Yes, clever plot twists both, but the result was to diminish my connection with the characters, and therefore with the story itself. Tainted heroes and wronged villains can be valid subjects in themselves, or can add complexity to crime stories, but MacDonald knew that, in this novel at least, readers would be best served by the uncomplicated collision of good and evil.
And he was skilled enough to make sure that simplicity did not mean superficiality. In The Executioners we have a rich tale of people unnerved, confused, and unsure about how to cope with this exquisite villain. Max Cady’s goal of destroying a family is a simple one. What’s far harder is for everyone else—read: the rest of us—to respond within the confines of our carefully circumscribed and sheltered lives. MacDonald makes clear that doing so is probably not possible. The only real answer is to meet evil on its own ground.
A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, Jeffery Deaver is an international number one best-selling author. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages. The author of twenty-nine novels, two collections of short stories and a nonfiction law book, he’s received or been short-listed for a number of awards around the world. His book The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers Association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window was also nominated for that prize. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year. Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award. He was recently short-listed for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author.
His latest novels are Carte Blanche, the latest James Bond continuation thriller; Edge; and The Burning Wire. His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into a movie by HBO starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. And yes, the rumors are true, he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns.
He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University. Visit him online at www.jefferydeaver.com.
The Pledge
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1958)
ELISABETTA BUCCIARELLI
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A highly regarded dramatist and essayist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) also wrote crime novels. While his plays are generally acknowledged to be influenced by the theater of the absurd, Dürrenmatt’s detective novels offer an unflinching realism that interrogates the reader as to his or her relationship with the genre. Das Versprechen (1958), subtitled Requiem for the Detective Novel, is the first-person account of a retiring homicide detective and his promise to a mother to find the killer of her eight-year-old girl. The novel was adapted for the film The Pledge (2001), directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson. Dürrenmatt is also known for his deeply cynical police inspector, Bärlach, who first appeared in 1950 in the novella Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and His Hangman).
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Das Versprechen (The Pledge) was first published in Switzerland in 1958. Written by Swiss dramatist, painter, and author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, it is the novel that, above all others, inspired me to weave my first noir crime plots. The main character is Police Inspector Matthäi, who, with a cold temperament and deep commitment to his work, finds himself investigating an incredibly complex case. An abhorrent crime has been committed against a seven-year-old blond girl who is found murdered in a forest just outside the Swiss village of Magendorf, near Zurich. The loathsome peddler who found her body is accused of being the perpetrator. He has traces of the girl’s blood on his clothes, and, like the victim, he is covered in chocolate. He also has a number of razor blades in his possession, which are deemed to be compatible with the murder weapon.
Following his confession, the man ends up hanging himself. To all intents and purposes, and, according to everyone involved, the case is closed. To everyone, that is, except to Matthäi, a guardian of law and order with those antihero traits commonly associated with noir mysteries rather than detective stories. He is cold and calculating, full of self-assuredness and with no apparent vices. He is stubborn, restless, tormented, and, even worse, his pursuit of a spasmodic trace of truth becomes his greatest inadequacy rather than his most enviable quality.
Profoundly struck by the drama that the girl’s family is going through, and by their composed yet excruciated reaction to their pain, Matthäi vows to find the murderer. Ultimately, it is this promise that will radically change his life. It is a promise to his soul, as the victim’s mother describes it. It goes beyond his simple duty as police inspector and becomes, at first, a rational and calculated challenge before degenerating into a battle with all the legitimate doubts and impediments that life places between an objective and the path that leads to it. One at a time, his colleagues withdraw their support from his investigation to the point that Matthäi gives up his job at the police station, determined to do things his way. He is convinced that the only possibility of finding the murderer is to lay a trap.
What motivates this decision? One could say “the folly of childhood,” an unusual sense of unrest that anyone who has daily contact with children will be familiar with. A drawing done by the victim depicts a giant man wearing a black hat as he holds out tiny hedgehogs to a young girl. A big dark car is drawn on the edge of the sheet of paper. Matthäi is absolutely convinced that it is a drawing of the murderer. In order to capture him, Matthäi will need the endurance of a fisherman: endless patience and the ability to choose both the right location and the correct bait. The ex–police inspector thus ends up identifying a petrol station between Zurich and the canton of Grisons in which to expose a similar-looking young girl to the maniac’s temptation, and there he lies in wait as if it were his only reason for living. The wait proves to be excruciating and nerve-racking, until the final denouement, when the cruelty of this case (or the cruelty of chaos) ironically deprives him of his ultimate objective: the capture of the culprit.
The Pledge is a grave and unsettling novel. It is claustrophobic and violent, laden with satire and denunciation. Its pages tangibly radiate the author’s critique of the society in which he lives, but it is not limited to Cold War Switzerland, then in search of economic and social reaffirmation. Dürrenmatt is also critical of an entire universe of rationalist certainties that are so rarely capable of reaching satisfactory solutions. As Dürrenmatt himself states, “the more meticulously man plans, the more likely he is to be subjected to chance.”
But The Pledge is also a novel about the nature of literary fiction, about the weakness of a plot created solely by clues, a plot that the author repeatedly challenges, stating, without any possibility of contradiction, that facts are never as they appear because they do not abide by mathematical rules. Quite the contrary, they respond better to the chaos of existence dominated by a kind of spectacle of the absurd.
The greatness of this book, always considered crime fiction yet at the same time defined as a true “requiem to the detective story” (as the Italian edition is subtitled), lies in the author’s determination to break away from clichés. Dürrenmatt demonstrates how the Truth (with a capital “T”) can be revealed through investigation: it is chaos that governs human destiny, not rationality. There is also a deep critique of an imperfect judicial system, satisfied simply to have a culprit while uncovering little of the underlying verity.
Crime writing, in Dürrenmatt’s hands, becomes an efficient instrument with which to meditate on life, on the human mind, and on the nature of plot. Skillfully regulated by the intuitions and clues of a thriller, The Pledge helps explain how, more often than not, man is in fact ruled by events despite his illusory conviction of dominating them.
> According to Dürrenmatt, a story always serves (or should serve) a secondary purpose. It is not just about entertainment, or providing the opportunity for voyeurism that often hides behind the vast popularity of this type of narrative, one that also expects a false and eternal happy ending aimed at restoring the status quo. No, above all the story should insist on exposing evil: that absolutely banal evil that torments man and is made up of wretchedness, cynicism, indifference, and nasty, everyday small-mindedness.
After reading this book I asked a number of friends and acquaintances if they had ever made a promise and, if so, what was it, and what was the outcome? This obsession with the importance of making a promise led me to discover its true essence: the necessity of being faithful and coherent even at the cost of sacrificing one’s life, of feeling responsible for one’s actions, of getting to the bottom of things despite everyone and everything.
Keeping a promise is perhaps anachronistic in this historical moment, where nothing counts and retracting has become an art. And that is why Dürrenmatt’s “little” story must legitimately be considered a classic, providing a basis for ongoing meditation and thoughtful analysis.
The Pledge is a harrowing, emotional, passionate, and desperate novel that does not offer a consolatory or resolved ending, but keeps alive the awareness that a good read (in any genre) is an antidote to the torpor of the mind. Ultimately, it asks the right questions, as opposed to providing the right answers.
Elisabetta Bucciarelli was born in Milan, Italy. She has written for theater, film, and television. As a mystery/crime writer, she is best known for her critically acclaimed series of novels that are set in Milan and feature Inspector Maria Dolores Vergani, the first of which, Happy Hour, was published in 2005. It was followed by Dalla parte del torto in 2007, Femmina de luxe (2008), Io ti perdono (2009), Ti voglio credere (2010) and Corpi di scarto (2011). Bucciarelli’s screenplay for the short film Amati Matti (Beloved Matti, 1996) received a Special Mention at the 53rd Venice Film Festival. Visit her online at www.elisabettabucciarelli.it.
The Scene
by Clarence Cooper Jr. (1960)
GARY PHILLIPS
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Clarence Cooper Jr. (1934–78) led a short and tragic life. His first novel, The Scene, was published when he was only twenty-six, and won acclaim for its narrative audacity and its depiction of the lifestyles of the heroin-addicted in the titular Scene, the place in any city where everything is for sale. Unfortunately, Cooper, who was himself a heroin addict, was already in jail by the time the reviews appeared, and his lifestyle meant that mainstream publishers ran scared of him, relegating his subsequent novels to cheap pulp editions. He made one great, final effort for The Farm (1967), a daring, experimental love story between addicts set in the infamous Lexington Narcotics Farm, but the novel was judged less by its bravery and quality than by its author’s personal failings. Cooper died, penniless and homeless, at the Twenty-third Street YMCA in New York.
* * *
In brooding crime films like The Killers, Detour, and Double Indemnity, the stories begin with the sense of the foreboding that is the undercurrent to the story about to unfold in flashback. In Double Indemnity the antihero Walter Neff is dying from a gunshot wound. In The Killers, the Swede awaits, Zen-like, his inevitable demise. In Detour, Al Roberts sits quietly in a diner listening to a song on the juke that used to be the song for him and his gal before it all went wrong.
I don’t know if the late Clarence Cooper Jr. was a fan of crime films, but in his novel The Scene he puts the story in motion with murder and a flashback, and there is certainly foreboding.
In The Scene, we are initially introduced to Rudy Black. He is young, ambitious, and ruthless, and all about fattening his pockets. In his dog-eat-dog arena, these are the strengths that he needs to survive. The Scene is an area of an unnamed town, though it could be modeled on parts of Cooper’s native Detroit. Cooper describes it this way:
All the elements of the Scene—the lights, the whores, the tricks in their cars, the razzle of jazz music from the record shop on the corner of Seventy-seventh and Maple—repelled Rudy, the pimp and pusher, made him feel alien, a person without stable ground or purpose, although he knew no other atmosphere but this.
The Scene was originally published in 1960 by Crown, a division of Random House. The New York Herald-Tribune noted, “Not even Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm burned with the ferocious intensity you’ll find here.” Like the two erstwhile godfathers of ghetto lit who would come down the line a little later in the 1960s, Donald Goines and Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim (a pimp whose life and fiction would inspire gangsta rapper Tracy Marrow, aka Ice-T, to adopt his swagger and moniker), Cooper wrote from hard-earned experience.
Goines, like Rudy Black, had been a hophead and a third-rate pimp. Reading Iceberg Slim’s fictionalized biography Pimp: The Story of My Life while in the joint, Goines was still behind bars when he wrote his first two books. Cooper had also served two years at Iona Penitentiary, among others jolts, and by the time The Scene and The Syndicate came out in 1960, he would be back inside.
Cooper was also, like Goines and Beck, a heroin addict, and although he managed to get clean at times, he would, like his doomed characters, find its pull inescapable. Yet he could also be coldly detached, writing passages in The Scene that are harrowing in their authenticity as he shows us the allure and the curse of H. There are various other characters in the book, and Cooper shifts points of view among them: booster girls, first-timers, single mother Black Bertha who pushes junk but doesn’t use, a couple of black cops—the growling, cynical veteran Mance Davis and college-educated, idealistic Virgil Patterson. Rollers, the junkies call the cops, out to flip the weak addicts and make the big bust of the Man and the man above the Man, Big Boy. Cooper effortlessly switches in and out of their perspectives. In a cinematic way, he’d cut from a scene before it unfolded fully, keeping his pace fast, sometimes jittery like one of his junkies in search of his “stuff.”
Cooper’s book came along at a time when the civil rights movement was burgeoning. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56,7 a few years before The Scene appeared, had been successful, further energizing the fight for equal rights. This aspiration by America’s black citizenry was foreshadowed in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man and crystallized in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, which ran on Broadway in 1959. Sure, the corrosive effects of racism had been chronicled in books like Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, a kind of sociopolitical crime novel. But what was the black intelligentsia of the day to make of The Scene, with its unapologetic descent into a dark underworld where junkies betrayed one another for a bottle cap of “stuff”? This was not literature that uplifted the race. Cooper wasn’t profiled in the pages of Ebony or, I imagine, discussed much, if at all, among the self-identified arts and literature crowd. The Urban League wouldn’t be inviting him to speak at their annual dinner.
It didn’t help that Cooper was imprisoned again as The Scene garnered attention. According to the intro to the Old School Books edition, published by W. W. Norton, Cooper played bass in a prison band during this period of imprisonment, and pounded out more novels such as Weed and The Dark Messenger. These books didn’t get mainstream treatment like The Scene, and were instead published by Regency, a second-tier outfit of the day.
Yakuza-like—that is, with a perverse honor at being among the lowest—it’s noteworthy that Beck and Goines were also published by an outsider press, Holloway House. This was an L.A.-based publisher whose white owners came out of the soft-core girlie market, publishing magazines like Knight and Adam. One of their first books was The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, but they hit their stride as the “publishers of the black experience” with titles like Daddy Cool by Goines and Airtight Willie & Me by Beck. Daddy Cool was also republished by Old School Books, and Airtight has recently been returned to print by Cash Money Content, the publishing offshoot from the Cash Money rap record label.
Back then you didn’t find Holloway House paperbacks in most bookstores. As a teenager, I bought them at the Thrifty’s drugstore in my South Central, Los Angeles, neighborhood. These days, those first-edition Regency and Holloway House paperbacks fetch a nice price.
When, in 1996, Old School Books republished The Scene, it was on the cusp of the explosion of ghetto lit: novels—initially self-published—that reflected a gangsta-rap sensibility of slanging dope big-time and getting over. Cooper, and other forgotten black writers of an underworld aesthetic such as Herbert Simmons and Ronald Deane Pharr, also revived by Old School, didn’t really fit into that category; nor did they quite fit among the new wave of black crime and mystery writers whose books had started to drop in the late 1980s.
Cooper died in 1978 from an overdose while rooming at the Twenty-third Street YMCA in Manhattan. His last book, The Farm, had been published in 1967, once again by Crown. Apparently, that was the last thing he completed. Tony O’Neill, in his piece on Cooper in the Guardian newspaper book blog, said about this last novel, “Cooper wrote an institutional novel as ambitious and complex as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He also noted in his piece that Cooper’s The Scene had been favorably compared to William Burroughs in a New Yorker review.
So if you’re feeling bogue, need to fix your crime jones, read The Scene. To paraphrase Rudy Black, it’ll be like mainlining an ounce of stuff for Christmas.
Books to Die For Page 20