Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Patti Abbott posed an interesting question today. She asked if it made a difference whether you watched a movie on DVD or saw it in the theater. My answer: the theater.

Movies are larger than life. They are, and always have been, made to be viewed in a theater. They were intended to be mechanically projected through light onto a giant screen in front of perhaps hundreds of people. The viewers are colonized into a large room, where they sit in darkness with total strangers, gazing at a screen several stories high. When the image appears, they almost involuntarily surrender to the wonder of Hollywood magic.

Television is smaller than life. DVDs, as presented over television, are, and always will be, made to be shown in a small room. They are intended to be electronically projected through a (relatively) small screen in front of perhaps four or five people. The viewers are colonized into a small room where they sit with the lights on among friends, gazing at a screen dozens of inches wide. When the image appears, they may talk to one another, get up to go to the kitchen, pass around refreshments, go to the bathroom, or answer the phone. The remote is never far away, and the image can be, and usually is, paused at will. The continuity effect that the director built in constructing the movie is virtually destroyed. The suspense, as enhanced by lighting, setting, and dialogue, is destroyed. Large-scale action scenes lose all magical quality.

Years ago I saw The Last Emperor in the theater. I sat there in awe of the story, the acting, the look, the detail, the whole presentation. A few months later, I saw it on TV. I was looking forward to reliving my experience I’d had in the theater. It was terrible. I turned it off after about fifteen minutes.

Say what you will about Titanic (1997), but it was a sensational movie. The haunting story, which could never have been invented, was so faithfully rendered on the screen, and of course, the effects…the ship, the clothing, the sinking, the faces of the victims…all of it touched me. Needless to say, when I saw it on TV, it played like a network movie of the week. None of it, and I mean none of it came across as the director had intended.

This is not to say that all movies fail on TV. Just most of them. Woody Allen movies would be among the exceptions. His movies are small, heavily reliant on sharp dialogue, and utterly lacking in real action. They seem a perfect fit for TV. There are others, too, but not many.

Film noir plays much better in the theater, in my opinion, although it doesn’t lose everything on TV the way that big-production movies do. Classics like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Detour can still be enjoyable on TV. The big screen, however, really brings out those shadows and angular camera shots.

Not long ago, I watched The Lost Horizon (1937) on DVD. It’s a great film, but the sweep of the Shangri-la scenes and the frigid desolation of the mountain-climbing scenes were really lost. Another one was The Hurricane (1937), directed by John Ford. The mind-blowing special effects, especially for 1937, were extremely impressive. But they were greatly diminished by the smallness of television. There are a lot of older films like that, where you can only see them on DVD because they’re so old.

Nothing much you can do about movies made in 1937; DVDs are really the only way we can usually see them. But movies made in 2010 deserve your attendance at the theater, where you can see them and be overwhelmed by them as you ought to be. If you’re not overwhelmed, then it’s a bad movie and it ain’t gonna get any better by the time the DVD comes out.

Besides, popcorn doesn’t taste the same in front of a TV.

THE COLDEST MILE by Tom Piccirilli (2009)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

How would you like to take a job where your employer cuts your predecessor’s stomach open before your very eyes?  Well, that’s what’s offered to the central character in the opening of The Coldest Mile, a 2009 blow-‘em-out hardboiled tale by Tom Piccirilli.

He’s called Chase, and we learn that he was raised as a grifter by his grandfather, Jonah, who pulled him out of a foster home and straight into a life of crime.  Now, as a twentysomething adult, he’s on his own.  Jonah, now in his sixties, and who is one hardass dude, has plenty of blood on his hands.  But he’s still deep inside Chase’s head, for more reasons than one.

Immediately after Chase takes the job as chauffeur for a disintegrating New Jersey crime family, he runs into problems, all of his own making.  He’s not given to following orders too closely, he talks back, shows no respect, and pushes the family’s gunmen around.  The reader can’t help but think he’s going to get whacked any second.

Referring to a previous Piccirilli novel, The Cold Spot, a dense backstory is cleverly revealed in bits and pieces, letting the reader in on the complex relationship between Chase and Jonah.  In The Coldest Mile, Chase wants to find him again, but for very different reasons.

Piccirilli, an award-winning author of some twenty novels, knows how to write this stuff.  He keeps the reader’s eyes on the page with lots of stinging prose and tough dialogue.  He takes us with Chase to Florida, where the criminals are decidedly minor league, and gives us a finely-tuned feel of the messiness of their organizations.

He also draws a clear connection between Chase and Jonah.  It’s an ambivalent one, filled with both resentment and respect, but most of all, it is riveting, and forms the emotional core of the novel.

Through Chase’s memories, Jonah’s character is well-drawn before he ever actually walks onto the page.  When he finally does appear, he steals every scene he’s in, whether Piccirilli wants him to or not, and he very nearly steals the entire novel.  By then, however, the reader is totally ready for one of the most hardened, uncompromising characters he will ever encounter.

Over on the Kill Zone blogspot today, John Gilstrap posted a provocative piece about his latest novel, which centers around the Iraq War. One of his characters, it seems, refers to the enemy as “Hadjis”, a term commonly used among GIs on the field of battle. John’s editor took a dim view of the word, thinking it would be “offensive” to some group or another, claiming it was like using the word “Kraut” or “Nip” during World War II.

Well, you see where we are here. The PC Gestapo has reached right into John’s novel and is threatening to, I don’t know, call him a racist or something for using this word, which by the way, is now apparently referred to as “the h-word”.

I take great offense at someone telling a writer what words he/she can or cannot write. If the words are technically incorrect, or if they’re overused, or some other traditional objection applies, I have no problem. But to axe a word simply because it might “offend” somebody is BS. Or rather, let me say, bullshit.

In my humble opinion, the more people who are offended by a writer’s output, the better. You can tell he’s done his job if he can get that kind of reaction from people. These are people who probably have no business reading anything in the first place, since they apparently reach for the smelling salts at the merest hint of “offensive” language.

The only people who can truly judge a writer are the readers. If they don’t like what they read, they won’t read that writer again. It’s that simple. But believe me, a lot more goes into that judgment than whether or not the readers are “offended”.

Anybody out there familiar with the controversy surrounding Rhett Butler’s use of the word “damn” in Gone With The Wind? It was thought, in 1939, to herald the end of civilization, so many upright (or is it uptight) people were “offended” by its inclusion in the novel and the movie. If they’d thought about it, they probably would’ve assigned it the label of “the d-word”.

This deal with John’s use of the word “Hadjis” is basically a variation on the same theme that is currently propelling the heated differences swirling around the violence in serial-killer novels. There are people out there who want to censor what is being imagined and written during the creative process, and they will never relent. We’ll always be on defense, but we have to keep fighting them off or else we’ll move into an era of censorship, strict oversight, penalties, and God knows what other restrictions on our freedom.

When a writer caves in to these PC terror tactics, we all lose a little something. We lose it for the silliest of reasons, namely that someone out there–maybe even just one person–won’t be “offended”. That is true BS (excuse me, bullshit!).

I think any writer should be free to use whatever words he/she feels are appropriate.

If someone is “offended”, that’s their problem. Get it? Their problem.

If someone wants to write about spics, wops, niggers, micks, chinks, limeys, kikes, fags, towelheads, wetbacks, japs, or any other “sensitive” group, go ahead. Provided, of course, that it fits the story, is not gratuitous, is not overused, or any of the other common-sense criteria that writers follow. I might also add, these criteria don’t just apply to “offensive” words, they apply to everything in the novel. Characters’ names, use of certain punctuation, syntax, all the tools available to a writer should follow these common-sense guidelines. The work should live or die in the marketplace, not in the twisted imagination of some PC fuhrer.

The notion that something might “offend” someone is not a reason to refrain from anything in writing. I also believe that “offense” is not the real driving force behind these “sensitive” complaints. I believe there’s a down-and-dirty effort out there to clamp down on creativity, and ultimately on every aspect of our lives.

As I mentioned above, we’ve got an h-word now. This will fit in quite nicely with the b-word, the n-word, the c-word, and so on. Eventually, you know, you’re going to run out of letters to connote these words. Then the PCers will have to move to maybe the Greek alphabet and we’ll all be running around talking about the gamma-word and the omicron-word.

But when you run out of Greek letters, where do you go from there? Cyrillic script?

THE WOMAN CHASER by Charles Willeford (1960)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

Los Angeles, 1960.  The pinnacle of the California dream.  Cars are king, and the king of the used cars is Richard Hudson, recent transplant from San Francisco.  That’s the backdrop for The Woman Chaser, a fine noir novel by Charles Willeford.

Hudson, a Type A personality if ever there was one, regards himself as one of the greatest used car salesmen of all time, and he’s not too far wrong.  He really knows all sides of the business, as he opens up a Los Angeles lot for Honest Hal Parker, the leading used car dealer in San Francisco.  No angle escapes Hudson’s sharp eye, no customer gets anything less than his highest-pressure pitch, and no car goes unsold.

He makes plenty of money, lives well, tips generously, and you would think he’s hit his lick.  But no.  There’s an itch that he can’t quite scratch.  He longs to be in the movie business.  The position of writer-producer-director will do just fine, thank you.

His stepfather (who is only seven years older) is a blacklisted Hollywood director, and one night Richard approaches him with an idea for a script.  It can’t miss, Richard says, turning on his salesman’s charm.  And before you can say “Lights, camera, action!”, the two of them are trying to get his script turned into a movie.

The novel is divided not into chapters, but sections separated by movie script jargon (dissolve, cut to, fadeout, etc), and it’s somewhat unsettling, but that’s why Willeford is so good.  He can use a pedestrian story as an overlay, or even as a decoy, while he barely hints at the swampy mess that is the human condition festering underneath.  You just know that, despite Hudson’s having made it in the used car business, he’s doomed as a human being.

The title implies that Hudson spends most of his time hitting on women, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Women pop up here and there in the novel, but in fact, he’s wracked with guilt over his own lack of real masculine desire.  It bothers him that he’s too preoccupied with business to get bogged down with women.  And that includes his mother, an oddball ex-ballerina who is a book all by herself.

In reality, Hudson doesn’t need a woman to lead him down the road to perdition.  Like so many of Willeford’s protagonists, he can get there on his own.

Scott D Parker posted a blog on the Do Some Damage site today which got me to thinking. He posited the analogy of a book to a concert t-shirt.

When you read a book, according to Scott, the book becomes an artifact of the reading experience, in much the same manner as a t-shirt becomes the artifact of a concert you attended. People see the book, they can assume you’ve read it. People see the t-shirt, they can assume you went to the concert. If he reads a book, the experience is internal, personal, and not needing a souvenir for verification. He goes on to say that in a book, the story is everything, and the medium is irrelevant. As long as the material can be delivered to the reader, what’s the difference if it comes through an iPad or a 500-page hardcover? It’s through this prism that the book becomes like the t-shirt. An artifact. This is a somewhat original way of looking at it and it works, up to a point.

I would highlight a big difference, though. If I want to reread a particular passage in the book, or reread the entire book, for that matter, I can do so. The written words are still there. The concert’s music, however, is long gone, vanishing the moment it was played. The t-shirt is just a memory of the event, embalmed in a cotton-polyester blend and growing more distant with each passing day. If I want to hear Don Henley sing, “Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’” once again, well, I’m going to have to go to another concert.

Now, I know that ebooks offer the same reviewing capabilities as print books; if you want to reread something, just scroll back to the point and read away. But Scott cited Stephen King, who in a recent interview, said he felt a certain “not-thereness” to ereading. It’s exactly this “not-thereness” which crystallizes the difference between books and digital files.

Books are much more than mere souvenirs of reading. Rather, they are the physical repository of the art itself. They are tangible proof that the author and his muse came together in a magical confluence of events. Their covers are large enough to be examined in close detail. They can be signed, displayed, resold, reprinted (with different covers), and, perhaps centuries later, gazed upon with awe from behind a velvet rope. And, not incidentally, they can never be deleted with the stroke of a key.

I remember seeing the original Magna Carta around 20 years ago, as it rolled through New Orleans. It was on tour along with several other “documents of democracy”, and was displayed inside an air-conditioned tractor trailer, out of the bright sun. It was lit with the dimmest of bulbs, difficult to see, fading after nearly eight hundred years of existence. But there it was. The paper that started it all. I mean the very paper with the very ink forming the very words which, back in the early 13th century, shook England to its core and would go on to resonate around the world. It’s hard for me to imagine staring at a digital file on a computer screen with that same sense of reverence.

Don’t get me wrong, now. I’m not blind to reality. I know digitalization is here to stay and it’s only going to have a larger presence, much larger. Furthermore, it’s going to be mostly to our benefit. A quick check of the blogosphere–Joe Konrath, for example–will convince even the most hardline skeptic. Ebooks are the future and we’re probably all going to be better off for it. Indie authors will multiply and thrive because they’ll be able to draw a straight line between themselves and their readers. This is a fantastic development which could never have been foreseen just five or ten years ago.

But in the process, we’re going to lose something. Whether you call it the artifact of the experience or the vault of the knowledge itself, it’s going to disappear, straight into the digital mist.