{"id":32619,"date":"2015-11-12T06:17:24","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T12:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=32619"},"modified":"2016-09-02T17:24:10","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T22:24:10","slug":"deadlier-than-the-male-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/11\/12\/deadlier-than-the-male-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadlier than the male (novelist)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"REckless<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about time! Sarah Weinman, editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives<\/em><\/a> (already praised in these precincts<\/a>) has brought out a two-volume set<\/a> devoted to women crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s.<\/p>\n

\"Women<\/a>
\nIt\u2019s not that these authors are utterly unknown. Popular in their day, some retained a following for a few decades, and Patricia Highsmith has become an enduring figure. Yet the never-ending frenzy for male-oriented noir in books and movies has led us to\u00a0neglect what these writers and their peers accomplished. In the online essay \u201cMurder Culture\u201d<\/a> I argued that we\u2019ve probably overemphasized the hardboiled detectives and brutalized losers, and we\u2019ve not paid enough attention to the accomplishments of other writers. The rise of the psychological thriller was central to 1940s popular culture.<\/p>\n

Granted, it wasn\u2019t only gynocentric. The thriller assumed exciting shapes\u00a0in the hands of talented men like Patrick Hamilton, Cornell Woolrich and John Franklin Bardin. But the 1940s saw the emergence of a powerful\u00a0cadre of women writers, many of whom started writing “pure” stories of detection\u00a0but decided that suspense would be their forte. Surely they were encouraged by the success of Daphne du Maurier\u2019s Rebecca<\/em>, the best-selling mystery novel before Mickey Spillane came on the scene. But these suspense-mongers avoided mimicking Mignon Eberhart and other predecessors in the innocent-girl-in-a-spooky-house tradition. These new talents saw menace crouching\u00a0behind the windows of drab houses and apartment blocks. Out of several tendencies I tried to sketch in that essay, they forged a tradition of what Weinman calls \u201cdomestic suspense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Library of America volumes give us a fine occasion for\u00a0appreciating what they accomplished.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Artisans of suspense<\/strong><\/p>\n

You might say that Double Indemnity<\/em> and Out of the Past<\/em> are quintessentially 1940s-1950s films, and I\u2019d agree. But other important\u00a0films were derived from works by\u00a0women writers. The list of Highsmith adaptations<\/a>, starting with Strangers on a Train<\/em> (1951), is too long to recite\u00a0here, but let\u2019s remember that Charlotte Armstrong provided source novels for The Unsuspected<\/em> (1947) and Don\u2019t Bother to Knock<\/em> (1952, from Mischief<\/em>), as well as for Chabrol\u2019s La Rupture<\/em> (1970) and Merci pour le Chocolat<\/em> (2000). Filmmakers produced now-classic versions of the Dorothy B. Hughes novels The Fallen Sparrow<\/em> (1942), Ride the Pink Horse<\/em> (1946), and In a Lonely Place<\/em> (1950). The prolific but less famous Elizabeth Sanxay Holding gave us The Blank Wall<\/em> (1947), adapted twice (The Reckless Moment<\/em>, 1949, and The Deep End<\/em>, 2001). Dolores Hitchens\u2019 Fools\u2019 Gold<\/em> (1958) yielded the implausible basis for Godard\u2019s Band \u00e0 part<\/em> (1964). Helen Eustis\u2019s The Fool Killer<\/em> (1954) became a 1965 film. And of course Vera Caspary\u2019s Laura<\/em> (1943) became a monument of studio moviemaking.<\/p>\n

The thriller, you could argue, makes more engaging cinema than the straight detective story. Much as I admire cinematic sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Nick Charles, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and particularly Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto<\/a>, pure mystery plots need a lot of bells and whistles to keep from being simply a matter of following the detective as he moves from place to place asking questions and dodging blows on the head. The\u00a01940s tales of espionage, women in peril, serial killings, household anxieties, warped husbands and crazy wives and guileless governesses and all the rest have\u00a0left a stronger legacy today. We live in the Age of the Thriller, as a glance at any bestseller list will indicate. The\u00a0recent death of Ruth Rendell, arguably Highsmith\u2019s only top-flight competitor, can only remind us of how the genre has flourished for decades.<\/p>\n

\"Do<\/a>As for the Library of America collection: You couldn\u2019t much improve on Weinman\u2019s selection, I think. All eight novels were appreciated in their day, and some won awards. A reader coming fresh to them will be surprised, I think, by the variety of treatment and the vigor of the writing. It\u2019s to be hoped that encountering these will encourage readers to go on to other works by the same authors. In particular, I\u2019d recommend Sanxay Holding\u2019s The Death Wish<\/em> (1934), a prefiguration of Highsmith\u2019s dissection of male vulnerability; Margaret Millar\u2019s Do Evil in Return<\/em> (1950), which centers on a female doctor regretting not helping a woman obtain\u00a0an abortion; Millar\u2019s chilling The Fiend<\/em> (1964); and of course almost anything by Dorothy B. Hughes, not least The Expendable Man<\/em> (1963).<\/p>\n

The Library of America collection has rounded up several contemporary purveyors of suspense to write brief online appreciations<\/a>\u00a0of the titles in the collection. These are well worth reading. On each page further links take you to fresh material. There’s also a succinct introduction<\/a> by Weinman. The print editions include her\u00a0judicious career summaries, as well as notes on allusions and citations in each novel.<\/p>\n

For readers interested in how women’s cultural roles are represented in fiction, these books provide a field day. Several of the professional commentaries suggest that the authors injected\u00a0social criticism into their works. These writers are far more willing to get inside men’s heads than the hard-boiled boys are to think like a woman, so you can see the macho attitude in a new light. Here’s how Dorothy B. Hughes in The Candy Kid<\/em> (1950, not in this collection) describes her hero:<\/p>\n

Just as he was thinking that he\u2019d better go in and buy a pack, wait for Beach in the air-cooled coffee shop, the girl came around the corner. She was tall, almost as tall as he, but he took a quick look at the pavement and saw that she was propped on heels. That made him feel more male.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Candy<\/a><\/p>\n

Very often these writers take certain stereotypes, both male and female, and submit them to pressure through their craft. Others seem to accept those stereotypes and employ them for their own storytelling ends.\u00a0Those ends are very much worth our attention.<\/p>\n

We know that several of these writers were self-conscious artisans. Hughes and Armstrong wrote articles reflecting on mystery and suspense, while Hughes also wrote a sharp\u00a0biography<\/a> of\u00a0Erle Stanley Gardner. Hughes also conducted a course on mystery writing at UCLA in the 1960s; she invited Vera Caspary in for a guest lecture, and Caspary\u2019s advice makes for fascinating reading. Highsmith\u2019s notebooks, preserved at the Archives litt\u00e9raires in Switzerland, are filled with meditations on story problems, and she wrote as well a book-length manual, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction<\/a><\/em> (1966, 1981). I don\u2019t think that any hard-boiled writers of the era have left such systematic reflections on the nuts and bolts of their work.<\/p>\n

Once we pay attention to technique, we can see how these writers rework\u00a0topics and concerns of the day. For example, we could talk a long time about how social roles induce women to assume a split identity: one face for friends and family, another that resists the masquerade. But these, after all, are mysteries, so that divided identity has to be dramatized\u2014or better yet, played with and teased out for the sake of suspense and surprise. It\u2019s remarkable that two of the books in the collection exploit the syndrome of Multiple Personality Disorder, which becomes part of the final surprise. Another, Laura<\/em>, makes an enigma of the woman\u2019s inner life by virtue of dispersed viewpoints.<\/p>\n

If we want to learn about storytelling, we can usefully look at how writers manage traditional demands of craft. These books \u201csay what they say\u201d in and through technique\u2014narrative form, literary style. The experience that results can be an enduring achievement.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pronoun trouble<\/strong><\/p>\n

No use asking if the crime writer has anything of the criminal in him. He perpetuates little hoaxes, lies and crimes every time he writes a book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Patricia Highsmith<\/p>\n

Start with style\u2014important in all storytelling, but posing some fascinating issues in the domestic thriller.<\/p>\n

One problem faced by all these writers was: How to avoid the sentimental\u00a0style of romantic suspense writers? Here’s a typical passage from\u00a0Mignon G. Eberhart’s\u00a0Another Woman’s House<\/em>\u00a0(1946).<\/p>\n

She said, blindly choosing trite and inadequate words, “You cannot change your own sense of loyalty, of your own creed and code. It’s bred in your bone; it’s part of your body.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

He understood all the argument below it. He understood too that it was a fundamental argument in his own heart. His eyes deepened, searching her own. He said suddenly, “Myra, you must<\/em> see this sensibly; you must be realistic and . . .”<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Oh, Richard, Richard!” She cried despairing, and put her head against his shoulder.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s some of this novelettishness in Armstrong, as in this bit from Mischief<\/em>:<\/p>\n

When a fresh scream rose up, out there in the other room in another world, Ruth\u2019s fingertips did not leave off stroking into shape the little mouth that the wicked gag had left so queer and crooked.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hughes and Hitchens, I think, leaned toward the hardboiled laconicism of Hammett and Cain, though without the slanginess. In The Horizontal Man<\/em>, Eustis tries for a brittle, satiric tenor and some Hollywoodish banter between a reporter and a college woman. Highsmith was adamant in refusing what she called a \u201cpulp\u201d style. Hence her flat, spare simplicity. (Funny, though, since she started out\u00a0writing comic books for the company that would become Marvel.)<\/p>\n

Stylistic options can lie\u00a0very far down.\u00a0For years I\u2019ve been curious about what fiction writers call their characters on first entrance. It\u2019s a fundamental creative choice, and it\u2019s absolutely forced: you have to call them something<\/em>. And what you call them matters.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the beginning of Armstrong\u2019s Mischief<\/em>:<\/p>\n

A Mr. Peter O. Jones, the editor and publisher of the Brennerton Star-Gazette<\/em>, was standing in a bathroom in a hotel in New York City, scrubbing his nails. Through the open door, his wife, Ruth, saw his naked neck stiffen\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cozy, our relation to this Mr. and Mrs. Jones: Mischief<\/em> gives their first and last names. So far, no reason to be apprehensive. But here\u2019s the start of Hitchens\u2019 Fools\u2019 Gold<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The first time they drove by the house Eddie was so scared he ducked his head down. Skip laughed at him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here a relationship is defined through laconic action: we\u2019re on a first-name basis with the pair. It\u2019s as if we\u2019re riding in the back seat. \"Blunderer<\/a>Compare the opening of Highsmith\u2019s The Blunderer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The man in the dark blue slacks and a forest green sportshirt waited impatiently in the line. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The girl in the ticket booth was stupid, he thought, never had been able to make change fast.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Highsmith is more ominous: No names, just a man as if seen from across the sidewalk. Yet we can\u2019t say the presentation is \u201cobjective\u201d because we\u2019re given his annoyed thoughts about the ticket girl. So we are forced to ask: If I\u2019m in his head, why don\u2019t I know who he is? And why is he in a hurry?<\/em><\/p>\n

And finally, the opening lines of Eustis\u2019 The Horizontal Man<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The firelight played over all the decent, familiar objects of his everyday life; he viewed them desperately, looking for some symbol of succor. The firelight played on his rolling eyeballs, the careless tendrils of his black hair. \u201cOh now,\u201d he said, \u201cOh now, I say, look here\u2026\u201d trying to summon a tone of commonplace to breast the tide of nightmare that was rising in that room.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eustis dispenses with everything but he<\/em> in describing something terrible going on. Not only do we not know who\u2019s suffering, but we won\u2019t know for some time. This, like the Highsmith, might be called \u201cpronominal mystery\u201d: not knowing anything about who\u2019s in danger, we sense the danger as a pure force swallowing up trivialities of identity.<\/p>\n

Most manuals of fiction-writing start by reviewing the bigger choices, like first- or third-person narration, but note that even within third-person storytelling, these passages bristle with different implications. Each of these openings puts us in a different relation to the characters picked out.<\/p>\n

The storyteller makes a choice about how to name the actors in the scene, and that choice leads to others: the scene is built out the premises of what have launched it. Ruth, who studies her husband Peter at the mirror, will become one conduit of information within Mischief<\/em>. Skip, who laughs at Eddie as they size up the home they\u2019ll invade, will bully his partner throughout Fools’ Gold<\/em>. The man in the slacks and sportshirt will drop out of The Blunderer<\/em> for several chapters. So no need to name him yet; magnify the mystery. And the opening scene of The Horizontal Man<\/em> will continue with personal but untagged pronouns\u2014a she<\/em> will be picked out too\u2014as the full awfulness of the action emerges.<\/p>\n

\"Horiz<\/a>I suspect that the development of the suspense thriller in the 1940s sensitized writers to fine-grained<\/em> choices like this. The verbal fabric became part of the suspense: not just what will happen next?<\/em> but why is the action being presented in this way?<\/em> This second layer of intrigue seldom occurs in the hardboiled detective novels. While Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald (married to Margaret Millar) slipped easily into first person and easygoing openings, these women writers were willing to try more oblique, tantalizing, and formally adventurous options. (Though we find them in Goodis, Woolrich et al. as well.) Without this newly cultivated sensitivity to names and non-names, proper nouns and pronouns, I doubt we would have the tour de force of Ira Levin\u2019s A Kiss Before Dying<\/em> (1953) and the shock of Hughes\u2019 Expendable Man<\/em>, or the brilliant opening of Ruth Rendell\u2019s Wolf to the Slaughter<\/em> (1967).<\/p>\n

Fussy as these details are, they\u2019re what I mean by craft. The verbal texture of any piece of fiction depends on dozens of such minute judgments. Just as in film every cut, camera movement, and actor\u2019s glance matters, so does every word in a prose narrative. These writers understood that what we learn, syllable by syllable, can be a potent source of uncertainty and suspense.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who sees and who knows?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view\u2014the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction<\/em><\/p>\n

In mystery fiction, management of point of view is critical. Not only will it weave the moment-by-moment verbal tissue, but it provides the large-scale parts that present the overall action. Where the Had-I-But-Known romance tends to be restricted to a single character, often through first-person narration, domestic suspense employs other options. It\u2019s significant that of these eight novels, only one, Laura<\/em>, employs first-person narration, and that in a distinctive way I\u2019ll consider further along.<\/p>\n

\"Mischief<\/a>Unrestricted narration is a good strategy for maximizing suspense, as we see in Armstrong\u2019s Mischief<\/em>. A husband and wife leave their little girl with a babysitter in their hotel while they go off to an awards dinner. But the babysitter is one of those Crazy Ladies that the 40s produce in great profusion and the child is endangered.<\/p>\n

How to complicate this basic situation? Armstrong recruits a device\u2014call it a narrative meme if you want\u2014that emerges at the period: the eyewitness, typically in an urban setting, who glimpses possibly criminal doings and gets involved. This device finds its supreme filmic expression in Rear Window<\/em> (1954), but it\u2019s established in earlier films like\u00a0Lady on a Train<\/em> (1945), Shock<\/em> (1946), and The Window<\/em> (1949), and in the radio drama The Thing in the Window<\/a><\/em> (1945), by Lucille Fletcher (another thriller queen, but of the airwaves). In Mischief<\/em>, people in a building across the street from the hotel intervene in\u00a0the doings of the babysitter, and the plot \u201cintercuts\u201d all their trajectories in order to create tension.<\/p>\n

Hitchens\u2019 Fools\u2019 Gold<\/em> similarly jumps from character to character, even\u00a0within a single scene. This tale of a heist that is way above the skill sets of the thieves\u2014a sort of humorless anticipation of an Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake situation\u2014uses unrestricted narration to build sympathy for the characters who are gulled into participating.<\/p>\n

\"Fools<\/a>Central among these is Karen, pathetically happy that Skip is paying attention to her. One chapter starts with her meeting him after class, snuggling warmly into his arms (\u201cHere was someone to whom she could confide the disaster with the coat\u201d), before the narration switches brusquely to him:<\/p>\n

Skip listened, at first with indifference. He\u2019d heard already from Eddie of Karen\u2019s reaction to the money, her frightened excitement about it. It took a moment to realize that this wasn\u2019t more of the same, the reaction of an inexperienced girl, but that a bad break had really occurred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Throughout the chapter, this rather nineteenth-century version of omniscience will toggle\u00a0between Karen and Skip, heightening the disparity between her lack of awareness and his harshness. \u201cHe was just having fun though she didn\u2019t know it.\u201d Arguably, a heist plot needs a certain wide-ranging narration (see The Asphalt Jungle<\/em>), but Hitchens uses it to take us into the minds of all the characters, major and minor, and suggest both vulnerability and menace.<\/p>\n

In a classic detective story, the identity of the culprit is concealed until the end. One Golden Age \u201crule\u201d is that in the course of the action we must never be given the viewpoint of the killer. The rule was broken on occasion, notably in a certain novel by Agatha Christie, but it remained rather firm. In the thriller, by contrast, we can be in the killer\u2019s mind, knowing full well that he or she is indeed the killer. A prototype is Patrick Hamilton\u2019s Hangover Square<\/em> (1941). Two books in this collection walk a line between detective story and thriller in this respect.<\/p>\n

In Eustis\u2019 The Horizontal Man<\/em>, a popular professor has been murdered. The effects of his death ripple out across the campus, and the narration shifts among his colleagues, some\u00a0students, and a reporter investigating the crime. In the midst of a corrosive satire of the academic life, we suspect that someone whose mind we have entered will turn out to be the culprit. So we have to probe the inner lives of the characters we encounter for psychological clues, not physical ones. The author must conceal the killer\u2019s identity and \u201cplay fair,\u201d in that what we learn at the end unexpectedly fits the characters\u2019 stream-of-consciousness musings.<\/p>\n

\"Beast<\/a>A similar problem confronts Margaret Millar in Beast in View<\/em>. At the start the viewpoints aren\u2019t quite so dispersed: initially, we shift between a woman plagued by threatening phone calls and an amateur investigator looking into the matter. As the mystery deepens, however, the range of knowledge spreads and we get \u201clateral\u201d viewpoints on the central situation. This is partly to deflect us from the grim revelation that we have been quite thoroughly misled.<\/p>\n

It is a pity that this edition didn\u2019t include Millar\u2019s 1983 Introduction and Afterward. The latter explains the origin of the book\u2019s device, while the Introduction reports the effects the book had:<\/p>\n

I was threatened with a libel suit, informed by a patient in a mental institution that at last she had found someone who really understood her, invited to join a coven of witches, asked to address a meeting of psychiatric social workers, and presented with the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award for best mystery of the year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the other extreme, two of these novels focus on extremely restricted viewpoints. Hughes\u2019 In a Lonely Place<\/em> is wholly locked within the mind of a hypermasculine ex-Air Force pilot who trails and murders women. Hughes gives us the pronominal tease: it\u2019s he<\/em> for the first five pages until, when he places a phone call, we learn he\u2019s called Dix Steele. In a cat-and-mouse game reminiscent of films like Woman in the Window<\/em> and Where the Sidewalk Ends<\/em>, the killer gets close to the murder investigation. Dix\u2019s army buddy is the chief cop on the case, so Dix can monitor things and even drop in on crime scenes. Strikingly, Hughes puts the killings \u201coff-page.\u201d This admirably eliminates any Spillane-ish sensationalism while keeping the focus wholly on the way Dix loses control of his masquerade. He\u2019s worn away in a series of confrontations with two women who see, as no man can, something deeply wrong in him.<\/p>\n

\"Blank<\/a>Closest to the traditional woman-in-peril plot is Sanxay Holding\u2019s The Blank Wall<\/em>. While her husband is away in the service, a middle-class housewife learns that her daughter has been seduced by a sleazy opportunist. The wife soon becomes the target of two blackmailers, one of whom grows to love her. Gifted with a pair of\u00a0obnoxious and ungrateful children and an amiably oblivious father, the heroine is doubly trapped\u2014within a confining household and a crime cover-up. We’re limited to her range of knowledge, so every encounter is charged with uncertainty about the motives of others. She can\u2019t confide in her husband and so must write bland letters to him reporting that everything is just fine.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d expect, Highsmith tries something more intricate in The Blunderer<\/em>. Here we have two protagonists, each man given his own viewpoint. But after an opening introducing us to one man\u2019s crime (in a scene that spares no violent detail), he drops out of the action for a hundred pages. We concentrate instead on the polished professional lawyer whose life unravels when his domestic skirmishes\u2014nearly all petty and drab\u2014come to a head. As with most Highsmith men, he is tempted to do something very trivial and very stupid, almost out of intellectual curiosity. Highsmith policemen\u00a0take a dim view of\u00a0such enacted thought experiments.<\/p>\n

As the two protagonists\u2019 worlds converge, we get the characteristic Highsmith themes of self-possessed men losing their nerve, the traps of respectable life, the risk of impulsive action, the ways in which friends turn away from you when they suspect you of lying. The lawyer is called by his first name, Walter, while his counterpart is known to us by his last name, Kimmel. In such subtle ways does an author align us a little more closely with one character than another. Both, though, are blunderers.<\/p>\n

I should add that all the markers\u00a0of 1940s fiction and film\u2014dreams, hallucinations, false fronts, unstable families, untrustworthy lovers, socially adroit psychopaths\u2014are woven into these novels with great\u00a0skill. What more could you ask?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A frenzy of recapitulation<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Caspary<\/a><\/p>\n

Vera Caspary, 1946.<\/em><\/p>\n

The earliest novel in Weinman’s\u00a0collection is also one of the most remarkable of the period. Vera Caspary was a woman to be reckoned with\u2014Greenwich Village free-love practitioner, Communist party member, occasional\u00a0screenwriter, boundlessly energetic purveyor of suspense fiction, passionate paramour of a married man,\u00a0and advocate for women in prison. Our State Historical Society holds her personal collection, which includes fascinating notes on projects both realized and unrealized. Turning the pages of her files, you meet a crisp, professional artisan.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s look at Laura<\/em> the novel. If you know the film, as you probably do, nothing I say will spoil<\/strong>\u00a0the book for you.<\/p>\n

In 1942 Collier\u2019s<\/em> (\u201cThe National Weekly\u201d) offered Caspary $10,000 for the serial rights to Ring Twice for Laura<\/em>. That sum, equal to $150,000 today, didn\u2019t include book publishing rights, movie rights, and any other ancillaries. The price tag tells us quite a bit about the robust slick-magazine market of the period and about Vera Caspary\u2019s standing. After writing novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays, she was no novice, but her new manuscript set her on a path toward fame. Published as Laura<\/em> in 1943, it found acclaim as \u201csomething quite different from the run-of-the-mill detective story.\u201d The publisher called it a \u201cpsychothriller.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laura<\/em> is both a mystery story and a romance. A woman is found murdered in her apartment. Although a shotgun blast has disfigured her face, she\u2019s initially identified as ad executive Laura Hunt. After the funeral, while detective Lieutenant Mark McPherson is poking around her apartment, Laura returns from a trip and it\u2019s revealed that the victim was actually Diane Redfern, a model to whom Laura had loaned the apartment.<\/p>\n

The misidentified-victim convention triggers an investigation into the usual sort of suppressed backstory: How did Diane\u00a0wind up in Laura\u2019s place? Was she alone? Was she the target all along, or was she mistaken by the killer for Laura? Along the way, the cop\u2014already half in love with Laura dead\u2014begins to both woo and browbeat her.<\/p>\n

\"Laura<\/a>At the same time, a cluster of suspects needs questioning: Laura\u2019s flighty Aunt Susie, her fianc\u00e9 Shelby Carpenter, and her lordly patron, the columnist Waldo Lydecker. Laura isn\u2019t exonerated either, because she has reason to hate Diane. The usual array of clues\u2014the murder weapon, a bottle of cheap bourbon, and a cigarette case\u2014tugs McPherson this way and that, although his final discovery of the killer depends as much on intuition about personality as about physical traces. The plot hole in the film (why isn\u2019t the artist Jacoby, who painted Laura\u2019s portrait, an obvious suspect?) is there in the original novel as well, but few readers or viewers seem to notice it.<\/p>\n

What was striking about the book was its point-of-view structure. \u201cFour persons tell this story and play the leading parts in it,\u201d noted the New York Times<\/em> reviewer. \u201cMcPherson questions all three, and all three tell him lies.\u201d In presentation Caspary revived what has been called the casebook<\/em> method of composition: a series of testimonies, written or transcribed from speech, that recount the mystery. Sometimes those are accompanied by police reports, newspaper coverage, and other documents.<\/p>\n

The method is identified with Wilkie Collins\u2019 two great novels The Woman in White<\/em> (1860) and The Moonstone<\/em> (1868), and was taken up occasionally by others, particularly within a trial situation (e.g., The Bellamy Trial<\/em>, 1929). Before Laura<\/em>, probably the most famous instance of a mystery collation is Dorothy Sayers and Robert Eustace\u2019s Documents in the Case<\/em> (1930). The technique also has affinities with multiple-viewpoint assembly in \u201cstraight\u201d fiction influenced by Dos Passos; Kenneth Fearing had tried it in his experimental novels The Hospital<\/em> (1939) and Clark Gifford\u2019s Body<\/em> (1942) as well as in his crime stories Dagger of the Mind<\/em> (1941) and The Big Clock<\/em> (1946).<\/p>\n

To take us through the eight days of the investigation, Caspary\u2019s casebook assigns each character a block of narration. Each block, told in first person, has its own distinctive tenor, representing a particular subgenre of mystery fiction.<\/p>\n

If you didn\u2019t know the Laura<\/em> mystique already, you might suspect that the opening chunk, told from Waldo\u2019s perspective, would announce him as the brilliant amateur detective who will solve the case and surpass the plodding McPherson. Waldo is a celebrity columnist, a connoisseur of murder and lethal banter. Like 1920s detective Philo Vance, he collects art and lords it over others through aggressive erudition. Waldo writes in periodic sentences of eloquent self-congratulation:<\/p>\n

My grief in her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are even the sort of fake footnotes that we find in S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen novels of the 1930s, attesting to the scholarly bona fides of this dilettante sleuth.<\/p>\n

\"Laura<\/a>Waldo\u2019s power over Laura, as her patron and guru, gets expanded to a remarkable authority over the narrative in this first part. He tells us things he did not witness, chiefly the early \u201coffstage\u201d phases of McPherson\u2019s investigation, and his explanation is that of the artist as god.<\/p>\n

That is my omniscient role. As narrator and interpreter, I shall describe scenes which I never saw and record dialogues which I did not hear. For this impudence I offer no excuse. I am an artist, and it is my business to re-create movement precisely as I create mood. I know these people, their voices ring in my ears, and I need only close my eyes and see characteristic gestures. My written dialogue will have more clarity, compactness, and essence of character than their spoken lines, for I am able to edit while I write, whereas they carried on their conversation in a loose and pointless fashion with no sense of form or crisis in the building of their scenes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is an extraordinary passage. It opens the very-\u201840s possibility that what follows may be Waldo\u2019s fantasy. Only near the end of his text does Waldo assert\u00a0that his knowledge of McPherson\u2019s investigation is derived from what Mark later told him one night at dinner. We will soon learn that Waldo\u2019s opening section was written directly after that dinner, but he actually didn’t know one key fact. His omniscience is an illusion.<\/p>\n

McPherson takes up the tale in the second part. He has read Waldo\u2019s account and treats it as a separate piece of evidence. As we follow McPherson’s\u00a0investigation, we’re in the realm of the police procedural. The register shifts too. If Waldo\u2019s style is showoffish, McPherson\u2019s is laconic. Whereas Waldo celebrates how his prose will immortalize Laura, McPherson admits that his version of things \u201cwon\u2019t have the smooth professional touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, though, it does. It reads hard-boiled.<\/p>\n

As we stepped out of the restaurant, the heat hit us like a blast from a furnace. The air was dead. Not a shirt-tail moved on the washlines of McDougal Street. The town smelled like rotten eggs. A thunderstorm was rolling in.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Caspary gives us the voice of the tough but vulnerable cop, the voice we would later learn to call\u00a0noir. There\u2019s an echo of James M. Cain when McPherson signals that in retrospect he was wrong to trust this femme fatale: he sourly describes himself in the third person.<\/p>\n

She offered her hand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The sucker took it and believed her.<\/strong><\/p>\n

McPherson\u2019s eventual victory over Waldo is prefigured in the cop\u2019s reflections on writing up crime. When Waldo learned Laura was still alive, McPherson says, \u201cThe prose style was knocked right out of him.\u201d So much for Wimseyish fops set down in a Manhattan murder.<\/p>\n

Shelby gets his voice in as well. A brief third section consists of a police transcript of McPherson\u2019s questioning. Aided by his attorney, Shelby withdraws some lies, dodges uncomfortable areas, and generally remains the most obvious suspect\u2014as well as Mark\u2019s rival for Laura. At this point in the book Caspary begins to play an intricate game of knowledge, in which we get, piecemeal, information that tests the string of deceptions and evasions confronting McPherson.<\/p>\n

\"Laura<\/a>In the fourth section, Laura writes her testimony. Once more the circumstance of composition is explained to us. Laura confesses that she can\u2019t understand what she thinks and feels unless she sets it down. She has burned her old diaries, but now she has to start over.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always when I start on a long journey or meet an exciting man or take a new job that I must sit for hours in a frenzy of recapitulation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now the action is that of the woman in peril, the figure familiar from Eberhart and Rinehart and Sanxay Holding. And so the stylistic register is \u201cfeminine,\u201d tracking fluctuations of feeling and noting costume details and shades of color. Laura’s narration is also suspenseful and contemplative, dwelling on\u00a0moments that seem to radiate danger\u2014McPherson\u2019s trick questions, Waldo\u2019s sinister manipulations, and Shelby\u2019s pretense that he\u2019s protecting her rather than himself.<\/p>\n

The emphasis is less on external behavior than Laura\u2019s growing realization of why she has clung to two failed men. She will gradually realize that McPherson, despite his coldness, is the best match for her. Waldo is \u201can old lady\u201d and Shelby is an overgrown baby. Caspary the left-winger gives these portraits the taint of class corruption. Waldo and Shelby are ghoulish creatures of the high life, while Aunt Susie is the faded, self-indulgent beauty Laura might become.<\/p>\n

Laura\u2019s recognition of her entrapment is rendered in a choppy, spasmodic fashion. Waldo\u2019s, McPherson\u2019s, and Shelby\u2019s accounts have all been linear. Laura\u2019s is not. It skips around in time, replays scenes we\u2019ve seen from other viewpoints, and incorporates dreams that seem as well to be flashbacks.<\/p>\n

This is no way to write the story. I should be simple and coherent, fact after fact, giving order to the chaos of my mind. . . . But tonight writing thickens the dust. Now that Shelby has turned against me and Mark shown the nature of his trickery, I am afraid of facts in orderly sequence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a narrative dynamic we find throughout 1940s fiction and film, the strong career woman is thrown off balance and succumbs to confusion. The most notorious example is of course Lady in the Dark<\/em>, the 1941 play that appeared on film in 1944, the same year as the film version of Laura<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The lady returned from the dead will need a real man to rescue her. That rescue is enacted, again, in prose when McPherson reassumes control of the narrative. The book\u2019s fifth part consists of two sections: the classic summing up and denunciation of the culprit (Waldo) and the rescue of Laura from Waldo\u2019s second attempt to kill her. McPherson\u2019s hard-boiled diction has won out. As Waldo is taken away in the ambulance, however, he earns a degree of purely verbal revenge. McPherson\u2019s narration quotes Waldo\u2019s mumbled phrases as, dying, he fills in plot points. In the process, his style gets inserted, like an alien bacterium, into McPherson\u2019s curt passages.<\/p>\n

McPherson, who can afford to be gallant, gives Waldo the last convoluted word. It comes in a quotation from the manuscript found by McPherson at the climax, a passage that confirmed Waldo\u2019s guilt. In Waldo\u2019s unfinished account, Laura is an essence of womanhood, a modern Eve; but one who continually reminded him that he could never be Adam.<\/p>\n

During production of the film version of Laura<\/em>, the makers considered mimicking the novel\u2019s block construction. Citizen Kane<\/em> had made multiple-viewpoint narration more thinkable in the 1940s. In the end, though, only Waldo\u2019s voice-over was retained, with results that have provoked several\u00a0critical comments.<\/p>\n

The film made many other changes, large and small, but during this reading of the novel two improvements stood out for me. Making Waldo a radio commentator as well as a columnist allows a rich play of sound that comes to a climax at the film\u2019s d\u00e9nouement. Secondly, Waldo drops out of the book for many stretches, largely because Caspary is concerned to throw suspicion on Shelby and Laura. But the film keeps Waldo onscreen a lot, even permitting him (against all plausibility) to tag along with McPherson on the investigation. His waspish interjections, delivered by a suave Clifton Webb, add a nice tang, while sustaining Caspary\u2019s theme of class snobbery. The film adds several kinks, such as introducing Waldo writing in his bathtub. The situation includes one of those how-did-they-get-away-with-it? moments when, as Waldo climbs out of the water, Mark glances scornfully offscreen at Waldo\u2019s privates.<\/p>\n

\"Waldo<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Mark<\/a><\/p>\n

Caspary would go on to other successes, notably the screenplays for A Letter to Three Wives<\/em> (1948) and Les Girls<\/em> (1957) and several other novels that play with block construction and shifting viewpoints. But Laura<\/em> would remain her prime achievement. It’s a striking novel that became a landmark film and an enduring example of how female crime novelists could stretch and deepen\u00a0the conventions of popular literature.<\/p>\n

\n

A useful and spoiler-free biographical survey of many of these writers is Jeffrey Marks\u2019 Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s<\/a><\/em> (Delphi, 2003). See Mike Grost\u2019s inevitably encyclopedic coverage<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

Highsmith\u2019s disdain for pulpish style is discussed in Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith<\/a><\/em> (Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 124; my quotation above comes from p. 256. I\u2019m grateful to Ms. St\u00e9phanie Cudr\u00e9-Mauroux of the Archives litt\u00e9raires suisses for other information about Highsmith.<\/p>\n

Some craft advice from these authors can be found in Dorothy B. Hughes, \u201cThe Challenge of Mystery Fiction,\u201d The Writer<\/em> 60, 5 (May 1947), 177-179; Charlotte Armstrong, \u201cRazzle Dazzle,\u201d The Writer<\/em> 66, 1 (January 1953), 3-5; and Patricia Highsmith, \u201cSuspense in Fiction,\u201d The Writer<\/em> 67, 12 (December 1954), 403-406. Millar’s discussion of Beast in View<\/em> is in the International Polygonics edition<\/a> of the novel, 1983, pp. 1-2, 249.<\/p>\n

Vera Caspary\u2019s autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups<\/a><\/em> (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), is a captivating read that introduces us to a fascinating personality. (“Under the ready smiles were witches’ grimaces, beneath the padded bra a calcified heart.”) In Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel<\/a><\/em> (McFarland, 2011) A. B. Emrys offers an excellent study of Caspary\u2019s work in relation to mystery traditions. Caspary\u2019s \u201cofficial\u201d response to Preminger\u2019s film comes in \u201cMy Laura and Otto\u2019s,\u201d <\/a>Saturday Review<\/em> (26 June 1971), 36-37.<\/p>\n

Hammett was no slouch at juggling proper names and pronouns either. I marvel that he could call Ned Beaumont \u201cNed Beaumont\u201d all the way through The Glass Key.<\/em>\u00a0All the other characters are tagged with their first or last name, but this option maintains an unsettling middle distance on his psychologically opaque protagonist.<\/p>\n

I discuss Waldo’s narration in the film version of\u00a0Laura<\/em> in more detail in this entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Don't<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here: It\u2019s about time! Sarah Weinman, editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (already praised in these precincts) has brought out a two-volume set devoted to women crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s. It\u2019s not that these authors are utterly unknown. Popular in their day, some retained a following for a few decades, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,7,54,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s-hollywood","category-film-and-other-media","category-narrative-strategies","category-narrative-suspense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32619"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32732,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32619\/revisions\/32732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}