Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Charlaine Harris, New York Times best-selling author, is a voracious reader. She had a hard time picking which book to write about for this collection. Her most recent novel is the twelfth in the Sookie Stackhouse series, Deadlocked, and she’s edited five anthologies with her buddy Toni L. P. Kelner. This year’s anthology is An Apple for the Creature. In 2013, the first installment of the graphic novel she’s writing with Christopher Golden, Cemetery Girl, will be on the shelves. Visit her online at www.charlaineharris.com.

  Farewell, My Lovely

  by Raymond Chandler (1940)

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  * * *

  Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) turned to writing crime fiction at the relatively advanced age of forty-four, publishing short stories with “pulp” magazines such as Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939 and featured the private detective Philip Marlowe. In total, Chandler published seven novels, all of which featured Marlowe. He also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, adapting James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder, and adapting Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1951) for Alfred Hitchcock. The Blue Dahlia (1946) was Chandler’s only original screenplay; it was nominated for an Academy Award, as was Double Indemnity. Chandler’s final novel, Playback, was published in 1958. His essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944, is regarded as a seminal piece of criticism on crime fiction.

  * * *

  Interestingly enough, I came to detective fiction seriously, and to Raymond Chandler, and finally to Farewell, My Lovely, by the route of science fiction.

  I’ll come back to that.

  I grew up on comic books and superheroes, and by the end of the 1950s, even though I was young, I was beginning to read widely in adult books. I read some crime and detective stuff—Poe, Sherlock Holmes, that kind of thing—and loved it, but the stuff I wanted was stories like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, and their likes, only I didn’t know it yet. At that point that kind of story was known to me only through films on the upstart medium of television, not books, and man did I like those films. Shadows and tough guys, squealing tires, gunfire and cigarette smoke, blond babes so sexy they could make a eunuch weep.

  When I was young, I wasn’t checking to see who wrote what. That came a little later. But I loved those films, and I loved science fiction, and in the early 1970s I fell in love with the first-person novels of a science-fiction writer named Keith Laumer. Most of his third-person material left me cold. I have always preferred first-person narration to any other kind. Hadn’t I been weaned on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first-person tales about John Carter of Mars? Burroughs, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, had left a unique and profound impression on me, almost like a wound, and the blade that cut me deepest was first-person narration because I could more easily get into the mind of the main characters, and learn and experience events as they did. Later, To Kill a Mockingbird did the same for me, and so on and so on.

  I read third-person narration, and liked it plenty, but there was always for me a kind of magic in that “I’m telling the story as it happened” approach, or its close cousin “This is the story that was told to me.”

  Keith Laumer wrote beautifully in the first person. His books, like A Trace of Memory and A Plague of Demons, had this snappy style that reminded me of those old films I’d loved. I had come to realize, by this time, that those films were often based on books, but I had never read any of them, so I didn’t quite realize that Keith Laumer’s favorite writer was Raymond Chandler, and his style was heavily influenced by Chandler’s.

  And then Laumer wrote a crime novel. I found it in paperback. It was called Fat Chance. It had been made into a movie. I don’t think the movie was called the same thing. It starred Michael Caine, and I saw it years later and didn’t think much of it. But the book, it knocked me dead. The people in it spoke like people I knew, right down to the marvelous similes and metaphors. My father, who couldn’t read or write until late in life, and then only enough to kind of dope out the newspaper, comics, and maybe a simple story, talked like that when he talked. He was full of witty sayings and turns of phrase. I think this may have been passed down by generations of storytellers, handed from him to me.

  So it was familiar. The characters seemed more like real people. Fat Chance was a bit of a parody, though I didn’t know it at the time, but the most important thing about that book, with its private detective, Joe Shaw (obviously named after the famous Black Mask editor), was its dedication.

  It was dedicated to Raymond Chandler.

  The name rang a distant bell, but though I was uncertain where I had seen the name, I knew this: if Fat Chance was dedicated to the memory of a long-gone writer and I had enjoyed it, then there was a good chance that I should check out Raymond Chandler, see what he was all about.

  There must have been something in the air, because then, like magic, looking through a spin rack at a college bookstore, a paperback jumped out at me: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I thought, Wow, that’s the guy in Laumer’s dedication. I took it home and read it and was hooked.

  Those days were different from now. You couldn’t hop on the Internet and find all the books that you wanted by an author. You had to hunt for them. But in this case, it wasn’t hard. Chandler’s books started to pop up all over; a renaissance was going on, and I didn’t even know it.

  Suffice it to say I found Farewell, My Lovely, and later the rest of his books, but when I read Farewell, I went from being a fanatic for his writing to being a superfanatic. For several years I slavishly imitated him, and his work led me to read other prominent detective and mystery writers. I found a number of them whom I loved. Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain, all the old Gold Medal crime writers, but Chandler, oh my goodness, he was high wonderful. It wasn’t just the story and the characters, it was the language, all oiled up and sassy like a sports car with a naked model in it, one long, feminine leg propped on the dashboard as she drove, the other flat down solid on the gas. I felt such kinship to his writing, and in many ways to Marlowe himself, that it was eerie. I liked that Marlowe was a knight in a savage land, as the old Have Gun—Will Travel song went.

  Meanwhile I was sending out the Chandler imitations I was writing. I remember one called “Set Up” that went to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. I tried to get that sense of mystery Chandler had about everything. He has been criticized for not writing clockwork mysteries, but it was just this element that appealed to me. Chandler once suggested that he wanted to write the kind of mysteries that someone would read even if they knew the last page was torn out. He did just that. It wasn’t just the mystery that pulled you along. It was the characters and the language.

  But my story, “Set Up,” was more of an unintentional parody of Chandler, and the editor told me as much, but he thought it was good enough that I should send him something else. I revised the story and sent it to him, and he wrote back saying it was better, and then I punished him with it again and again until he said, “I hate this story more each time I see it.”

  In time I did sell to Sam—several stories—but I did it by a constant rereading of Chandler, trying to understand his method, which seemed to be: write the best scene and dialogue possible between people and keep about your work an air of mystery and suspense, and it won’t matter if all the gears click together at the end. It’s the scenes that matter, and if you have enough good ones, the reader will forgive you anything.

  If there is one novel of Chandler’s that does it all, it’s Farewell, My Lovely. The mystery is in some ways a little far-fetched, but the delight of Chandler’s prose, his tremendous set pieces, powerful and witty dialogue, and magnificent descriptions raise it above thousands of stories about dead people in the parlor where it’s all solved in the end as if it were a crossword puzzle. Farewell takes Chandler’s hero, Marlowe, through a dark world of murder and corruption, of fine-looking wom
en of low circumstances seeking a grip on the good life. There’s a crime and a lie rooted in the past as well, something that would later become a staple for hard-boiled writers, Ross Macdonald being one of the most obvious of that group.

  Farewell, My Lovely literally changed my life. I never ceased to love science fiction, but this wonderful crime stuff led me out of the more primitive kinds of science fiction that I had been reading into a world where real people did real things and for real reasons, and not just to satisfy plot motivations. It was, as Chandler suggested in his great essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” about giving crime back to those who really commit it. His work is poetic grit: magic sweated up in a rumpled suit, a poorly creased fedora, and a gravy-stained tie. It is about people who seem like people I know or knew, even if my people were rural and Chandler’s were not. But they had the same motivations, needs and desires, strengths and weaknesses, savagely driven by their dreams beyond all reason; heading for what seemed like a beautiful sunset, instead they were driving pedal to the metal toward an alluring flame licking up from a wide and deep trash pit into which they would tumble, a cheap little hell of disappointment and misplaced ambitions.

  All of Chandler’s books moved me in one way or another, but I believe Farewell, My Lovely was Chandler at his peak. Not even his more lauded The Long Goodbye could capture the delight this book gave me in feeling that, by reading it, I had somehow touched some great truth that I could nearly hold in my hand, but not quite. That’s because it is myth, and myth is truth felt but not understood. Myth is the locked house that holds our hopes and dreams.

  And Chandler gave me the key.

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than forty novels in a variety of genres, including mystery/crime, adventure, Western, and horror. Among the many prizes he has won are an Edgar Award (in 2000, for The Bottoms), a Booklist Editor’s Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writers’ Award, and the Critics’ Choice Award. He has also won eight Bram Stoker Awards. He is best known, in mystery/crime terms, for his “Hap and Leonard” series of novels, of which there have been ten to date. Joe R. Lansdale is also a member of the Martial Arts Hall of Fame. Visit him online at www.joerlansdale.com.

  Hangover Square

  by Patrick Hamilton (1941)

  LAURA WILSON

  * * *

  Patrick Hamilton (1904–62) was an English novelist and playwright with an instinctive empathy for the poor and the underprivileged, due in no small part to the difficulty of his own upbringing. (Although his father and mother were both published authors, his father squandered his inheritance, and Hamilton was forced to leave formal education at fifteen.) He worked as an actor and stage manager, and then as a stenographer, before publishing his first novel, Monday Morning, in 1925. He fell in love with alcohol at an early age—he was a man “who needed whiskey like a car needed petrol”—and died of drink-related organ failure.

  * * *

  Patrick Hamilton was described by J. B. Priestley as “uniquely individual . . . the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.” Despite enormous popularity during his lifetime—his plays Rope (1929, filmed in 1948 by Alfred Hitchcock) and Gaslight (1938, filmed by Thorold Dickinson in 1940, and by George Cukor in 1944) were spectacularly successful—Hamilton, largely forgotten in the years after his death, has been curiously absent from modern British literary history, and it is only now that his work is beginning to get the recognition it deserves.

  At the end of his life, Hamilton said of his novels: “What I was trying to present was a ‘black’ social history of my times. There were so many ‘white’ portraits of the twenties and thirties that I wanted to show the other side of the picture.” The world he writes about may be narrow—although no narrower than the one portrayed by, say, Raymond Chandler—but, unlike Chandler, it was the world that, for most of his life, he inhabited: his observations are meticulous and vivid, his ability to create atmosphere and tension is second to none, and his novels range from masterpieces of painfully dark comedy (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse, The Slaves of Solitude) to the classic murder story that is Hangover Square.

  In 1929, Hamilton published The Midnight Bell, the first book in the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. The other titles, The Siege of Pleasure and The Plains of Cement, were published in 1932 and 1934. In these books, Hamilton portrays a world of superficially bonhomous boozing in which the characters are lonely and adrift, plagued by unrequited feelings, self-deception, and schemes that invariably come to nothing. Much of Hamilton’s fiction takes place either in pubs, dreary hotels, or boardinghouses, all types of no-man’s-lands in which people are thrown together by chance rather than inclination. Priestley notes, in his introduction to Hangover Square (1941), that “no English novelist of my time has a better ear for the complacent platitudes, the banalities, the sheer idiocy of pub talk, than Hamilton.”

  Hamilton’s fictional milieu reflected his own life: time spent in pubs (his addiction to alcohol led to his death at the age of just fifty-eight) and an obsession with prostitutes. One Lily Connolly is the real-life template for the capricious tart Jenny Maple in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, object of the unrequited adoration of Bob the barman. In many ways Hangover Square, Hamilton’s most intense and powerful work, is a retelling of The Midnight Bell. Praised by critic James Agate as “a masterpiece of frowst” (the word “frowst” meaning a stale, stuffy atmosphere), it is an extraordinary study of infatuation as well as a preapocalyptic vision of a country on the brink of war. Aimless, dopey George Harvey Bone, living off a rapidly diminishing inheritance in a “large glorified boarding house” in Earl’s Court, is obsessed with beautiful, callous Netta Longdon. He hangs about outside Netta’s flat for the “miserable pleasure of mere proximity,” agonizes over the best time to telephone her, analyzes her every word for a sign of encouragement, and allows himself to be repeatedly humiliated by her friends. His only real source of comfort is the hotel’s cat, who comes to his room in search of a warm place to sleep.

  Netta is not a prostitute but a failed actress, and Hamilton really goes to town on her, describing her as “like something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering sideways without fully conscious motivation.” Impervious to everything—even the weather and the fact that a member of her clique, Peter, routinely forces himself upon her when she is drunk—she harbors a secret ambition to become the mistress of a theater impresario (the 1930s equivalent of a WAG, the term used by the British tabloid press to describe the high-profile wives and girlfriends of male celebrities) and strings Bone along, cadging money while reviling him at every turn.

  The novel begins on Boxing Day 1938, two months after the Munich Agreement, and the sense of impending catastrophe as the country heads inexorably toward war is mirrored by the reader’s knowledge, right from the start, that the characters are also heading toward a violent climax. Bone is subject—when not drunk or inhabiting the realm of compounded depression, shame, and remorse that is Hangover Square—to periods of amnesia, during which his unconscious mind is fixated on killing Netta as a means of freeing himself from his conscious mind’s infatuation. It’s a fairly clumsy device—Hamilton biographer Sean French describes it as a “literary mechanism rather than a medical condition”—but an effective one, illustrating the self-hypnotizing nature of obsession.

  Bone sees Munich as “a phoney business” but Netta and Peter have fascist sympathies and are admirers of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. This strikes me as writing with the benefit of hindsight (the novel was finished in March 1941), as public opinion was generally in favor of Chamberlain in 1938, although I can’t imagine many British citizens went so far as Netta who, “without admitting it to herself,” finds Hitler sexually alluring. She is also attracted by the fact that Peter has twice be
en jailed, once for violence at a political meeting and once for a drunken driving incident that resulted in the death of a pedestrian. Characters connected with cars in Hamilton novels are always suspect: he had been knocked down and critically injured in 1932, and—surely not coincidentally—Netta’s flat is located on the stretch of Earl’s Court Road where the real accident took place.

  Hamilton spent most of his childhood in Hove on the south coast of England, and frequently used its more famous neighbor Brighton as a setting. In fact, the first novel of his Gorse Trilogy, The West Pier (1951), was described by Graham Greene as “the best book ever written about Brighton.” For Hamilton, it’s a place of escape, extending—but never actually keeping—the promise of emotional and sexual fulfillment. In The Midnight Bell, Bob’s trip to Brighton is aborted when Jenny Maple fails to meet him at the station, and in Hangover Square, Netta ruins Bone’s chances by turning up drunk with two male hangers-on. Ejected from the hotel for their appalling behavior, they return to London, leaving Bone with the bill. It is this that finally rouses his conscious mind to anger—“he felt he would like to beat [Netta] up, do her some physical damage”—and, although he tries to compartmentalize his life in order to achieve some distance from her, his ego and id come together to lethal effect at the end of the book.

  I first read Hangover Square in my early teens, with a teenager’s black-and-white view of the world, turning the pages with fascinated disbelief. Where was the hero? How was it that I could be both massively irritated with and hugely sympathetic to George Harvey Bone at the same time? How could Netta and Peter be so monstrously, eye-poppingly horrible, and why did I care so much about what was going to happen to them? Why did everyone keep on getting drunk when it had such disastrous consequences? How could an author be so contemptuous of his characters, and yet, at the same time, so engaged and compassionate?