Roses Are Red, Dahlias Are Blue

“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.” So spaketh Ray Chandler (right), who wasn’t overly enamoured, to put it mildly, by his experience of working as a screenwriter in La-La Land. Still, the movies are crackers, and the Irish Film Institute in Dublin is hosting a mini-festival of Chandler-related flicks in September, which kicks off with Farewell, My Lovely (1944) on September 5 and includes The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Marlowe, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity.
  My favourite, I have to say (usually while ducking rotten fruit and eggs of a similar disposition), is The Long Goodbye, probably because if I was a private eye, I’d be closer in spirit to Elliott Gould’s Marlowe than Bogart’s, or even Dick Powell’s. But hey, imagine if Mitchum had played Marlowe thirty years earlier …
  Speaking of Sleepy Bob, I watched Out of the Past the other night, yet again – it’s almost 20 years since I wrote a college essay on Out of the Past as the quintessential, and damn near perfect, film noir. Maybe there’s more important noirs, tauter and darker noirs, more noir-ish noirs – but Out of the Past is noir in a nutshell, right down to its US title. Build My Gallows High is too melodramatic, regardless of what the novel was called.
  Anyway, here’s a quick take on The Long Goodbye’s transition from novel to movie:

“The realist in murder,” wrote Raymond Chandler (right) in 1950, “writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” Originally a man of action in taut, streamlined plots in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953) finds PI Philip Marlowe ruminating at length on the relevance of his attitude and philosophy. Plot had never been Chandler’s strength but in The Long Goodbye the plot becomes a rambling, shambolic paean to the tattered grandeur of a man out of time, whose idiosyncratic sense of morality has outlived its usefulness and relevance …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Snoop Piggy Pigg; and Stona Fitch

The universe and / or the interweb works in mysterious ways. I was writing up Bob ‘No Relation’ Burke’s debut offering, THE THIRD PIG DETECTIVE AGENCY, which has the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

A rather silly detective story in the spirit of Jasper Fforde. Harry Pigg, the only surviving brother from the Big Bad Wolf attacks, has set up business as a private detective in Grimmtown, only things aren’t going too well. Down on his luck, with bills to pay and no clients in sight, the outlook is poor. But then in walks local businessman Aladdin who needs someone to help him track down an old lamp. What follows is a case of nursery rhyme noir. Funny, thrilling and always entertaining, Harry Pigg is an old breed of hero for a new generation. It’s as if Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney had walked into the middle of a bedtime story. A comedy caper for all ages. The first in a major new series.

  With the post written and ready to upload, I logged on to the web to upload it. Dropping by Twitter before heading for Crime Always Pays, I found Allan Guthrie tweeting about Stona Fitch. I’d been talking with Allan earlier today, and he’d mentioned Stona Fitch, so I clicked through to Me and My Big Mouth, where Scott Pack was describing Stona (love that name) as “ a shining beacon of fucking brilliance in an increasingly conservative and scared publishing industry.” An excerpt from the interview runs like this:

SP: What sort of reaction have you been getting from other writers and publishers? I’m assuming a mixture of admiration and fear.
SF: “The response has been overwhelmingly positive from readers, writers, bookstore owners, publishing gurus, and even traditional publishers. Concord Free Press has been called a grand experiment in subversive altruism, the Robin Hood publishing model, and (our favourite) generosity-based publishing. We’re simply exploring new, innovative ways to think about books and connecting with readers, not trying to figure out what’s wrong with publishing. That’s beyond our scope.”

  Terrific stuff, and I want to donate a book to Stona Fitch. Clickety-click here, and so will you …
  Anyway, just as I was about to leave Me and My Big Mouth, I noticed he had Bob Burke’s THE THIRD PIG DETECTIVE AGENCY in his sidebar. Quoth Scott: “Three pages in and they’d already laughed about a dozen times. I think we are on to a winner here.”
  Coincidence? Fate? Spooky action at a distance? YOU decide …
  Meanwhile, here’s the ‘literal’ version of Bonnie Tyler’s immortal Total Eclipse of the Heart, which was written, of course, by the immortal Jim Steinman. Roll it there, Collette …

The Book Wot Changed My Life

The Sunday Tribune was kind enough to ask me what book changed my life, and kinder still to run my answer in Sunday’s edition, the opening gambit running thusly:

“In the very first paragraph of THE BIG SLEEP, there’s a line that runs, ‘I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.’ I’d been a voracious reader all my life but when I read that line for the first time, at the age of 21, I felt like I’d come home. At the time, I was a student in Coleraine University, studying film. I had to write an essay on The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart. The university library didn’t have a copy, but the bookshop did. I was broke, paying my way through college by working whatever shifts I could get as a barman, but when I read that line I couldn’t resist: I stole.”

  Over to you, folks – what one book changed your life?

Flick Lit # 109: Dark Passage

It has been said that David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes, and the titles of his novels give some idea of the mental and emotional state of this virtual recluse: Dark Passage (1946), Nightfall (aka The Dark Chase, 1947), Street of the Lost (1952), The Moon in the Gutter (1953), Street of No Return (1954), The Wounded and the Slain (1955), Down There (aka Shoot the Piano Player, 1956), and Somebody’s Done For (1967). In the post-war years, and in the hands of David Goodis, crime was no longer something ‘out there’, a concept to be taken on by hard heads and smart mouths. Crime, according to Goodis, was ‘down there’ – a sickness of the soul. His characters were paranoid and tortured, keenly aware of their lowly social status and the squalid desires that drove them further down into the mire. Those who believe in the innate goodness of man, and the possibility of redemption, would do well to steer clear of David Goodis. The opening lines of Dark Passage are as good an example as any of the way in which Goodis blended deceptively lucid prose, Kafkaesque hopelessness and simple human yearnings:

“It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The jury decided he was guilty.”

Parry breaks out of prison, becomes a fugitive, and embarks on a nightmarish hunt for the person who framed him for the murder of his wife. The desperate gamble he takes to gain time – submitting to a quack surgeon’s knife for plastic surgery – allowed the director of Dark Passage (1947), Delmer Daves, to follow on from a technique pioneered in 1946’s The Lady in the Lake, in which the camera’s point-of-view plays the part of the detective. When the bandages finally come off, the comely features of Parry, aka Humphrey Bogart, are revealed. The film’s producers made much of the fact that Bogart and Lauren Bacall were back in harness again, for the first time since The Big Sleep (1946). And, as usual, their timing, screen presence and ability to play off one another is impeccable. But anyone expecting the rapid-fire dialogue and crackling sexual chemistry of Howard Hawks’ classic was to be sorely disappointed. Goodis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Daves, had other fish to torture. Parry distrusts everyone and everything, wallowing in his misery until it seems he must surely drown. That the film doesn’t sink under the weight of its own pessimism is down to Daves’ crisp pacing, a brooding, atmospheric depiction of San Francisco, and a wonderfully eccentric supporting cast of noir misfits, including Bruce Bennett, Clifton Young, Douglas Kennedy and Hollywood’s best-ever on-screen WASP, Agnes Moorehead. Noir purists decry Dark Passage’s implausibly upbeat denouement, but to be fooled by the happy ending is to ignore all of the preceding ninety minutes. The success of Dark Passage, first as a serialised tale in the Saturday Evening Post, then as a film, led to work as a Hollywood screenwriter. However, Goodis fell out with Hollywood and retreated to his home town of Philadelphia. There he moved in with his mother and began a long and lonely slide into alcoholism. Successful as a novelist during the ’50s – Cassidy’s Girl, one of nineteen novels, sold over a million copies – his star dimmed as the ’60s wore on. By the time he died in 1967, Goodis was broke and – with the notable exception of French film directors – languishing in squalor and obscurity. The pity is that he never turned to autobiography: his life would have become his finest novel.- Michael McGowan