Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Ginger Rogers? Ronald Reagan? Doris Day? Must be some frothy Hollywood comedy. Certainly can’t be anything close to film noir.

What really surprised me about this powerful 1951 noir classic is that not only had I never seen it, I had never even heard of it. It had sailed completely under my radar all these years. So when it came on TCM one middle of the night a few weeks ago, I recorded it, not expecting much. And what I saw blasted me right between the eyes.

Ginger Rogers, whose dancing career was in her rear view mirror at this point, is a big-city dress model on her way to a big show. She gets off the bus en route in the small town of Rock Point to pay a one-day visit to her sister, effectively played by Doris Day. Within minutes, she witnesses a murder by the Ku Klux Klan. What follows is a descent into Klan terror and the grip that organization had over Rock Point and so many towns like it back in those days.

Storm Warning is not like any other movie in which the Klan plays a role. The murder victim is white, and the subject of race never comes up. Race is only hinted at on one occasion, and even then very obliquely. Ginger is slowly drawn into a conspiracy to cover up the murder and to stymie the investigation, headed up by the anti-Klan district attorney, played with remarkable skill by Reagan in a surprisingly solid performance.

From the moment Ginger gets off the bus two minutes into the film, the tension never lets up. Under the confident hand of director Stuart Heisler, this film takes unpredictable turns every sweaty step of the way, aided immensely by a literate script, penned by no less than Richard Brooks and Daniel Fuchs. The final result deftly avoids all the usual stereotypes associated with Klan movies. The characters don’t even speak with Southern accents, letting the viewer know in no uncertain terms that such terrorism is an American phenomenon, not confined to the backwaters of Dixie.

Doris Day is clearly warming up her cutesy persona which would later bloom in the Rock Hudson comedies at the end of the decade, but her role here is a serious one and she handles it well. Her thick-witted husband, played by Steve Cochran, is one of the Klan killers. This is unquestionably Cochran’s finest performance. During his twenty-year career as a character actor, he was usually called upon to play gangsters and other assorted typical tough guys, but his portrayal of Hank Rice is utterly three-dimensional. Playing “stupid” requires an actor to walk a fine line, to flesh out a believable character without lapsing into stereotype, and Cochran pulls it off without one false note, making it look easy.

Despite the presence of all this talent working at the top of their game, the real star of Storm Warning might well be director of photography Carl Guthrie. His dizzying play of shadows and light rivals the best of the film noir cinematographers. In lesser hands, this potent story could easily lose a lot of its punch.

When the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, played by Hugh Sanders, says at one point, “We’re the law here,” a chill runs up your spine, because this movie is making you realize how true that was. Ordinary people were frightened out of their wits at the thought of snitching on any Klan crime, and no one, not even right-thinking law enforcement, dared stand up to them. Today, we can all be thankful that organization has gone into deep decline and is no longer a factor in American society.

Storm Warning is one of those rare B-movie gems that is seldom on TV. You should make every effort to see this film, one way or another.

BUY THE EBOOK

McCoy’s hardboiled noir classic, about an Ivy League graduate’s criminal rampage through the seedy underground and glitzy high society of an unnamed American city

To escape prison, Ralph Cotter uses the same genius for planning and penchant for cold-hearted violence that helped earn him a spot in the slammer in the first place. On the lam in a city where he knows nobody, Cotter has nothing to lose, no conscience to hold him back, and no limit to his twisted ambition. But in the midst of a criminal spree, a grift leads him to the boudoir of wealthy heiress Margaret Dobson, a woman with the power to peel back the rotten layers of his psyche and reveal the damaged soul beneath.

Vicious and thrilling, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a look at one man’s relentless attack on American society, conjuring one of the most memorable antiheros of twentieth-century noir fiction.

This ebook features an extended biography of Horace McCoy.

• Biography
  • Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American author whose hardboiled novels documented Americans’ hardships during the Depression and post-war periods. His most famous work, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and directed by Sidney Pollack.McCoy was born on April 14, 1897, in Pegram, Tennessee, and grew up in Nashville. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family didn’t have much money. Although he was an avid reader, McCoy never finished high school. After a move to Dallas, Texas, he joined his father in sales at age sixteen.McCoy worked as a traveling salesman through his teens, then joined the United States Army Air Corps. During World War I, he flew missions in France as a navigator and aerial photographer. He earned the Croix de Guerre from the French government after piloting a plane safely home despite suffering two bullet wounds. After the war, McCoy returned to Dallas and took up journalism. As a reporter, he exaggerated and invented details to make his stories more interesting, leading to frequent dismissals from Dallas papers. During this time he also met and married his first wife, Loline Sherer, with whom he had one son. He would later divorce and marry twice more, and had two children with his third wife, Helen Vinmont.By the mid-1920s, McCoy’s interest in storytelling led him to publish his first fiction. Through the 1930s, he published more than a dozen crime and detective stories in Black Mask, a popular monthly pulp fiction magazine that was also printing the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time.In 1931, McCoy moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. Though he failed to gain much notice as a leading man, the author did have some success writing script scenarios for the big studios. One such project described characters participating in a dance marathon; that scenario became the basis of his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). The novel distills many hallmarks of McCoy’s writing, including a tough style, wry observations of class disparity in the 1930s, and a hard look at the dehumanizing effects of poverty. They Shoot Horses fared better with European audiences than with American readers, a trend that McCoy would see throughout his writing career.After the publication of They Shoot Horses, McCoy returned to screenwriting, churning out scripts for successful westerns such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and brooding noirs such as Persons in Hiding. He also continued writing novels, most notably Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), considered one of his best. That same year, McCoy suffered a mild heart attack. Though he resumed working, his health declined and in 1955, he died of a third heart attack while at home in Beverly Hills.
  •  

    EXCERPT

    Chapter One

    THIS IS HOW IT is when you wake up in the morning of the morning you have waited a lifetime for: there is no waking state. You are all at once wide awake, so wide awake that it seems you have slipped all the opiatic degrees of waking, that you have had none of the sense-impressions as your soul again returns to your body from wherever it has been; you open your eyes and you are completely awake, as if you had not been asleep at all. That is how it was with me. This was the morning it was going to happen, and I lay there trembling with accumulated excitement and wishing it would happen now and be done with, this instant, consuming nervous energy that I should have been saving for the climax, knowing full well that it could not possibly happen for another hour, maybe another hour and a half, till around five-thirty. It was now only a little after four. It was still so dark I could not see anything distinctly, but I could tell by the little of the morning that I could smell that it was only a little after four. Not much of the morning could get into the place where I was, and the portions that did were always pretty well mauled and no wonder: they had to fight their way in through a single window at the same time a solid shaft of stink was going out. This was a prison barracks where seventy-two unwashed men slept chained to their bunks, and when the individual odors of seventy-two unwashed men finally gather into one pillar of stink you have got a pillar of stink the like of which you cannot conceive; majestic, nonpareil, transcendental, K. But it never intimidated that early morning. Ever indomitable, it always came back, and always a little of it got through to me. I was always awake to greet these fragments, hungrily smelling what little freshness they had left by the time they got back to me, smelling them frugally, in careful precious sniffs, letting them dig in the vaults of my memory, letting them uncover early morning sounds of a lifetime ago: bluejays and woodpeckers and countless other birds met like medieval knights and thrusting at each other with long sharp lances of song, the crowings of roosters, the brassy bleats of hungry sheep and the mooing of cows, saying, ‘No-o-o hay, No-o-o milk’, that is what my grandfather said they were saying and my grandfather knew. He knew everything there was to know about everything that was completely unimportant. He knew the names of all Hadrian’s mistresses and the real reason, hushed-up by the historians, why Richard took the Third Crusade off to the Holy Land and the week the Alaskan reindeers would mate and the hours of the high tides of Nova Scotia; my grandfather knew everything except how to run the farm, lying there deep in the featherbed in the side room where Longstreet once spent the night, buried under the quilts that hid me from old John Brown of Osawatomie, dead and gone these many years, but who, they said, still clumped the foothills of the Gap gathering up disobedient little boys; smelling the morning and hearing the sounds, smelling and hearing, hiding from old John Brown (but hiding from something else too, although I did not then know what it was), frightened with little-boy fright (which, I also was to find out, was not so annihilative as grown-man fright), waiting for the daylight…

    The darkness began to fade slowly at the window, and a few men turned over, rattling their chains, waking up; but you did not need these noises to tell you that there was movement any more than any other wild animal needs noises to tell him there is movement; the pillar of stink which had been lying in laminae like the coats of an onion was now being peeled and a little of everybody was everywhere. There was coughing and grunting and hawking and much spitting, and then the man in the next bunk, Budlong, a skinny sickly sodomist, turned on his side facing me and said in a ruttish voice: ‘I had another dream about you last night, sugar.’

    It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought.

    ‘Was it as nice as the others?’ I asked.

    ‘Nicer …’ he said.

    ‘You’re sweet. I adore you,’ I said, feeling a fine fast exhilaration that today was the day that I was going to kill him, that I was finally going to kill him as soon as I got my hands on those pistols I was going to kill him. I hope Holiday knows what the hell about those pistols, I thought; I hope they’re where they’re supposed to be, I hope Cobbett doesn’t let us down. Cobbett was the clerk of the farm who doubled on Sundays as the guard in the visitors’ cage, an old man who had spent his life as a chain-gang andprison-farm guard, now too feeble to have a squad of his own, and pensioned off to sinecures. He had taken a shine to Holiday the first time she had come to visit us, and from then on he had been less and less strict in the matter of her visiting hours, and now she had gotten him to help us make the break. He was to have met her last night and got the pistols and stashed them for us. They were to be sealed in an inner tube and hidden in the irrigation ditch that ran along the upper end of the cantaloupe patch where we were working. The exact spot of their submergence was to be marked with a rock the size of a human head, on which there would be a dab of white paint, placed in line with the pistols but on the other side of the ditch where it would be less likely to attract attention. This was all that Cobbett had to do. I hoped he had done it. If he had, if the pistols were there I was going to kill this swine Budlong, as sure as God made little apples I was going to kill him…

    All of a sudden the door banged open and there was Harris, the sergeant, standing in the gloom no eyes, no nose, no mouth, just a great big hunk of obscene flesh standing there in the doorway with his arm hooked under a Winchester, yelling for us to hit the deck. Always he stood there in the same way and always he yelled the same thing and always the prisoners in the rear of the barracks called him the same names. But I never called him names. I was too busy being glad that the door was finally open. I lay there waiting for him to come and take the manacles off my ankles, and the fresh morning rushed through the door like children coming into the living-room on Christmas morning.…

Michael Lipkin has done me the honor of featuring me and several of my titles very prominently on his terrific website, Noir Journal. It begins with a piece I wrote summarizing my introduction to noir fiction, to even the term itself, and continues with excellent reviews of The Ghosts Of Havana and Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Eyes. Please go here and check it out. And dig into their archives. They featured Reed Farrel Coleman in a similar fashion two months ago.

And while you’re there, please leave a brief comment. It’s a great site, worthy of your attention.

DRAWING DEAD by JJ Deceglie (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

“I wasn’t always an asshole.”

That’s Jack Andrelli talking in the opening line of JJ Deceglie’s Drawing Dead, and then he takes the rest of this riveting noir novella trying to convince you of exactly the opposite.

Andrelli is a down-and-out private investigator in Perth, Western Australia, with virtually no redeeming qualities, and he appears determined to assist in his own death any way he can. He’s a degenerate gambler, he owes big money to small gangsters, and he consumes every drop of alcohol he can get his hands on as quickly as possible. He’s a wiseass, profane noir character, to be sure, making big mistakes every step of the way, utterly without regard for the consequences. You get to the point where you want to reach into the page and slap the shit out of him to make him act a little more rationally, but of course, that’s when you realize Deceglie has you right where he wants you.

Amid all his grim prospects, Andrelli actually manages to get a client, a gorgeous brunette (“a vixen, a kitten, a demon”) who, in almost any other private eye novel, would be a mawkish cliché. In Drawing Dead, however, she’s a good fit, giving Andrelli an outlet for his bizarre sexual fantasies, as well as making a sturdy contribution to the plot. It seems she can enable him to get his hands on a lot of money, money he needs to pay back the gangsters who are by now considering ways to end his life.

With blinding neon prose, the author places the reader squarely at his protagonist’s side, and through all the boozing and the beatings, you find yourself actually rooting for the guy. I found the unconventional style, which includes no quote marks around dialogue, few commas, and block paragraphs, to be off-putting at first, but I quickly adjusted and let the style close in over my head for a much more satisfying reading experience.

Deceglie has taken the notoriously inflexible private eye format and busted it wide open, cutting this novella loose from the genre’s stifling chains. Drawing Dead breaks new ground.

I just received my Blu-Ray boxed set of Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries from 2011 directed by Todd Haynes. Nominated for twenty-one Emmys and winner of five, it’s a powerful story of a world-weary woman striving against odds for a better life. I had seen it when it originally aired several months ago and promptly pre-ordered the Blu-Ray box, because I felt it would be one of those things I would want to watch every couple of years or so.

And I was right.

When I watched it again, it didn’t seem at all stale. Rather, I was able to pick up things I’d missed the first time around (always a sign that a movie is doing something right). My overall appreciation of it rose considerably.

Frankly, I’d been waiting for something like this for many years. The 1945 film of the same name may have won an Oscar for Joan Crawford, but it didn’t do any justice to James M Cain’s novel from which it was adapted. For Hollywood purposes, they added a murder and other such nonsense and deleted much of the class division that Cain went to great lengths to portray. The HBO version, however, replicates the novel virtually scene for scene, and it vividly paints the picture of the sharp social differences between the characters. In 1945, Hollywood tried mightily for a noir atmosphere with lots of shadowy photography, especially in the police station (didn’t those cops have lights in their offices?). HBO achieves a thick, textured noir feel through well-fleshed-out characters and their motivations. You could almost call it “chick flick noir”.

Kate Winslet turns in a major-league performance in the difficult title role. Traipsing around in dowdy dresses and aprons, she crawls inside Mildred’s skin as she bakes her pies and eventually runs her restaurants. Crawford, on the other hand, always seemed to be going through her usual motions of acting, always mugging for the camera. Winslet makes you feel voyeuristic, like you’re watching her personal life unfold by peeking through the blinds. You will completely forget she was ever in Titanic as she plows through all five Mildred Pierce episodes, trying to get above her raising, caving in to the guilt trips her social-climber daughter is constantly laying on her, and ultimately falling for the conniving Monty Beragon, played with gusto by Guy Pearce.

Beragon, polo-playing man about town, has seen his fortune wane through the depression, and he’s reduced to living in the servant’s quarters of his damp, drafty Pasadena mansion. He was portrayed by Zachary Scott in the 1945 film, and truth be told, Scott fit that character like Clark Gable fit Rhett Butler. But Scott is gone, and Pearce approaches the role from a different angle. Where Scott was oily, Pearce is far more sincere, or so he seems. A key scene in the big Pasadena house where Beragon tells Mildred the importance of rooms and the things they contain makes you believe for a moment that he’s redeemable, that he’s not quite the rat you suspected. One of the audio commentaries that accompany the Blu-Ray set tells us that Pearce’s dialogue coach helped him nail the subtle speech inflections unique to old-time natives of Los Angeles, those who, like Beragon, came from old money.

The miniseries is set from 1931-1940, like the novel, and the title notwithstanding, it is almost stolen by the story of Veda Pierce, Mildred’s daughter, played as a pre-teen by Morgan Turner and from ages 17-20 by Evan Rachel Wood. Only the strength of Winslet’s star turn keeps the story in Mildred’s court. Turner is outstanding as the bratty, self-absorbed young Veda and Wood seems like the natural older version of her. I would imagine Wood’s performance was heavily influenced by watching Turner in the rushes for her body language, her voice inflections, and most of all, her all-about-me attitude.

In a smaller role, Hope Davis scores big as Mrs Forrester, a patrician grande dame who interviews Mildred for a maid’s job in one of the early episodes. Later on, her character marries a movie director and she becomes Mrs Lenhardt. Again she meets Mildred, but under very different circumstances, and can’t quite place her. Davis makes the most of her onscreen time, giving life to a minor character and preventing her lapse into stereotype.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to mention the production design in Mildred Pierce. Authentic period detail and a palette of muted greens and grays give the miniseries a vivid look at a middle-class American family of the 1930s. Production designer Mark Friedberg, Art Director Peter Rogness, and Set Decorator Ellen Christiansen shared the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction.

Mildred Pierce is a winner for everyone involved, though, especially the late James M Cain, who was one of the great noir authors of all time. Nobody could tell a story better.

EVERY SHALLOW CUT by Tom Piccirilli (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

What’s the deal with Tom Piccirilli? Doesn’t he realize too much backstory is fatal to any novel? That it absolutely has to be woven in to the story, not dumped up front? Doesn’t he realize you need ample dialogue to move everything along? The reader will, you know, get awfully bored reading all that narrative. There are, after all, rigid rules all writers must follow.

Well, maybe he doesn’t realize the existence of these rules, because if he did, he might not have written Every Shallow Cut (ChiZine Publications, 2011), a shattering novella of our times.

On second thought, maybe he does know about the rules, but broke them anyway, which makes him a far better author than most people realize.

Incredibly, the entire first half of this compact book (I read the paperback in its unusually small format) is nearly all backstory, with Piccirilli pulling a reverse, deftly weaving in the actual story while he recites the grim history of his nameless central character. Dialogue is virtually absent throughout this first half as well, leaving the reader to turn the page solely on the strength of the author’s bleeding prose, as he plunges us into a hard-edged tale of a man whose life has evaporated, who has lost everything in our troubled economic times.

This character is the quintessential noir protagonist. From the first page, he’s in deep shit, largely because of his own bad choices, and it only goes downhill from there. And as with all of us when we make bad decisions, the fiddler must be paid. Yes, Piccirilli follows the noir playbook perfectly.

But somehow, Every Shallow Cut transcends noir and its conventions. It leaps up and slaps you in the face and screams at you that maybe we’re all in deep shit, and maybe our decisions have nothing to do with it. Maybe we all have a screw quietly loosening somewhere in the darkest corners of our souls which, given the right circumstances, could eventually cause all of us to become unspooled.

In addition to the central character, none of the characters has a name, and this fits the story well, because, like it or not, names carry connotations which help bring fictional characters into sharp focus. Piccirilli’s characters are meant to remain cloudy in our mind’s eye, as if seen through a window streaked over with grime. This way, they are almost interchangeable with people we might know, maybe even with ourselves. Even the cover is hard to read. This all adds up to very little distance between the reader and the characters, making the reader uncomfortable and providing a more powerful emotional wallop.

Piccirilli is an excellent author, having written over twenty novels, along with numerous short stories and novellas, and this is not the first of his books that I’ve read. It is, however, the best. I’ve wondered why he’s not better known, why his books don’t sell in such numbers as to propel him into permanent status on bestseller lists. It might be because the American reading public is not ready for the likes of Every Shallow Cut. It’s a masterpiece far ahead of its time.

Heath Lowrance, a talented author if ever there was one, has just added “man of impeccable taste” to his credentials. He took the time to read The Ghosts Of Havana and write a wonderful review of it. I could stick a slick link in here to the review, but hey, I’m a simple guy, so I’ll just post the entire review below.

When a woman is murdered at his nightclub, Robbie makes it his mission to find out who and why– he’s a bit of a shady character himself, but a feeling of responsibility drives him on. Teaming with the victim’s reporter sister, he finds himself caught up in the dark, sinister underworld of Key West, and uncovers a mind-boggling conspiracy that dates back decades. Robbie is no stranger to violence, but now it seems he may have bitten off more than he can chew…

The Ghosts Of Havana is a relentlessly fast-paced conspiracy thriller, the sort of book that keeps you reading all through the night. I devoured it in two sittings, on the edge of my seat the whole time to see what unexpected turn of events would occur next. Mike Dennis does a terrific job of revealing the seamy side of Key West, with the sort of intimate touches that only a native of that place would be capable of. And his protagonist, Robbie, moves through this dark world as if he’s right at home. 

And the secret behind the conspiracy, once it’s revealed, will blow your mind. Top-notch suspense here.

Heath has written a game-changing novel, The Bastard Hand, as well as a short story in the horror-western-noir genre, That Damned Coyote Hill. He’s also got a short story collection that’s well worth your attention called Dig Ten Graves, along with various other stories and an upcoming novel. Yes, he is productive, and I’m very pleased that he did this review of my novel while he’s on his way up, and still has the time.

Christmas again. Can you believe it? I think I just celebrated New Year’s last week! I wonder why the time flies much more rapidly as you get older. Anybody got any ideas?

Anyway, I thought I’d do a little post about my favorite Christmas movies. These films convey to me a Christmasy feeling, even though some of them don’t deal directly with the Christmas holiday. In no particular order they are:

HOLIDAY INN (1942) / Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale. Director: Mark Sandrich. Crosby-Dale-Astaire song and dance team is broken up when Astaire takes Dale away. Crosby eventually heads for Connecticut (always shown in these movies to be a rural kind of place populated with funny Hollywood types), where he opens up an inn that operates only on holidays. Irving Berlin wrote a song for each of the major holidays, including the legendary White Christmas, performed for the first time in this film. Lots of charm as Bing sings and Fred dances. As expected, Berlin’s tunes are top drawer.

YOUNG AT HEART (1954) / Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Gig Young, Ethel Barrymore. Director: Gordon Douglas. Classy remake of 1938 film, Four Daughters, in which a down-and-out piano player arrives into a warm and fuzzy home, and things are never the same. Sinatra shines as the loner with an attitude and Day warms up her cutesy persona that would permeate her films of the late 50s and early 60s. Barrymore, as Aunt Jessie, delivers many great lines.

A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983) / Peter Billingley, Darren McGavin, Melinda Dillon. Director: Bob Clark. Now-classic holiday yarn set in the 1940s, told from Ralphie’s (Billingsley’s) point of view. He craves a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, but his parents are adamant: it’ll put your eye out. McGavin scores big as Ralphie’s father, the “furnace fighter”, and Dillon as the weary mother. Movie touches every Christmas nerve in your body and gets better with each viewing. Often runs as a 24-hour marathon on Christmas day.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) / James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore. Director, Frank Capra. Stewart runs a small-town building & loan company and is well-liked by everyone but Barrymore. Things turn sour for him and he’s about to commit suicide when he is saved by his guardian angel, unforgettably played by Henry Travers. What follows is a look at what his life would’ve been like if he’d never been born. Imaginative, fanciful piece of filmmaking by Capra, who was inspired to make this movie after visiting Seneca Falls, New York, the town on which the fictional “Bedford Falls” was created.

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1946) / Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet. Director: Peter Godfrey. Stanwyck writes for Greenstreet’s magazine and has everyone fooled into thinking her Martha Stewart-type articles reflect her real lifestyle, when in fact she is completely un-domestic. Enter returning war veteran Morgan and the fun begins. Pour some hot cocoa and curl up with this film on Christmas Eve.

I’LL BE SEEING YOU (1945) / Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple. Director: William Dieterle. Wartime tale has Rogers as convict on Christmas leave from prison. She meets Cotten, a war vet who has recovered from his physical wounds but not from the mental problems he incurred during the battles. Memorable MGM drama with the stars at the top of their form. Haunting title song stays with you.

MIRACLE ON 34th STREET (1947) / Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Natalie Wood, Edmund Gwenn. Director: George Seaton. Gwenn is hired as a last-minute replacement Santa Claus for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, eventually becomes the store Santa for the Christmas season. Pretty soon, he’s claiming to be the real Santa Claus. Good-natured film hits all the right spots in attaining its well-deserved classic status. Film won four Oscars, including one for Gwenn in a supporting role. Lost out for Best Picture to Gentleman’s Agreement.

QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

Review by Mike Dennis

“Clients opened a drawer, stuck in their hand, and I was the weapon they pulled out.”

That’s Quarry talking, and he’s a professional killer. Like most in his line of work, he sees things through a very tight, all-business prism. He knows the intended targets are the walking dead, slated for extinction by someone else who has paid a lot of money to get it done. So if he has a moment of queasiness or second thought, a replacement will step in and do it instead. Either way, the target goes down.

Quarry is far from one-dimensional, however, and his personality shines through in Max Allan Collins’ Quarry’s Ex, a top-notch 2011 effort for the newly-resuscitated Hard Case Crime imprint.

The year is 1980 and we find Quarry in Boot Heel, a small town in extreme southern Nevada, which is prospering from the patronage of middle-class people, most of whom sport Reagan For President buttons, and who find Las Vegas too expensive and/or too crowded. While having lunch in a casino restaurant, he has a chance encounter with Jerry, a former colleague who, after a few Scotches, starts talking shop.

Turns out Jerry is in town as part of a two-man team whose intention is to kill a movie director shooting a film on location in Boot Heel. As it happens, Quarry is stalking the other member of the team in what will eventually turn the hitman-story subgenre on its ear.

In a rare moment of introspection, Quarry reveals to the reader his reasons for entering the murder business. Due to a perfect alignment of the stars, he tells how he met the Broker years earlier, who began setting him up with good-paying hit jobs. Eventually, Quarry had to liquidate the Broker and wound up with his database of contract killers.

Sensing a big-money opportunity, he then decides to surveil these killers, one at a time, until they go out on a job. Through diligent work, he determines who their target is, and then approaches that target, telling him/her of the imminent danger. For a price, he will eliminate the killer and for a larger price, he’ll eliminate the one who hired the job to be done. Nick Varnos is one of these hitmen and Quarry has been tailing Varnos at his Las Vegas home for a month, waiting for him to go out on a job. Finally, Varnos leads him to Boot Heel.

Quarry’s Ex is the latest entry in Collins’ series about this hardass killer. By wisely filling in some of Quarry’s past, he has added a lot of texture to the character, enabling the reader to invest in him emotionally. We learn that through the years, Quarry has overcome some of his greatest struggles, not the least of which were caused by his cheating ex-wife. Years later, as his body count surges upward, he remains haunted by her and the demons she awakened within him.

Collins is the author of several successful series, as well as bearing the Mike Hammer torch passed to him by the late Mickey Spillane. I certainly hope he finds time in the future to continue this riveting series about a hired killer.

It’s too bad Zachary Scott’s movie career didn’t last longer than it did. He was tailor-made for film noir. The deceptive cheshire smile, the just-right mustache, his oily presence, his ability to portray utterly amoral characters, he had it all. Whenever you saw his name on the poster, you knew someone was going to get royally fucked. Films like Mildred Pierce (1945), Her Kind Of Man (1946), and Flamingo Road (1949) served as great showcases for his sinister-smooth screen persona.

I could’ve seen him as a film noir staple throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, then sliding into villainous character roles in middle age. Unfortunately, a serious injury resulting from a rafting accident in 1950 sent him reeling into a long, painful recovery period and heavy depression. Although he made occasional movies after that and digressed into TV, his film career never recovered.

Which is why I got excited the other night about watching Danger Signal (1945) for the first time. The synopsis said his character “murders women for their inheritance”. I could just hear the producer bellowing into his intercom, “Get me Zachary Scott!”

The film opens in classic Warner Bros style with Scott in a sleazy apartment at night, a female corpse sprawled on the bed. The landlady is pounding at the door, neighbors gather, and Scott rifles the dead woman’s purse. He grabs a fistful of cash and splits out the window. Next thing you know, he’s on a bus to California.

Soon he meets Faye Emerson and he slides right into his slick-gigolo routine that he carried over from Mildred Pierce. She falls for him and she has a younger sister played by Mona Freeman and…well, it gets a lot better from there.

I liked Danger Signal. I liked it a lot. It wasn’t nearly as predictable as it could’ve been, and Scott carried the film well, weaseling his way through a series of women, always looking for the score, the angle. Emerson was the female lead, and she handled it. Her attraction to Scott’s character was believable, as was her slow realization that his intentions were, shall we say, less than honorable. Taut direction by veteran Robert Florey (The Cocoanuts (1929), Murders In The Rue Morgue (1932), King Of Alcatraz (1938)) kept the tension high in all the right spots, while cinematographer James Wong Howe’s brilliant use of shadows and light elevate this film to very respectable film noir levels.

But Scott is really the star of this show. There weren’t too many actors in those days who could play these shameless characters with a straight face and make you buy into them, but he did it time after time. With his unswerving instincts and his solid grip on the material, he made it look so easy.