{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} no orchids for miss blandish

James Hadley Chase No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939)

 

The blonde leaning over the counter smiled at him. She had big white teeth that reminded Bailey of piano keys. She was too fat to interest him. He didn't return her smile.

“Hello, mister,” she said brightly. “Phew! Isn't it hot? I didn't sleep a wink last night.”

“Scotch,” Bailey said curtly. He pushed his hat to the back of his head and mopped his face with a filthy handkerchief.

She put a bottle of whiskey and a glass on the counter.

“You should have beer,” she said, shaking her blonde curls at him. “Whiskey's no good to anyone in this heat.”

“Give your mouth a rest,” Bailey said.

He carried the bottle and the glass to a table in a corner and sat down.

The blonde grimaced, then she picked up a paperback and with an indifferent shrug, she began to read.

Bailey gave himself a long drink, then he leaned back in his chair. He was worried about money. If Riley couldn't dream up something fast, he thought, we'll have to bust a bank. He scowled uneasily. He didn't want to do that. There were too many Feds around for safety.

Apparently James Hadley Chase, a Brit., knocked out No Orchids for Miss Blandish in a couple of weeks without ever having visited the U.S. He based all his gangster knowledge on the cinema (source).

It was a sensation in its time. George Orwell, in his essay on the decline in moral sensibility in the crime novel between the gentlemanly Raffles (c. 1900) and the "cruelty and sexual perversion" of Miss Blandish (1939), thought reading the latter was akin to taking "a header into the cesspool".

Certainly Miss Blandish retains the power to shock in its story of the kidnapping of the wealthy and beautiful Miss Blandish by a small-time gang who are almost immediately bumped off by a larger and more brutal mob of gangsters. Is that the collective noun for gangsters? There is a lot of casual death-dealing: one scene that sticks in my mind was when the psychotic son of Ma Grissom (the female gang-leader) pretty much has an orgasm while knifing the opposition. The killing has a casualness coupled with a sadistic bent that makes this a brutal book to read.

The book maintains an impressive level of outright open brutality and horror, with torture, knifings, shootings, bombings, etc. The viciousness is racked up even more by the sexual sadism presented in the narrative. Miss Blandish's fate at the hands of the brutal Slim Grissom sticks in the mind for a very, very long time. The bad guys (and gals) even look bad:

Ma Grisson was big, grossly fat and lumpy. Flesh hung in two loose sacks either side of her chin. Her crinkly hair was dyed a hard, dull black. Her little eyes were glittering and as impersonal as glass. Her big floppy chest sparkled with cheap jewelry. She wore a dirty cream colored lace dress. Her huge arms, mottled with veins, bulged through the lace network like dough compressed in a sieve. Physically she was as powerful as a man. She was a hideous old woman, and every member of the gang, including Slim, was afraid of her.

A couple of things stood out for me about Miss Blandish. One was that it devoted the majority of the narrative to the gangsters' side of the story, rather than to that of the good guys. The reader is immersed in amorality from the opening lines and there seems little chance of any redemption as the narrative continues. Another interesting factor was 'Miss Blandish' herself: she is never described by any other moniker, which adds to the frightening depersonalisation of her experience at the hands of her captors (an experience in sexual objectification further exacerbated by drugs).

Despite its subject matter - and the treatment of women in this book is sickening, so you've been warned - this book was a real page-turner (or, rather, page-clicker). The writing - especially the idiom - was excellent, and the story gripped from start to climactic conclusion. I would definitely chase (ha ha) down some more Chase.

"Women! Women! Women!" Ma snarled, pounding on the desk. "Always the same! Barker... Karpis... Dillinger... they all went the same way... because of women! Everything I've planned could be shot... just because a goddamn chippy opens her goddamn mouth!"

Rating: 9/10.  I got my free e-copy from manybooks.net (not too many typos).

If you liked this... I was reminded a bit of Dorothy B. Hughes In a Lonely Place {REVIEW}. I really want to read some James M. Cain now too (I loved the film Double Indemnity - the book has been reviewed at ready when you are, c.b.).

 

{review} in a lonely place

Dorothy B. Hughes In a Lonely Place (1947)

His hand slowly stroked the dog’s curly head. ‘Nice fellow,’ he said. The dog was nuzzling him when the girl came out of the fog. Dix looked up at her and he said, ‘Hello.’ She wasn’t afraid. She said carelessly, ‘Hello.’ He smiled. She didn’t know that behind that smile lay his hatred of Laurel, hatred of Brub and Sylvia, of Mel Terriss, of old Fergus Steele, of everyone in the living world... 

Whoa. Fabulous book. I couldn't put it down.

The majority of crime stories I read are of a conventional type: the search for the unknown committer of a crime, with the great identity revelation served up at the end. In a Lonely Place inverts our expectations by focusing the narrative on the known murderer and presenting the unravelling of his crazy little fantasy world. This is a really spooky, eerie and frightening book. 

The color under her sunbrown had returned as she did the little normal things of lipstick, cigarette. He could make it recede so easily, a word, or one more question on the subject. He could make her heart stop beating as easily. With a simple statement. His lips smiled. And his eyes again turned to the room. Away from temptation.

The tension is excruciating at times: not only could almost anyone whom the murderer encounters become his next victim, but his best friend Brub (if a serial killer has friends!), an old war buddy, is the detective on the case and there is, indeed "A moment when each knew the other for what he was, the hunter and the hunted."  The writing is terrific:

He heard Sylvia’s amused voice as from afar, as through a film of gray mist. ‘Brub’s always looking for the hidden motive power. That’s because he’s a policeman.’ He came sharply into focus. The word had been a cold spear deliberately thrust into his brain. He heard his voice speak the cold, hard word. ‘Policeman?’ But they didn’t notice anything. They thought him surprised, as he was, more than surprised, startled and shocked. They were accustomed to that reaction. For they weren’t jesting; they were speaking the truth. Brub with an apologetic grin; his wife with pride under her laughter. ‘He really is,’ she was saying. And Brub was saying, ‘Not a policeman now, darling, a detective.’

I don't want to give away too much, but the elements which make this book so enticing are a wonderful setting (making one nostalgic for a more innocent, big country town-like 1950s Santa Monica/L.A./Beverly Hills), gorgeous femme fatales in the best noir style, and a hero who leaves the reader feeling entirely ambivalent - can one pity a serial strangler of women when he's "in a lonely place"? The murderer has flashes of overwhelming anger when his ability to control himself seems insurmountable. Tiny, everyday noises set him off. He struggles with the post-war world, having lost the status and pay that went with being a jet-fighter colonel. He has only bitterness towards those who are better off. He is an irrational, volatile, depressive, jealous, vain, ex-alcoholic psychopath who kills the only people who could help him; but he is also, somehow, pitiable. 

The phone hadn’t rung all day. It wasn’t going to ring now, not while he stood here in the bedroom looking at it. There wasn’t any girl worth getting upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d proved it over and again. There wasn’t a decent one among them. There’d only been one decent one and she was dead. Brucie was dead. Laurel couldn’t disappoint him. He’d known what she was the first time he’d looked at her. Known he couldn’t trust her, known she was a bitchy dame, cruel as her eyes and her taloned nails. Cruel as her cat body and her sullen tongue. Known he couldn’t hurt her and she couldn’t hurt him. Because neither of them gave a damn about anyone or anything except their own skins.

Rating: 10/10.

Favourite line: "Liquor is such a nice substitute for facing adult life."

If you liked this... I've downloaded Hughes' The Blackbirder.

 

And I want to see the Bogart movie version (1950: wiki; imdb).