Return within Thirty Days: The Birthday Present (2008), by Barbara Vine

Ruth Rendell published 14 Barbara Vine novels over nearly three decades between 1986 and 2014.  As perhaps can be expected with a highly prolific writer--in addition to the 14 Vines she published 52 novels under her own name, as well as seemingly countless pieces of short fiction--the Vines afforded diminishing yields of poisoned fruit over time.  Rendell banged out the first three Vine novels--A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion and The House of Stairs--in just three years between 1986 and 1988.  She was then at the height of her powers and it shows in this terrific trio.  Afterward, however, there was a perceptible overall decline in the books that grew steeper over time.

There was, to be sure, Asta's Book (1993), perhaps the best novel in the series and the best book Rendell ever wrote, and the moving, melancholy The Brimstone Wedding (1995), and even The Blood Doctor (2002), one which I know a lot of people hate but I rather admire.  After The Blood Doctor there came three last Vines: The Minotaur (2005), The Birthday Present (2008) and The Child's Child, the latter of which was published only about two years before the author's tragically crippling and soon-to-be fatal stroke (which occurred about a decade and one week ago).  

None of the books in this farewell trio, regretfully, are very good.  (Disclaimer: I've never actually finished The Child's Child.)  I remember reading The Minotaur a few years after it was published and being surprised how banal it was.  It was supposed to be a Gothic thriller and was really nothing of the sort.  The best Vines are celebrated for their dense but dexterous narratives, which move teasingly and tantalizingly back and forth in time, navigating treacherously shifting viewpoints and perspectives. Far less of that skill was present in The Minotaur, which mostly seemed a wearisome slog over a flat and dreary plain.  

The same is true, only more so, of the penultimate Vine, The Birthday Present, over 100,000 words of tedium, by and large.  It's not terrible like late Christie or Carr is terrible, just rather a bore.  And, in the end, that's worst thing you can say about a thriller.

Red Shoe Diaries
I have a feeling we aren't
in Kansas anymore.

The Birthday Present is one of those books which is all premise no plot.  This is the one about a Tory politician in the late-Thatcher/Major era (1990-97), Ivor Tesham, who fears being implicated in a sex scandal when his mistress Hebe--that's Hee-bee as in heebie-jeebies--Furnval is killed in a car accident during an "adventure sex" scenario which the two pretty pervs concocted for her birthday.  

Hebe was to be "kidnapped" by two men, blindfolded, handcuffed and gagged, carried to a house and dumped on the bed for Ivor's (and apparently her own) carnal pleasure.  All well and good, at least if you're a kinkster, but as mentioned there's a deadly car accident along the way and Hebe is killed along with one of her "kidnappers," while the other is hospitalized in a coma.  What will happen now to Ivor and his political career?!  

Well, not much, really, in the event.  The whole thing just seems to drag interminably.  It sounds exciting, adventure sex, bondage and all that, but it's really a damp squib.  Rendell is far too decorous--dare I say genteel and ladylike--to write about this sort of thing with real conviction.  It's like Agatha Christie writing about SM Clubs.  

For example, Rendell repeatedly says that in the kidnap car Hebe had a gag in her mouth and it's indicated that Ivor got this "gag" at a sex shop but then it's stated that Hebe had a scarf wrapped around her mouth.  Well, that's not the same thing, is it?  You wouldn't be buying a scarf at a sex shop.  Hebe's gal pal Jane Atherton (see below) is reluctantly titillated by a "dog collar" from Hebe's kink bag, but that's about as far as Rendell dares go with this.  (She also mentions the word "dildoes" once and she has Ivor say "fuck" about four or five times.)  

I wonder whether Rendell ever saw the infamous "gimp scene" in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction, which came out around the time of the events detailed in Rendell's novel?  I'm guessing not, her grip on popular culture started noticeably to slacken from the 1990s onward.  Still The Birthday Present anticipated the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which mainstreamed bondage for the Oprah set, by three years, so perhaps it seemed more venturesome at the time.    

It's no gag
(Bruce Willis in 1994's Pulp Fiction)
Rendell gets mildly kinky
in The Birthday Present

On the whole though Rendell seems more interested in exploring some of her favorite pet peeves with modernity, like people who address one familiarly by one's first name or, worse yet, by a diminutive.  There's an "uppish" window cleaner who does this who reads like a reincarnation of a character from a much earlier and better Rendell novel, The Lake of Darkness.  I don't care how many times Rendell proclaimed she was a socialist; I have my doubts and I stick to them with each read.  

It doesn't help that neither pervy Ivor, nor his dull sister, nor his even duller brother-in-law, who tells a good chunk of the tale, are remotely interesting characters. I'm afraid I just couldn't care less what happened to Ivor in this book.  

To pad things out and lend some interest to the narrative, Rendell introduces a friend of Hebe's, Jane Atherton, known as the "alibi woman," because Hebe used her to cover up her affair with Ivor from her doting husband.  By far the most interesting chapters in the book come in the form of extracts from Jane's diary from the time.  (The brother-in-law's portions of the novel are told retrospectively from the present day, i.e., about 2008.)  

Even the Jane portions lift the book only slightly, however.  The Hebe-Jane relationship was potentially interesting, being the classic Hot Girl-Plain Girl relationship (Plain Jane?) you often see in real life, where a hot girl likes to hang around a plain girl to shine even brighter against her dull background.  There was a pair of girls I knew in high school who were just like this.  Years later I met the plain girl again and I didn't even recognize here--she had utterly transformed herself into a hot girl who looked a lot like her old hot girl gal pal!  Now there's an interesting story.  But Hebe dies so early in the book, there's no exploration of this dynamic.

Although I've only ever seen one other review of Rendell's novel ever comment on this, it seems to me blatantly obvious that the Jane Atherton character was inspired by Barbara Covett in English mainstream author Zoe Heller's much-praised 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, which was made into a superb Oscar-nominated film in 2006, merely two years before the publication of The Birthday Present.  You almost feel like Rendell must have seen this film and begun writing this novel the very next day, the impression is so strong.  

Scandal tells about the bizarre codependent relationship that develops between two women teachers, an older spinster type (Barbara) who narrates the novel and a younger married woman, Sheba Hart, who is having a torrid, ill-advised affair with one of her students.  In The Birthday Present Jane is much younger than Barbara, in fact about the same age as Hebe, but she is very similar to Barbara, a lonely spinsterish type with a soured attitude to life, while Hebe is very similar to Sheba--How similar are their names!--in the sense of being an attractive woman married to a dull husband who is engaged in risky sex with another man (or boy, really, in Sheba's case).  

Gone Girls
Sheba (Cate Blanchett) and Barbara (Judi Dench) throw down in
the superb, Oscar-nominated 2006 film Notes on a Scandal

Unfortunately, however, Jane is a dreary wet blanket mostly lacking Barbara's quirky character and sardonic narration.  Part of the perverse "fun" of Scandal is seeing Barbara taking control of events and gradually becoming the dominant partner in the relationship.  Jane, on the other hand, remains an embittered loser in life to the end.  Still, her story provides the novel with what narrative drive it has.  

The biggest problem here is that The Birthday Present feels like a Ruth Rendell non-series psychological novel masquerading as a Barbara Vine.  One could easily reimagine Present, retrospectively set in the 1990, as a Rendell actually published in the 1990s.  Shorn of 20,000 or so words and narrated in the present by Jane, this might actually have been a thrilling thriller.  As it is this "present" is one which most readers likely will want to return to the store within thirty days.  Save the receipt!

And Then There Were Nuns: The Religious Body (1966), by Catherine Aird

In 1966 at age 35 the late Catherine Aird published her debut detective novel, The Religious Body, putting her squarely in the midst of what might be called second wave crime queening in British detective fiction.  With Dead Men Don't Ski in 1959, Patricia Moyes slightly anticipated this newer generation of Sixties women mystery authors who were writing firmly in the style of their predecessors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey and Gladys Mitchell (not to mention later-comers Margaret Erskine, Christianna Brand and Elizabeth Ferrars).  Moyes was followed by PD James and Sara Woods (1962) as well as Ruth Rendell (1964) before Aird came along two years later.  (Anne Morice popped in for tea a bit later in 1970.)  

All in all, it's a pretty formidable group of mystery writers, which surely gave comfort to readers of the day who were repeatedly being informed by smug critics, celebrating the merits of the likes of Simenon and Patricia Highsmith and John le Carre, that the classic detective novel exemplified by Christie and her sister monarchs was dying a rapid and deserved death.

Margery Allingham passed away neatly in the middle of 1966 (June 30), leaving behind an unfinished mystery novel later completed by her husband, while Sayers and Tey had both expired in the 1950s and Christianna Brand largely retired from writing detective novels after 1955.  However, all of the other ladies remained quite active players in the murder game.  In 1966, there appeared, in addition to Aird's The Religious Body, Christie's Third Girl, Marsh's Death at the Dolphin, Mitchell's The Croaking Raven, Erskine's The Family at Tammerton, Woods' Enter Certain Murderers and Rendell's Vanity Dies Hard. I think you can make the case that Aird's novel is is the best of the bunch.  

1985 sixth printing of the
US pb ed in Bantam's
"Murder Most British" series

The Religious Body concerns the murder of a nun, Sister Anne, at the Convent of St. Anselm in the village of Cullingoak in Aird's fictional county of Calleshire, which she presumably based on Kent, the county where she lived out her adult life.  At the end of Chapter 1 we learn that Sister Anne has gone missing and at the beginning of Chapter 2 we find that Inspector C. D. Sloan of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Constabulary is investigating her suspicious death. (She was found huddled at the bottom of the cellar stairs.) 

Sloan is doubtfully assisted by young Detective-Constable William Crosby, who is "raw, perky and consciously representing the younger generation in the force." Detective-Sergeant Gleven was not available and only appears briefly in the book, but a young woman detective-sergeant named Perkins appears near the end in a significant select capacity.  

In the character of Crosby you can detect that despite being only 35 herself, Aird disapproved of the rising generation--another quality she had in common with Christie and her company!  Personally I rather like the lad.  

Sloan is overseen by Superintendent Leeyes, a pompous windbag fond of self-improvement seminars who contributes nothing of use to the investigation but is there to supply a bit of comic relief to the criminal proceedings--not that things ever get that dark in the book in the first place.  

Along with pathologist Dr. Dabbe this police trio appears in every book in the series, I believe--though none of them ever seem to change or even age over more than half a century!  Aird had a formula and she stuck to it.  In later books I find that the vaudeville comedian act of Crosby, Leeyes and Dabbe can get a bit tiring.  Sloan on the other hand, is a bit drabbe, shall we say, but that's okay--you might say he's tragic relief.  Someone has to play the straight man.  

The Religious Body actually is somewhat less formulaic than later books, with the comical digressions of later books much toned down.  For fans of some of the more serious crime queens who are new to Aird, the author's first few books probably are the best place to start.  And none better, indeed, than The Religious Body.

Rereading the novel I was struck by how it fits right in with Gladys Mitchell's two mysteries set at convents, St. Peter's Finger and Convent on Styx, which came respectively 28 years before and nine years after The Religious Body, in 1938 and 1975.  There is also resemblance to Mitchell's Spotted Hemlock (1958), which is appealingly set at neighboring schools, a female agricultural college and a men's college. 

In The Religious Body, a men's agricultural college adjoins the property of the convent.  In both the Mitchell and the Aird novels the penchant of the young college men for performing rowdy "rags" plays pivotal roles in the plots.  (Guy Fawkes Night takes place in the Aird novel.)  

St. Ethelburga's Convent, formerly in Deal, Kent

The convent building itself was converted from the former manor house of the diminished local great family, the Faines, who sadly now are represented solely by one winsome daughter.  By special dispensation she is soon to wed the headmaster of the agricultural college at her old home, now the convent.  

Aird lacks Mitchell's often bizarre, sometimes surreal, aspect, but in their mysteries both women convey a quirky, wry sense of the absurdity of life that appeals to many readers while putting off some others.  Me, I'm a fan on the whole, although both authors go overboard for me into dottiness occasionally. 

Suitable to her subject (nuns), Aird stays pretty serious for the course of the book, mostly poking fun, when she does poke fun, at the policemen's bemusement over the, to them, passing strange conventions of convent life.  There's a nun who holds the office of procuratrix, for example, and a sister named St. Bernard.  

Some of the cops and other characters express notions about nuns that seem very antiquated today--all to the effect that they must be failed women running away from real life and cruelly exploited by the Papacy.  The author's sympathetic portrayal of convent living challenges those notions, however.  (You might also be reminded of the beloved British television series Call the Midwife.)  St. Anselm's Mother Superior and her much younger underling, Sister Lucy, for example, are impressive characters.  Much of the book is rather sober by Aird's standards--in other words, this ain't The Flying Nun.  

The Flying Nun television series ran from 1967 to 1970 and starred Sally Field
who worked years to live down her cutesy ingenue image

It's all very impressively done and adds immeasurably to the appeal of the novel.  Gladys Mitchell had a sister who was a nun, but I don't believe that Aird, of Highland Scots ancestry, was even Catholic, so kudos to her for informing herself on the subject.  

Anyway, it transpires that Sister Anne was bumped off with the proverbial blunt instrument, the precise identity of which is cleverly hidden throughout most of the book.  Aird looks at both people inside and outside of the convent who might have had motivation to murder Sister Anne, who, it turns out, was actually an heiress to a valuable estate, which would go in turn to the convent.  (Nuns don't own property.)  There's a chapter devoted to a call which Sloan and Crosby pay on Anne's repellently cold and superficial mother, who never forgave her daughter for devoting her life exclusively to God.  

Some years ago Patrick Ohl, a young mystery blogger who later became a priest, in his review was pretty hard on this book, saying that Aird made a flub concerning blood coagulation and provided an ill-motivated second murder, but I'm inclined more to let the author off the hook for these alleged sins.  However, you could actually argue that both of the murders are insufficiently motivated. In classic detective novels the nicest people--and all of the people in this book at least seem nice--just will go and start plotting ingenious murders at the drop of a hat.   

I do think Aird provided some very good clues to the crimes, however, keeping the whole affair rolling along in an engaging way as a brain teaser.  Coupled with the strong atmosphere you have a real winner of a classic detective novel, rather along the lines, come to think of it, of PD James' later Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), memorably set at a nursing school--though admittedly Aird's book is a far lighter read.  Which some people no doubt will actually prefer!  

RIP Catherine Aird (1930-2024), Silver Age Crime Queen

Catherine Aird, who died ten days ago at the age of 94 from a massive stroke, was one of the notable figures of the British Silver Age of Detective Fiction, as I call it (I don't know whether it's caught on with anyone else yet), roughly from 1940 to 1990.  The Silver Age gets little attention relative to the Golden Age, though it produced a host of wonderful crime writers, like (aside from Aird) Edmund Crispin, Julian Symons, Andrew Garve, Michael Gilbert, HRF Keating, Elizabeth Ferrars, Christianna Brand, Patricia Moyes, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Sara Woods, Joyce Porter, Anne Morice, Margaret Yorke, Peter Lovesey, Reginald Hill, Simon Brett and Robert Barnard.

monument commemorating
Catherine Aird's parents 
and brother in Rosskeen
Churchyard, Scotland

The oldest writers in this distinguished cohort actually began writing mystery  fiction in the early years of the Second World War, when the younger writers in the group, like Peter Lovesey, were but children.  Simon Brett, the baby of the group, as far as I know, is actually a baby boomer and still in his seventies. 

Catherine Aird published her first detective novel, The Religious Body, at the age of 35 in 1966.  It received high praise at the time as a detective novel in the classic genteel British mold.  Over the next 57 years, she went on to publish 25 additional detective novels, the last of which, Constable Country, appeared just last year.  In his tribute  last week to Aird, Martin Edwards mentions visiting her two or three years ago, when she was enthusiastically working on this book.  A successful mystery writer for nearly sixty years--that puts Aird in select company, like the great Agatha Christie herself, as well as Peter Lovesey and the late James and Rendell.  

I started reading Aird back in the 1990s, as I did other Silver Agers.  Between 1966 and 1969 she had a great initial run with The Religious Body, A Most Contagious Game, Henrietta Who? and The Complete Steel (aka The Stately Home Murder, once American publishers retitled it), all Silver Age classics of the genre, before coming somewhat a cropper, in my estimation, with A Late Phoenix (1970), reviewed by me here four years ago.  But that was her fifth book in five years, everybody needs refreshing after a jag.  

After three years came her locked room mystery (Aird was a great fan of this mystery subgenre) His Burial Too (1973) and the author had another nice run with a total of eight more books in the 1970s and 1980s, all of which, I believe, were reprinted in Bantam Books' Murder Most British series, which one could still easily find in used bookstores in the United States back when I use to haunt the shops back in the 1990s.  

Catherine Aird (1930-2024)

I kind of lost touch with Aird after that, though in the internet age I used to pick up copies of her books on occasion.  She published thirteen more from 1990 onward, as well as three books of short stories, though I think her popularity diminished somewhat, as the genteel British detective novel fell out of critical fashion.  

The late Rue Morgue Press reprinted several of the author's older detective novels in the first decade of 21st century, usually depicting on their covers photos of quaint village churches, and then along came the eBooks. Much of Aird's work is readily available today in nice eBook editions.  

Catherine Aird, I think it's safe to say, is one of the survivors.

*******

The real name of "Catherine Aird," who was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1930, was Kinn Hamilton McIntosh--it won't surprise you to learn that her medical practitioner father was a native Scotsman.  Her mother, Violet Jessie Kinnis, was herself half Scottish, the daughter of John Kinnis, a dry cleaner in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex whose parents were born in Scotland.  

Kinn derived her Christian name from her mother's surname "Kinnis."  She derived her pen name Catherine Aird from a great-great grandmother after an incredulous publisher ordered her, as she divulged to an interviewer, "to go away and get myself a name that people would recognize [either] as a man or a woman."  No sexual ambiguity for mystery readers!

Kinn also had an elder brother, Munro, who was born in 1921 and died in 2012 at age ninety.  Her family all are buried at Rosskeen Churchyard in Rosskeen, a parish tucked away in the Scottish highlands.  

Kinn's father, Robert Aeneas Cameron McIntosh, graduated from the University of Edinburgh and 1922 and that same year was listed on the medical register.  He was only 22.  The year before he and Violet, who was slightly younger than he, produced Kinn's elder brother, Munro, though apparently they didn't actually marry (in Sussex) until 1929, a year and a half before Kinn was born.  Now there's an interesting circumstance.

Rosskeen Parish Church (now closed)
In the churchyard, which is still in use, Catherine Aird's immediate family lies buried.

The new husband and wife moved north with their son to Huddersfield, where Kinn was born.  She grew up and attended school in Huddersfield until she was sixteen (1946), when she became seriously sick.  When she recovered later that year she went to live with her parents back in southeastern England at the village of Sturry near Canterbury, where she served as her father's practice manager and dispenser and was active in the Girl Guides.  Did they move back south for their daughter's health?

They parents and their daughter lived at a big house, Invergordon, near the railway station at the bottom of Sturry Hill.  The home was named after a town in the Scottish Highlands.  Here Dr. McIntosh maintained, with Kinn's help, his surgery.  The author herself later recalled that she had planned to become a doctor before she her problematic health setback.  She apparently lived here, dispensing, girl guiding and, most importantly for mystery fans, writing, for literally the rest of her life--nearly eighty years!  

Aeneas Mackintosh
(1879-1916)

Kinn McIntosh recalled being an inveterate mystery fan during her childhood in Yorkshire during the Second World War.  (Did she ever run across future crime writer Sara Woods, who lived fifteen miles north of Huddersfield in Bradford?)  

Being a huge mystery reader, Kinn was thrilled when her library in Huddersfield allowed patrons to check out a dozen books at a time.  She read everything from English thrillers to the Crime Queens to American hard-boiled.  

Was Kinn McIntosh related to Scotswoman Elizabeth MacKintosh, aka Josephine Tey?  Her lauded mystery novel A Most Contagious Game (1967) is definitely an homage to Tey's The Daughter of Time.  

I get the feeling everyone in Scotland is related to some degree.  If you're Clan Mackintosh, for example, you're connected, even if you spell the name differently.  Especially if you're named Aeneas.  

How common in Scotland is the name Aeneas, one of the Christian names of Kinn's father?  It seems a distinctly favored name by McIntosh men.  There was a Captain Aeneas Mackintosh of Mackintosh, for example, a canny laird who was active in the Jacobite Rising of 1745.  Then there was handsome, intrepid Aeneas Mackintosh, one of the members of the famed Shackleton Antarctic Expedition.  

Unlike that poor, brave, ill-fated fellow, who died heroically but futilely at the untimely age of 36, Kinn McIntosh, aka Catherine Aird, though she never married lived a long, creatively productive life of nearly ten full decades.  As with Aeneas, Aird's name will live on after her, through her charming, long-running crime fiction saga. 

Rosskeen Stone

Not a Nice to Place to Visit--and You Might End up Dying There: Pop 1280 (1964) by Jim Thompson

"Just how big is Pottsville, anyways?"  "Well, sir," I said, "there's a road sign just outside of town that says 'Pop. 1280,' so I guess that's about it.  Twelve hundred and eighty souls."

All my life, I've been just as friendly and polite as a fella could be.  I've always figured that if a fella was polite to everyone, why, they'd be nice to him.  But it don't always work out that way.  

It was a kind of hard fact to face--that I was just a nothing doing nothing.  

But we're a real God-fearin' community, like you've probably gathered.

They were all asking for it!  And like the Good Book says, Ask and ye shall receive.

Just because I put temptation in front of people, it don't mean they got to pick it up.

I'd maybe been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it.  But this was the first time I'd seen what they really were.  Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin'.  Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness.

I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison.

Or maybe I'm just kind of sour...

--Pop. 1280 (1964) by Jim Thompson

Nearly sixty years and six months ago, on the night of Father's Day, June 21, 1964, three young, earnest and idealistic civil rights activists--James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner--were abducted and systematically shot and killed by a mob of vicious Ku Klux Klan thugs in a lonely wood outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the trio of activists had been participants in the "Freedom Summer" campaign to register black Mississippians to vote.  (Fewer than 7% of adult black Mississippians had been registered to vote in 1960.)  For this transgressive compassion for their fellow human beings the trio merited merciless execution in the eyes of many white Mississippians.  

After the young men's huddled bodies were discovered buried under fifteen feet of dirt at a dam site about six weeks later, federal authorities brought charges for the killings against eighteen members of Mississippi's supposed "master race," including the county sheriff and his deputy.  It was clear that the racist white segregationist state government empowered by the good white people of Mississippi to keep their fellow black citizens "in their place" was not going to lift a finger to achieve justice for the victims, a native black man and two "outside agitator" Yankee Jews.

Seven of the charged men were eventually convicted, but none of them would serve more than six years in prison.  Many of the people implicated in the case would die peacefully in their beds, their pasts cleanly scrubbed and whitewashed as it were by their families. It was a paltry dish of justice that was served, to be sure, but the FBI was working in the face of implacable opposition from local whites, who still clung to the notion that through "massive resistance"--i.e., intimidation and outright murder--they could prevent black Mississippians from enjoying equal rights as American citizens.  After all, they and their ancestors had successfully resisted reform for nearly a century after the Civil War.  

Just around the time that the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were unearthed from their mean red clay grave, paperback publisher Gold Medal published Jim Thompson's crime novel Pop. 1280.  The novel details the murderous activities of Nick Corey, sheriff in the tiny town of Pottersville (population 1280), the seat of rural Potts County, "the forty-seventh largest county" in an unnamed southern state.  (In fact there are precisely forty-seven counties in the state, get it?)

When the novel opens Nick Corey is facing the tiresome task of having to run for reelection for the office of county sheriff.  This time around there may be trouble in store for him.  He has gotten along for years by being amiable and inoffensive and doing nothing, but now the people seem actually to want him, so he frets, "to do a little something instead of just grinning and joking and looking the other way."  Over the course of the novel Nick comes to the conclusion that the easiest thing for him is just to start killing objectionable people on the sly.  

He starts by shooting the two pimps in charge of the local whorehouse, who had been giving him, along with a rakeoff, a whole lot of lip and insolence.  Whores are essential to the stability of Pottsville or any town, we learn.  "Why," ingenuously observes a deputy sheriff in a neighboring county, "if there wasn't any whores, the decent ladies wouldn't be safe on the streets."  But them saucy pimps had to go and go they did, courtesy of night shots from Nick Corey's gun.  In dispatching them, Nick also takes time to setup for the crime a man he hates (quite rightly so).  

a southern courthouse

Nick soon finds himself plotting murders to get himself out of other difficulties, like the problem of nasty, vicious town drunk Tom Hauck, with whose sultry wife Rose he, Nick, is having an affair.  Nick's own wife, Miriam, despises him and he despises her, she having trapped him into marriage with a rape claim, scotching his plan to marry local beauty Amy Mason.  Nick would dearly love to ditch Miriam and win back ladylike Amy.  

There's also the problem of his opponent in the sheriff's race, who is that rarest of things in Potter County, a genuinely decent man.  In fact, in the whole novel Nick's naively good opponent is about the only decent person one will find, aside from the inoffensive, obsequious old black man Uncle John.  

Much of Pop. 1280 is sardonically amusing, as Nick slaughters and sets up people who are, frankly, quite deserving of the dishonor he does them.  But eventually things take a darker turn, as murder starts to go to Nick's head.  

In this aspect of the novel, Pop. 1280 very much resembles inverted mystery tales like Francis Iles' Malice Aforethought from over three decades earlier, but where it very much differs from and ultimately transcends such earlier books is in its ambitious political satire and its utter, overwhelming nihilism.  Pop. 1280 is one of the darkest meditations on the sacred myth of the American Dream that I have ever read.  

Although Jim Thompson set the novel in the second decade of the twentieth century (most people drive horse and buggies, autos and telephones are comparatively new and there's a reference to silent film actor William S. Hart whose first film dates to 1914), the author clearly wrote it with an eye cocked ahead fifty years later to the then present time of the second Reconstruction, when activists were pressing the federal government into finally fulfilling the broken promises of the first Reconstruction by mandating desegregation and civil rights, including the right to vote.  

Lige Daniels lynching at the courthouse
in Center, Texas,1920
Obviously an exciting day in the dull lives
of the local yokels.

The greatest irony of Pop. 1280 is that the murderous sheriff is probably the most admirable, on-the-ball citizen of the county, with the most developed social conscience (not that there's much competition).  It's his consciousness of the manifest absurdity and injustice of life that finally drives Nick over the edge into sheer, savage nihilism. 

What he's really expected to do as sheriff, Nick comes to realize, is not administer justice, but to keep down the "white trash" and the "damn n-----s," or all those people who can't pay the poll tax or pass the selectively administered literacy tests and thus are denied the franchise and have to be kept in line on behalf of the respectable classes, who lie and cheat and steal and debauch just as much as anyone else but keep it all on the down low while they virtuously attend church on Sunday.  

In this novel there's no real justice in the world, no discernible meaning to life. It's just kill or be killed. Be a master or slave.  

There's a deeply radical critique of society here, obviously, one that sweeps beyond the compelling personal drama of The Grifters to encompass an entire accursed place in time.  In the United States MAGA regimes currently are banning what they call critical race theory and diversity education because they want to present a more positive vision of the the American past, but the sanitized vision which they have cooked up in their kitchens is a saccharine and false one.  Try to imagine growing up a black person in the South under the Jim Crow "separate but equal" regime between 1875, after the demise of Reconstruction, and 1965.  How does a decent country allow that to go on for almost a century?  How does it pat itself smugly on the back for its rare humanity and decency?  

Jim Thompson's father 'Big Jim" was sheriff here for a time
in the first decade of of the 20th century, around the time the novel Pop. 1280 is set

Pop. 1280 gets much closer than sanitized MAGA curricula to what life was like for a lot of people in God's country.  That's partly why the book would be banned from school libraries under MAGA regimes.  

Nick can be quite corruscating in his seemingly naive homespun country philosophy, like when he discusses southern lynching:

I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation.  People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend do much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or any hours left for practical purposes.

Or his observations on Henry Clay Fanning, a great believer in the rights of a parent, but not so much in his obligations:

That Henry Clay Fanning was a real case, what we call a cotton-patch lawyer down here.  He knew all the privileges he was entitled to--and maybe three or four million besides--but he didn't have much sense of his obligations.  None of his fourteen kids had ever been to school, because makin' kids go to school was interferin' with a man's constitutional rights.  Four of his seven girls, all of 'em that were old enough to be, were pregnant.  And he wouldn't allow no one to ask 'em how they'd got that way, because that was his legal responsibility, it was a father's job to take care of his children's morals, and he didn't have to tolerate any interference.

Of course, everyone had a pretty good idea who'd gotten those girls pregnant....

I could see HCF on X today, vigorously denouncing both polio vaccination and "men" in women's bathrooms while God knows what goes on at home.  

This is humor at its darkest and as pointed as a sharpened bayonet.  Coming in 1964, as the white South through criminal mayhem and murder was doing its damndest to maintain its regime of white privilege in the face of the increasing dismay and disgust from the rest of the nation, it reads like Jim Thompson's great fuck you letter to his native region.  (The author was born in southeast Oklahoma, the son of a county sheriff, and later grew up in Texas.)

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies in the US critics (Anthony Boucher excepted) largely treated Pop. 1280 as pulp trash, refusing, if they looked at all, to gaze beyond the book's sex and salaciousness to see the social satire.  However, this pulp trash was appreciated, like Jerry Lewis, by the French.  

In "Donald Stanley's Book Corner" in the San Francisco Examiner in 1966, the columnist observed that France's Serie Noire crime fiction imprint, edited by Marcel Duhamel, now numbered 1000 volumes, 300 of which were by American authors.  No. 1000 was Pop. 1280.  Although "wholly ignored in its homeland," Stanley wrote with evident bemusement, in France critics had lauded the novel"as a fine example of black humor."  They compared Jim Thompson to Henry Miller and Erskine Caldwell. I'd say here he's also an R-rated Mark Twain.  The novel frequently is quite funny.  (See the outhouse episode for example.)  

Phillipe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert
as the wily sheriff and his troublesome, fiery mistress in Coup de Torchon

It was the French who in 1981, filmed Pop. 1280, cannily relocated from the American South to French West Africa, as Coup de Torchon. ("Wipe of the Cloth" I think would be a literal translation.)  In France the film, a popular hit, received ten Cesar nominations and it was also nominated for an academy award for best foreign film at the 1982 Oscars.  If only we could see ourselves as other see us.  Especially today.  

Today the book generally is regarded as one of Thompson's finest crime novels and I agree.  The biggest weaknesses are its women characters--Nick's trio of problematic ladies is pretty shrill and onenote--and its indeterminate ending, which was altered in the film.  But for most of the ride the book is masterful indeed, if you have the stomach for some hard home truths about the checkered history of God's country. 

The Art of the Grift: The Grifters (1963), by Jim Thompson

Thus, for the tenth time that day, he had worked the twenties, one of the three standard gimmicks of the short con grift.  The other two are the smack and the tat, usually good for bigger scores but not nearly  so swift nor safe.  Some marks fall for the twenties repeatedly, without ever tipping.  

--The Grifters (1963), by Jim Thompson

Since in the United States a month ago--Has it been a month already?--Americans elected as president, for the second time, an unashamed, unregenerate grifter, a cynical purveyor of Trump guitars and Trump watches and Trump bobbleheads and Trump bullshit, I thought it would be appropriate to pay tribute to the heinous, YMCA-tripping, old bastard--and the legion of marks who elected him--with a review of Jim Thompson's timeless classic crime novel The Grifters.  

If there's a crime writer who knew about rogues and thieves and villains from the poisoned heart of America's heartland, it was old Jim, creator of such classic noir novels about rural psychos and sociopaths as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280.  I freely admit to loathing the first of those two books, finding it completely repulsive, but in a way maybe that's a testament to its power.  I think Jim had his finger on the elevated pulse of America's dark, damaged heart far more surely than more pious writers, not to mention even that other great J-man, Jesus Himself.  

Born in Anadarko, Oklahoma in 1906, Thompson led a wayward life but in his middle age he published a slew of hard-hitting paperback originals in the United States during the Fifties and Sixties that now widely are seen as crime fiction classics.  Essentially this run extends a dozen years beginning with The Killer Inside Me (1952) and ending with Pop. 1280 (1964).  Along the way some of the author's most famous paperback originals were Savage Night, The Nothing Man, A Swell-Looking Babe, A Hell of a Woman, After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway and The Grifters.

The hard-living Thompson died at age seventy in 1977 with his books out-of-print and seemingly forgotten, though two of them were filmed in the Seventies.  In 1984 Vintage's Black Lizard Crime imprint began reprinting Thompson's novels, in the process catching the jaundiced eye of then influential British crime critic Julian Symons, who adjudged, Jehovah-like, that the American was "no more than an efficient imitator of other writers in the genre, particularly James M. Cain."  

Personally I find Thompson's crime writing much more perverse and viscerally horrifying than Cain's.  Cain after all was in vogue in the Thirties, while Thompson was pushing the envelope even by Fifties standards.  I frequently come across passages in Thompson that I find intensely unsettling--that's not something I can say so much about Hammett or Chandler or even James M. Cain.  

But I think Symons essentially dismissed most of American "tough" crime writing after those three greats as simply sex and sleaze.  He didn't really like Cain all that much either, complaining of the author's "coarseness of feeling allied with a weakness for melodrama."  

No wonder, then, Symons saw Thompson as nothing more than a mere imitator of Cain.  You could level the same charges at Thompson were you so inclined; and Symons was so inclined.  Some critics were never comfortable with the sex and violence in these books, and Symons was one.

I'm not comfortable with them myself frequently, but then every read needn't be a comfort read.  Symons himself dismissed much of British genteel detective fiction as anodyne and he reserved only mockery for cozies.  Certainly cozy is not a word you can apply to Jim Thompson's books.  

The violence--especially against women--in The Killer Inside Me by the murderous anti-hero is something I personally can't stomach, but I have enjoyed other Thompson novels over the years, increasingly so in the last few as my own life has gotten bleaker and the world has turned dark.  If you want to read about sleazes and psychos and dirtbags and louses--which after all is what a good-sized chunk of the world is and always has been composed of--Thompson is the guy for you.  

Still, however, I'm always pleased to find qualities of suspense and puzzlement in a  crime novel and one of my two favorite Thompson novels--the other is Pop. 1280--has just that.  It's The Grifters.  

Thompson published The Grifters in 1963, near the end of his great run as a novel writer.  I couldn't find a single newspaper mention of it until 1984, when it was became one of the Thompson novels Black Lizard republished.  

Six years later The Grifters was released as a film starring Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening.  It was produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Stephen Frears, an up and coming director who had already helmed the lauded films My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick up Your Ears and Dangerous Liaisons.  (Is the last Renaissance noir?)

Huston, Cusack and Bening were all up-and-comers in a manner of speaking.  Huston, 38 at the time of filming, was the daughter of the great sometime noir director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle) and had won a supporting actor Oscar for her role in her father's gangster film Prizzi's Honor four years earlier. 

Cusack, 23, was already a veteran of Eighties teen coming-of-age films and Bening, 31, made her breakthrough in this film.  She received her first Oscar nomination (supporting) for this film, while Huston received her last (lead).  Frears was nominated for best director and the screenwriter, noted crime writer Donald Westlake, was nominated for adapted screenplay.  

Probably the film just missed a best picture nomination.  (They really nominated Godfather Part III over this?)  It still stand as one of the most lauded neo-noirs of its era.  In the original noir era one might have seen, say, Joan Crawford, Tony Curtis and Gloria Grahame in the major roles.  

I haven't seen the film in over thirty years but I certainly still remember some of the scenes.  (Ugh, do I.)  I had never read the book, however.  

It's is about Roy Dillon, a 25-year-old short con grifter (as opposed to the grifter of the more complex long con, like running for President of the United States) who has been on his own since at age seventeen he left the single, "backwoods white trash" mother who negligently raised him.  

At age thirteen Lilly Dillon married a thirty-year-old railroad worker, giving birth just shy of fourteen to Roy.  Her husband died soon after and she eventually ended up in Baltimore as a B-girl and later went in for the bookie rackets.  This has brought her out for a time to LA, coincidently when Roy is gravely ill with internal bleeding after a grift that went wrong resulted in his getting a baseball bat tap to his stomach.  

Though Lilly, who had been a wayward adolescent mother and not much better as an adult, hasn't seen Roy in eight years, she takes him into her new place to recuperate.  Roy also has a girlfriend, Moira Langtry, an attractive divorcee of, I think it was, thirty-one.  Moira and Lilly can't stand each other (they see too much of themselves in each other) and Moira tries to set her son up with the nice young European immigrant day nurse, Carol Roberg, whom she has hired to help care for Roy.  

Lilly, it seems, has developed a bit of a belated conscience about the shitty upbringing she provided for Roy, who has grown into a smart, handsome man, even if his ethics, like hers, are rather on the shady side.  Moira, who has been living off a large sum of cash and occasionally granting other men her favors for a price, is none too scrupulously honest either.  Of course she isn't happy about the prospect of Carol, nor is she pleased with the existence of Lilly.  Nor does Lilly think much of Moira.

I have to stop here, just when the novel really gets interesting, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read the book of seen the film.  The last fifth of this short novel (about 55,000 words) is really headlong paced, with lots of suspense and classic noir twists and turns.  It is indeed very much a noir novel, with copious irony in the just-missed opportunities and fatally spurned forks in the road.  At heart it's a study of the two main characters, the mother and her son, both of them toiling in traps of their own devising.  

Certainly neither one of them is a sympathetic individual, but neither are they entirely hateful either despite despicable things that they do.  Both of them are driven by a desperate will to survive, but which of the two has the stronger will?  

And then there's Moira, who is given some backstory too, though I was not as drawn to her character.  Carol on the other hand is a genuinely "good girl" in the hard-boiled/noir tradition.  Yet she is allowed quietly to fade from the narrative.  (Indeed in the film she is largely eliminated altogether.)  

This is not a sex and sleaze novel, though there is a torture scene of a woman involving a cigarette lighter and a bag of oranges that is particularly repellent (though it's not as bad as The Killer Inside Me).  In many passages I actually found the book quite ruminative.  They don't call Thompson Dimestore Dostoevsky for nothing.  Very near the end the author offers some thoughts on men protecting women whether they like it or not, as you might say, which seem actually feminist, especially in today's environment.  

Although Carol is a lesser character, there are some truly awful revelations concerning her that will stay with you, as will the book's ending.  For a lot of people in the world life indeed is brutal, nasty and short.   Thompson certainly catches that quality of what the poet Blake called endless night, what none other than Agatha Christie wrote about in her bleak mystery of that title concerning the activities of what you could well term a grifter, which she published four years after The Grifters.  

It's what Thompson in the novel calls life on Uneasy Street.  This is true noir in the black-and-white tradition, but just as timely and terrible as life is today:  

For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street.  It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped package.  It beams out from the baby's carriage, the barber's chair, the beauty parlor.  Every neighbor is suspect, every outsider, everyone period; even one's husband or wife or sweetheart.  There is no ease on Uneasy Street.  The longer one's tenancy, the more untenable it becomes. 

It's true too of even the whitest and loftiest of houses, at least when the grifters have taken up residence.

Killing Kindness: The Lenient Beast (1956) by Fredric Brown

As crime and mystery writers got increasingly interested during the mid-century in the psychology of murderers, fictional slayers became portrayed in increasingly nuanced ways, not just as ingenious chess puzzle plotting murder fiends and slavering shocker maniacs.  Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast (1956) looks at the seemingly paradoxical concept of the kindly killer and is reminiscent of novels like Helen Nielsen's The Kind Man and Dorothy Salisbury Davis' A  Gentle Murderer, both of which published five years earlier.  

The Lenient Beast received good reviews when it was published, especially from American mystery reviewing dean Anthony Boucher, who deemed the novel "extraordinarily successful."  During the first Brown revival after the author's death it was reprinted in paperback in 1988 for the first time in English in three decades, in tandem with the better-known The Screaming Mimi.  Some readers have found this Beast a bit too tame, however--dare I say that it's a tad too laid-back and gently ruminative for some tastes?  

Beast is set in Tucson, Arizona, where the author and his wife had recently settled.  It concerns the criminal activities of John Medley, a mad "mercy killer" who when the novel opens has made another killing, as it were: this a man so guilt stricken over the deaths of his wife and children in a recent car accident for which he blames himself that he no longer has left within him much of a will to live, just barely going through the daily motions to get by from to day.  

A pair of investigating cops, Fern Cahan and Frank Ramos, first interviews Medley in the matter of this murder.  (Conveniently Medley left the man's dead body in his backyard.)  Only Frank, a smart, Mexican heritage cop who may just be too smart--and too Mexican--for his own good, senses something is rather off about the guy.  

The novel is told through multi-character chapter narratives: those of Ramos, Medley and Cahan, as well as the cops' superior officer, Walter Pettijohn, and Ramos' wife, Alice.  Alice Ramos is Brown's seemingly obligatory alcoholic character, an ugly drunk who has gone off Frank and is having an affair to boot.  

Since this is not a whodunit, the novel's interest lies in the fates of these characters.  Will Ramos' inchoate suspicions focus firmly on Medley?  Will Medley strike again?  Will Alice patch things up with her husband or leave him for good?  Will confirmed ladies' man Cahan settle down with a nice girl?

I thought this was a very engrossing crime novel.  It is of course Brown's take on the police procedural subgenre and it is very good indeed, much more convincing to me than Elizabeth Linington's seemingly endless succession of Dell Shannon police procedurals featuring her highly synthetic and insufferable, ostensibly native Mexican cop Luis Mendoza.  Brown actually deals with the matter of anti-Mexican racism lightly but convincingly.  

Brown underplays the finale in a way that probably disappoints some readers.  Personally I found it rather moving and was pleased that the author avoided a "movies" finish.  Beast is a thoughtful, indeed rather philosophical novel, as suggested by the poem, by Beat poet Lawrence P. Spingarn, which Brown uses as an epigraph as the title of the book.  

The lenient beast is no jabberwock, easily dispatched by the clean snicker-snack of a vorpal blade, but rather something altogether more, well, manxome: the death we actually come to welcome.  When you're done with Night of the Jabberwock, do give Beast the old gyre and gimble.  

When I said that mercy stood

Within the borders of the wood,

I meant the lenient beast with claws

And bloody, swift-dispatching jaws.

Brownie Points A Fredric Brown Review Roundup: Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

I haven't posted in almost a month but have been working on a Fredric Brown article and I did a couple of book intros in that time too.  The Fred Brown article is about 12,500 words and forty pages with lots of new information on the author and will appear shortly.  I hope you will read and enjoy it.  For now I'm posting some shorter reviews of Brown works.

My favorite pb edition of the novel
though I own the early Eighties ed.
by Quill, where series editor
Otto Penzler gives himself a bio
on the front endpaper right below
the author's bio.  Modest, huh?

Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

This one made the rounds of the blogosphere pretty broadly a few years back.  I think the fantastical, Carrian/Queenish plot elements had special appeal for people.  But there's a grounding presence of smalltown realism too at the novel's core.  

Born in 1906, Fred Brown grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and began his crime writing career while living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but his own family background was very much that of smalltown Ohio.  His father Karl was a cog in some highly questionable Cincinnati businesses but his grandfather Waldo was a prominent agriculturist and newspaper farm page editor and his uncle Linn was also a small-town newspaperman.  

The elder Browns all hailed from the little pastoral college town of Oxford, Ohio, about forty miles from Cincinnati, which at the time Fred was growing up had a population in the 2000s.  

Although Brown calls the small town in Night of the Jabberwock "Carmel City" and Bill Pronzini, who has written some perceptive stuff on the author, has stated that it's in Indiana, I suspect Carmel City is really based substantially on Oxford, Ohio.  There is also a Mount Carmel in Ohio, not far from Cincinnati.  A lot of Brown's settings are indeterminately located somewhere in the Midwest.  

Fred's Uncle Linn's modest frame house in Oxford (left)

In any event, Brown in Jabberwock offers a charming small-town portrait--charming, that is, until bizarre and deadly things start to happen.  People have compared the novel, in terms of its surreal aspects, to Joel Townsley Rogers' mystery The Red Right Hand, but you might also be reminded of Ray Bradbury's dark fantasy novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which in the early Eighties was made into a not very good film with a terrific movie poster and performance by Jonathan Pryce.  There's even a bit of noirist Jim Thompson (predating), with a particularly venal and vicious small-town sheriff.  

Fred Brown expanded the novel from his novelette The Jabberwocky Murders, folding into the middle of the concoction, like Moira and David Rose in Schitt's Creek, the plot of another novelette, The Gibbering Night.  Some people have complained that the two novelettes don't really mesh--"folding in" can be hard (see video below)--but I actually think they fit together in the novel just fine.  They add to the sense of its being "one wild night."

Jabberwock details the crazy adventures one night and early morning of Carmel City Clarion editor Doc Stoeger, who wistfully dreams someday of breaking a big story in his newspaper.  He may soon get his wish--and more!  Be careful what you wish for.  

One weird thing happens when a strange man calls upon Doc at his home that night and invites him to attend, at the local haunted house naturally, a meeting of a Lewis Carroll fan group called the Vorpal Blades.  (Doc is a Carroll fan too, like the author.)  Is this man insane?  There's a report of an escaped maniac loose in the vicinity.  Is his story simply the delusion of a madman?  

From there things just get weirder.  Yet at the book's heart is a genuinely clued mystery plot.  The novel received very good reviews in its day, with critic and pioneering woman journalist Miriam Ottenberg declaring: 

This could be titled Lewis Carroll revisited.  On one side of the looking glass are lunatics, bank robbers and murderers.  Figuring prominently on the other side are Vorpal Blades, Jabberwocks and Bandersnatches.  Sashaying on both sides is a small-town editor, who just wants to out out one exciting issue of the Clarion,  How Mr. Brown manages to juggle this assortment into some faint semblance of credibility is one of the minor miracles of mystery fiction.

Bill Pronzini does not deem the novel one of Brown's very best, adjudging the plot too fantastical for Brown credibly to explain at the end.  Me, I think Fred just manages it, though the killer's motivations get to be a bit of a stretch at times I'll admit.  

For me the only major flaw of the novel  is the melodramatic denouement having to do with how Doc extracts a confession, which Brown lifted from the pulp version.  It still feels rather overpulped to me.  

Otherwise, Brown did a great job of broadening and deepening the novel from its source material.  The arc story of Doc hoping to break some big news for once is very well done indeed, with a nice sense of whimsical irony.  

As I said I've been rereading and first-time reading Fred Brown this month and I think my top three by him so far would be The Screaming Mimi, The Far Cry (both reviewed here) and Jabberwock.  Far Cry is still my favorite--though I'm due to reread it!