Review: Crime Novels Five Classic Thrillers 1961 - 1964 (Library of America #370)

 

By the time the crime novels collected here first appeared in the early 1960s, the popularity of the type of crime fiction pioneered by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and others had already peaked. Now, as Geoffrey O'Brien points out in his introduction to the collection, "the best crime writers reinvented the genre." That was probably the only way the genre had much of a chance, according to O'Brien of competing with powerful competition from a burst in popularity of science fiction novels, fantasy novels, spy novels, and political thrillers.

Represented in this volume of Crime Novels are five very different writers, writers who found varying degrees of success during their lifetimes. Whether or not all of them lived to enjoy the success and respect they deserved, all five are recognized today as some of the best crime fiction writers of their day.

The collection opens with Fredric Brown's The Murderers, a story about a group of sociopaths in Los Angeles who will do just about anything to keep themselves financially comfortable. When two frustrated actors decide to swap murders that will benefit both their careers, innocent people will die but nobody really seems to care. Brown's novel is a scary look inside the mind of a true sociopath.

Next comes The Name of the Game Is Death by Dan J. Marlowe, another psychological novel that follows a bank robbery gone bad after one of the three robbers is shot dead, one escapes with the all the cash, and the narrator goes into hiding until it's safe for him to rejoin the other surviving gang member. But after the man with the money suddenly cuts off all contact with the main character, all bets are off. Much of the character development in this one occurs through flashbacks that illustrate just what a pure sociopath our hero is.

Third in the collection is probably the best known of the group, Dead Calm. Some twenty-six years (1989) after Charles Williams published the novel in 1963, Dead Calm was turned into a successful movie starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane. The novel tells the story of a young couple alone on their yacht who pick up what appears to be the only survivor of a sinking vessel on which the survivor claims everyone on board has died of food poisoning but him. It's easy to imagine the tension that will build over time as the stranger's story begins to unravel.

Then we have The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, the only novel in the collection written by a woman. Hughes is largely ignored today, but Geoffrey O'Brien's introduction calls her "one of the most important crime writers of her era." Hughes dared to tackle racism in the heat of the racially turbulent 1960s by making her message a major factor governing the behavior of her main character, a young black doctor who happens to have picked up a young female hitchhiker who is later found dead.

The last novel in the collection is Richard Stark's (Richard Stark is a pen name used by Donald Westlake at times) The Score. This one is actually the fifth book in Stark's twenty-three book "Parker" series. The most unusual thing about the series is that Parker is not a cop or a detective; he is a successful criminal. The Score serves as a reminder that even the best mind can become a little overconfident and overambitious. The caper-gone-wrong here is one in which Parker and his gang decide to simultaneously rob multiple locations in one small town.

This volume of Crime Novels  is the first of two volumes soon to be published by Library of America. The second collection will feature similar fiction written in the second half of the decade.

The Murderers by Fredric Brown

 

Fredric Brown's 1961 noir crime novel The Murderers made me realize just how much more sensitive to sexual slurs and crimes even my boomer generation has become since the whole "Me Too" movement broke a few years ago. And that's a good thing, of course. Surprisingly enough, I had to keep reminding myself that even in 1961 Brown was using those terms and attitude descriptions only to describe what turns out to be a pretty despicable lead character - not to show that they are the norm of the day. 

That character, Willy Griff, is a struggling actor who barely manages to cover his day-to-day living expenses in a cheap Los Angeles boardinghouse. That's largely due to Willy's habit of spending any spare cash he accumulates on cheap booze, drugs, and young women as much on the make as he is. Willy's been getting some extra cash from his current lover who just happens to be the wife of the Southern California "seat cover king," but after their affair is exposed, the pair figure out that they can still have each other and all that seat cover money if they can only figure out a foolproof way to eliminate the king.

That's when things get complicated.

Another struggling actor, who lives in the same boardinghouse, has been blackballed by a vindictive producer, effectively ending the man's acting career even before it starts. Struggling actor #2 will certainly shed no tears if something were to happen to Mr. Producer. So maybe a you-kill-mine-and-I'll-kill-yours deal can be struck between the two? Be careful what you wish for, boys.

If this plot reminds you a little (or a lot) of Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train, you are not alone. And like Highsmith's hugely successful novel, The Murderers is largely a psychological novel in which considerable time is spent developing the lead novel's  character and motivations. The Murderers even has one of those ironic Alfred Hitchcock kind of endings we all enjoyed so much in the sixties and seventies. Despite the sometimes formulaic structure of this one, I enjoyed it enough to give it three stars out of five.

Slowing Down Is Good for Me

 

I've purposely slowed down my reading pace (well, it was not entirely voluntary for me to slow down...but that's another story for another time), and I find myself enjoying books - of several genres - more than I have in years. Rather than always chasing the shiny new covers and flashy new novelists of the day, I'm letting one book just lead me naturally to the next one. That doesn't mean that I'm reading one at a time, just that I'm reading fewer total pages per day. And that works wonders for me. It's even, I hope, freed me up to doing shorter...but semi-regular...posting again - good intentions that may go astray, I admit.

So instead of the 120 to 130 books I've read each year for a long time, I'm probably going to read, re-read, and re-re-read maybe 60 or 70 each year for a while. The biggest surprise as I near one-half a year at this new pace, is that my concentration and first-read comprehension levels seem to me to have significantly increased. I can't tell you how often I use to have to go back and read paragraphs, or even whole pages, for a second timebecause I had obliviously slipped into some kind of daydream. 

All that said, this is a simple list of what I read in May:

1. The Rising Tide - Ann Cleeves
2. Expanded Universe - Robert A. Heinlein
3. Hell and Back - Craig Johnson
4. Justice Corrupted - Ted Cruz
5. Tastes Like War - Grace M. Cho
6. The Jealousy Man - Jo Nesbø
7. The Best American Travel Writing 2012 - Various Writers

Now I'll find out where June carries me.

Little Big Man - Thomas Berger

I only discovered Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel Little Big Man after watching its 1970 movie version starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role. But coincidentally, this week's second reading of the book coincided almost perfectly with the fiftieth anniversary of the first time I read it — and it turned out to be as entertaining as ever.

The novel’s main character, Jack Crabb, is the Forrest Gump of the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite dying at 34 years of age before he could complete his memoir, Crabb tells of his experiences and/or friendships with the likes of George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, and others. Much like the fictional Forrest Gump would do in his own part of the country decades later via novel and film, Jack was everywhere out West where anything of consequence seemed to be happening, including the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The fictional editor responsible for getting Little Big Man’s memoir into print put it this way:

“It is of course unlikely that one man would have experienced even a third of Mr. Crabb’s claim. Half? Incredible! All? A mythomaniac! But you will find, as I did, that if any one part is accepted as truth, then what precedes and follows has a great lien on our credulity. If he knew Wild Bill Hickok, then why not General Custer as well?”

Jack Crabb’s big adventure begins when his father converts to Mormonism and decides to move the family cross country to Salt Lake City. Unfortunately for Mr. Crabb and his family, an Indian raid on the wagon train the family was a part of ended their move well before its intended destination. The good news is that not everyone in the family was killed in that raid; the bad news is that Jack and his older sister were carried away by the raiders. Jack’s sister, who had talked the Indians into taking Jack along in the first place, manages to escape early on, but she does so without including Jack in her escape plan. And that’s how Jack became the adopted son of an Indian chief and survived to have all the adventures captured in Little Big Man.

For the next quarter of a century, Jack will move between the white world and the Native American world each time he needs to save his life from one side or the other. Whenever he finds himself on the losing side of any battle between the Americans and the Indians, Jack manages to switch sides just in the nick of time in order to survive and begin a new set of adventures. He is so good at saving his own neck, in fact, that by the time his memoirs have attracted some interest, Jack Crabb is 111 years old and still feisty as ever. 

Bottom Line: Little Big Man is great fun despite the tragic events the novel vividly portrays as Jack Crabb negotiates the two very different cultures he spends time in. It is the story of America’s westward expansion and the simultaneous near elimination of a race of people who already called this country home. It is a farcical view of American history that still manages the kind of emotional impact that serious, nonfiction history books do not always achieve. Little did they expect it, but fans of Little Big Man were to be rewarded 35 years later with the publication of Berger’s The Return of Little Big Man. How did Jack manage to tell the rest of his story? I’ll leave that up to you to find out because it’s all part of the fun. 

Thomas Berger

The Best Man to Die - Ruth Rendell

The Best Man to Die (1969) is the fourth novel in what would turn out to be Ruth Rendell’s twenty-four book Inspector Wexford series. The twenty-four novels were written between the years 1964 and 2003. Rendell, who died in 2015, may be best known for the Wexford novels, but the prolific author also wrote numerous standalones and short story collections under her own name or using her Barbara Vine pseudonym. All told, Rendell produced near eighty books.

The Best Man to Die begins with a stag party held in the Kingsmarkham and Districts Dart Club, one of the pubs in Inspector Wexford’s own stomping grounds. A small group of friends has gathered to boozily celebrate the next-day marriage of one of the men. They have been there for a while — and it shows — when the last of the group finally shows up and starts flashing a wad of cash around as he buys several make-up rounds for the others. The men only stop celebrating, and drinking, when the pub closes down for the night.

The next morning, while walking a dog his adult daughter has brought with her on a visit to her parents, Wexford himself discovers the dead body of the man who had been bragging about all the cash in his wallet. It all appears simple enough. The man has been bashed in the back of the head, stripped of his cash, and tossed into the river…a typical mugging of a man with too big a mouth for his own sake. Wexford, however, will soon learn that this is not just a mugging gone bad. Charlie Hatton’s is, in fact, just one murder in a string of murders that, according to the book’s jacket, involve “small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women.” 

So where does Charlie Hatton fit in, and who wanted him dead?

Bottom Line: The Best Man to Die is a solid murder mystery, one that gets surprisingly complicated considering that it is barely 200 pages long. But what surprised me most about it is how different this 1969 novel is in style from the style Rendell later developed. This one has a rather old-fashioned feel to it that is exaggerated by the period in which it is set. Looking back, the 1960s do not seem all that long ago, but this novel is a reminder that, for many, life was still much as it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. It is also a reminder of how rapidly the world was already changing. 

Ruth Rendell

Hombre - Elmore Leonard

1961 First Edition Cover

Rightfully so, Elmore Leonard is best known for his crime fiction, but Leonard was not always a mystery writer. He began his career, in fact, as a writer of western novels and short stories, and he made significant contributions to that genre. And, just as with his crime novels, several of Leonard’s westerns were chosen by Hollywood producers to become major movies of the day. Hombre, written in 1961, was one of those so chosen, and in 1967 it became a feature film starring Paul Newman as “Hombre,” a white man who had been raised by his Apache kidnappers. 

“Maybe he let us think a lot of things about him that weren’t true. But as Russell would say, that was up to us. He let people do or think what they wanted while he smoked a cigarette and thought it out calmly, without his feelings getting mixed up in it. Russell never changed the whole time, though I think everyone else did in some way. He did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying. So maybe you don’t have to understand him. You just know him.”

As a boy, John Russell was taken from his family by Apaches who made him one of their own. Now, Russell so easily passes for Apache that the light color of his eyes is the only startling thing about his physical appearance. Russell continued to live with the tribe even when it was eventually forced onto the reservation, so for all practical purposes he considers himself to be Apache - not white. But now, John Russell, sporting a fresh haircut and dressed as a white man, is on a personal mission of his own, and he finds himself on a small stagecoach making its final run across that part of Arizona. 

When the other passengers realize who John Russell really is, they want nothing to do with him — even to forcing him to ride atop the coach with its driver. The passengers include a young woman who has just been recaptured from the Apaches who had held and abused her for several weeks, another woman and her Indian Agent husband who has a secret of his own, and an intimidating cowboy who bullied his way into the stage at the last minute. Russell, who has little other choice, tolerates the abuse, but he’s listening to their words — and he’s taking notes. 

But then everything changes. 

Suddenly, the passengers are begrudgingly depending on John Russell to keep them alive. And John Russell is probably just as surprised as they are to find himself defending a bunch of people who hate him so much. 

Bottom Line: Hombre is significant in the degree to which it exposes the exploitation and deadly abuse suffered by the Indian tribes at the hands of those who continually invaded their lands, and it is highly sympathetic to that point of view. It is also a novel about the foolishness and hypocrisy of any kind of racism that happens to have been written in the midst of America’s civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties — and the timing was no accident. This is a reminder of just how good and impactful a western novel can be, and I highly recommend it.

Elmore Leonard in the Sixties

Hop a Long, Git a Long, Read a Long with Elmer Kelton

This is a 1982 edition of a western first published in 1963

James, over at Ready When You Are, C.B., is hosting a western reading challenge during the month of May and I've been looking through my books to see what I might want to read for the challenge.  I have lots of westerns around the house, but I'm leaning toward reading one or two of these:

This is a 1985 edition of a book published in 1959

This is a 1967 first edition of what Ballantine Books called a "Western Original"

This is a 1975, third printing of a book first published in 1960

You will notice that all four of these westerns were written by West Texan Elmer Kelton. I first discovered Mr. Kelton's work in After the Bugles, pictured above, and over the years ended up with several hard covers of his and even one e-book double that I recently purchased. Kelton, in my opinion, wrote (he died in August 2009) better westerns than Louis 'Amour but he never seemed to get the public recognition that L'Amour got.  Kelton, who was 83 when he died, seemed to get better and better as the decades passed, eventually winning "Best Western Novel of the Year" seven times.  I'm always on the lookout for interesting western paperback covers like these but they are getting harder and harder to find.

If you like westerns, or if you want to break new reading ground, go over to Ready When You Are, C.B. to sign up; it's a one-book challenge, so give it a shot.

True Grit

Tom Chaney makes the biggest mistake of his already despicable life when he murders Mattie Ross’s father and robs him of his horse and the cash in his pockets (including two unusually shaped, and easily recognized, gold pieces). Now he has to deal with Mattie Ross, the murdered man’s fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who will not rest until she sees Tom Chaney hang for the murder.

Mattie makes the trip to Fort Smith, Arkansas, with two missions in mind: claim her father’s body and send it home for burial, and hire someone to help her capture his killer. The first task is a relatively easy one, but the second is more of a challenge. Mattie, though, knows exactly the kind of man she is searching for and, once he sobers up, U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn seems to be the answer to her prayers. He is a man with true grit enough to match Mattie’s own.

Rooster Cogburn has a history of his own, having ridden with the infamous Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War, but he is smart enough to keep the odds in his favor. Not only has he accepted a $100 contract from Mattie Ross to capture her father’s murderer; he also draws a U.S. Marshall’s salary and hopes to claim the bounties being offered on Chaney and others traveling with him. After LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger/ bounty hunter, offers to split the bounties with Cogburn, the two men decide to team up – and to sneak out of Fort Smith early enough to leave Mattie far behind. It would not be that easy.

True Grit is first rate western adventure as seen through the eyes of Mattie Ross, now an old woman recalling the adventure of a lifetime she experienced at age fourteen. Young Mattie sees the world in black and white terms. She wants Tom Chaney to hang for the murder of her father or she wants him shot dead if it proves impossible to take him alive. What’s right is right, and she will not rest until she makes it happen, even if she has to shoot the man herself.

There is adventure in True Grit and there is humor. The more subtle humor stems from the way that the roughest and toughest characters in the book speak their dialogue. Even in the heat of battle, or while throwing personal insults at each other, Cogburn and the rest speak in Mattie Ross’s voice, including her vocabulary and grammatical style. It took me more than a few pages to figure out that the book is more a monologue than a traditional novel. The reader is hearing the elderly Mattie Ross recount her adventures, and each of the characters, from Rooster to Tom Chaney, speaks the way that Mattie would have spoken had she been in their shoes.

It is easy to see why True Grit made Charles Portis’s reputation; it is a shame, however, that Portis wrote so little else. This is one of those books that can be enjoyed by readers of all ages, and it is good to see that the new movie version has given it new life.

Rated at: 5.0