Trevanian and the slice o' life, or McFetridge, Montreal, Toronto, and Hamilton

I'm not sure I'd have compared Trevanian's 1976 novel The Main with John McFetridge's novels had McFetridge not written about it in Books to Die For.  Knowing of McFetridge's love for the novel, and having just finished reading it myself, though, I recognize The Main as an earlyish example of a kind of crime writing at which McFetridge excels: that in which the protagonist's life is at least as integral to the story as are the crimes he solves or commits.

The Main's Lt. Claude LaPointe has a problematic domestic situation and trouble with his boss, as do a million other fictional cops. But Trevanian delves so deeply into LaPointe's inner life, and he so efficiently but fully fleshes that boss out as a character, that the conflicts seem fresh and deeply felt. The same goes for a number of the novel's other minor characters. They may be minor, but they feel like more than just plot devices. Like McFetridge's Toronto novels, The Main offers an affectionate, unsentimental look at the city where it is set. As in McFetridge's Black Rock, that city is Montreal. Unlike Black Rock, The Main lacks a police photographer named Rozovsky,

In what other crime novels is the protagonist's life as important as the crimes he or she solves? In which novels are the alcoholism, troubled relationships, and clashes with authority more than mere window dressing?

 *

Here's a bit of my recent non-crime reading that is ripe with potential for a dark crime story:

"For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."

— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 25

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

America: Red, white, and noir; plus a question for readers

He ran with “bad company.” At 14 years of age, he wrote, "the whole care and direction of my self was thrown on my self entirely, without a relation … to advise or guide me.”

She was "a risk taker given to impulsive behavior and bad decisions — traits that were passed on to her son — took up with James, despite his “indigent circumstances” and the fact that she was still legally married to Lavien."

He was Thomas Jefferson, she Rachel Faucette, mother of Alexander Hamilton, and the quotations are taken from John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation. Even before Hamilton died, paralyzed and suffering following his duel with Aaron Burr, the lives of the Founding Fathers were ripe with hard-boiled material.

And now, dear readers, it's your turn. What characters, circumstances, or events from history would make good hard-boiled or crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Hammett, Hamilton, and Jefferson

1) The United States might be a better country if everyone in it were forced to declare himself either a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian, and then read the life and works of the man he or she did not declare for.

2) The Hunter and Other Stories, the new collection of previously unpublished and uncollected work by Dashiell Hammett, highlights at least two aspects of Hammett's crime writing (though not all its selections are crime): the hard-boiled side, and the side that marvels at the inexplicable things that some men do (or, to cite two examples of the first tendency and one of the second, The Glass Key, the end of "The Gutting of Couffignal," the "Flitcraft Parable" from The Maltese Falcon.) Readers wary of rediscovered and other "lost" material can rest assured that these stories are nothing like Metterling's laundry lists.

Each of the book's four sections ("Crime," "Men," "Men and Women," and "Screen Stories") includes an introduction of its own, which means the reader gets a good, well-rounded picture of what Hammett was up to as a writer.  The book also includes a fragment from a Sam Spade story, and the e-book version includes additional fragments.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Reading fun from Faust to the Federalist

My reading has been both eclectic and promiscuous in recent weeks. Here are some highlights:

• 
  Fiction from outside one's own country comes with a burden of greater expectations. We expect such fiction to contain clues to the essence of the country where it originates, and I sometimes wonder if this is unfair to authors who may just want to show the reader a good time. I don't know yet what Mike Nicol's thriller Black Heart says about South Africa, but it sets a fine mood of tension, suspense and paranoia.
  
  
• 
  Christa Faust's Hoodtown is as much alternate-universe fantasy as it is crime. In this case, the universe is a neighborhood populated entirely by luchadors and luchadoras (masked Mexican wrestlers) and their descendants. Sure, fetish sex is part of the mix, but this is mainly a story of outcasts, a protagonist with a dark past, thwarted love, and this bit of musing on the decadence of today's youth: "It was easier back then. Not like now when you got joints all through Hoodtown with Hood girls in máscaras that might as well not exist, string bikinis for the head that cover barely more than a Halloween domino. You couldn't pay me enough to leave the house like that."
  
  
• 
  Frederick Nebel's writing has not dated as well as that of his fellow Black Mask authors Dashiell Hammett, Paul Cain, or Raymond Chandler. Period slang and dated locutions weigh more heavily on his work than on theirs. But Nebel was at least as good as the big three at creating an atmosphere of  menace and uncertainty, and his writing at times has as hard an edge as Cain's. He deserves to be better known and more widely published.
  
  
• But the hardest-edged writer I've read this week, the one with the bleakest (or most clear-eyed) view of humanity, may be Alexander Hamilton. Here are some selections from Federalist Paper #6:

"(M)en are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.  ...

"Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011