Brainquake
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Interviewed about Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese credited Fuller for inspiring some of the techniques he used. And Quentin Tarantino, who became a friend of Fuller’s toward the end of the older filmmaker’s life, owes a debt to Fuller that seems to grow with every picture he makes. Certainly it’s hard to imagine the gut-wrenching WWII narrative of Inglourious Basterds or the provocative and violent musing on race that is Django Unchained without Fuller’s spirit hovering over the proceedings.
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So: Brainquake.
Where does this book fit in Samuel Fuller’s extraordinary story?
Well, Fuller never stopped writing novels, and when making films became harder for him he found himself returning with a vengeance to the printed page. In 1982, he made his last American film, the anti-racist parable White Dog, but Paramount Pictures refused to release it, citing concerns about the movie’s inflammatory racial subject matter. Outraged, Fuller went into self-imposed exile in France, where he made three final films and wrote two final novels. One of the novels, Quint’s World, was published and distributed widely. The other, though, never was—it was only ever published in French (as Cerebro-Choq) and in Japanese. Never in English, and never in Fuller’s native United States.
It’s a book that fits squarely in the bullseye of Fuller’s lifelong themes and preoccupations. Paul Page’s shack down in the Battery calls to mind Richard Widmark’s waterfront shack in Pickup on South Street. The anecdote about the Statue of Liberty getting its pedestal thanks to contributions by children echoes a plot thread in Park Row. The depiction of underworld affairs has a precedent in Underworld U.S.A. And Captain Lafitte’s traumatic memories of World War II could be episodes from The Big Red One.
And yet Brainquake is very much its own animal. Written and set at the start of the 1990s, it’s a startlingly modern novel for an author best known for stories set around the middle of the century (or earlier—Park Row and the Westerns take place in the 1800s). And while madness abounds in Fuller’s universe, giving his protagonist the sort of brain disorder he gives Paul is a daring step even by Fuller’s standards. Paul is not Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but his mental and physical abnormalities certainly make him a less-than-typical lead for a Hollywood crime story. Can one picture Widmark in the role? A pickpocket may live on the margins of society and be despised by many, but Widmark still brought more sex appeal than pathos to the role in Pickup on South Street. If Brainquake had ever gone before the cameras, the balance would have had to have been different, more delicate.
And what of Father Flanagan, the Mob hit man who goes around dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, nailing his victims to walls and tables and picturing every woman he meets naked—even an old nun? Fuller was no stranger to controversy, but the firestorm this character would have created might have dwarfed all the rest.
But what a character! And what a book. From its piss-cutter of an opening image (“Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father…”) to its sardonic view of corruption masking itself in sanctimony (“Laser beams on the Statue of Liberty were blinding as the guests sang along with the Star-Spangled Banner while Paul transferred $15 million in cash from his bag into the open fat briefcase held by the drop…”) to its genuinely disturbing deaths (“She never tried to struggle. She showed fear in her face but didn’t fight to live.”), Brainquake is every bit as powerful and memorable as Fuller’s best films. In spots, it makes you squirm; in spots it makes you wince. In a few places you scratch your head. But you never doubt the author’s conviction or his vision or his unique talent.
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When Christa Fuller, Sam’s widow (also an actress who was featured in several of her husband’s movies, including The Big Red One and White Dog), first contacted me four years ago to say that a novel of his existed that had never been published in English, I was astonished. It took some time to turn up a copy of the manuscript, laboriously transcribed by Sam’s friend and literary agent, Jerome Rudes, from the nearly illegible pages that Sam had pounded out on a Royal typewriter and then marked up extensively by hand. When I read the manuscript, I was more astonished still. Why had this book lain unpublished all these years? It was not as though Fuller lacked for publishers. Bantam had brought out the novel version of The Big Red One in 1980. The Dark Page had been reissued by Avon in 1983, Crown of India by Critic’s Choice Paperbacks in 1986. Quint’s World had come out from Worldwide Library in 1988. It seems to me that one of these publishers would have jumped at the chance to publish Brainquake just a few years later.
But stranger things have happened. At Hard Case Crime we have turned up previously unpublished novels by luminaries such as James M. Cain, Donald E. Westlake (twice!), Roger Zelazny, David Dodge, Mickey Spillane and Lester Dent—why not Samuel Fuller?
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Fuller returned to the United States from France at the very end of his life. He died in 1997 at the age of 85, at home once more in the Hollywood Hills. Today, his legacy as a filmmaker is better known and more widely respected than ever before, in part because of the devoted efforts of his family and friends, most recently his daughter Samantha, who directed the 2013 documentary A Fuller Life, which The Hollywood Reporter praised for its depiction of “an indelibly influential persona that combined showman-like flamboyance, old-school masculinity and die-hard personal integrity to disarming and intoxicating degrees.”
That Fuller also had a legacy as a novelist is less well known. He was every bit as flamboyant and showman-like on the page as he was on the screen, and brought the same integrity and intensity, the same uncompromising, excoriating vision, to his books as to his films. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to remind readers of this, by giving his last book its first publication in the language in which he wrote it and the country he defended with his life.