perfect noir greatness: Black Wings Has My Angel, by Elliott Chaze

(read in June)



9781590179161
NYRB Classics, 2016
originally published 1953
209 pp

paperback

"...real life is not a series of nice interlocking ripples graded for size and fitting into a pattern that can be called off like your ABCs. It's a bunch of foolish tiny things that don't add one way or the other, except that they happened and passed the time." -- 62

As I am fond of saying, plot isn't always everything in a good crime novel, and Elliot Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel is a great case in point.  It's also now the best crime novel I've read so far this year, and I do not say those words lightly.

After a sixteen-week gig working as a roughneck on a drilling rig in Louisiana, Tim Sunblade has his first bath in four months in his flea-bitten hotel in Krotz Springs.  A knock on the door later he meets prostitute Virginia; three days later they're on the road together, Virginia having warned him that "when the money's gone ... I'm gone too."  When Tim tells her in return that when that day comes, he'll probably be sick of her, she replies in what turns out to be prophetic words: "It'll be better if you're sick of me."   The two begin to make their way west where Tim has big plans that initially don't include Virginia, but as they make their way first to Colorado and later, to the Big Easy, their relationship takes on a strange, twisted life of its own, ultimately sealing both of their fates. That's the nutshell version which doesn't say much but in terms of what happens here, the story is best experienced on one's own.   Chaze has offered up a deadly match up in Tim and Virginia, both of whom have self-destructive tendencies, both of whom are flawed people with dark pasts.  Tim and Virginia are two of a kind: they have a healthy love of cash; both have a "horror of being broke," and each has the measure of each other.

 But as I said, it's not so much the plot here but the ongoing, deepening interplay between these two characters that makes this story, as well as  Chaze's excellent writing.  I already knew I was in love not too far into the novel, when Virginia gets the better of Tim at a cafe in the New Mexico desert, and Tim goes back to track her down. He's fuming, holding a Magnum .357 that he sticks into his waistband as he's coming into town, where he passes by some little shops with signs that read "COME IN AND SEE THE GIANT MAN-KILLING LIZARD," "SEE THE MAN-DESTROYING RATTLESNAKE," and "REAL LIVE COBRA -- COBRAS KILL A MAN EVERY HOUR IN INDIA."  If we haven't yet figured out that Virginia is a femme fatale, a predator, and a man eater, well, we definitely get the point now, in big, bold letters.   But more than anything else, the beauty of this book is in the way Chaze uses Virginia's sexuality to bedazzle Tim into making some pretty bad choices here, while at the same time revealing Tim's major weaknesses and his sheer desperation that allow readers to actually sympathize with him.

Black Wings Has My Angel is one of those books that kicks you directly in the gut and doesn't let up. Reading it, I knew that happy endings probably weren't in the cards for either Tim or Virginia; I knew something terrible was coming down the pike, and I once again had that feeling of watching an unavoidable, inevitable train wreck, unable to look away.  It's not pretty -- it's very dark, filled with an overarching sense of doom and gloom, and god help me, I absolutely loved it.  I'd say that someone needs to make a movie out of this book, but they'd probably mess it up, so no.  This is noir reading perfection and it seriously just does not get better than this.

The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes

9781590174951
NYRB Classics, 2012
originally published 1963
245 pp


My favorite fiction is the edgy, gritty kind where some poor guy, for some reason or another,  gets drawn into a hopelessly screwed-up situation and finds that it just keeps getting worse, despite everything he does to try to escape.   These kinds of stories start off innocuously enough, but within just a very short time my tension starts to build, joined by a restlessness and a quickly-growing sensitivity to the fear and paranoia emanating from  the hapless character. When that level of unease stays with me the entire time I've got the book in my hands,  I'm positively elated.  This feeling is precisely what I look for when I pick up a crime novel, and this is exactly what I got in Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man.  What happens in this novel is nothing less than one man's nightmare played out over the course of a few days of his life; between the lines Hughes pens her own insights into issues pertinent to the time & place of this novel's setting.

Dr. Hugh Densmore is an intern at UCLA, and he's left the city to be with his family for his sister's upcoming wedding in Phoenix.   In his mother's borrowed car, he's making his way through the desert highway and notices a hitchhiker along the side of the road. Normally, he "knew better" than to stop for hitchhikers, but this time it's different -- leaving the young, teenaged  girl at the side of the road just wasn't something his conscience isn't going to  allow him to do:

"He had sisters a young as this. It chilled him to think what might happen if one them were abandoned on the lonesome highway, the type of man with whom, in desperation, she might accept a lift."

Although his growing uneasiness on the drive leads him to make plans to leave her at the border before crossing the state line into Arizona,  that idea backfires and he takes her on into Phoenix. He drops her off at the bus station and she's gone.  But the day after she makes a surprise visit to his hotel room,  he hears an announcement on the radio about an unidentified girl.  Grabbing the newspaper, he discovers that the body of a young girl has been found in a nearby Scottsdale canal.  He quickly discards any idea of helping the police identify her,  but later an anonymous tip sends the cops directly to him -- as a suspect.  He hides the situation from his family and tells the police the bare outlines of his story,  but he's just certain that they're going to pin the girl's murder on him.  They delay an arrest, but growing ever more paranoid that it's going to happen at any moment,  he spills everything to Ellen, a family friend in town for the wedding. Densmore now has no choice but to try to prove his innocence.  He has to show that he played no part in the girl's murder before they take lock him away for good:  "because of circumstance," he has been tagged as the "sacrificial goat,"  and he knows it.  But time is ticking and no one but Ellen believes him. 

A  taut, thoroughly convincing and highly atmospheric novel, The Expendable Man is a classic "wrongly-accused-man" story with a bit of a twist that adds an extra layer of reader tension when it dawns on you exactly what's going on.  Hughes is superb at plotting and pace; her descriptions of the Arizona desert are spot on.  For example, in describing a ride through the desert night, she writes:

"The moon was high and white; each fence post, each clump of cactus was as distinctly outlined as by the sun. The mountains were moon-gray against the deep night sky. A dog barked from a distant house, the only reminder that they were not on a distant planet."

The atmosphere she creates with phrases like these also reflect Densmore's own isolation throughout the story.  Her characters and dialogue are all believable as well, but beyond the normal components of this kind of fiction,  Hughes also incorporates people from different walks of life into her story, all the while  scrutinizing American attitudes regarding race, socio-economic status and crime in the early 1960s.

The Expendable Man is among the best books I've read all year, and I can't recommend it enough.  Sure, the wrongly-accused-man thing has been done before and for many modern readers used to the gimmicky serial killer type reads that top the charts today,  it might come across as a little tame or outdated.  But this book goes well beyond just another novel of crime fiction, spilling into the realm where empathy takes over:  the reader remains trapped in Densmore's nightmare just as much as he is, up until the final sentence. That's how much power Hughes has over her audience.  And I loved every second of it.

To Each His Own, by Leonard Sciascia

9780940322523
New York Review Books
2000
originally published as A ciascuno il suo, 1966
translated by Adrienne Foulke
158 pp

(book #2 in my mini-series of posts called "What Would Montalbano Read")

 Just a brief note before I begin: if you have the NYRB edition, save the introduction until you've finished the book. It gives away a lot of plot elements within the story.

*****

Italy is a country so blessed that for every weed they destroy, two spring up in its place.

It is very easy to understand why Andrea Camilleri would include Sciascia as an author read by Salvo Montalbano, and easier to understand how Sciascia's writings influenced those of Camilleri.  Actually, it is The Council of Egypt that comes up in one of Camilleri's novels, but To Each His Own highlights the author's exploration of the nexus of Sicilian identity, politics and criminality. And the real reason I chose this one is, truth be told, I already had To Each His Own in my tbr pile.  To Each His Own is only one of the author's long list of novels  translated into English; it is a literary, intelligent and yet unconventional novel of Italian crime fiction. And it's superb.

The story begins when the local pharmacist, Manno, receives a death threat in the mail:

"This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done, you will die." 

He waves it off guardedly as a joke, because he can't think of anything he's done to merit this kind of warning, but when he and his friend Dr. Roscio go off hunting the next day, they do not return. Only their dogs are left to announce their deaths.  The authorities make a perfunctory appearance, questioning the pharmacist's widow as to what kind of behavior could have built up such animosity that it would be worthy of revenge. Settling on the fact that he must have been killed by a jealous husband or lover because of some kind of adulterous behavior, a sort of collective fiction is born regarding the pharmacist's (unfounded) extramarital flirtations. Once that ball has started rolling and the rumors start flying, his "adulteries" become the "official" reason for his death among the locals.    Roscio's death is put down to him being the poor guy who just happened to be an innocent bystander; caught in a bad place at a bad time, the victim of Manno's "bad" behavior.  After the funerals are over,  having settled on a reason for the murders,  the townspeople turn their focus to the future of Roscio's voluptous widow, Luisa.

There is, however, one person, high-school teacher Professor Laurana, who is still thinking about what may have actually happened.  He picks up on an important clue about the threatening letter, noticing that the word "Unicuique" comes through the paper in the light.  Laurana realizes that the words "Unicuique suum" is one of the mottoes printed under the masthead of the newspaper  L'Osservatore Romano.  At this point, Laurana's vanity and curiosity compel him to follow his hunches, and then he "doggedly sets about doing so", unable to let the matter rest like everyone else.  At the same time, it becomes clear that uncovering the truth is a very personal matter rather than a means of  securing justice:

"...Laurana had a kind of obscure pride which made him decisively reject the idea that just punishment should be administered to the guilty one through any intervention of his. His had been a human, intellectual curiosity that could not, and should not, be confused with the interest of those whom society and State paid to capture and consign to the vengeance of the law persons who transgress and break it." 

Laurana is an interesting character: he lives a sheltered life with his mother and in the halls of academia.  He has a firm "belief in the supremacy of reason and candor over irrationality and silence...", even though he's a lone stranger within a culture that exemplifies the opposite. He lives in a society where truth falls victim to the ongoing maintenance of the accepted status quo by people "who have every interest in working to keep the impunity coefficient high." His curiosity is unwelcome in such a system, and along the way his need to know will turn his understanding of the real world on its head and even worse.

Although the crime fiction aspect of this book will keep the reader turning pages trying to figure out exactly what happened, the story operates on other levels as well. It is a commentary on the justice system, party politics, the Church, and other facets of Sicilian culture. And, as di Piero notes in the introduction, Sciascia 

"used storytelling as an instrument for investigating and attacking the ethos of a culture -- the insular, mafia-saturated culture of Sicily -- which he believed to a metaphor of the world."

One of the basic points the author makes throughout this book is that there are various levels of criminality in which we are all complicit, so in that sense, the metaphor is not too far off the mark.

Readers of more socially and politically-oriented crime fiction will like this book, as will readers of literary fiction.  It's intelligent, thought-provoking and frankly, is very high on my list of good books for the year.

crime fiction from Italy

*Classic Crimes, by William Roughead

0940322463
NYRB Classics
2000
560 pp

Classic Crimes really appeals to my deeply-entrenched fascination with true crimes of the past, and was such a pleasure to read that its 560 pages just flew by in no time.  Rarely does a book of nonfiction this large maintain my interest so intently, but for some reason, I hated having to put this one down. And it just goes to show that crime hasn't really changed over the centuries -- the prime motives of murder (sex and money) are timeless.  Before I even get to the end here, let me just say that if you are at all interested in famous crimes from times gone by, especially from the UK, this is a book you should consider reading.

The author of this book is William Roughead (1870-1952) a lawyer in Scotland who was quite well known for his interest in the history of crime.  He was a contributor to the Notable Scottish Trials and Notable British Trials series, friend to Henry James, and in one famous case of the era (that of Oscar Slater), he joined such notables as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in trying to get justice for what they considered to be a trumped-up case and an incorrect verdict that sentenced a man to death.  Roughead does more than chronicle the cases in this book; at many junctures he injects his wit and sarcasm and tries to appeal to his readers' sense of justice in cases where the guilty walked away and the innocent were wrongly convicted. Using the official court documents of each case, he takes the reader through the commission of the crime (with all personalities involved), witness statements, the arrest and trial, and the aftermath.  Roughead's version of true crime reporting is nothing at all like some of today's accounts that promise titillating tattle, you know, the ones with the catchy titles and lurid covers -- he offers  facts, his opinions and manages to keep the reader interested throughout. As Luc Sante, who introduces this book, notes:

He is relentlessly discursive, his asides convincingly sounding as if they are being whispered along a bench, and digressive too. But his sense of timing is superb: though he'll take the reader on a walk through the past or through the neighborhood, he will always be back in time for the crucial next question.

There are an even dozen cases in this book, all of which occurred in Scotland, some of which have been well publicized via books, television, and movies, including:

• The case of Madeleine Smith, who was tried for murder in 1857 after her secret lover had been poisoned.

• The case of Constance Kent, whose half-brother (the son of her recently-widowed father and his new wife, the former governess) went missing one night and was found dead in the morning

• The case of Florence Bravo, a young newlywed whose husband died mysteriously from poisoning one night

• The case of Oscar Slater, who was convicted of a brutal murder solely on the basis of a pawn ticket and mistaken identity

and some I'd not heard of before, including

• The case of Katherine Nairn in the 18th century, suspected of murdering her husband by poison

• The case of Deacon Brodie in the 18th century, respected gentleman by day, burglar by night

• The case of Jessie McLachlan, who was supposed to have killed one of the maids of the Fleming household, and laid the blame on the eldest member of the Fleming family

• The case of Dr. Pritchard, whose wife and mother-in-law both died under very mysterious circumstances, probably at his hands

• One of my favorite cases in this book, "The Arran Murder," in which two men on holiday climb up a mountain and only one comes down

• An incredibly twisted case known here as "The Ardlamont Mystery," involving the mysterious shooting death of a young man and a rather slimy con man of sorts

• The case of John Donald Merrett, who went off to a dance hall while his mother was dying of a bullet to the head

Classic Crimes is a treasure trove of true crime and treachery, one of the best I've ever read.  I found myself heading to the Internet on several occasions to see if there were other books, television dramas or movies based on any of these cases and threw a few into my Netflix queue and onto my Amazon wishlist. On the negative side of my praise for this book, however, the language throughout is a bit stilted and may turn many readers off.  Again, by Luc Sante:

You can open the book anywhere and light on a random sentence -- for instance, 'The secret marauder came and went without a trace, save for the empty till, the rifled scrutoire, or the displenished plate-chest that testified to his visitation...' The usages herein may often send the reader to the dictionary, sometimes even to the OED.

However, if you can get used to Roughhead's manner of speech, the cases themselves will provide you with hours of entertainment, if true crimes of the past are one of your interests. Highly recommended.