I'm happy to say that the publisher Stark House has published Nothing Darker Than The Night a collection of essays from the last fifteen years by me (many of them revised and expanded) on hard-boiled and noir crime fiction. 48 (!) articles and essays, ranging from around 1300 words to nearly 18,000 words. (Most follow in the middle of those two lengths.) It's a big book, 424 pages. Definitely a book to dip into at one's leisure and pleasure.
I hope some of my fellow bloggers will get around to reviewing the whole thing someday but in the meantime a Goodreads reviewer, "AC," gave the book five stars and commented: "A wonderful collection of essays by a rather cranky reviewer and critic that covers a great deal of interesting biographical information about Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as a host of lesser known books of crime fiction and noir, including many of the short stories of Cornell Woolrich. Lots if interesting material to browse and to read in."
I was pleased with this take and will even cop to "cranky"--though I might just say opinionated! You definitely will get opinions in this book.
It starts off with with a nine-page introduction on how I came to get interested in hard-boiled and noir crime fiction in the first place. (Readers of this blog may recall how I started reading Agatha Christie at age eight and remained an exclusively Anglophile classic mystery reader for decades.) The two sections, roughly equal in length, are devoted respectively to hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.
'Hard-Boiled" has multiple essays on Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, as well as pieces on Hammett's Thirties and Forties shadows (lesser known writers who followed him) and on Gore Vidal (his Edgar Box mysteries) and two women crime writers, Margaret Millar, Ross's amazing wife, and Mignon Eberhart (!). Yes I look at hard-boiled influence in unexpected places, like work by Eberhart and traditionalist crime fiction guru S. S. Van Dine.
 |
| Crime may or may not pay but it certainly inspires some fascinating fiction |
On Hammett there is original research on the mystery woman in his life, Elise De Viane (the girlfriend he likely drunkenly sexually assaulted), a new look as his short Continental Op stories which challenges received wisdom on them, and analyses of four of his novels. With Chandler I analyze his attitude toward classic British crime fiction (something widely misunderstood), his bitter and rather stupid feud with Ross Macdonald, and his ironic epistolary relationship with crime writer James M. Fox. With Macdonald I look largely at his attitude to crime writing and the evolution in his own work. I greatly admire the "hard-boiled triumvirate" but I don't pull occasional punches when it comes to criticism either.
I also look at some obscure right-wing and left-wing hard-boiled crime writers, as well as the depictions of Asians in American pulp fiction. One of the pieces was inspired by a letter written in the early Thirties by a Chinese immigrant in rural Arkansas to a pulp magazine complaining about the way Asians were portrayed.
"Noir" starts off with a very long piece--if it were fiction it would almost be a novella--in which I revise the "tragic homosexual" legend which has grown up around Cornell Woolrich. A great deal of new biographical information here. I also look at his seminal noir novel The Bride Wore Black, and, as the goodreads reviewer stated, a good deal of his short fiction, including pieces which have been very little studied.
Probably the second most significant piece in the collection is on the colorful, quizzical life of Fredric Brown, a great vintage crime writer similar to Woolrich in some ways. Huge amount of new biographical life here. There's also a look at his novel The Screaming Mimi. There are two articles apiece on Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The last sub-section collects nine introductions I have written to Stark House reprints of noir novels that were adapted to film, including James Gunn's rather amazing Deadlier Than The Male (filmed as Born to Kill), Theodore Strauss' rural noir Moonrise and Edna Sherry's spectacular Sudden Fear, adapted as an Oscar-nominated film starring Joan Crawford.
I'm pleased with this book and hope my readers will take a look. If it does well enough, a collection of my vintage true crime essays (a score of those) will follow.
