behave suspiciously while weaving complicated theories implicating each other. The plot itself is relatively simple but the theory spinning eventually becomes rather tiresome. But it’s not the plot, it’s the nonchalant savoir faire and humorous banter, particularly between Nick and Nora, which make this a genuinely amusing read.

Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: ‘What are you holding out on me?’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the – ‘
‘Be funny. Don’t you want something to eat?’ (Penguin 1961 paperback edition, p.18)

Hammett uses the same approach as the previous novels ie little or no direct access to the characters’ thoughts instead deploying predominantly dialogue or the description of externals – rooms, clothes, appearances, facial expressions. But whereas in the predecessors the dialogue was hard-edged and designed to show the characters’ alienation from each other, indifference to each other, here the tone – even if venturing for spells into tough guy stuff with cops or crims – always returns to the comfy banter between the married couple at the heart of it, or to Nick’s deadpan jokiness.

So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing – the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing. (p.28)

The confidante

It is just so damned handy to have a partner or confidente, someone the protagonist-hero-detective can share his thinking with, who can pick him up and dust him down and encourage and support. A sidekick, someone to spar with. Don Quixote had his Sancho Panza, Holmes has Watson; pairing wise guy Nick who knows his way round the underworld with smart socialite Nora, for whom the dark underbelly is a revelation, is a clever manouevre. Violence or plot twists which just seems random and therefore alienating in Falcon and Key, can here be situated and contextualised by being explained to Nora. Even if there isn’t an exact explanation – at least we know there isn’t an exact explanation, instead of being puzzled by random and often brutal violence as we often were in the previous novels.

Nora was wide-eyed and amazed. ‘It’s a madhouse,’ she said. ‘What’d they do that for?’
‘You know as much about it as I do,’ I told her…
‘Listen, you’ve got to tell me what happened – everything. Not now, tomorrow. I don’t understand a thing that was said or a thing that was done.’ (pp.118-119)

Movie versions

When it’s not disappearing into more and more complicated theory-spinning, The Thin Man has the feel of the wisecracking movies of the period, all fix-me-another-drink-dahling. It comes as no surprise to discover it was not only made into a movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy (1934) but that the movie was so popular it spawned no fewer than five sequels, which were being release well into the 1940s.

American boozing

Part of the humour – or the humorous backdrop to the comedy – is the couple’s continuous and compulsive drinking, partying and eating out. Reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

‘My nice policeman wants to see you,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Terrible. I must have gone to bed sober.’ (p.47)

‘Where’d you get the skinful?’
‘It’s Alice. She’s been sulking for a week. If I didn’t drink I’d go crazy.’
‘What’s she sulking about?’
‘About my drinking.’ (p.104)

‘How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?’
‘Why don’t you stay sober today?’
‘We didn’t come to New York to stay sober.’ (p.143)

It seems like such an incongruous vibe during the depths of the Depression to be putting out fictions about humongously rich people leading boozy lifestyles, parties, opening nights, jazz… Then again, taken as a consumer product, this novel is more like the fantasies of Hollywood which were at their most silken and sparkly when the Depression was at its bleakest. Entertainment. Distraction. Fantasy.

She laughed… ‘Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?’
‘Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around for a while. This excitement has put us behind in our drink.’ (p.189)

The Thin Man

Turns out the missing scientist they’re all looking for, who remains elusive despite his phone calls, letters and fleeting visits: he was always very tall and thin but Nick is the first to realise he’s dead.

‘What was that joke about a guy being so thin he had to stand in the same place twice to throw a shadow?’
I laughed – not at the joke – and said: ‘Wynant’s not that thin, but he’s thin enough, say as thin as the paper in that cheque and in these letters people have been getting.’
‘What’s that?’ Guild demanded, his face reddening, his eyes angry and suspicious.
‘He’s dead. He’s been dead a long time except on paper.’ (p.179)

Songs mentioned in the text

“Though her life was merry (though her life was merry)
She had savoir-ferry (lots of savoir-ferry)”

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by Simon on October 12, 2014  •  Permalink
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The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1931)

Ned Beaumont did not say anything. His face was expressionless. (p.153)

Narrated in the third person, this feels like a further move away from Hammett’s origins in that, yes it involves crime and murder, but it is not focused on a detective solving the crimes and leading us through the maze of misleading information to a clear understanding of events, as were his first three novels.

It’s more an exploration of the world of Ned Beaumont (‘Im a gambler and a politician’s hanger-on’ p.155), a tough fixer for gang-leader-going-straight Paul Madvig, who’s running an election campaign when the son of the Senator they’re supporting is found dead and all his enemies start blaming it on Madvig. Beaumont:

  • follows a crooked bookie who owes him money to New York, gets beaten up before framing the bookie & getting his money
  • tries to get to the bottom of the murder of Senator’s son Taylor Henry
    • finding out who’s sending anonymous letters blaming Paul
    • dealing with the newspaper editor who’s going to print a front page exposé of Paul
    • when the editor commits suicide, going to extreme lengths to get the next day’s revelations canned
  • gets kidnapped and badly beaten by the thugs of rival gangster Shad O’Rory
  • manages the spineless District Attorney’s handling of the case
  • deals with the Senator’s daughter, Janet, who Madvig loves but who hates him
  • goads the psychopath Jeff into strangling O’Rory

Style

Again there’s an odd discrepancy between the street slang of the characters and the sometimes ornate vocabulary and rather mannered style of the narrating voice.

1. Slang terms

  • buzzer = police badge (p.31)
  • licked = beaten (p.31)
  • take a Mickey Finn = leave in the lurch (p.32)
  • unkdray = too much booze, hungover (p.46)
  • drop the shuck on someone = frame them (p.49)
  • keysters = (p.83)
  • ducat = ticket (p.83)
  • smeared = closed, shut down (p.85)
  • iron = car (p.127)
  • it’s a pipe that = it’s a certainty that (p.169)
  • roscoe = gun (p.197)
  • screw = depart (p.198) cf blow

2. Mannered narrator

His walnut desk-top was empty except for a telephone and a large desk-set of green onyx whereon a nude metal figure holding aloft an airplane stood on one foot… (p.58)

Farr smote his desk again. (p.63)

Ned Beaumont’s mien had become sympathetic when he transferred his gaze to the shorter man’s china-blue eyes. (p.66) Alarm joined astonishment in her mien. (p.123) Though he was attentive there was no curiosity in his mien. (p.148) The round-faced youth to whom he said it left the outer office, returning a minute later apologetic of mien. (p.163) There was as little of weakness in her voice as in her mien. (p.202)

Silence was between them awhile then. (p.86)

Ned Beaumont looked, with brown eyes wherein hate was a dull glow that came from beneath the surface, at the card players and began to get out of bed. (p.94)

When it became manifest that he was not going to speak she said earnestly… (p.107)

She drew away from his hand and fixed him with severe penetrant eyes again. (p.119)

Her blue eyes wherein age did not show became bright and keen. (p.123)

These are deliberate choices, out-dated vocabulary, Victorian phraseology. It’s odd that a style which goes out of its way to be like this can be considered the father of the hard-boiled style when it is in fact a little ornate and mannered.

What does ‘hard-boiled’ mean?

The plot isn’t particularly violent (to be precise: Ned gets hit in New York, then imprisoned & badly beaten by Shad’s men; Taylor Henry is knocked over, fractures his skull and dies; the newspaper editor Mathews shoots himself; the drunk psychopath Jeff strangles his boss O’Rory; Opal, Paul’s sister, slashes her wrists – it’s nothing compared to the earlier bloodbaths).

It isn’t a formal detective story at all since there are no detectives involved (though the mystery of Taylor Henry’s death does come to dominate more and more).

The style doesn’t have the dazzling panache, the tough guy charisma, of Raymond Chandler.

What Falcon and this one have in common – and what ‘hard-boiled’ may mean in practice – is that they both completely and utterly exclude any insight into the minds of the characters. Everything psychological is rigorously excluded for the text. When I compare it with the hundreds of pages of Graham Greene’s novels devoted to nothing but the characters’ thoughts and memories and feelings and impressions and anxieties and fears – Hammett’s novels seem like fleshless skeletons. There isn’t a flicker of warmth or humanity about them.

Instead of any of the thoughts and feelings you associate with the novel, you get minute and detailed descriptions of the outside of the characters: of the precise movements of every part of their bodies; exactly how they roll a cigarette or open a door; exactly what every part of their body does in a fight, with lecture-hall anatomical precision; and minute descriptions of their faces, especially the changing expressions of their eyes.

Mechanical habits: Thus Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon has a way of pinching his lower lip between thumb and forefinger (a mannerism portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 movie); in Key Ned is given the habit of brushing his moustache with a thumbnail (eg p.175, 187).

Robots

The reader is challenged to figure out what is going on in everyone’s minds from this external evidence alone. Initially this is a challenge but quite quickly I relapsed into the odd sensation that I was observing robots. They talk. They move. But they appear to have no insides at all.

Ned Beaumont’s face, after a grimace of rage at the closed door, became heavily thoughtful. Lines came into his forehead. His dark eyes grew narrow and introspective. His lips puckered up under his moustache. Presently he put a finger to his mouth and bit a nail. He breathed regularly, but with more depth than usual. (p.116)

He became thoughtful. But we are not told what he is thinking about. We are never told what he is thinking about. Nowhere in the entire novel do we learn what Ned is thinking about. Instead we are given details of his breathing patterns. This epitomises the No Depth, Only Surfaces modality which Hammett has adopted. Is it this, this deliberate rejection of the humanist tradition of the novel which developed over three centuries to explore people’s feelings and psyches with growing subtlety and insight – this rejection which makes these books ‘hard-boiled’?

Ned Beaumont’s eyes widened a little, but only for a moment. His face lost some of its colour and his breathing became irregular. There was no change in his voice. (p.119)

It could be said that Hammett is more interested in his characters’ physiology than in their thoughts. Their thoughts are concealed within the black box of his prose. All we get is unnecessarily detailed descriptions of their precise physical movements. Sam Spade attacking Joel Cairo or pulling Wilmer’s coat down over his arms to get his guns are good examples from The Maltese Falcon. Here, Janet Henry has just heard her father accused of murder.

For a moment Janet Henry was still as her father. Then a look of utter horror came into her face and she sat down slowly on the floor. She did not fall. She slowly bent her knees and sank down on the floor in a sitting position, leaning to the right, her right hand on the floor for support, her horrified face turned up to her father and Ned Beaumont. (p.211)

Not now or at any other time are we told anything about her feelings at this devastating revelation. We simply see her crumpling like a broken marionette described very precisely.

Nothingness

Again and again and again the narration emphasises that these people acting like robots have no feelings, no emotions, no investment in what they’re saying or doing. Is it this emotional coolness, this nullity of affect, which makes these novels ‘hard-boiled’? It is as if the text is hypnotised, rotates around, gravitates towards, and is continually trying to achieve this state of emptiness. Blankness. Nothingness.

He rose from the sofa and crossed to the fireplace to drop the remainder of his cigar into the fire. When he returned to his seat he crossed his long legs and leaned back at ease. ‘The other side thinks it’s good politics to make people think that,’ he said. There was nothing in his voice, his face, his manner to show that he had any personal interest in what he was talking about. (p.149)

Ned Beaumont was looking with eyes that held no particular expression at the blond man and his voice was matter-of-fact. (p.169)

Ned Beaumont nodded. His face had suddenly become empty of all expression except hard concentration on Madvig’s words. (p.171)

Jack said nothing. His face told nothing of his thoughts. (p.186)

Janet stirred, but did not rise from the floor. Her face was blank. (p.212)

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Pulp cover of The Glass Key

Pulp cover of The Glass Key

Hammett’s five novels

  • Red Harvest (February 1, 1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus the individual murders.
  • The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
  • The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
  • The Glass Key (April 24, 1931) The adventures of Ned Beaumont, fixer for reformed gangster Paul Madvig, as he copes with a rival gangster, a corrupt DA, a pliant newspaper editor, and various difficult dames in the run-up to an election Paul must win.
  • The Thin Man (January 8, 1934)
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by Simon on October 11, 2014  •  Permalink
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

‘You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like, “Be generous, Mr Spade.”‘ (p.404)

He stood beside the fireplace and looked at her with eyes that studied, weighed, judged her without pretence that they were not studying, weighing, judging her. (p.421)

Like its two predecessors, Hammett’s third novel The Maltese Falcon was originally serialised in the pulp magazine Black Mask (between September 1929 and January 1930) before being published as a one-volume novel later the same year. Unlike its two predecessors it doesn’t feature the unnamed Continental Operative as detective-hero, instead introducing Sam Spade.

Third person

The Continental Op stories are told in the first person. We overhear the Op thinking through his cases or explaining that he’s putting on this or that facial expression for his interlocutors, we watch him figuring out, guessing, taking a punt, speculating.

In contrast, the Falcon is told in the third person and this makes a real difference. We are on the outside and Hammett doesn’t give us any of the characters’ thoughts. Instead we get much more detailed descriptions of their faces and expressions and eyes than in the earlier books. Lots more. And we have to figure things out for ourselves.

For example, in the second part of the second chapter, ‘Death in the fog’, the police lieutenant, Dundy, and the detective, Tom, make an unwanted call on Spade’s apartment at 4 in the morning to push him about his partner’s murder. If it had been the first-person Continental Op we’d have been overhearing all his thoughts and calculations. But it’s in the third person so all we get is dialogue, the disposition of bodies and detailed descriptions of faces, as the two men try to outplay each other.

This approach allows much more scope for our interpretation of what’s going on, more scope for ambiguity and uncertainty, making it a much more complex and stimulating read. I’ve read comments praising Hammett’s dialogue but it’s more than a question of dialogue alone, it’s the sentences which describe the facial expressions around the dialogue which give it its power. It’s like a rally in tennis or a ballet. Thus:

The Lieutenant looked at his glass for a dozen seconds, took a very small sip of its contents, and put the glass on the table at his elbow. He examined the room with hard deliberate eyes, and then looked at Tom… Tom moved uncomfortably on the sofa and, not looking up, asked… The Lieutenant put his hands on his knees and leant forward. His greenish eyes were fixed on Spade in a peculiarly rigid stare, as if their focus were a matter of mechanics, to be changed only by pulling a lever or pressing a button… Spade smiled and waved his empty glass a little… ‘What do you want, Dundy?’ he asked in a voice hard and cold as his eyes. Lieutenant Dundy’s eyes had moved to maintain their focus on Spade’s. Only his eyes had moved… Spade made a depreciative mouth, raising his eyebrows… He stopped smiling. His upper lip, on the left side, twitched over his eyetooth. His eyes became narrow and sultry… Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice… Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes were warm green discs… He smiled with grim content… The wariness went out of Spade’s eyes. He made his eyes dull with boredom. He turned his face round to Tom and asked with great carelessness… Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its calmness… ‘I know where I stand now,’ he said, looking with friendly eyes from one of the police detectives to the other… Spade looked at him and smiled, holding the finished cigarette in one hand… Dundy looked with hard green eyes at Spade and did not answer him… Spade looked at the Lieutenant with yellow-grey eyes that held an almost exaggerated amount of candour… ‘We’ve asked what we came to ask,’ Dundy said, frowning over eyes hard as green pebbles… (Picador Four Great Novels edition pp.388-393)

Having a third person narrator, being on the outside of the characters and limiting himself to only reporting, in detail, the changes in their faces, expressions and eyes, paradoxically makes Falcon a much more psychological novel. Whereas the Op told us what he was thinking and when he was lying, here we have to piece it together from the outside, only from what Hammett shows us, which gives the whole text a much greater sense of psychological depth.

The merits of the respective plots play a part (Falcon is just a much better story), but I think it’s also the new-found depth derived from this approach which make the Falcon so much more appealing, more read, better known and more frequently filmed (three times) than the first two novels.

More literary?

In Harvest and Dain a lot of the reader’s effort went into, was designed to go into, trying to figure out the complexities of the plot and the characters’ motivations, before – that is – they were laid bare by the narrator in the concluding, Wind-Up chapter (in the classic detective novel style). This put them towards the pulp, genre end of the spectrum, with its focus on outlandishly complex plot machinations.

Here there is still a lot of plot, but the interest has shifted to trying to suss out the characters moment by moment in scenes which are written with much more interest in the detail of moment by moment flickers of emotion, feeling, intelligence over faces described only from the outside. Sure there’s an overarching crime plot – but there’s a lot more going on in each individual scene, a lot more portrayal of mood and personality and psychology. And this puts Falcon towards the literature end of the spectrum.

The eyes have it

I wrote a long post about the importance of eye imagery in Raymond Chandler’s novels. The same conclusions are true of this novel. Deprived of information from a first person narrator or the knowledge that comes from free indirect speech (where the text depicts the character’s thoughts as if reported by a narrator; Greene uses it all the time) we are put in the same position as the characters, having to suss out the other’s motivation from their facial expressions alone, of which the most acute and revealing facet is the expression around the eyes – smiling, hard, crying, cruel, cold etc.

So, chapter four describes Spade’s visit to Mrs Wonderley aka Brigid O’Shaughnessy who slowly reveals a bit more of the secret, and their sparring is depicted in the dialogue, of course, but also in their facial expressions and particularly in the state of their eyes.

His smile brought a fainter smile to her face… Her eyes, of blue that walmost violet, did not lose their troubled look… Spade smiled a polite smile which she did not lift her eyes to see… she stammered, and looked up at him now with miserable frightened eyes… Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes… Her eyes suddenly lighted up… Her face had become haggard around desperate eyes… She squirmed on her end of the settee and her eyes wavered between heavy lashes, as if trying and failing to free their gaze from his… (pp.401-403)

The same happens at every dialogue, that is throughout the book, on almost every page: the play of facial expressions and especially the state of the eyes reveals/conceals just as much as the spoken words. There was less in the first two books because there was so much action, shooting and blasting.

  • Sam Spade: yellow-grey eyes (p.408) ‘His eyes were shiny in a wooden satan’s face.’ (p.423)
  • Effie Perine: brown eyes (p.396)
  • Brigid O’Shaughnessy: cobalt-blue eyes (p.375) ‘Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.’ (p.423)
  • Lieutenant Dundy: hard green eyes (p.392)
  • Casper Gutman: dark and sleek (p.466) ‘The fat man’s eyes were dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh.’ (p.469)
  • Joel Cairo: black eyes (p.538)
  • Wilmer Cook: small hazel eyes (p.456) ‘The boy’s eyes were cold hazel gleams under his lashes.’ (p.534)
  • Luke the hotel detective: crafty brown eyes (p.457)

Spade is sexy

The Continental Op emphasised to twenty-year-old Gabrielle Leggett that he was old, middle-aged, forty, and past making a pass at her. He is very close to Dinah Bird in Harvest but never makes a move on her or even contemplates it for a second.

By contrast Sam Spade is sexy, looking ‘rather pleasantly like a blond satan’. He is the regulation six foot tall and

  • he has a comfortably flirtatious relationship with his secretary
  • he has been having an affair with his partner’s wife
  • he handles Miss O’Shaughnessy’s passes at him with savoir faire until he decides to go ahead and sleep with her
  • he pats the secretary at the hotel’s shoulder in a calm confident way

He is portrayed as knowing his way around women, how to manage and handle women, in a way the Op couldn’t. He has a free, easy and confident way with women as with men, as with life. However, he himself says there is a problem with his attitude which is that he only really knows how to flirt with women, implying he doesn’t know how to treat them as just people; whether his Miss Moneypenny-ish relationship with his secretary Effie proves or disproves this is open to debate.

If you were to indict him, central would be the way he betrays Brigid after sleeping with her (and making her strip naked in his apartment to search her) – though he has by that time established that she shot his partner dead in cold blood. And then there’s his shabby treatment of his partner’s widow, Iva – though that seems realistically messy. Nobody’s claiming he’s a saint.

From the outside

Over the course of the novel it becomes very striking how deliberately Hammett describes all the humans in it from the outside as if they’re robots. He describes their movements as if observing animals, pedantically noting every move and flicker. This has a very unsettling effect. Take this, Spade furtively unlocking his office door in case there are intruders inside:

He put his hand to the knob and turned it with care that permitted neither rattle nor click. He turned the knob until it would turn no further; the door was locked. Holding the knob still, he changed hands, taking it now in his left hand. With his right hand he brought his keys out of his pocket, carefully, so they could not jingle against one another. He separated the office key from the others and, smothering the others together in his palm, inserted the office key in the lock. The insertion was soundless. He balanced himself on the balls of his feet, filled his lungs, clicked the door open, and went in. (p.490)

Maybe it’s meant to be building up tension, but the basic idea – he unlocked the door carefully – needn’t have been described this meticulously nor stretched out to this length. Why do it? For the immediacy? To make the reader feel like they’re watching every minute movement? And the same technique is applied to scenes with no tension, when he’s kissing Brigid or rolling a cigarette or sitting on a chair. All described in pedantic and very externalised detail.

If the above is a description of a purely physical act, the following is a small example of what happens in almost every dialogue ie Hammett not only records the words spoken, but describes in minute detail the physical behaviour of each of the participants.

 Spade said, ‘Yes,’ very lazily. His face was sombre. He touched his lower lip with a finger, looked at the finger, and then scratched the back of his neck with it. Little irritable lines had appeared in his forehead. He blew his breath out heavily through his nose and his voice was an ill-humoured growl. ‘You wouldn’t want the kind of information I could give you, Bryan.’ (p.506)

Vocabulary

There’s two or three slang terms in the novel (‘fog’ = kill p.537) but the switch to the third person has allowed Hammett to drop a lot of the patois which the Continental Op used in his racy narration. The slang now only occurs in the dialogue of the characters. Something that stands out on a handful of occasions is Hammett’s use of unusually formal, technical and Latinate vocabulary. It’s as if he wanted to distance himself from his pulp milieu, or was experimenting with a more detached vocabulary, complimenting the more detached, external, objective style of description mentioed above.

  • an ellipsoid p.513
  • incoordinate steps p.518
  • in her mien was pride p.551

Related links

Edition of Black Mask magazine containing the first instalment of The Maltese Falcon

Cover of the September 1929 edition of Black Mask magazine containing the first instalment of The Maltese Falcon

Hammett’s five novels

  • Red Harvest (February 1, 1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus the individual murders.
  • The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
  • The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
  • The Glass Key (April 24, 1931)
  • The Thin Man (January 8, 1934)
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by Simon on October 11, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in American literature, Books, Detective stories, Noir, Novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on October 11, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/the-maltese-falcon-dashiell-hammett/

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

‘You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business. You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.’
(The Dain Curse page 320)

In retrospect, Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, seems like a delirious fantasy: an entire town populated only by rival gangs of gangsters and their molls and armies, set at loggerheads and wiping each other out in a mounting frenzy of violence. More parable than fiction. The red in the harvest is a harvest of blood; almost everyone dies, maybe it should have been titled The Slaughterhouse.

The Dain Curse starts out much more restrained and sober, more like a traditional crime story: research scientist Leggett has borrowed some diamonds from a merchant because he thinks he might be able to improve the look and appearance of sub-standard stones. One night they are stolen. The Continental Detective Agency is asked to investigate by the insurance company and our friend, the Continental Op, is assigned the case. We find him rooting through grass outside the burgled house, then interviewing various witnesses and suspects. Routine detective work. Only slowly does The Dain Curse, also, like Red Harvest, unravel into a murder fest…

A back story

Early on we discover that Leggett the scientist is not at all who he pretends to be. He appears to commit suicide and leaves a long suicide note, an improbably detailed account of his improbably colourful life of crime in remote foreign lands. This is reminiscent of the way the Sherlock Holmes novels rely on long backstories in India (The Sign of Four, 1890) or among the Mormons (Study In Scarlet, 1887) or as John Buchan will rely on a long-past vow to drive the plot of the final Richard Hannay adventure, The Island of Sheep (1936).

Then again, as the Continental Op probes it, he discovers that maybe the suicide note is not all it seems…

A partner

It’s just so convenient in stories like this to give the protagonist a partner – someone to deploy on missions when the hero can’t do everything himself, to act as dummy or decoy in dangerous situations – but above all, someone to discuss the case with while it’s in mid-stream, to bandy theories around with. And then, finally, someone to mull over the loose ends with when it’s all over, and who can – at a pinch – make sense of it all for the reader.

Dr Watson is the archetpye of the partner because he fulfils all these roles so well. Hammett’s detective, the Continental Op, was able to confide in Dinah Brand in Red Harvest, until, that is, he woke up holding the domestic ice pick which was embedded in her dead chest. Oops.

In this novel, the Op conveniently runs into his old mucker, the novelist Owen Fitzstephan, who helps out with a few minor errands but whose real purpose is the epilogue chapter at the end of each of the three parts which the book is divided into – chapters where the two guys sit and piece together what happened and why, for the reader’s edification. Until Fitzstephan himself becomes part of the story…

Three parts

The text is divided into three parts, each one dealing with a cluster of deaths and the rather far-fetched explanations which are concocted to account for them:

The Dains

A few bodies turn up even before Leggett is found dead with a note. In an extended revelation scene the Op moves through several theories of who did what to arrive at a sort of truth, that the current Mrs Leggett is one of two Dain sisters who, back in Paris, before the War, were in love with Maurice Pierre de Mayenne. He married the other sister, already pregnant with the daughter Gabrielle. The current Mrs elaborately arranges for the little girl to shoot dead her mother; Leggett takes the rap and goes to Devil’s Island until he manages to escape and works his way to California and a new identity; the current Mrs brings up Gabrielle, tracks Mr L down, surprises him by arriving on his doorstep then, when Mrs L kills not one but 2 private dicks she’s hired to track him down but were now blackmailing her, she a) kills them both b) persuades Mr L to shoot himself (!). At which point she makes a break for the stairs, is tackled by the Op and Gabrielle’s thick hunky boyfriend Collinson, and in the scuffle, guess what, the gun goes off and she is dead. Among the many facts and fictions thrown around during this mayhem, Mrs Leggatt née Lucy Dain, says there is a Curse on all the Dain family; which now amounts to young Gabrielle.

The Temple

Ten days later the Op is called off another job by the family lawyer who is uneasy that Gabrielle has insisted on going to stay at the San Fran headquarters of a religious sect. The Op is installed there, with the sect owners’ agreement, but that night all hell breaks loose. The Op is drugged by dope fed into his room by secret pipes, encounters a weird physical illusion, bumps into Gabrielle almost naked holding a blood-stained ornamental knife (see illustration, below) saying ‘I killed him’, finds the family doctor stabbed to death by said knife on the religion’s ‘altar’, returns to find Collinson and Gabrielle gone, goes into the servant girl’s room and is overcome with fumes again, then attacked, then nearly knifed, then clubbed, then rushes back down to the altar to find the doctor gone and the lady of the house & cult (Mrs Haldorn) tied up on the altar and her husband, Joseph, having chosen that night of all nights to go beyond the cult they’d cooked up with theatrical robes, hypnotism and dope fed into the followers’ rooms, purely to make money, but on this night he’s finally flipped, thinks he genuinely is God, and is about to sacrifice her on the altar; the Op has to shoot him six times and then stab him through the throat to kill him. Then the Op and Owen the novelist have another session piecing it all together.

Quesada

The Op is called off another case (again) by an urgent cable from Eric Collinson who has hurriedly married Gabrielle and spirited her off to a secluded cottage in Quesada, rural California. He finds Eric’s body fallen off a clifftop path. A lot then happens. there are car chases and car smashes. The sheriff’s wife is discovered to be unfaithful to him with another police official, tells our guys her husband did it, but is then discovered murdered, we go out in a small boat round hidden coves round the coast where a bad guy is discovered who has kidnapped Gabrielle but is shot down before he can reveal who put him up to it…

A small bomb goes off in the Op’s apartment, injuring him, the crim who brought it, and mangling to a pulp his friend the novelist. The main thrust of this section is the Op helps Gabrielle go cold turkey to get over her morphine addiction, and manages to protect her from potential killers, including Mrs Haldorn from the cult, the Mexican maid with the knife, the crooked lawyer who tried it on with her once, and Fink, the helpmeet at the cult who made and placed the bomb. Quite a few more people get killed before the Op/narrator explains it in a detailed 7 or 8 page finale, packed with detailed explanations of everyone’s outlandish motivations and wildly improbable schemes, which caused so much death and, in the end, changed so little. Gabrielle walks clean and free – there is a Happy Ending.

Four short stories

In fact, as with Red Harvest, this ‘novel’ started life as four connected stories in the ‘pulp’ magazine, Black Mask.

  • Black Lives’ (November 1928)
  • ‘The Hollow Temple’ (December 1928)
  • Black Honeymoon’ (January 1929)
  • ‘Black Riddle’ (February 1929)

Separate short stories, or a conscious novel published in the serial method which dates back to Dickens and beyond?

The Continental Op

Usually our heroes are tall, dark and handsome. It is notable that the protagonist of these stories is described as short and stocky:

  • ‘He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad – somewhat of your build… ‘ …’ (p.197)
  • five foot six (p.223)
  • ‘a middle-aged fat man’ (p.284)

Compare and contrast with the tall, dark, handsome strangers Sam Spade ‘quite six feet tall’, Philip Marlowe ‘slightly over six feet’, Sherlock Holmes ‘rather over six feet’ etc etc.

Fast

As I noticed in Greenmantle (1916), almost as soon as the motor car had been invented it was getting stolen, hijacked, and used in high-speed pursuits. In other words, right from the start of its existence the car has helped us act out our unconscious desires for speed and flight and brainless excitement.

He had a Chrysler roadster parked around the corner. We got into it and began bucking traffic and traffic signals towards Pacific Avenue. (p.222)

This ride ends, as any traffic policeman might have predicted, in a bad crash where all the car’s occupants are injured. In this respect, The Dain Curse is a bit more realistic than Red Harvest in which there are innumerable car chases and high-speed shootouts.

Underworld slang

Similarly, now I come to look for it, there is less underworld slang and thieves’ argot in Hammett than you might expect.

  • dinge = black person
  • dark meat = black person
  • rats and mice = rhyming slang for dice
  • the nut = earnings, income
  • a gallon of the white = alcohol
  • chive = knife
  • heap = car

Style

In this novel the prose is less crunched and abbreviated than in Harvest, maybe because that one was set in a rather comic-book way among hard-talking gangsters, and this one is set among the more civilised professional classes starting with Dr Leggett the scientist, then taking in the upper-class devotees of the Temple and including the Op’s pal, the novelist: all very literate and civilised types. Less slang, less street patois.

Hammett takes a while to do detailed, rather laborious descriptions of characters. Chandler, Greene or Deighton would have nailed the following character in a few lines. Hammett is surprisingly verbose.

[Edgar Leggett] was a dark-skinned erect man in his middle forties, muscularly slender and of medium height. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn’t been so deeply marked with sharp, hard lines across the forehead and from nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around the broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes were abnormally bright behind horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp, nimble, over a small, bony chin. His black and white clothes were well made and cared for. (p.196)

There are occasional outbursts of jazzy prose, some smart-alec sentences, but not many. There are only a dozen or 15 sentences like that out of a 200-page novel. Nowhere near the stylistic jazz and sparkle of Raymond Chandler.

We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. (p.327)

I piled up what facts I had, put some guesses on them, and took a jump from the top of the heap into space. (p.353)

Go-getter

The Op is sardonic about the pushy District Attorney in Querada, describing him as ‘very conscious of being a go-getter’ (p.306). I was interested to see the Online Dictionary dating this term to 1920-25, making it very new when Hammett used it; though the Etymological Dictionary dates it further back, to 1910.

Author’s message

‘Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wrangle yourself out another to take its place’ (p.331)

Credit

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929. All references are to the Picador Four Great Novels 1982 paperback edition.

Related links

Hammett’s five novels

  • Red Harvest (February 1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus the individual murders.
  • The Dain Curse (July 1929) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
  • The Maltese Falcon (1930)
  • The Glass Key (1931)
  • The Thin Man (1934)
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by Simon on October 9, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Detective stories, Noir, Novel, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 9, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/the-dain-curse-dashiell-hammett/

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