The Big Click
May 2013 (Issue 8)
The Big Click is an electronic magazine of crime fiction. We publish bimonthly online and for various e-reader formats. Our mission is to find the best of new crime fiction in a variety of modes—we are especially interested in noir, confessional, weird and “literary” fiction that depict and interrogate crime and social trespass.
The Staff
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: Jeremiah Tolbert
Associate Editor: Seth Cadin
Associate Editor: Molly Tanzer
Editorial Consultant: Nick Mamatas
© 2013 The Big Click.
Cover artwork by Maria Raia.
Ebook design by Clockpunk Studios.
www.thebigclickmag.com
May Editorial
by The Editors
Welcome to the beginning of year two of The Big Click! It’s a been a great year so far, and we have a lot in store. So much that indeed we have resorted to bulletpoints like the cretins you work with and their horrifying PowerPoint slide shows.
You can now subscribe. Indeed, if you like us, you should subscribe. We’re offering subscriptions via Weightless Books, for we are always independent. $17.94 for a year, and we’ll appear right on your ereader the way a criminal can show up in your bedroom—when you least expect it. And with a knife.
We are thrilled that Ken Bruen’s “The Angel of Hospitality”, from our debut issue is a nominee for the Spinetingler Award for best short story on the web. We hope you voted. Hell, we hope we won!
We are even more thrilled to report that our regular columnist Tom Piccirilli has had a successful brain surgery, and his cancer seems to be in remission. While he recovers, we have brought in Barry Graham to be our interim regular columnist. You may remember Barry’s story “Big Davey Joins the Majority”; his non-fiction is as provocative, and rough-and-tumble.
Oh, and stories, do we have stories! Joe Clifford is one of the leading exemplars of what we’ve started calling the East Bay Noir scene. (Is that dying for an anthology or what?) And coming at you from across the Atlantic is Tony Mason, the writing partner of the wonderful UK writer Dreda Say Mitchell. We need more of their stuff in North America! So be sure to subscribe, or buy our ebook issues right from us, so we can continue to scour the world for the best in crime fiction.
And some teasers: next time we’ll have a story from Jason Ridler, and one from Ann Sterzinger. Yes, we will do a fundraising project and you can have the opportunity to own publisher Jeremy Tolbert’s hat! (He sweats in it when he eats…) And this autumn, we may just throw open submissions for a special theme issue. So keep your ears to the ground, your bodies in the gutter, and your eyes focused on the stars…till next time.
—The Editors
Noir: The Marxist Art Form
by Barry Graham
There were rat footprints in the dried lard in the frying pan. Sometimes the rats woke me, but this time I had slept through their visit. They were now a fact of life, like dogs or pigeons.
It was Raeberry Street, Maryhill, Glasgow in 1975. The cleansing department was on strike, and mountains of plastic bags full of garbage were piled in the back courts of the crumbling tenements. The flats didn’t have bathrooms or hot water, just closet-sized toilets.
This was how we lived, but it was not what we read. The most popular books read by children were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels, about a group of upper-class English children who had adventures and solved mysteries. The most popular books among the adults, I think, were Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and Barbara Cartland’s romances. We kids also liked American comics. I remember standing on top of the midden, pretending to be Superman atop a tall building, yelling, “Up, up and away!” but I couldn’t fly out of there.
It was how we lived, but it was not what we watched on TV. Whether it was Upstairs, Downstairs—a soap about the English aristocracy—or Coronation Street, a soap about working class people in the North of England—there were no rats. There was hot water, and bathtubs. There was no mother of five knocking on a neighbor’s door to ask for help because it was payday and instead of coming home from his job at the butcher’s, her husband had disappeared into the pubs, and would not come home until Sunday. In the books we read and the TV we watched, money—or rather the lack of it—was never mentioned. The characters engaged in their dramas, mundane or life-threatening, marrying or divorcing or fucking or murdering one another without ever discussing rent arrears, lack of food, or utilities being cut off.
That year, the film Jaws was released, and broke all-time box-office records. Because of this, the novel it was based on became ubiquitous, in paperback with the image from the film’s poster on the cover. The film, a masterpiece of suspense, was the standard story of a heroic individual—a police chief, played by Roy Scheider—who wants to close his town’s beach because of shark attacks, but is overruled by greedy officials who want tourist dollars.
But the novel is less about man-eating sharks than the fear of poverty. Brody, the police chief, is struggling to get by. His wife, who comes from a wealthy family, is embarrassed about having married beneath her station, and is so resentful and bored that she has an affair. The reason that the town’s elected officials and business people conspire to keep the beaches open is not because they are evil and greedy and don’t care that people might get eaten by the shark; they are desperate, because they depend on the summer tourist season for their livelihood, and are afraid of losing their homes if the beach is closed.
Although the characters in the novel Jaws had a standard of living that seemed fabulous to me, it was the first time in fiction that I encountered the fear that defined the lives of everyone I knew.
The first time I saw that fear on TV was when I happened to watch The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 film that shows how little has changed in the American psyche in the last half-century. Ostensibly a science-fiction movie, it is really about the same fear as the novel Jaws. The protagonist lives with his wife of six years in a suburban house that, had the movie been shot in color, wouldn’t look any different from a contemporary one. The kitchen, with its fridge and its counters and its toaster, is unsettling in its familiarity…
And the horror in this movie is the protagonist’s fear of losing that privileged, comfortable, convenient lifestyle. When he realizes he’s shrinking, he wonders how he’s going to be able to hold onto it. When he decides to sell his story to the media, it’s because he isn’t getting enough work and is falling into debt. When he gets to be only a few inches tall, his wife sets him up a doll’s house—anything to preserve the illusion of affluent white America. This film bears witness to the fact that the American Dream has always been a nightmare.
Depressing though this sounds, watching it in a filthy tenement with rat footprints in the frying pan, I was exhilarated—because, though we didn’t have a fridge or a toaster or kitchen counters, this was a film that seemed more real than Coronation Street.
I got older, and I found noir. Not just a genre, but the most honest depiction of the struggles of real life. And by the time I read Marx, I knew that he was right, because films like Detour and The Big Heat and Kiss of Death and The Hustler and Get Carter had shown me, and the novels of James M. Cain and David Goodis and Jim Thompson and George V. Higgins had told me.
In so-called “literary fiction” (which is just another genre), I mostly read only about the psychological hang-ups of affluent white people whose affluence never seemed threatened. There were exceptions, like the petty-bourgeois drama of George Orwell’s first three novels, and some of Graham Green’s novels. Significantly, Greene separated his genre novels from his literary ones, giving t
hem the subtitle “An Entertainment,” but it is in these “entertainments” that he most seriously reflects class issues.
This has been true of noir from the early days, and is true now. Take the 1953 classic The Big Heat, with its blunt acknowledgment of class and poverty. The protagonist, Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), a cop, and his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) discuss how fortunate they are to be able to eat steak for dinner; he tells her that his colleagues don’t believe him when he says they can afford steak, and she tells him that they won’t be able to afford it when they have their second child. Even now, they only have one steak, which they cut in half and share. This poverty, and fear of it getting worse, pervades the film. The reason Bannion’s boss refuses to stand up against police corruption is that his wife is worried about his pension— and Katie tells Bannion that she sympathizes with them.
Two decades later, witness George V. Higgins’ novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and the magnificent film starring Robert Mitchum. Both book and film show criminals as working stiffs, and so get to the real heart of the crime story.
In any film noir, what do the characters want? It is always the same thing. The characters played by Mitchum in Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter may be evil, but it is not evil that drives them. They are driven by the same need that drives the weary, sad, kindly Eddie Coyle.
Nowadays, we have the novels of Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis, Gary Phillips, Charlie Stella, Larry Fondation, Benjamin Whitmer, Vicki Hendricks, Tony Black, Ray Banks. We have such films as Texas Killing Fields, The Town, Killing Them Softly, Killer Joe. Like their antecedents, these are not mysteries, and they are not fantasies. They shatter the mainstream fantasy of what is “normal,” and depict the ordinary madness of life, the third world hidden inside the first.
Where did it start? Even while Arthur Conan Doyle was writing his Sherlock Holmes cozies in the 19th Century (which, it should be remembered, he lifted from Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin), his brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, was writing the dark tales of Raffles, Victorian gentleman and cricket star who moonlights as a burglar. Raffles seems to be a gentleman of leisure, but it’s all about surface appearance and desperate avoidance of losing his upper crust status. While enjoying membership of exclusive clubs and hobnobbing with the aristocracy, he is always one theft away from destitution.
This is the demon that haunts all the Raffles stories. When he teams up with his sidekick, Bunny Manders, at the beginning of the first book, it is because Manders is facing bankruptcy and is so desperate that he helps Raffles rob a jewelry shop.
In the second book, Manders has just gotten out of prison and is applying for menial jobs. Raffles, who is thought to have died, is living in squalid rooms and still living by his wits. Little is said of Manders’ time in prison, but much is made of the now reduced circumstances that the two men now must endure.
Explaining his criminal ways, Raffles tells Manders, “Of course, it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with.”
There are those of us who argue that capitalism is a crime. For almost a century, noir has shown that (with the exception of “crimes of passion”), in the absence of capitalism crime could not exist. When the lightbulb is bare, darkness increases.
© 2013 Barry Graham.
About Barry Graham
Barry Graham is a Caledonian gentleman of letters whose previous occupations have included prize-fighting, monastic vocation, the fourth estate, vagabondage and the general avoidance of honest toil. Along the way, he has penned more than a dozen books, including the novels The Book of Man (an American Library Association Best Book of the Year) and When It All Comes Down to Dust (a Mystery People Best Book of the Year). Three of his novels and a collection of his stories have been translated into French.
In 1995, he fled his native land for the U.S.A., and thus far has managed to avoid deportation. He spent 12 years in the cactus jungle of Phoenix, Arizona, five years in the hell realm of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is now a denizen of Portland, Oregon.
The Fifth Witness
by Tony Mason
Only five people knew how James Davitt had been killed. Four of those were among the police officers who’d been trying to arrest him. The statements they gave afterwards were all consistent. They’d been stationed at the rear of the house where Davitt had been living under an assumed name. When their unit had kicked their way through the front door, the suspect had escaped through a window into the back garden.
He was carrying a pistol. All four of them were clear about that. They shouted a warning that they were armed and told him to throw down his gun. Davitt hesitated and then made a break for it. He scaled the garden wall and let himself down the other side into a narrow lane that led up from the street to a second-hand car lot. The officers went over the wall in pursuit. But in the seconds that followed, realising that he was trapped and that the police were everywhere, Davitt had turned and raised his gun at them. Another warning was shouted. That too was ignored. Fearing for his own and his fellow officer’s lives, one of the cops fired a single bullet to Davitt’s head. Despite their frantic efforts to keep him alive, he was pronounced dead half an hour later by a doctor who attended the scene.
But that wasn’t how the fifth witness remembered it. That wasn’t how he remembered it at all.
Tom Crowley had been fast asleep when he was woken by the sound of breaking glass, running, shouting and what sounded like muffled explosions. He looked at his clock. 2.00 a.m. Rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. He lived in a rough area of South London. There was often trouble in the night and he didn’t want to get involved. Didn’t want to see or hear anything. Didn’t want any trouble with local petty criminals or gangs. But when he heard the sound of voices and movement in the lane that ran under his slightly open bedroom window, his curiosity got the better of him. He went over and moved the curtain a few inches so he could see what was happening.
Below, a man seemed to be lying on the ground. There were a group of other men around him in dark overalls and baseball caps. Some were standing, some were crouching but it was dark and raining so it was difficult to see. But the prone man had his head raised and Tom was sure his arms were tied behind his back with white straps. Then there was an explosion like a box of fireworks being ignited by a loose match. A gunshot. Tom ducked down instinctively below the window sill.
There were shouts and screams from the lane: “What the fuck?! What the fuck…?!”
He didn’t dare look outside again. But outside came looking for him and there was a hammering on his front door. He ran downstairs and checked through the peephole. Two cops were there, with sub machine guns slung over their shoulders. They told him to evacuate the area as a ‘serious incident’ was taking place. So he got out and went with a neighbour to an all night burger bar a mile away.
When Tom got back a few hours later, the street was full of residents excited by the goings on in the night. The house where Davitt had lived and the lane where he had died were sealed off with tape. Meanwhile the first reporters were running around trying to get a story. The police allowed Tom to go back to his home and when the journalists realised he was virtually Davitt’s next door neighbour, they moved in.
“Did you know the bloke who got killed?”
That was the first Tom knew that Davitt was dead. “He got killed?”
“Sure—the cops shot the bastard.”
“No, I didn’t know him. Everyone keeps themselves to themselves round here.”
“OK—so did you hear the shootout?”
Tom was baffled, “I didn’t hear any shootout … I saw the police had a bloke on the ground, but I didn’t hear any shootout, no.”
“You saw the police had a bloke on the ground…?”
Tom Crowley had made a terrible mistake.
***
The following day, Tom saw all the newspapers with their banner headlines—
“Top Irish terrorist dies in gun
battle with police.”
“Fugitive bomber was preparing bloodbath say cops.”
“The face of evil—hero cops take down merchant of death.”
But there were other, less sympathetic, headlines in the more pompous newspapers.
“Eyewitness casts doubt on police version of killing.”
“James Davitt ‘executed’ by police says witness.”
“Terror suspect detained by police BEFORE death.”
At first Tom wondered where the papers had found this new witness—it took a few reports before he realised who it was. Him. And despite the fact he’d refused to give it to the reporters, in one article, he was identified by name. In another, his photo appeared, showing him at his front door. When he got back home from work, he began calling news desks and frantically trying to correct their mistakes.
“But I never said that … where did you get my name from … I never said the police shot the bloke in cold blood…”
Bored receptionists promised to pass on his concerns; others suggested writing letters if he was unhappy with the reports or taking his case to the Press Complaints Council. But it was too late. While he was arguing with one woman on the phone, there was a knock on the front door.
He opened it to find two plain clothes policemen looking stony faced.
“Mr Crowley? We understand you may be a material witness to the enquiry being conducted into the death of Mr James Davitt. We’d like you to come to Scotland Yard in the morning, answer a few questions and make a formal statement. We’ll send a car over for you.”
“But I didn’t see anything.”
“We understand from reports in the press that you did. But in any event, we’d like to speak to you anyway. Would you like a lawyer present?”
“A lawyer? What the hell do I need a lawyer for? I haven’t done anything.”
The Big Click: May 2013 (Issue 8) Page 1