Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Today I spotted a blog by Peter Rozovsky on the Detectives Beyond Borders site, in which he proclaimed He Hit Me by the Crystals to be the greatest noir song ever written. I’d never heard the song before, so I listened to it and it was plenty dark, let me tell you. Peter didn’t mention that the Crystals also recorded Then He Kissed Me, so maybe they were into some kind of career-long story arc, but I’ll leave that for the Crystals purists to dwell on.

It got me thinking about noir songs in general, and after considerable thought, I would nominate the Marty Robbins classic, El Paso, as the greatest noir song of all time.  Written and recorded by Robbins in 1959, it’s set in the lawless West of the late 19th century. Don’t let that fool you, though. This tune is strictly noir from start to finish.

Guy walks into a bar, spots a hot-blooded Mexican babe, watches her dance, gets ideas. Of course, in true noir fashion, you know he’s totally fucked right out of the chute.  Anyway, after a few drinks, he argues over her with another guy. The quarrel escalates until BANG!  Our guy shoots him dead. The dead guy has friends, though, and they begin to move in on our noir protagonist. He runs out the back, steals a horse, and rides away into the night, followed by this makeshift posse.

He gets away clean and is headed for New Mexico when he’s overcome with pangs of love/lust for the girl. Finding that he just can’t bring himself to leave her forever, he heads back to El Paso and to the cantina where she dances. As he does, he’s surrounded by his pursuers, who shoot him down. Mortally wounded, he lies there as the girl rushes to his fallen figure. As he takes his final breath, she kisses him goodbye.

Fade to black.

Cut! Print it!

What makes this even more compelling is this little followup story.

Many years ago, when I was playing music for a living, I did a show with Marty Robbins and he told me he believed that he was that cowboy/central character in a former life! As in “reincarnated”, and he said his memories of that incident were so clear, so strong, that he was able to write a timeless song like El Paso, giving it such a vivid feel. He explained to me exactly what it felt like to watch the girl dance and how he got excited over her, then how shocked he was immediately after killing the other guy during their argument.

I have a noir novel coming out this year called The Take, and I don’t mind admitting that it was heavily influenced by two lines in El Paso:

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting a spell.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden. I was in love, but in vain I could tell.

I even named the girl in my novel Felina.

Come on, you’ll have to admit, that’s pretty noirish. But maybe you’ve got a nomination or two for Greatest Noir Song of All Time.

WEB OF MURDER by Harry Whittington (1958)

Review by Mike Dennis

Charley Brower is a pretty smart guy.  That’s what he thought, anyway.  Shoot, a big, smart lawyer like him?  Shouldn’t be any trouble at all to kill his rich wife for her money, then make off with his secretary.  No sir.  No trouble at all.

Turns out Charley is maybe a little too smart.

That’s the general idea in Web Of Murder, a tight little noir novel from 1958 by one of the masters of the genre, Harry Whittington.

Charley saves guilty clients from the electric chair and has every material possession he could want:  a Cadillac, cashmere jackets, and a big home.  The home, however, is in his wife Cora’s name and that bothers him.

Cora spends her time straightening out her house and getting on Charley’s nerves.  They’re both in their middle thirties, but are already starting the physical slide into middle age.  You know Charley’s brain is ticking when he says, “I was showing my age, but with Cora, I had to look at it.”  You can’t sink any deeper into noir than that.

He becomes obsessed with Laura, a coy little babe who takes his dictation and types up his briefs.  Soon, they tumble into bed together and before the sheets are dry, Charley realizes that Cora has to go.

Harry Whittington, unfortunately, has been nearly forgotten in the sweep of time.  He was an incredibly prolific author, cranking out upwards of 200 novels during his career, which tapered off in the late 1960s.  At one point, he wrote 85 novels in twelve years, seven in one month!  He wrote under his own name, as well as some fifteen pseudonyms, and easily crossed genres from mystery into western and even pornography.

But his forte was noir.

Web Of Murder is a slim little book, probably fewer than 35,000 words, but it tells its tale extremely well.  The characters are well-drawn and the plot is never really rushed.  When it came to old-school paperback authors, Whittington was one of the best, and he holds up to this day.

DIE A LITTLE  by Megan Abbott (2005)

Review by Mike Dennis

Things are never as they seem.

That could easily be the subtitle of Die A Little, the 2005 debut novel by Megan Abbott.  The characters are shrouded in their own obsessions and desires, but the shroud is not easily lifted, so nothing is ever entirely clear in this stylish, neo-noir tale.

Set in Los Angeles of the mid-1950s, during the very zenith of the California-as-land-of-dreams era, Lora King lives out the dream in a little house in Pasadena with her brother, Bill.  They’ve always lived together, even as they passed into adulthood, in a kind of mutually protective, fairy-tale world:  childlike Lora the schoolteacher, parading through sunny kitchens, making ham-and-pineapple-ring dinners; square-jawed Bill, saving society as a crime-fighting investigator for the LA County district attorney.  There’s probably a twin bed in Lora’s room.

But Bill marries Alice, and everything is shaken up.

While Alice is all cleavage and plucked eyebrows, she seems to truly love Bill, but she carries the whiff of the tawdry world that Lora knows is out there, and doesn’t want to think about.

Alice tries hard to bond with Lora, referring to the two of them as “sisters”.  She invites Lora over for dinner parties, and otherwise insinuates herself into Lora’s life.  Lora wants to like Alice, but she has her suspicions.  Alice has no photos of her family, her life before Bill is cloudy, and darn it, she’s just so different.

Pretty soon, a couple of bodies turn up, as Lora finds herself dragged into the back-alley LA cesspool of the time, a world drenched in drugs, prostitution, and murder.  She learns terrible things she didn’t really want to know, as everyone’s true motivations eventually crawl out into the sunlight.

Abbott takes her time in the unfolding of the story, narrating it in Lora’s first-person, present tense voice.  I found the present tense to be somewhat off-putting, not bringing the dark urgency to the story that was needed.  If you can get around that (which I did), then you’re in for an unusual, noirish look at LA in the fifties.

Unusual because of Abbott’s distinctive feminine voice.  It’s not the hard-as-nails voice of say, Christa Faust, but it’s not trying to be.  It’s softer, but no less dark, and always hinting at something creepy behind the milk-and-honey facade.

One more thing:  if you don’t know anything about the story, then the cover, which is a hand-painted photograph, is almost worth the price of the book all by itself.

STREET 8  by Douglas Fairbairn

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

“Nobody wants to come downtown anymore.  They tell you it’s like coming to a foreign country.”

That’s the sentiment expressed by a Miami native in Street 8, a  hot-blooded 1977 noir novel by Douglas Fairbairn.

The title street, an English translation of Calle Ocho, the main drag of Miami’s Little Havana, is the site of Bobby Mead’s used car lot.  Out of habit, Bobby still calls it by its original name, Southwest 8^th Street, and from the office window of his lot, he’s seen Miami transformed from a sleepy, one-season tourist town into a vibrant Latin city.

The Cubans are everywhere.  They’re even buying cars from him, so for the first time, he hires a Cuban salesman, Oscar Pérez, to accommodate them.  Oscar, however, soon becomes embroiled in the hornets’ nest of exile politics, and the trouble begins.

The problem with Miami’s exile community in 1977 is that, while they’re committed to eliminating Fidel Castro, they also want to wipe out his sympathizers and spies who have infiltrated their organizations.  But exactly who is who?

Told entirely from Bobby Mead’s point of view, Street 8 allows him no letup.  His world is contracting around him, threatening to choke him, and not even his ratty South Beach hotel room offers him any sanctuary.  He has a teenage daughter, but his incredibly twisted relationship with her only serves to further cut him off from the city he once loved.

Fairbairn deftly ushers the reader through the dark fringes of the byzantine world of Miami Cubans.  These were the pre-cocaine-cowboy and pre-Miami-Vice days, and we eventually learn that some of them are more interested in acquiring power in Miami itself than they are in retaking their homeland to the south.

This little-known novel is an excellent noir tale, highly recommended, as it offers an uncompromising look at one man caught up in a city’s convulsive transition.

While surfing the blogosphere today, I came upon Rob Kitchin’s blogspot. Rob is an Irish author who’s in search of pre-1970 crime fiction classics to read. Okay, Rob, here’s my list, in no particular order.

1. The Grifters, Jim Thompson, 1963

2. Double Indemnity, James M Cain, 1936

3. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett, 1929

4. The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler, 1953

5. The Asphalt Jungle, W R Burnett, 1949

6. Street Of No Return, David Goodis, 1954

7. The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson, 1952

8. 13 French Street, Gil Brewer, 1951

9. His Name Was Death, Fredric Brown, 1951

10. Branded Woman, Wade Miller, 1952 (back in print, thanks to Hard Case Crime)

Rob is looking for an introduction into pre-1970 crime fiction, so these are my recommendations. They all lean heavily toward noir and away from traditional whodunits, so no Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe here. Holmes and Wolfe are fine, as are other much older novels, like The Woman In White. But these 10 books are what I feel would be a good intro to the darkside.

I’ve included two novels by Jim Thompson. The Grifters is a much more “standard” crime novel, but only as compared to everything else that went through Thompson’s twisted mind, while The Killer Inside Me is a sheer trip on the fast train to hell.

Anybody else got any good ideas?  Any good additions to this list?

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story.  He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most:  his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him.  A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed, and his soul has a price.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Angel’s Game)

A few months back, I wrote a blog here called “Publishing and the Record Business”, in which I went on about the similar problems the two industries are facing today. There’s been a lot of talk lately in the blogosphere about this topic, so I felt it worthwhile to revisit it.

The record business has been largely decentralized, thanks to the digital revolution. It’s now at the point where a completely unknown artist or band can record their own album in his own software-based home studio, promote and sell it on the internet (if it’s any good), book tour dates as a result of sales, get “airplay” on internet radio, and carve out a modest career for themselves. This is happening over and over again all around the world, as thousands upon thousands of artists who would’ve had no shot under the dominion of major record labels are now following their dream with some success. And record stores? A distant memory.

As you can clearly see, under this scenario, the record companies are completely circumvented. They’re left with the big, big super-artists, who are really just putting out one bloated same-ol’-same-ol’ album after another, trying to hang on to their security within the record-label plantation system. Even major artists have liberated themselves by deserting the record-company sinking ship and starting up their own internet-based operations.

This is the future of publishing.

We shouldn’t worry ourselves about 100,000 free downloads of a Dan Brown book as much as we should be welcoming the opportunity for more writers to be published and read. I mean, does anyone really think that the future of publishing lies within the corridors of Random House?

I think the future lies much more substantially in the den at my house.

And your house.

And the houses of thousands of writers whose work would otherwise never see the light of day because agents and big publishers are too busy having lunch with each other to pay attention to them. Well now, they’ve got an outlet. And the publishing business as we know it is going to be ground into dust, exactly as the major record labels and the old Hollywood movie studios were, unless they get on board.

Now, I know there are many out there (myself included, actually) who say, “Whoa! I will never stop buying real books with covers and binding and all that other good stuff!” Well, if the publishing business gets their act together, we may be able to avoid an all-digital future, but that’s a mighty big “if”. In the meantime, we have to quit whining and start planning.

There’s a brave new world coming. And it’s coming sooner than we think.