Story and voice: A post about The Big Sleep inspired by cold mutton fat

"She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores."

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

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Haunted by John McFetridge's comment about voice and story here at Detectives Beyond Borders and consumed by desire to revisit the greatest mutton-fat simile in American crime writing, I read The Big Sleep again on Saturday.

McFetridge wrote "I think voice is really important in a story but not as important as the story," which sounds at once reasonable and at odds with the wisecracking American P.I. tradition that Raymond Chandler perfected for eternity. So I kept my eye on story this time, and McFetridge was right. The pathos of the story and the depth of the Sternwood family's pride and self-delusion get more affecting each time I read The Big Sleep.

Martha Vickers as Carmen
Sternwood in The Big Sleep's
best performance.

The novel also increased my wonder at Howard Hawks' celebrated 1945 and 1946 film adaptations. Aside from minor details of hair color and such, the performers — and the cast is a strong one — are dead ringers for Chandler's versions of them. And the movie's additions either are plausible extrapolations from the novel (the racy horse-racing dialogue between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart) or good, solid action in their own right (the end of Eddie Mars). My guess is that the former is due to the movie's writers, who included Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner, and the latter to director Howard Hawks.

Oh, and the novel's plot is less confusing than the movie's, if that matters.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My first book cover as a photographer!

Stark House Press, that terrific publisher of crime classics and crime originals, has a new mass-market crime line called Black Gat Books. The imprint's first three offerings include work by suck authors and photographers as Harry Whittington, Leigh Brackett, Charlie Stella, and me.

Yep, I shot the cover for Black Gat's edition of Stella's novel Eddie's World, and I could not be more chuffed. Stella is one of my favorite crime writers, a hell of a guy, a loyal family man and sports fan, and a passionate, entertaining social commentator whose only flaw is that he wouldn't know a good bagel if it bit him on his Buffalo Bills-loving rear end. Here's what I wrote about Stella in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Much of a crime novel's texture comes from the bits between the main action, and no one writes those bits better than New Jersey's Charlie Stella. If you like Elmore Leonard, you'll love this guy and his funny, unsparing yet sympathetic looks at mid-, high-, and low-level mobsters, hangers-on, and cops."

Judge the book by its cover, or the cover by its book. In this case, it really is all good.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

No Good From a Corpse: Why I am a Leigh Brackettologist

A few good things about No Good From a Corpse, the hard-boiled 1944 novel by Leigh Brackett, who also wrote the screenplays to the 1946 and 1978 versions of The Big Sleep (the first with the help of some hack named William Faulkner) when not compiling a science fiction résumé of novels, stories, and screenplays that included the script of The Empire Strikes Back:

1) The similes, perhaps not as funny as Raymond Chandler's but perhaps sharper and with more of an edge, e.g.:

"He was a little man with a large head and a face like a healthy, sunburned frog."

2) An eye for detail that let Brackett make familiar points in unexpected ways, as in:

"Vince Klingman lived in a neat, old-fashioned cottage near Western Avenue. The lawn was green and the white fence had all the pickets in it."

or

"The butler paused. His correct front dissolved enough to show a resigned and patient loathing."

 3) A knack, also apparent in her screenplay for El Dorado, for combining humor and violene in ways that are shocking without seeming gratuitous. An example:

"Vivien giggled. `Blood pressure. We're always hoping he'll have a stroke, but he never does.'"

4) She knew how to say funny things in ways that made them even funnier: 

"Johnny wormed his face through a froth of pink chiffon ruffles and said, `Hiya, Ed.'"

In fact, I like that scene so much that I'll give you a bit more of it:

"The blonde's fist caught him on the side of the head. Clive turned over three times and hit a table, causing a crash and an explosion of splinters.

"Kethrin set her bottle on the floor, clapped her hands together, and said solemnly, `Whee.' Clive rolled over, shaking his head and kicking pieces of table out of his way. The blonde advanced, breathing heavily.

"`Now,' she roared, `he busts my furnicha!'"

5) Like Chandler, Leigh Brackett had an eye for the despoilation of Los Angeles:

"They get water from an ocean inlet down at Del Rey. We kids used to spend most of our time down there, fishing and swimming.

"You wouldn't want to swim there now. The banks are black with seeping oil, and the water's black, too, and it stinks. There aren't any fish in it now."

6) Brackett wrote a convincing male P.I. protagonist who appreciates the dames but who nonetless expresses his appreciation with a dressmakerly precision that I can't imagine from a male author:

"The soft wool of her dress was gathered and bloused, so that her full sharp curves were hinted at rather than seen ..."

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(Read an excerpt from No Good From a Corpse.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The real star of El Dorado

And that's no small accomplishment for a movie whose cast included John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and a young James Caan, and whose director was the great Howard Hawks.

And she was a crime writer, too!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Long Goodbye and Leigh Brackett: A non-Bouchercon, non-international post

And I mean Robert Altman's 1973 movie, not Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel, on which it was based.

1) Jim Bouton, who plays Terry Lennox, is a better writer than actor. He was also a better baseball player.

2) That comment notwithstanding, none of the actors was awful. Altman let no one in the large cast dominate the movie, either, though Sterling Hayden gave a sometimes enjoyable over-the-top performance as the drunken writer Roger Wade.

3) But the real reason for this post is that, as much as the movie makes me want to reread Chandler's novel, it really makes me want to read some Leigh Brackett. You'll get no plot spoilers here, but every significant departure from the novel, with the possible exception of the movie's 1970s setting, seems due to the writing, and that was Brackett's job.

Brackett was familiar with the formidable task of adapting Chandler to the screen; Howard Hawks hired her to co-write his screen adaptation of The Big Sleep. She also wrote science fiction and westerns in addition to crime, and her screenplays include Hawks' Rio Bravo, Hatari!, Man's Favorite Sport, El Dorado and Rio Lobo — and The Empire Strikes Back.

OK, Brackettologists, where should I start my Leigh Brackett reading? (I've got a head start on the viewing already.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010