Although she was born in Texas in 1921, Patricia Highsmith lived most of her early life in Manhattan with her mother and stepfather, the artist Stanley Highsmith. She grew up in a low-rent bohemian atmosphere on the outer fringes of New York’s art scene. A precocious child, she was a voracious reader of fiction, science, art history, and psychology. She had always known that she was going to be a writer, and at Barnard she took literature and English composition.
Her first job in publishing was as one of the bullpen scripters producing comic strips for the publisher Ned Pines, eventually moving up the chain of Fawcett Comics to work on early iconic characters such as Golden Arrow and Captain Midnight.
At a suggestion from Truman Capote she began Strangers on a Train at the Yaddo Writers Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Determined to make a splash with her debut, Highsmith saw Strangers as an attempt at an American Crime and Punishment. She admired and envied Dostoyevsky, but read him somewhat cynically through the prism of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Where Dostoyevsky felt that a fallen man could be redeemed through God’s infinite love, Highsmith saw no such possibility. Like Camus’s Meursault in L’Etranger, Highsmith’s oeuvre is filled with outsiders attempting to overcome the mores of a tedious, bourgeois society.
Strangers on a Train begins with architect Guy Haines and spoiled scion Charles Bruno meeting in the Pullman car of a train going to the fictional town of Metcalf, Texas. Bruno is oily and unpleasant from the get-go, and perhaps a less weary Guy would have had sufficient will to resist Bruno’s demand that they dine together.
Bruno discovers that Guy is having trouble getting a divorce from his wife, Miriam, who stands not only in the way of Guy’s happiness with his new girlfriend, Anne, but whose vulgarity is holding back Guy’s career as a promising architect with a white-shoe New York firm. In another moment of weakness, Guy admits that if Miriam could only be disposed of, many of his problems would disappear. Bruno, too, wants someone dead. He despises his money-grubbing father, whose affairs embarrass his saintly mother. Wouldn’t it be interesting, Bruno suggests, if each committed the other’s murder while the beneficiary had a watertight alibi? Guy is repulsed by the idea, and forgets it—and Bruno—when he gets off the train.
Unfortunately for Guy, Bruno is a single-minded psychopath who has gotten it into his head that he and Guy have reached a tacit agreement. At the first opportunity he takes the train to Metcalf, follows Miriam to a funfair, waits until she is alone, and strangles her.
Over the following weeks and months, Bruno begins hounding Guy to fulfill his side of the bargain. He turns up at Guy’s offices, at various social occasions, and even at his home, passing himself off as a family friend. Bruno begins blackmailing Guy, telling him that, unless he murders Bruno’s old man, he will go to the police and implicate Guy.
Never strong to begin with, Guy starts to unravel, seeing Bruno everywhere, hearing voices, and hallucinating. In order to save his sanity he finally kills Bruno’s father. For a while things improve, but then detective Arthur Gerard gets on the case and begins to pick apart Bruno’s frequent, silly, and unnecessary lies.
There is an elegiac Spenglerian quality to Highsmith’s writing: the Long Islanders in Strangers, like Western man in general, have become spoiled, decayed, and corrupt. Bruno kills not because he hates his father, but because this act (or any violent act) is a way of staving off the fatal ennui that comes with twentieth-century life. He is without scruples or regret.
Guy, however, is crippled by guilt and shame. On the verge of madness, he travels to Metcalf to find Miriam’s boyfriend in order to confess his role in her death. The diffident hick boyfriend, Owen, is not interested in Guy’s story, and tells him to let bygones be bygones. He, too, was glad that Miriam had been killed because she had become a nuisance. Aghast, Guy realizes that he is not going to get beaten up by Owen; in fact, he is not going to get any kind of absolution or penance at all.
Patricia Highsmith tells this deceptively simple story in a prose style that is economical and quietly muscular. She avoids hysteria and hyperbole and builds Guy’s prison of remorse brick by toxic brick. The story is a brilliant and entirely believable character study of two flawed men brought low by their fragility and aimlessness. Guy and Bruno are different sides of the same coin, and the novel itself is prophetic of much contemporary fiction: in a postironic, disenchanted world, there are no great causes or faiths to believe in; there is no God watching over us, and if we can get away with murder, there are no consequences in this world or any other.
Neglected as a child, Patricia Highsmith became a somewhat mean-spirited, standoffish young adult, and in middle age her misanthropy morphed into full-blown anti-Semitism and paranoia. She became, in effect, a less charming version of her Nietzschean alter ego Tom Ripley. Ripley has none of the qualms about killing his fellow human beings that so haunt Guy, or even Bruno, and this is one of the reasons why I feel that Strangers on a Train is Highsmith’s best novel. As she grew more successful and confident, the humanity began to drain from her books. Most of us would not act like the unruffled, aloof Tom Ripley, but every one of us could see himself falling into the abyss of cowardice and mendacity that finally drives poor Guy Haines to kill.
Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He moved to New York in the early 1990s where he worked in bars, road gangs, and construction crews. In 2001 he moved to Denver, Colorado, where he taught high school English. His debut crime novel, Dead I Well May Be, was short-listed for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. His 2010 novel, Fifty Grand, won the Spinetingler Award and was long-listed for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. His most recent book is The Cold Cold Ground. Visit him online at www.adrianmckinty.blogspot.com.
The Tiger in the Smoke
by Margery Allingham (1952)
PHIL RICKMAN
* * *
Margery Allingham (1904–66) described mystery writing as “both a prison and a refuge,” the form providing her with the discipline and framework that she required to house her stories. She was the creator of Albert Campion, an aristocratic yet modest detective who, over the course of forty years, developed from the “silly ass” of Mystery Mile into a man of formidable intelligence, aided and abetted by his sidekicks, the former criminal Magersfontein Lugg; the solid, dependable policeman Stanislaus Oates; and Lady Amanda Fitton, who subsequently becomes his wife. Allingham’s formula for the mystery novel was deceptively simple—“a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it”—but her execution was consummate, and nowhere more so than in Tiger in the Smoke.
* * *
The rebirth of British crime fiction came with the glint of a blade in the fog—Jack Havoc, psychotic knife artist, springing fully formed into the rubble and rationing of a war-weary London.
A man of his time, but also startlingly modern. We can see that now, but not many people did when The Tiger in the Smoke came out. A string of savage murders with only one obvious killer—what kind of mystery was that?
It was many years later, long after the now elusive black-and-white movie, when I first discovered Tiger. I was about thirteen, and remember bringing it home from the library: a shabby old bottle-green hardback without a dust jacket, the kind of book your mum would rather that you didn’t leave on a clean sofa. In fact, I may well have been the last borrower before it wound up in a council skip.
I thought it was the best novel I’d ever read. Atmosphere you could cut with . . . well, a knife.
Born in 1904 into a family of writers and Fleet Street journalists, Margery Allingham was probably the first writer to outgrow the so-called Golden Age of the crime novel.
Her hero was Albert Campion, an upper-class apparent twit with unexpected connections in the worlds of criminal investigation and national security. Mr. Campion was played by Peter Davison in the BBC adaptations of eight Allingham novels broadcast in 1989 and 1990, mainly classic country
house–type mysteries with the willowy, bespectacled Campion at the wheel of his Lagonda.
What was noticeable at the time was the one serious omission.
They didn’t go near The Tiger in the Smoke.
Albert Campion still appears in Tiger but, in the aftermath of World War II, it’s a sober, middle-aged Campion who, for family reasons, is peripherally involved in the hunt for Jack Havoc, on the run from Wormwood Scrubs and leaving a bloody trail of stab victims across London. Havoc is “that rarity, a genuinely wicked man” who evokes “the ancient smell of evil, acrid and potent as the stench of fever.” You know something fundamental has changed in the world of fictional detection when Campion says, “The days when little Albert charged into battle single-handed have gone for good. Havoc is police work.”
And Allingham is ready for the new age with a new kind of cop. Gone are the faintly dopey Lestrades and Inspector Japps of yore. Enter DCI Charlie Luke: young, sharp, intelligent, committed, and driven. A hard man of the new school who politely shoulders the diffident Campion clean offstage. Luke is not exactly the mirror image of Jack Havoc, but you get the idea.
The actual force for good in the novel—another departure after decades of wispy vicars—is old Canon Avril, patriarch of a cozy little London community. It’s the wisdom of Avril that finally unwraps Havoc’s psychology in a late-night church confrontation that has clear hints of an exorcism.
But none of these unforgettable characters has the central role in Tiger. The smoke in the title has a double meaning: the famous slang name for London—the Big Smoke—and a description of November fog at its most toxic. The fog is this novel’s essential medium, right from its second sentence: “The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water.”
And Allingham doesn’t give up there, oh no. The fog is a “grimy counterpane” and “greasy drapery” with its “smell of ashes grown cold.” The fog is Jack Havoc’s best friend in his homicidal search for the treasure he believes he deserves, a treasure intended for Meg, the Canon’s daughter whose husband was killed in the war—or was he?
It would have been easy to make Havoc just another modern-day Jack the Ripper, but Allingham gives him substance and humanity, of a kind, and a reason to rip, linked to a pervading postwar mood among working-class ex-servicemen—the relief that it was all over giving way to anger and disillusion. What separates Havoc from the tattered band of disabled veterans he hangs out with is a black rage powered by a sense of invulnerability he calls “the Science of Luck.” Without exposing the reader to a single image of extreme violence, Allingham has created a killer who makes Hannibal Lecter look like an effete poser.
You can imagine regular readers being slightly aghast to see a posh lady novelist getting down and dirty, but she’s clearly loving it, and perhaps a little in love with Charlie Luke. The excitement sets light to her prose. We get the “shriek” of a sash window flying up, and a lovely description of the damage inflicted by a German V2 bomb, “half the street coming down very slowly like a woman fainting.”
We get lots of enveloping atmosphere, but never a hint of melodrama. Allingham even backs away from a classic cliffhanger because she feels the need to explain the physical effects of psychological damage and knows that there won’t be room for it later.
She uses light and texture like a good film director. After the murk of London, the climax takes place in the blinding clarity of a winter’s day on the French coast when, in a scene of tension and strange pathos, Jack Havoc—sapped like a vampire at sunrise—finally discovers his treasure.
As you might expect, Tiger shows its age now and then. Detectives are routinely described as “dicks”; someone says, “I ain’t chatty but I’m not funky”; and a character’s real name is revealed as Johnny Cash. But its teeth aren’t blunted and its grip hasn’t loosened; no joyful relief in the last chapter, no formal stitching up of loose ends. Approaching the close of the era of suspects-gathered-in-the-library, the final sentence is laconic, stark, and entirely satisfying.
• • •
In search of a new copy of Tiger to reread for this piece, I discovered that there wasn’t one. Another masterpiece had been allowed to slip out of print.
Now that’s a crime.
English author Phil Rickman published his debut, Candlenight, in 1991. The critics acclaimed him as the next great British horror writer, a reputation enhanced by his following four titles. In 1998, Rickman published The Wine of Angels, the first of a long series of novels that blended crime narratives and the supernatural, and featured Merrily Watkins, a Church of England priest and exorcist. There have been eleven titles in the series to date, the most recent being The Secrets of Pain (2011). Rickman also writes under the pseudonyms Will Kingdom and Thom Madley. In 2010 he published the first of a proposed historical series, The Bones of Avalon. Visit him online at www.philrickman.co.uk.
Black Wings Has My Angel (aka One for the Money)
by Elliott Chaze (1953)
BILL PRONZINI
* * *
Lewis Elliott Chaze (1915–90) was a Louisiana-born writer and journalist who spent much of his later career in Mississippi as the city editor of the Hattiesburg American. With tongue set gently in cheek, he attributed his desire to write fiction to a combination of ego and money. This resulted in ten novels, both mysteries and nonmysteries, including Tiger in the Honeysuckle (1965), set against the backdrop of the civil rights struggle in the United States, as well as short stories and articles for most of the leading magazines of his day, including Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker.
* * *
I grew up reading and admiring the paperback original crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s. What publishers such as Fawcett Gold Medal, Dell, Avon, Lion, and others succeeded in doing with these books was to adapt the tried-and-true pulp formula of the previous three decades to postwar American society, with all its changes in lifestyle, morality, and newfound sophistication. Their “life on the mean streets, anything goes” policy drew into their stables not only such established hardcover writers as W. R. Burnett, Cornell Woolrich, Sax Rohmer, Chester Himes, Thomas B. Dewey, and Wade Miller, but also a host of former pulpsters and talented newcomers who went on to have substantial careers in the field: Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), John D. MacDonald, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, Day Keene, Bruno Fischer, Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, Stephen Marlowe, Lawrence Block, and Donald Westlake.
These and others produced a host of minor and cult classics for the softcover market, in particular Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, John D. MacDonald’s The Damned, David Goodis’s Street of the Lost, Charles Williams’s Hell Hath No Fury (aka The Hot Spot), and Gil Brewer’s A Killer Is Loose. But for my money, Black Wings Has My Angel—a one-shot by career newspaperman and part-time novelist Elliott Chaze, who did not publish another piece of crime fiction for sixteen years—is not only the best of the Gold Medal titles, but ranks second only to The Killer Inside Me as the finest of all softcover noir novels.
Black Wings Has My Angel originally appeared in April 1953. It had the usual lurid paperback cover art of the period and a typically provocative teaser line: “She had the face of a Madonna and a heart made of dollar bills.” The brief back-cover blurb was equally melodramatic:
It was my own fault, the way it blew up in my face.
I had planned it so carefully.
Until I ran into Virginia.
Virginia and a hundred grand just couldn’t mix.
Maybe if you saw her you’d understand. Face by Michelangelo, clothes they drape on those models in Vogue, and a past out of a tabloid front page.
Smart guy, that’s me, who dreamed the heist for a year—the armored car, the dead guard, the cool green bills . . . the getaway.
Then Virginia, who came for one paid hour—and stayed for all eternity.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But that poorly contrived capsule description does no justice whatsoever to the novel itself, giving no hint of its power and
intensity, the depth of its dark-side character development, its bleak social commentary, the existential savagery of its final pages. In his brief memoir about Chaze (in a piece published in the Oxford American [2000]), Barry Gifford called the book “an astonishingly well written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime,” but not even that praise is sufficient. Black Wings Has My Angel is a book that must be experienced, not read quickly for casual entertainment. It makes demands on the reader, as any piece of quality fiction does, and delivers hammer blows where other noir novels provide light raps.
Essentially Black Wings is a two-character story. The narrator, escaped convict Tim Sunblade (not his real name, which is never revealed, but an alias adopted after his jailbreak “because it smells of the out of doors”), has been hiding from the law by roughnecking on an oil-drilling rig in the South on the Atchafayala River. While relaxing in a local motel he meets and eventually falls for Virginia, a stunning blond, violet-eyed, high-priced call girl who is also on the run. Both are corrupt, beset by money, lust, and private demons, but believing themselves to be more or less in control of their destinies. When they team up and begin feeding each other’s hungers, they become a kind of cyclonic force that demolishes their illusions about themselves and each other and whirls them along a path of mutual destruction.
Sunblade is the more complex of the two. Whereas Virginia is an unrepentant bitch, as blackhearted as any woman in fiction, Sunblade has at times led a respectable life and possesses a conscience that wars against his dark side—an ongoing battle he is doomed to lose. As Max Allan Collins wrote in a review of the novel in 1001 Midnights, “Chaze’s anti-hero is too complex to be described as amoral; his immoral deeds haunt him in a manner an amoral individual would shrug off.”
Books to Die For Page 17