Did Derek Raymond know Shane MacGowan?

Did the superb English noir writer Derek Raymond (right) know Shane MacGowan, the superb Irish songwriter and singer who was well into his dissipated career in and out of the Pogues when Raymond died in 1994?

Did MacGowan (left), who has spent a good chunk of his life in southeast England, read Raymond, who began chronicling London's shady half-world in 1962, in The Crust on its Uppers?

Each chronicled low lives with sympathy and compassion that can make you cry, and the temperamental kinship is nowhere as apparent, in my experience, as in Raymond's novel How the Dead Live and MacGowan's song "A Pair of Brown Eyes" (try to ignore the pretentious video by Alex Cox.)

How the Dead Live brings the nameless protagonist of Raymond's Factory novels into contact in several scenes with a old soldier whose experiences in love and war silence the protagonist. Something similar happens in "A Pair of Brown Eyes," where a self-pitying young lovelorn man wanders into a bar and encounters a old man with a far more harrowing tale. "All I could do was hate him," the narrator sings in one line, yet the refrain, in the voices of both characters, tells the real story. (Again, ignore the visuals on the video. They have nothing to do with the song and are clunkily obvious next to MacGowan's performance.)

While you are listening to the Pogues and reading the Factory novels (reissued by Melville House and recommended highly. Raymond is a David Goodis or Jim Thompson for our times), ponder this question: Which crime novels remind you of which songs, and vice versa? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

What, besides the words, makes a noir song a noir song?

Previous posts about noir and crime songs (click the link, then scroll down) elicited suggestions based mostly on what a song says — its lyrics.

But what about how it says what it says — its vocal inflections, its instrumental breaks, its production, its orchestration if you've chosen a piece of classical music? (Yes, classical, perhaps opera especially, can be noir. Think of Carmen.)

What does Shane MacGowan add when he drops his voice on the line "There ain't much else for kids to do" on "Rain Street"? What about the ghostly refrain of "Maria Lando," at first a chorus, separate from Susana Baca's lead voice, joining with her on the words solo trabaja ... Maria only works and never has time to raise her eyes toward the sky?

Think of those noir and crime songs that make you shiver, and tell me what, besides the words, makes you feel the way you do: the arrangement? A chilling flatness or an emotional catch in the singer's voice? Just to make things difficult, what are the literary equivalents of those tools? How does an author produce the effect in a reader that Billie Holiday's voice does in a listener?

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I'll be talking about crime and noir songs next week at NoirCon 2012 in Philadelphia. If you don't come to hear my Project Noir Songs, come and meet Lawrence Block, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Duane Swierczynski, Otto Penzler, Vicki Hendricks, and many more. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Shane MacGowan meets Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

One of the bounciest, most cheerful songs I've heard recently also makes the Detectives Beyond Borders list of great noir and crime songs (click the link, then scroll down for some good reading and listening.)

The song is "Rain Street," from the Pogues' 1990 album Hell's Ditch, and it includes lines such as:

"Down the alley the ice wagon flew
Picked up a stiff that was turning blue
The local kids were sniffin' glue
Not much else for a kid to do
Down rain street."

Lyrically, the song is a bit like Lou Reed and, in its stream of images, something like Bob Dylan's long, near-surrealistic songs from the mid-1960s. But Shane MacGowan had a livelier sense of fun than both those guys, and the Pogues were better and tighter musically, so the song is just plain fun to listen to even if you ignore the words.

But those words ... they're a little like David Goodis or maybe, I don't know, Nelson Algren. Click on the song's title above to hear Shane and the boys perform it.

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Rashomon is one of the greatest and most celebrated of all movies, and probably the best-known Japanese movie in the Western world. (How many movies have lent their titles to a psychological effect?)

But thirty-six years before Akira Kurosawa's film, "Rashomon" was a story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, one of two by the author that formed the basis of the movie. (The story "Rashomon" is the source of the ramshackle gate and the unforgettable rain in the movie; the "Rashomon effect" is depicted in a story called "In a Grove.")

Late on a rainless night in a deserted office is no time or place to start a consideration of twentieth-century Japanese literature, so I'll begin and end by saying that "In a Grove" is one of the wittiest and most carefully and deliberately constructed stories this writer has had the pleasure to read. As of now, I am, albeit tentatively, a Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and you should be, too. Read him to have your eyes opened to new, little-explored possibilities for crime stories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More crime songs

I've heard two folk songs recently that share something of the darker, Thompson/Goodis/Woolrich strain of noir and hard-boiled, yet remain two of the happiest, toe-tappingest, jolliest ballads you'd ever want to hear. This seeming contradiction captures the appeal of a certain school of crime story, and I invite your thoughts on the matter when you're done with this post.

The narrator of "Nancy Whisky" (known in some versions as "The Carlton Weaver") celebrates his "seven long years" in the thrall of the bottle, personified as a woman with "a playful twinkle in her eye." In some versions, such as this one by Shane MacGowan and the Popes, the singer "ran out of money, so I did steal."

In that way that folk songs and stories have, the song exists in multiple versions. In some, the narrator repents of his errant ways. In others, he pines away for his lost "Nancy Whisky." In still others, such as the version by Philadelphia's own Patrick's Head, the ending is more ambiguous: "As I awoke to strike my first (Or "slake my thirst"?) / As I went crawling from my bed / I fell down flat and could not stagger / Nancy had me by the legs," trailing off into the repeated, celebratory chorus: "Whisky, whisky, Nancy Whisky / Whisky, whisky, Nancy-o."

And how about this verse?:

"I bought her, I drank her, I had another
Ran out of money so I did steal
She ran me ragged, lovely Nancy
Seven years, a rolling wheel"

If that's not a Bonnie and Clyde or The Big O or a Barry Gifford story waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Of course, since "Nancy Whisky," though Scottish, is beloved of Irish bands, perhaps Big O author Declan Burke liked the song in his youth. Comment from said Mr. Burke is welcome.
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The amazing "Weila, Weila, Waila," with its sing-song chorus and horrific subject matter, invites comparison with a form of literature darker and more violent than crime fiction: nursery rhymes. Have a listen here.

"And there was an old woman and she lived in the woods
A weila weila waila
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Down by the River Saile

"She had a baby three months old
A weila weila waila
She had a baby three months old
Down by the River Saile ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2008