Linwood Barclay, Ross Macdonald, and me: What I shot and thought at Harrogate, Part II

Linwood Barclay signs a book for
an adoring fan. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky by special agreement
with Detectives Beyond Borders.

I’ve never been able to get Ross Macdonald or, as Macdonald himself might have said, I am paralyzed by a deep-seated fear of wince-makingly amateur Freudianism that I just can’t express.

Linwood Barclay, on the other hand, is a great admirer of Macdonald’s, so naturally when Barclay approached as I chatted with a fellow attendee at the Theakston Ole Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate last month, I said: “Oh, hey! We were just ripping the ---- out of Ross Macdonald.”

Barclay, born in Connecticut but rendered good-natured and amiable by his years in Canada, pretended to be offended. But then he smiled widely and offered a disarming explanation for his Macdonald love.

When he first encountered Macdonald, Barclay said, "I didn't know anything about Freud." And no wonder. Barclay was just 15 years old at the time, and a meeting just a few years later was a formative experience for Barclay. I don't remember the rest of his apologia for Macdonald. Perhaps he was touched by that author's yearning empathy for his characters, and not just his protagonist.

And that's what's important, isn't it, that Barclay, through the deadening welter of Macdonald's Freudian theorizing, found something that touched him and helped make him a critically admired and internationally successful author in his own right. So no, I'm not sure I'll ever warm to Macdonald, having tried his early overwrought imitations of Raymond Chandler and his mid-career embrace of Freud and found both wanting. But I was humbled by Barclay's innocent and whole-hearted early embrace of the man and by how deeply and author can touch his readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Meet Peter Rabe

Peter Rabe's gangster/fixer characters seem driven toward confrontations with their bosses that do not generally end well (though Daniel Port, the political fixer of the Glass Key-like Dig My Grave Deep, [1956] survived his confrontation long enough to feature in a series of novels.)

The Box (1962), A Shroud for Jesso (1955), and, believe it or not, Kill the Boss Good-By (1956), also turn on conflicts between ambitious underlings and the top men who punish them or stand in their way.   Can you imagine what sort of father-figure  psychobabble Ross Macdonald would have wrung out of material like that?  Rabe, a trained and practicing psychologist, on the other hand, avoided Macdonald's embarrassing amateur Freudianism, concocting instead stories of men who, while not necessarily trapped, just do what they have to, as dictated by their temperament, or circumstances, or ambition.

It's harder to find crime-fiction parallels for Rabe than it is for some authors, perhaps because, with two exceptions, Rabe said his influences came from outside crime fiction. (One of those two exceptions was Dashiell Hammett, so you know he had good taste.)

If you don't know Rabe or his work, this 1989 interview with him is a good place to start. If you do know Rabe, you may find his admiring comments about Donald Westlake especially interesting. Rabe also comes across as surprisingly genial for a man whose life included escape from Germany to avoid the Nazis, a false diagnosis of a terminal disease, several marriages and divorces, and ups and downs in his writing career that eventually led him so stop writing for publication. The man seems to have been pretty well adjusted for a psychologist.

======

Rick Ollerman will talk about Peter Rabe as part of my panel called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" at Bouchercon 2016. It happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans, Room LaGalleries 1.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016 

Rabe on (It's a crazy feeling)

I'm about to begin reading Time Enough to Die, which Donald Westlake called the only good novel of the six books by Peter Rabe that featured a tough guy and political fixer named Daniel Port. (Westlake regarded Rabe as a formative influence on his own crime writing. He just didn't like the Port books much.) In the meantime, here's a post from back when I first read Rabe.

================

 I'm a book and a half into my career as a Peter Rabe reader, and I've reached two tentative conclusions: 1) Rabe was an heir to early Dashiell Hammett, and 2) He worked psychology into his novels a hell of a lot better than Ross Macdonald did.

Rabe had a master’s and a doctorate in psychology. He incorporated psychology in his crime novels with an expert’s knowledge and an author’s restraint. Macdonald, on the other hand, at least in The Galton Case, was more like a yammering cultist on the subject.

The Hammett connection is more pertinent, though, to a discussion of Rabe’s The Box and Kill the Boss Goodbye. (I’m told that only one or two of Rabe’s novels appeared with a title he suggested. The Box is one of them. I would bet a dozen Montreal bagels that Kill the Boss Goodbye is not.) Each novel reminded me a bit of Hammett’s portrayals of men doing their jobs. More particularly, each portrays with cool detachment, deadly power struggles at the head of a criminal or quasi-criminal enterprise, in the manner of Red Harvest. But they read more like Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, no surprise given that both that book and The Box are set in North Africa.

(A post on the Violent World of Parker Web site discusses Donald Westlake and an essay he wrote about Rabe. Read Westlake on Rabe in the Westlake nonfiction volume The Getaway Car. Read more about Rabe at Mystery File and Stark House Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Ard boiled crime from the 1950s

William Ard (1922-1960)  was almost a topic on the "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., but the panelist, that knowledgeable Canadian Kevin Burton Smith, chose to discuss Norbert Davis instead.

But I sought Kevin's advice during an Ard-shopping expedition through the convention's book room, and I wound up with The Diary, one of Ard’s ten or so novels featuring the New York private investigator Timothy Dane (Ard wrote several other series in his his short life.) Here’s some of what I’ve learned:

1) Ard would make a perfect subject for “Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane,” which I first offered at Bouchercon 2014 and which spotlights lesser-known authors of the paperback-original and pulp eras. Ard is, indeed, little remembered, to judge by the paucity of references to him online and the apparent scant availability of his books. Little or none of his work is available in electronic versions, for example, where many lesser-known crime writers of the past have found new life.

2) He was fairly prolific in a short career, turning out about thirty novels though he died before his 39th birthday.

Kevin Burton Smith

3) I like Kevin's observation that Dane is "a pretty normal guy" compared to his fictional contemporaries Mike Hammer and Shell Scott. I love Kevin's remark that

"I find Ard's work far more enjoyable than that of Ross Macdonald in the same time period. Sure, Dane's cases tend to be a tad pulpier and melodramatic than Archer's, but at the same time, Dane's a far more compelling and down to earth character." 

4) The Diary's ending conforms to Kevin's assessment about Dane's cases compared to Archer's.  Ard built The Diary around themes familiar from Hammett and Chandler: political corruption, family secrets, and wild daughters.  But he knew how to build something unexpected out of familiar P.I. set-ups, such as the shamus in his office waiting for a client or the tough guys who confront the P.I. Several times near the novel's beginning, I'd think, "I know what will happen now," and I'd be wrong. After this happened two or three times, I figured this guy Ard's a pro who knows how to hold a reader's interest.

5) Dane also wrote crime series featuring characters named Lou Largo, Johnny Stevens, Barney Glines and Mike (later Danny) Fountain plus Westerns. I haven't read them, but thanks to The Diary, I may look for them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Too much of nothing: The High Window

The High Window has plenty of good stuff in it, but I know of no one who considers it among Raymond Chandler's best work. I'm part of that consensus, and here are some of the reasons, based on a recent rereading:

1) Chandler's inspiration flags.  In Chapter Four, needing to give Philip Marlowe and the reader information about the case at hand, Chandler has Marlowe call a friend who happens conveniently to be "a crime reporter on the Chronicle," a hard-boiled convention probably five to ten years out of date by the time The High Window appeared in 1942. The information is forthcoming, Marlowe and the crime reporter friend duly exchange mildly salacious wisecracks, and the reporter disappears, never to return.  The reporter's name suggests that Chandler was well aware of the scene's perfunctory nature: Kenny Haste.

2) The word nothing occurs 73 times in the novel, sometimes like a  self-mocking drumbeat: "Nothing in that, Marlowe," Marlowe tells himself, "nothing at all. Nothing for you here, nothing."  Chandler would engage in morbid crankiness in The Little Sister in 1949. Something similar may be at work in The High Window.

3) On a possibly related note, I detected what I would bet was the inspiration for Ross Macdonald's cringe-inducing pathetic fallacies in The Galton Case. In Macdonald, "Flowers bloomed competitively in the yards." In The High Window, "a small tiled pool glitter(ed) angrily in the sun." Is it fair to blame Chandler's mild excess for Macdonald's more serious sin? Maybe Chandler could be indicted as an accessory before the fact.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The Concrete Flamingo, a.k.a. All the Way, by Charles Williams

Nothing in Her Way remains the best of the five Charles Williams novels I've read in recent weeks, but each of the other four has impressed me. A Touch of Death, especially, is almost as good as Nothing ... . The Diamond Bikini wins points because it's not just a comedy, but one that manages not to condescend to its rural setting.

The Concrete Flamingo (1958), also published as All the Way, is not rural, and it's no comedy. But, like The Diamond Bikini, it demonstrates the author's versatility and sheer professionalism.

In bare outline, The Concrete Flamingo sounds like many mid-century paperback original novels: Down-on-his-luck but handsome man falls for woman who involves him in a plan to kill, steal, or both, and violent or tragic complications ensue.

The intricate plot works itself out nicely and with high suspense. No surprise there; Williams has to have been one of the better plotters who has ever written crime fiction. What impressed me most, though, was the plot's unexpected resolution. To avoid spoilers, I'll say no more. But I admire Williams for taking the chance that he did.

 *****

The Concrete Flamingo does, indeed, include a concrete flamingo, but All the Way is a more suitable title. I don't know why or when the title was changed, but it's hard not to suspect the publisher of trying to capitalize on Ross Macdonald's popularity. The Concrete Flamingo sounds as if it should be a Macdonald title. (The cover of the edition included here is unusually faithful to the novel's plot, though I don't recall that any of the book's cars were green. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

End of story, or what ever happened to plot? (With questions for readers)

It's no secret that plot has less cachet than character, setting, and atmosphere in harder-boiled crime writing, and probably at the cozier end of the spectrum as well.

Why is this? Why are character especially, but also atmosphere, considered more literarily prestigious than a brilliantly crafted plot?  When was the last time you read critical praise for a hard-boiled novel's plot? (I haven't read Gone Girl, but that's the only recent example that comes to mind. Well, that and anything by the brilliant Alan Glynn. But I suspect that even Glynn's thrilling chillers are likelier to find their way into book discussions for their larger themes of paranoia and government and corporate control than for the mechanisms by which Glynn tells his stories.)  Can you recall the plot of any Stieg Larsson novels? Probably not, but you sure as hell do know who and what Lisbeth Salander is.  Character is for serious writers. Plot? Why, that's something for trashy airport best sellers.

I don't mean that hard-boiled and noir novels have bad plots, but commentators (and, I'm guessing, readers and even authors) regard plot, if they think about it all, as a serviceable armature on which to hang ideas about men or women or the city or despair or economic deprivation or greed or violence or heroism or depravity, or just to give their characters something to do.  I've read two brilliantly plotted hard-boiled crime novels recently, one published in 1953, the other in 1961, and the third novel in my new holy trinity of crime fiction plotting appeared in 1959. (The books are, in order, Nothing in Her Way, by Charles Williams; Any Woman He Wanted, by Harry Whittington; and The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, whose story is so brilliantly worked out that one can almost overlook Macdonald's wince-making amateur Freudianism and badly dated jabs at suburbs.) In none of the books is plot a mere mechanism to activate the characters. Plot reveals character and is inseparable from it. The books reveal the shallowness of expressions like plot-driven and character-driven.

Those novels appeared more than 50 years ago, and here are your questions: Were the 1950s and early 1960s a high point for plot in hard-boiled writing? If so, when did plot lose its prestige, and why? What are the more brilliantly plotted crime novels you have read?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

When Jim (Thompson) read Ross (Macdonald)? plus a question for readers

Ross Macdonald got so excited one day in 1952 that he dropped his commas. A year later, another writer had a character express his opinion of that sort of thing. Please welcome Macdonald's "The Imaginary Blonde" and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me:

"The blankness coagulated into colored shapes. The shapes were half human and half beast and they dissolved and re-formed, dancing through the eaves of my mind to dream a mixture of both jive and nightmare music. A dead man with a furred breast jumped out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping tenor was saying ..."

And here's Thompson's Lou Ford:

"In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He'll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can't figure out whether the hero's laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to to his job."

Who's right, the psychologist or the psychopath?  How has description of lowered or heightened states of consiousness changed in crime ficiton since the 1950s?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Dogs, psychologists, fear, and Ross Macdonald

"She walked away from me and her fear." 

— Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case (1959)

"I could smell the fear on Donny: there's an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes." 

—  Ross Macdonald, "The Imaginary Blonde" (1953) 

I like Macdonald better as a dog than as a psych major.

"The Imaginary Blonde," which appeared first in Manhunt, was also known as "Gone Girl," the same title Gillian Flynn used for her 2012 novel. Do any Flynnheads out there know if the title is a nod to Macdonald?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A crime novel that's dated and progressive at the same time, and a question for readers

I'll post from time to time about dated aspects of crime novels, Ross Macdonald's freshman psychology, for instance, or Dillon's long virtual monologue in Chapter Six of The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

I inevitably contrast these with the scenes of Ned Beaumont being beaten and held captive in Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. That novel appeared in 1931, but the scenes' brutality and Beaumont's despair would be just as fresh and just as harrowing in a novel published today.

Then there's W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar, published in 1929 and the basis of the famous movie of the same name starring Emanuel Goldenberg (left). The movie's dated dialogue disappointed me, and I'd long been curious about whether the novel was any different. It isn't, full as it is of lines like "I got lead in this here rod and my finger's itching."

At the same time, the book's opening segments alternate chapters of a heist being planned with glimpses into the minds and lives of its characters that seem utterly modern. (These include a micro chapter of Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello combing his hair that includes the famous description "Rico was a simple man. He loved but three things: himself, his hair and his gun. He took excellent care of all three.")

What crime novels and stories have you read that seemed dated and surprisingly contemporary at the same time?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Ha!

I wrote in the discussion following yesterday's post that Philip Marlowe's tentative, fumbling attempts at psychoanalysis in The High Window are vastly more human, and hence easier to read, than Ross Macdonald's smug, wince-making, know-it-all amateur Freudianism in The Galton Case.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found the following as I read more from The High Window:

“`The old woman treats her like a rough parent treats a naughty child.'

“`I see. Regressive.' 

“`What’s that?' 

“`Emotional shock, and the subconscious attempt to escape back to childhood. If Mrs. Murdock scolds her a good deal, but not too much, that would increase the tendency. Identification of childhood subordination with childhood protection.' 

“`Do we have to go into that stuff?' I growled.”

Chandler puts the analysis in a supporting character's mouth (and that character is a doctor); Marlowe is skeptical of the diagnosis, but despite his gruff response, to which the doctor responds with good humor, he listens. In The Galton Case, the psychologist is the protagonist, Lew Archer, and the psychological pronouncements are offered with the humorless arrogance of the true-believing amateur. I know which I prefer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The way some writers date

(Ross Macdonald wearing a fedora)

I spent my previous post excoriating the obtrusively amateurish Freudianism in Ross Macdonald's The Galton Case. Another aspect of that novel has dated almost as poorly, and that got me thinking about why some themes date better than others.

That second aspect is the depravity of the dog-eat-dog American suburbs. Here are four extracts from The Galton Case:

"Flowers bloomed competitively in the yards."

"Arroyo Park was an economic battleground where managers and professional people matched wits and incomes."

"The commuters in their uniforms, hat on head, briefcase in hand ... It was a junior-executive residential section."

"You wouldn't want to to get around that I didn't do my share ... You don't want to shame me in front of my friends. [this from a housewife trying to talk into her husband into buying cake for a church supper. And where does she want him to buy the cake? "You know the bakery at the shopping center."]

The first image is striking even if the sentiment is dated. The next two extracts can have little impact on later generations whose views of the suburbs were shaped by "Pleasant Valley Sunday." The fourth is just wince-makingly bathetic today, however it may have seemed to readers when The Galton Case was published in 1959.

Once upon a time in America, starting sometime after World War II and fizzling out in the mid-1960s, suburbs and their new accessibility to middle-class homebuyers were objects of fascination, horror, and fevered imaginings. The Galton Case appeared three years after the novel Peyton Place. I'm just old enough to remember Dave Berg poking amused fun at the suburbs in Mad magazine.

But the novelty wore off, generations grew up in the burbs, and their depravities and social pathologies were absorbed into popular culture and forgotten.

I reflected several times while reading The Galton Case how odd it was that the trappings of a story published in 1959 should feel stale, while those of Dashiell Hammett's stories, from thirty and more years before, should feel fresh. Why is this? It's not enough to suggest that Hammett was a better writer than Macdonald, because chip away the social trappings, and The Galton Case is a thrilling family drama with a virtuoso twist.

I'm just old enough to remember the tail end of the world for which Ross Macdonald wrote The Galton Case. Hammett's world, on the other hand is remote and hence new. Is that why it seems fresher to me than Macdonald's? Why do some old stories date poorly? Why do others seem thrillingly fresh?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Ross Macdonald, amateur psychologist

I really did want to get back to more exotic climes for this post, but I got sidetracked by a sort-of Canadian.

An article called "The Second Generation of Hard-Boiled Writers" tells us that "Ross Macdonald brought Freudian analysis from the university, where millions of students were learning it, to explain to a mass public why good people do bad things."

In The Galton Case (1959) , some of the analysis is right out of a freshman class:

"But she held herself with adolescent awkwardness, immobilized by feelings she couldn't express."

or:

"She walked away from me and her fear."

How does the protagonist/narrator, Lew Archer, know this on first meetings with people he has never seen before?

Elsewhere, Macdonald, the eager amateur psychologist, shows, tells, and interprets what Macdonald the author would have been better off just showing:

"She tried to go on, but the words stuck in her throat. She plucked at the skin of her throat as if to dislodge them."

A laconic author in the Hammett mode would have let the reader guess the reason for the throat-plucking. So, I suspect, would a Macdonald more comfortable with psychoanalysis and more confident that his readers would be, as well.  Freudian psychology must have seemed more novel, more darkly exciting, in 1959 than it does today.

And how about "I had a delayed gestalt after I'd given up on the subject"? I think that's Macdonald's attempt to update the old something-bothered-me-but-I-couldn't-put-my-finger-on-it.-It-didn't-hit-me-till-later trope.  But delayed gestalt? Delayed-effing-gestalt?    

It may be significant that two of the wittier, less forced bits of psychological analysis in the book's first half come from characters other than Archer. Old Mrs. Galton "likes to dramatize herself. It's the only excitement she has left," the family lawyer says."She lives on emergencies," remarks a family servant.

But it's a hell of a story so far, and I can see why later crime writers worship Macdonald. Previous authors had made the long-buried family secret a motif. Macdonald made it the substance of this story, and he unfolds the suspense slowly and relentlessly.

This is my first real crack at a Macdonald novel, so my guesses could be dead wrong. But I suspect that his books got even better once he, er, internalized his psychological interests, got more comfortable with them, and learned how to have Archer express them more naturally and less like an enthusiastic recent convert.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Joe Puma is no ****-up

The Thrilling Detective Web site calls William Campbell Gault's Joe Puma "the fuck-up as P.I." I don't see that based on the five stories collected in Joe Puma, P.I.  

The same site says Ross Macdonald dedicated his last novel to Gault. That makes better sense. The stories have the same bitter attitude toward wealth, especially unearned, not to mention a whole lot of Chandlerian knightliness, plus compassionate description and dark, hard-boiled observation in about equal measure. We know that Puma is a knight, because he tells us in "Stolen Star" that "I was no knight."  As for the rest, we get:

• "I can never find the proper comment for the wailings of the wealthy. I tried to put some sympathy into my smile."

• "She lived in a beach shack south of there, out of the high-tax area."

• "It was a clear and beautiful day, a day for loafing, but I didn't have a rich or talented wife."

• "And if I told Duffy ... who would benefit? Not Gina Pastore and not Mrs. Alan Engle.  Justice might, but justice was only a word. The other two were people."

• "Money is only unimportant when you have a bank full of it."

• "You have to believe in somebody, Miss Pastore."

• "There was one suit, right out of a Fresno bargain emporium..."

• "His clothes were a bit frayed, but he wore them well."

• "Charles smiled and said nothing, as good bartenders do."

• "He had the kind of a face that looked naked without a number under it."

• Of a high-class pimp who has gone into the movie business: "If a man can afford it, buying a small studio is a fine way to keep supplied with dames."

One odd bit was the description of "a short, fat man, and his language seemed a little pompous," odd, because Puma, in his role as narrator, says things like "We're all victims of our own environment to a degree, you know" and "Her toughness was not inherent."

Gault, writing these stories in the late 1950s, also peppered them with self-conscious popular culture references before the practice became widespread ("Sam reads too much Mike Hammer," "The rube sees too many movies.").

So, maybe I'll read some Ross MacDonald.  But first, some current crime writing from a country that figures in the Old Norse sagas.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Yore accent sucks, y'all hea-ah?

I've just given up on The Drowning Pool, the second of two movies that starred Paul Newman as Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer but with his name changed to Lew Harper. I just couldn't take those crappy Southern accents. Or maybe the accents were too good – too studied, that is, to be anything but a distraction.

In any case, the movie is safely back in the store. Now I think I'll sample Macdonald firsthand, through The Moving Target, the first Archer novel and the basis of Harper, the first Newman/Macdonald movie.

Have you ever given up on a movie because an accent drove you nuts? If not, what similarly little things will put you off a movie or a book?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Acting up

Spurred by a fine old article from January Magazine, I decided to acquaint myself with Ross Macdonald, only I did so secondhand, through the 1966 movie Harper.

That Paul Newman vehicle, based on Macdonald's 1949 novel The Moving Target, alters one of the more famous names in crime fiction, turning Lew Archer into Lew Harper. It also brims with the early Macdonald's debts to Raymond Chandler that J. Kingston Pierce cited in January Mag, and more besides.

It's a highly watchable movie, though a weird blend of three eras in American pop culture: the wince-inducing Hollywood 1960s; the 1930s and early '40s, toward which Macdonald looked when he wrote the novel; and the late 1940s, when Macdonald, to judge from what we see on screen, had yet to make the "fairly clean break with the Chandler tradition" that Pierce cites.

Let me break down my comments into a list, and perhaps something coherent will emerge:

1) The Lauren Bacall/Raymond Chandler connections. In Howard Hawks' celebrated 1945/46 movie of Chandler's The Big Sleep, Bacall plays a sexy, spoiled rich woman whose father hires Philip Marlowe and hopes he can find a missing man, among other tasks. In Harper, she plays a sexy, spoiled rich woman who hires Lew Harper (Archer) to find her missing husband.

The Big Sleep has moody shots of oil rigs churning away in the California night; so does Harper.

Both stories take place in Los Angeles.

Both feature a troublesome, flighty young woman who makes herself a thorn in the Bacall character's side (Pamela Tiffin in Harper, the much-better Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep).

As a bonus, Michael Winner's 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, though transferring the setting to England, begins with a near duplicate of an early sequence from Harper.

2) The wince-inducing 1960s detail, and I don't mean just the laughable music and god-awful clothes and haircuts that are trotted out to indicate "1960s." I mean the acting. Just about anyone with more than thirty seconds' screen time spends some of it mugging or otherwise going over the top. Arthur Hill is not just Harper's lawyer friend, but a cringing über-nerd with thick glasses and a bad haircut. Shelley Winters plays a star gone fat, so naturally the camera captures her noisily stuffing her face.

Pamela Tiffin's go-go-dance-on-the-diving-board routine is so dated that I expected someone to yell, "Crazy, man!" Bacall grins evilly in one sort-of close-up, chewing scenery as if in an Agatha Christie parody. Even Newman, the anti-Pacino, the most graceful and restrained of stars, gets into the act, rolling his eyes and tossing his head in impatience. (He brings it off better than anyone else in the movie, making it a part of the character and not just a piece of schtick. With the exception of Tiffin, everyone in the cast can act and does so nicely when not mugging and grimacing.)

3) The really wince-inducing 1960s detail: The nightclub scene in which three musicians with English-style clothes and mod haircuts pretend to play guitar and bass to a soundtrack on which the only audible instruments are trumpets.

4) The pre-Chandler connection. The whiff of family secrets is still vaguely in the air, as in much crime fiction of Chandler's time and before. This was a hallmark of American crime fiction from the late 1920s on, as Robert Towne knew well when he wrote Chinatown.

A religious cult figures prominently, as in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse or "The Scorched Face" or Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard.

Hey, I didn't promise coherence.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007