Were the 1950s the era of gimmicks in American crime writing?

I don't mean that in a bad way. Fredric Brown had to have had considerable chops to keep the protagonist of Night of the Jabberwock (1951) drunk for the whole book. Same with Fletcher Flora, who has all the characters in The Brass Bed (1956) speaking in a kind of comically boozy cross-talk, though they are usually not drunk.

What other crime novel can you name in which the words goliard or goliards turns up more than forty times? (Detectives Beyond Borders readers are, of course, familiar with goliards.) And how many offer dialogue like this:

“`Will you come and sit beside me?' she said.

“`I don’t think I’d better.'

”`Are you afraid of what might happen?'

“`No. I’m afraid of what would almost certainly happen.'”

or this:

“`That this business of principles is merely a kind of rationalization or something?'

”`Yes.'

“`Well, it’s possible that you may be right. I’m actually quite a greedy person, and you are almost terrifyingly poor. You’ll have to admit that.'

“`I will indeed. I admit it.'

“`Do you think there is the remotest chance that you might come into quite a lot of money pretty soon?'

“`I can’t see any.'

”`How about the goliard? Do you think he might earn you a lot?'”

I don't know that I'd ever read such screwball weirdness before.

*

(Click here for another Detectives Beyond Borders post about crime fiction from the 1950s that also invokes Fletcher Flora's name. Quite a name it is, too. We shall not see its like again in crime writing, I think.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Future crime fiction artifacts?

Recent posts here at Detectives Beyond Borders about Fredric Brown's "The Wench Is Dead" (also his The Wench Is Dead) and Dan J. Marlowe's Strongarm raised the question of artifacts.

By artifacts I mean narrative and thematic characteristics or incidental features that make a story seem especially characteristic of the time it was written (In crime fiction a story's time usually means its decade), and I don't mean the term pejoratively.

Earlier this week, an article by Christopher Fowler's article in the Independent was decidedly pejorative about what Fowler sees as the stagnant state of English crime writing. Despite the profound social and demographic changes the country has gone through in recent years, Fowler writes:

"(T)here is a part of England that forever has an alcoholic middle-aged copper with a dead wife, investigating a murdered girl who turns out to be an Eastern European sex worker. This idea might have surprised a decade ago, but it's sold to us with monotonous regularity. It's not gritty, it's a cliché." 

The line about murdered Eastern European sex workers struck a chord. Such a motif is likely to mark recent crime novels as artifacts of their time. What other themes or situations in crime stories of the last ten of fifteen years are likely to mark them as typical of their time?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fredric Brown: The short Wench Is Dead

I mentioned in Sunday's post about Dan J. Marlowe that I tend to read paperback original crime stories from the mid-twentieth century as artifacts of their time.

I read another one of those artifacts this week, Fredric Brown's story The Wench Is Dead, which, I have just learned from the link in this paragraph, Brown later expanded into a 1955 novel of the same name.

I call this one an artifact because its man-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time plot seemed evocative of a time when the idea of being trapped (by middle-class morality, suburban conformity, or what have you) was a cultural current. Indeed, the protagonist is a young man of respectable background with a bachelor's degree in sociology who has fled Chicago for a few weeks of bohemian squalor before returning to a job in his father's investment business. (In the novel, apparently, he has hit the road to research his dissertation in sociology and plans to return to a teaching job in that field.)

The story seems artifact-like in the telling because its characters' grubby lifestyle (the protagonist is a wino scraping by on dishwasher's wages barely sufficient to keep him in Muscatel) is a dirty story told in an oddly clean, decorous manner. There is none of of the gritty despair David Goodis brought to stories whose characters led similar lives.

One artifactish aspect of the story serves it well. Brown must have been one of the earlier writers to begin shucking off the era's bars to descriptions of sex (or maybe paperback originals in general were ahead of their time in that respect). In any case, our introduction to the protagonist's girlfriend Billie is beautifully matter of fact about how she earns her living:

"`Jeez, only ten? Oh well, I had seven hours. Guy came here when Mike closed at two but he didn't stay long.'" 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

100 Must-Read Crime Novels

There may not be precisely a hundred, and not all are novels (the list includes story collections by G.K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle), but Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison's 100 Must-Read Crime Novels makes a nice, compact guide. It will fit easily into your pocket to replace the 5 pounds, 99 pence you take out to pay for it.

The occasionally flat prose in the capsule descriptions (Novels are "unbelievably powerful" or "atmospheric, entertaining") is offset by interesting choices from authors I had not read (John Franklin Bardin, Nicholas Blake) or knew only through movie adaptations (Vera Caspary's Laura). I was pleased to see Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint on the list and tantalized by the description of Eric Ambler's writing as "poles apart from the run-of-the-mill, imperialist yarns favoured by such writers as John Buchan and Sapper."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007