Crispin wrote eight novels between 1944 and 1952 as well as making a living as a musician, mainly composing for the cinema. Alcoholism derailed him: the next, last, and disappointing novel did not appear until 1977, and he died at fifty-six the following year. But what he wrote in his prime was a joy. “One of the undiscovered treasures of British crime fiction,” says A. L. Kennedy of The Moving Toyshop. “Crispin’s storytelling is intelligent, humane, surprising and rattling good fun.” She’s dead right.
Ruth Dudley Edwards has been a teacher, marketing executive, and civil servant, and she is a prizewinning biographer as well as an historian, journalist, and broadcaster. The targets of her satirical crime novels (which have been described as “marvellously entertaining and iconoclastic”) include the civil service, gentlemen’s clubs, a Cambridge college, the House of Lords, the Church of England, publishing, literary prizes, and politically correct Americans. In 2008 she won the CrimeFest Last Laugh Award for Murdering Americans. Killing the Emperors is about conceptual art and will be published in the autumn of 2012. Visit her online at www.ruthdudleyedwards.com.
In a Lonely Place
by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947)
MEGAN ABBOTT
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Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–93) was first published as a poet with the collection Dark Certainty (1933). Her first mystery novel, The So Blue Marble, was published in 1940. A poet, critic, and novelist, Hughes is today best known for a trio of novels that appeared in the mid-1940s: Ride the Pink Horse (1946), The Scarlet Imperial (aka Kiss for a Killer, 1946), and In a Lonely Place (1947). From 1940 onward, Hughes reviewed crime/mystery novels for a variety of newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Herald-Tribune, receiving an Edgar Award in 1951 for Outstanding Mystery Criticism. In 1978, she published a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner. In the same year she was given the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.
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Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) may be the most influential novel you’ve never read. A troubling, razor-sharp exemplar of midcentury noir, it predates the long line of serial killer tales to follow, but, for me, none of the rest comes close. Perhaps its greatest strength is how remarkably clear-eyed it is. It has nary a whiff of the rancid sensationalism of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho or the nihilism of Jim Thompson’s ugly and spellbinding The Killer Inside Me, two writers who enjoy or identify with their killers too much to see them with the piercing acuity of Hughes. (Nor is that their aim.) Hughes, however, is less interested in dropping the “ripe red veil” over the reader’s eyes than in penetrating it.
I don’t use the word “penetrating” lightly. Hughes hoists her killer on the autopsy table, still breathing, and shows us everything he doesn’t want us to see about himself: the twin arteries of masculine neurosis and sexual panic that drive his crimes. It turns out that Hughes is up to much more than telling a killer’s tale. Through her dissection, In a Lonely Place says more about gender trouble and sexual paranoia in post–World War II America than perhaps any other American novel. And she signals it from the start, naming her killer with a knowing wink: Dix Steele.
We learn almost from the first pages that the handsome, well-groomed Steele is a killer. We also learn that he is a World War II veteran who served as a fighter pilot, the most glamorous of all military positions. Now, however, he is aimless, jobless, but living well, for the moment, in Los Angeles on questionable family funds and a skill at the hustle. Gone are the glory days of the war and Dix has “found nothing yet to take the place of flying wild.” He longs for anything to approach “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom.” During the war, Dix reflects, “you wore well-tailored uniforms, high polish on your shoes. You didn’t need a car, you had something better: sleek, powerful fighter planes. You were the Mister.” Most of all: “You could have any woman you wanted in Africa or India or England or Australia or the United States, or any place in the world. The world was yours.” The loss of power is crushing. As an attempt fleetingly to recuperate—but much more so as a revenge for this loss—he satisfies himself by preying on the youngest and most innocent of girls: at bus stops, on darkened streets, alone in the loneliest of places.
Tellingly, though he is the stalker of prey, Dix’s primary fear and rage come from the idea that he is being watched, “seen through” and fatally understood by penetrating women. Time and again he refers to them as “meddler(s)” and “damn snooping dames,” calling one woman’s eyes “disturbing, they were so wise. As if she could see under the covering of a man.” His crimes, while acts of literal penetration, still cannot match the hard gaze of a smart woman. And Hughes offers us two very smart women: Laurel, the beautiful neighbor with whom Dix imagines he’s in love, and Sylvia, the wife of Dix’s air force buddy, Brub, now a Los Angeles police detective whose investigatory skills pale beside those of his wife.
In another noir novel both Laurel and Sylvia would be presented as femmes fatales, seeking to emasculate and entrap Dix. Sylvia in particular seems to be a powerful threat to Dix, who feels her “burrowing beneath his surface.” He tells us, “she had no business trying to find an under self in him; she should have taken him as he was taken, an average young fellow, pleasant company.” Long before Sylvia starts to feel truly suspicious of him—or at least as far as we can tell—Dix feels it. She knows what he is, and what he is not. He’s an imposter in every way, from the suits he wears to the car he drives. If it weren’t for these “snooping dames,” Dix could pull off the deception, ward off the larger disillusionment. He is a man who feels under siege, even at the very moment that he is laying siege to unsuspecting women across the city. The more he seeks to show his power over women, the more powerless he feels—and vice versa.
A pervasive—and ultimately convincing—theory of 1940s noir, especially the proliferation of femmes fatales, is that it arises from gender instability and the challenge of returning soldiers. The result is a dark current of books and films about men, alone, facing a world over which they have no control, and in which the greatest threat is emasculation at the hands of women. The male fears that he will be a patsy, a sap, unless he contains their threat (Chandler, Hammett), or reasserts his power, with a vengeance, as we see in Spillane, whose detective Mike Hammer, another World War II vet, kills women with admitted ease. Of course, the women are only the symptom of a larger feeling of disempowerment, and Hammer is more of a folktale figure than a man, a comic book avenger single-handedly taking down the New York City mob, the Red Menace, and any other enemies in his midst. Tellingly, his fevered mind works remarkably similarly to that of Dix Steele or countless other serial killer protagonists. Witness Hammer sitting on his sofa, “dreaming of the things I’d like to do and how maybe if nobody was there to see me I’d do anyway.” He tells us that he won’t stop until he is “splashing [his enemies’] guts around the room,” until he has them “on the dirty end of a stick.” He dreams of “fresh corpses.”
What we see in In a Lonely Place, then, is a cunning, remarkably prescient analysis of a postwar sexual panic that was still under way. Perhaps no year more than 1947, the year of the novel’s publication, reflects that panic: it was the year of the Black Dahlia murder, which tore the roof off a Los Angeles thick with sexual violence, missing women, unsolved crimes, and general mayhem. And, of course, In a Lonely Place must be set in Los Angeles: the end of the continent, with no place else to go. You’ve run as far as you can.
Hughes is quite clear that the war did not turn Dix into a killer. Instead, the war offered him all the things that his life at home does not: status, potency, power. But Dix reflects in extremis the worst fear of the returning veterans: that the world they left behind is no longer there. The economic opportunity, the glory, the innocence of their own youth—all gone.
And perhaps most of all, there is the sense that the place of their women has changed: out of the kitchen and into the workforce, potentially in the jobs once occupied by men. And who k
new what else they had been up to while their men were gone, whom they allowed into their beds? Once Dix begins to fall for the beautiful and cool Laurel, he feels he’s put himself at terrible risk. “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores,” he asserts. “Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them.” Each act of penetration is proof.
Brimming over with just this post–WWII malignancy and sexual panic, In a Lonely Place uses the conceit of a serial killer (although hardly a conceit yet) to highlight aspects of the culture that have little to do with serial pathology and everything to do with the gender and sexual tensions of postwar America, and the hard-boiled genre that reflects those tensions. While other noir novels of the day embody, demonstrate, or explore this phenomenon, mostly unconsciously, Hughes anatomizes it, and does so mercilessly. After reading her, one finds oneself looking, with a newly gimlet eye, at every purported femme fatale, every claim of female malignancy and the burning need of noir heroes to snuff that malignancy out. The stunning film version of In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, unfolds quite differently. While in many ways it embraces Hughes’s complex critique, director Nicholas Ray can’t resist putting a luminous romantic sheen on Dix and Laurel’s doomed romance. In Hughes’s novel, however, there is not a drop of romanticism, nor any opportunity for transgressive thrills. It is a dark, cold gem of a book, a gem without a flicker of heat or light, and one that cuts to the touch.
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award–winning author of the novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, and her latest, Dare Me, published in 2012. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Detroit Noir, Los Angeles Review of Books, L.A. Noire, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, and The Speed Chronicles. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. Visit her online at www.meganabbott.com.
Act of Passion (Lettre à mon juge)
by Georges Simenon (1947)
JOHN BANVILLE
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One of the most prolific writers of all time, Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903–89) published hundreds of novels and 150 novellas, along with dozens of pulp novels written under a variety of pseudonyms. A former journalist who drew on his experience of Liège’s seedy nightlife for his early inspiration, he is best known for his series of detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret, the first of which appeared in 1931, the last in 1972. Simenon is also highly regarded for his psychological mysteries, or romans durs. He was presented with the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1966.
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Georges Simenon was one of the master writers of the twentieth century. Some may find this a startling claim. It is true that he is generally regarded as a “mere” crime writer, author of pulp novels and the inventor of a much-loved fictional detective. He was also a great drinker—three or four bottles of red wine a day—and a classic case of satyriasis, who told his friend, the film director Federico Fellini, that he had slept with ten thousand women, although his wife dismissed this as boastful exaggeration, saying the real number was only about twelve hundred.
The number of books he wrote, under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, is also disputed, though it is probably close to eight hundred. He wrote at what seems impossible speed, dashing off completed novels in the space of a week or ten days. Among these many books are a score of masterpieces that can stand beside, or look down on, the work of Camus, Sartre, or André Gide, to mention only his French contemporaries.
Simenon made a distinction between his crime stories featuring the phlegmatic and uxorious Inspector Maigret, and what he called his romans durs, literally “hard novels,” such as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes, The Strangers in the House, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, and Act of Passion. These and a handful of other titles have been reissued in handsome paperbacks by New York Review Books over the past few years. For a reader coming fresh to this darker side of Simenon, Act of Passion is as good a place to start as any, although no one should miss Dirty Snow and The Strangers in the House.
So far as I know, Act of Passion is unique among Simenon’s novels in that it has a first-person narrator, although given the bleakness of the tale it might be better to follow Beckett and say last-person narrator. As so very often in Simenon, the protagonist is a middle-aged man who hitherto has lived a blameless life and who suddenly makes a desperate and inevitably disastrous break for freedom and fulfillment. Charles Alavoine is a doctor, a moderately successful general practitioner in the dull little city of La Roche-sur-Yon in the Vendée region of western France. His first wife, the unassuming Jeanne, having died in childbirth, he allows himself to marry a widow, Armande, whom he meets at a bridge party. She is handsome, capable, glacially composed, and she moves in on Alavoine with smooth and irresistible determination, taking over the house in which he has been living in unthinking contentedness with his devoted mother, and reordering his life along invisible though rigid lines that she wastes no time in setting down—“I yielded because she willed me to,” says the hapless Charles.
The book takes the form of a letter—the French title is Lettre à mon juge—addressed by Alavoine to the examining magistrate who has gathered testimony from him in preparation for his trial for murder. Of Armande, Charles writes: “What I am trying to make you understand, your Honour, is that she came into our house in the most natural way in the world and that, also in the most natural way in the world, she remained.” It is the classic predicament of the Simenon protagonist—who is, of course, always male. He does not love his wife, yet is ruled over by her, and he longs for escape.
It is another Simenon trope that nearly every one of his heroes, if we may call them that, trammeled though they are, has at some point in the past been given a glimpse of what life might be like outside the bijou steel cage of married life. For Charles, it was a chance encounter one rainy night in a railway café in Caen with a girl called Sylvia. “For twenty years,” he muses ruefully, “I had been looking for a Sylvia without knowing it.”
Now, bound by hoops of steel to Armande, he is on the lookout again, and again his need is answered. Caen once more, another railway station, another wet night, and this time her name is Martine. Simenon, with his accustomed masterly spareness, sets the scene: “Martine wanted to dance and I danced with her. That was when I noticed the nape of her neck, very close and very white, with skin so fine that the blue veins showed, and little tendrils of wet hair.” This time he does not walk out on the girl, but on the contrary brings her back to La Roche-sur-Yon and into his very home, persuading Armande that he is in need of an assistant in his medical practice. The results are, as we expect, calamitous.
Lolita was published in 1955, eight years after Act of Passion, and there are striking similarities between the two books. Both have first-person narrators awaiting trial for murder; Martine is hardly more than the child that Lolita is, and like Lolita she had a beloved precursor in the narrator’s lost past; blond Armande is only a slightly more controlled and controlling widow than Lolita’s doomed mother, Charlotte Haze, described by Humbert Humbert as “a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”; and there are direct and uncanny echoes between the two narrating voices—for instance, here is Humbert: “You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita . . . ,” and here is Alavoine: “I loved her, your Honour, I’d like to shout that word till I’m hoarse.”
Like Nabokov in Lolita, Simenon, in his account of a decidedly un-Wagnerian Liebestod, is writing a story not of love but of obsession, whether he is fully aware of it or not. For Alavoine, the poor child Martine hardly exists in her own right, outside his craz
ed need of her, and she has to die in order that her past be obliterated, since that past is beyond his control. Simenon, himself a driven and violent man, sees deep into the human, and especially the male, heart and does not flinch from the dim, appalling forms he sees heaving and thrashing in that darkness. Act of Passion is a report from the lower depths, couched in the most limpid terms, and is one of Simenon’s greatest novels.
John Banville’s novels have variously won the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has also won the Franz Kafka Prize. He has published six crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black, including the latest, Vengeance. Visit him online at www.benjaminblackbooks.com.
I, the Jury
by Mickey Spillane (1947)
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
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Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) was the Brookyn-born child of an Irish father and a Scottish mother who grew up to be one of the most commercially successful but critically misunderstood of mystery authors. He served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, and began his career in comic books before moving to novels. It is said that he wrote his first novel, I, the Jury, in only nineteen days. The comparatively high sex and violence content of his work (for its day), along with the relatively simple structure of his plots, invited the opprobrium of critics, but gained him massive sales. “I have no fans,” he told one interviewer. “You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.”