Dashiell Hammett, father of the wisecrack, plus questions for readers

Dashiell (accent on the second syllable)  Hammett was not the first to introduce humor; Edgar Allan Poe had already done that by 1844, in "The Purloined Letter." (First publication in December of that year, right here in Philadelphia.)

But Hammett may have been the first to incorporate wisecracks, and he was almost certainly the best.

The scene in "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" in which the  Continental Op tries to pry information about the vanished Jeanne Delano from her would-be lover Burke Pangburn ought to be read in its entirety, but this excerpt gives something of the flavor:

"`What color hair?' 

"`Brown—so dark that it's almost black—and it's soft and thick and— 

"`Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?'

"`Long and thick and—'

"`What color eyes?'

"`You've seen shadows on polished silver when—' 

"`I wrote down gray eyes ... '"

Hammett's wisecracks are entertaining for their own sake, wittier than most, and, unlike most wisecracks by the generations of hard-boiled writers who have followed, they are always thematically apt. They advance the story; they never seen designed to attract attention for their own sake. Hammett did it first, and Hammett did it best.

And now, readers, who are your favorite wisecracking hard-boiled writers? Why? What do wisecracks contribute to a story? What makes for a good wisecrack in the context of a story, as opposed to a mere funny line?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

A few thoughts about a writer named Macdonald

What might a reader of crime fiction find interesting in Dwight Macdonald's 1960 essay Masscult and Midcult and the essays collected with it in this 2011 New York Review of Books edition?

For one, while he appears to have considered "the detective story" Masscult, Macdonald discriminated between good and bad and made clear the basis of his judgment:

"The difference appears if we compare two famous writers of detective stories, Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. It is impossible to find any personal note in Mr. Gardner’s enormous output ... His prose style varies between the incompetent and the nonexistent; for the most part, there is just no style, either good or bad.   Like Mr. Gardner, Mr. Poe was a money-writer. (That he didn’t make any is irrelevant.) The difference, aside from the fact that he was a good writer, is that, even when he was turning out hack work, he had an extraordinary ability to use the journalistic forms of his day to express his own peculiar personality, and indeed, as Marie Bonaparte has shown in her fascinating study, to relieve his neurotic anxieties. (It is simply impossible to imagine Mr. Gardner afflicted with anything as individual as a neurosis."

He's willing, that is, to accord respect to "detective stories." (That's what he calls them. The term crime fiction was not in wide use in 1960, which leads to the question of then and why it became popular. Did crime writers begin writing stories about characters other than detectives? Did crime fiction sound more respectable than detective stories to the producers and marketers of the stuff? ) Anyhow, here's Macdonald, from a harsh assessment of Ernest Hemingway that, nonetheless, acknowledges his stylistic influence:

"The list of Hemingwayesque writers includes James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara, and a school of detective fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It also includes Hemingway."

That last sentence is just one example of the wit that makes Macdonald so much fun to read.

He was also a cultural prophet in some ways, alert to current trends and able to make intelligent guesses based on them.  He notes, for example

 "the recent discovery —since 1945 —that there is not One Big Audience but rather a number of smaller, more specialized audiences that may still be commercially profitable. (I take it for granted that the less differentiated the audience, the less chance there is of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle of the lowest common denominator applies.) ... The mass audience is divisible, we have discovered— and the more it is divided, the better. Even television, the most senseless and routinized expression of Masscult (except for the movie newsreels), might be improved by this approach. One possibility is pay-TV, whose modest concept is that only those who subscribe could get the program, like a magazine; but, also like a magazine, the editors would decide what goes in, not the advertisers."

Had he lived on into the age of cable television, Macdonald would not likely have lamented, as some did, the decline of the television networks as unifying forces in American life. Since the book's subtitled is "Essays Against the American Grain," though, I suspect he'd have been skeptical of the frequent claims in recent years that this is a golden age of television. But what would he have thought of the incredible stylistic fragmentation of rock and roll music, a form for which he had nothing but disdain?

As for the Internet, I suspect he'd lament the unprecedented speed with which it can turn folk art forms, for which he has kind words, into Midcult and even Masscult, of which his opinion is less kind.

Finally, a remark that put me in mind of sportscasters' increasing tendency in recent years, a tendency that has begun to seep into newspapers, to call millionaire athletes by their first names:

 "Since in a mass society people are related not to each other but to some abstract organizing principle, they are often in a state of exhaustion, for this lack of contact is unnatural. ... But people feel a need to be related to other people. The simplest way of bridging this distance, or rather of pretending to bridge it, is by emphasizing the personality of the artist."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crimefest 2012: Author says she'll give up sin

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Anne Zouroudi, Detectives Beyond Borders' favorite surprise of 2011, writes a series in which one of the seven deadly sins (and its consequences) features prominently in each book. Naturally she gets asked what she'll do for Book Eight.

(Little Shambles, York))

Zouroudi was part of my "Passport to Murder" panel at Bouchercon 2011, and I suggested that if she wanted to use Jewish tradition, she could write about the 613 mitzvot, which would leave Sue "L is for Long-Running Series" Grafton in the dust. (Yes, Grafton was also at the just-completed Crimefest in balmy Bristol.)

But Zouroudi told a Crimefest questioner that she'll likely take up the easier theme of the Ten Commandments next, which means more adultery, murder, covetousness, and dishonoring of parents for her protagonist, Hermes Diaktoros (the same name as the messenger of the Olympian gods) to negotiate.

It will be interesting to see what Zouroudi gets up to with graven images.

*

In other news — and excellent news it is — Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground is on its way to America from Seventh Street Books (the name is a tribute to the site of the Edgar Allan Poe house in Philadelphia.)

The book is hard-hitting and funny and very human, and it paints a plausible picture of what it must really be like for ordinary folks to live through Northern Ireland's Troubles. Highly recommended to Irish Americans and non-Irish Americans (NIAs) alike.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Why Edgar Allan Poe crossed borders

Here's the sort of unexpected answer I had in mind when I asked yesterday why crime writers set stories overseas:

"`There's something about Poe's work that's not very American. He's not a naturalist. He's not a realist.' The French were ready and waiting for what Poe had to offer: `Maybe it takes an older civilization to feel comfortable with the dark side and be able to enjoy it.'"

That was Poe scholar Shelley Costa Bloomfield one morning bright and early in the town of Baltimore (at Bouchercon 2008). The subject was why the American Poe chose a French hero (C. Auguste Dupin) and setting (Paris) when he invented the detective story, and why the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers, who disappeared in New York in 1838, became Marie Rogêt, found dead in the Seine in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt."

That's my favorite reason for setting a crime story abroad. What's yours?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchecon III

It's not specifically an international-crime-fiction conference, but Bouchercon 2008's second day touched from its beginning directly on a number of subjects often mentioned on this blog. And I do mean from its beginning. I was up, scrubbed, dressed and at an Edgar Allan Poe panel at 8:30 in the morning.

As is always the case with a good conference, much worthwhile stuff happens informally, and I don't mean just drinking and carousing. I hope to devote a post to the informal side of the convention in the next day or two. For now, on with the business at hand (and these reports cover a small selection of the panels on offer. For a full schedule, click here.):

1) The Poe panel, chaired by Philly Poe Guy and Detectives Beyond Borders friend Ed Pettit, focused principally on Poe's centrality in American literature, but Pettit also cited Poe's internationalism, specifically in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt." Quoth Ed: He's living in Philadelphia, he writes about a crime in New York, he sets it in Paris."

Panel member Shelley Costa Bloomfield said: "There's something about Poe's work that's not very American. He's not a naturalist. He's not a realist." The French, she said, were ready and waiting for what Poe had to offer: "Maybe it takes an older civilization to feel comfortable with the dark side and be able to enjoy it," a statement pregnant with meaning and ripe for future blog posts if I've ever heard one.

2) A panel on "the influence of music on/in writing." John Harvey offered a striking remark or two about his jazz-loving protagonist Charlie Resnick: "I try and get onto the page what he actually hears" – not always an easy task for music much of which is instrumental. "Sometimes he'll listen to Billie Holiday if he's feeling particularly melancholy" or to Lester Young, who suffered much.

Peter Robinson discussed a rather puckish invocation of technology in his Inspector Banks books. Odd things pop up occasionally when Banks' iPod is in random-play mode, Robinson said: "Sometimes a song will perhaps ironically reflect a situation."

3) Michael Genelin, an American who lives in Paris and writes novels set in Slovakia, suggested during a Soho Crime panel that an author writing about a country not his or her own can see things a native would miss because they are so commonplace. Cara Black, who lives in San Francisco and sets her Aimée Leduc novels in Paris, said that city works as a setting because "Many people have their own Paris."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Noir at the Bar: The Bugs Bunny and Edgar Allan Poe edition

My post on Jonathan McGoran's Noir at the Bar II reading last week neglected to mention that Ed Pettit served once again as questioner, as he had for Noir at the Bar I .

Here's Ed's account of the rapid-fire queries with which he peppered McGoran, thanks to which you will learn, among other things, that McGoran, obviously a man of exquisite sensibility, liked to watch Bugs Bunny on Saturdays.

That's Ed at left, by the way, or rather a little friend he carries with him at all times.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Noir at the Bar with rare, archival news footage

That's Duane Swierczynski (right) being grilled by Ed Pettit at the first Noir at the Bar reading this evening at the Tritone in Philadelphia.

Duane's the author of a slew of books, including The Blonde and the newly released Severance Package, about a boss who kills off his employees. Ed's an Edgar Allan Poe scholar and the instigator of the Poe wars, the battle to bring Poe back from Baltimore to Philadelphia (Blow this photo up, and you just might be able to see the Poe action figure peeking out of Ed's shirt pocket.)

Duane and Ed had the delightful idea of turning the reading into an event. So, instead of just an author reading his own stuff, Duane talked about his work and about his view of noir; Ed's actress wife, Kate, read the first chapter of Severance Package (you'll never guess what the murder weapon is); and Ed interviewed Duane, who then took questions from the audience.

The two are friends, and Ed's familiarity with Duane's work made for a free-flowing discussion that explored such topics as the influence of comic books on Swierczynski's fictional world (No surprise there; Swierczynski also writes comic books/graphic novels.)

The ambiance, too, was slightly rowdier than one normally finds at readings (The Tritone is a bar, after all), though I was pleased to note that even the bar's regulars paid respectful and interested attention.

The crowd? At least as good as expected, according to Rick at the Tritone, so stay tuned for Noir at the Bar II. A special treat for me was the attendance of Philadelphia writer Johnny Ostentatious, who presented me with a copy of a novel of his, for which I'd done the copy editing. It was nice to see my name between covers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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An old story

Have you noticed that well-known quotations get attributed to the same small group of sources whether the attribution is accurate or not? That anything worth repeating in English is said to have come from Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Winston Churchill or Yogi Berra?

Edgar Allan Poe occupies a similar role in crime fiction, credited with inventing the detective story and just about every variant thereof: the locked-room mystery, the private-detective tale, the thinking detective, the detective-plus-partner team, the puzzle story, the code-and-cipher tale, etc. Unlike Yogi Berra, though, Poe may get too little credit. He may have been the first comic crime writer as well:

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had the fashion of calling everything "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of contradictions.

That's from "The Purloined Letter," a reading of which has just prompted these thoughts:

1) The story takes place in Paris, yet, by contemporary standards, nothing save the protagonist's name (C. Auguste Dupin) and the police officer's rank (prefect) marks the setting as French. In Poe's day, however, the very fact of the story's being a detective tale may itself have carried all the connotations of France that he needed, thanks to François-Eugène Vidocq.

2) In one respect, at least, the story has found more followers in England than in the U.S. Dupin and his unnamed narrator are, of course, the direct fathers of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. The distinct superiority of private investigator to police is also, for various reasons, more characteristic of later English detective fiction than of American.

3) The story is all telling, no action. The only sections that take place in the narrative "present" are the meetings of Dupin, his assistant, and the Prefect of Police, Monsieur G– . This might interest followers of Patti Abbott's current discussion of exposition.

4) The anthologists' introduction tells us that "extensive research" has disproved the belief that Poe was plagued by alcohol and drug problems. Rumors to that effect, we are told, were "grossly exaggerated by a rival who sought to discredit him after his death." It is amusing to think there was a time when such things would discredit a crime writer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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