Patricia Highsmith's quasi-crime novel

"What the Vietnamese needed, Adams said in appallingly plain words, was the American kind of democracy."

"Several of Highsmith's works fall out from the mystery genre, and her crime novels often have more to do with psychology than conventional plotting, " according to one useful commentary. Someone else once said that when Highsmith, probably best known today for the Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train, and the movies based on them, wrote The Tremor of Forgery, she had almost entirely abandoned character for the political.

Both observations are pertinent to this novel, published in 1969 and set in 1967, at the time of racial unrest in the United States and the Six Day War in the Middle East. Highsmith's Howard Ingham is murkily aware of these events, a writer left to his own devices in Tunisia after a movie project falls through. Ingham finds a dead body late at night in a narrow Tunis street. The man's throat has been cut. Ingham fails to report his finding to police, and ... nothing happens. Ingham throws his typewriter at a man breaking into his room. The typewriter hits home, the man screams, the body disappears, and ... nothing happens.

Later, Ingham's sort-of fiancee arrives from New York. They patch up a misunderstanding born of betrayal. They drift apart. Ingham meets a Danish painter living in Tunisia, rejects his sexual advance, yet becomes the man's close companion. They, too, drift apart, Ingham accepting with enthusiasm then rejecting the man's invitation to accompany him back to Denmark for a visit. This Dane, having seemed to go thoroughly native, welcomes the opportunity to return to his homeland. Ingham stays behind.

Issues of morality and right social conduct arise, then melt away. The Dane, bitter over his treatment by some local residents, tells Ingham that his victim -- if, indeed, Ingham killed the intruder -- did not matter. Adams, the smug, Reader's Digest-reading American from the passage at the head of this post and possibly a spy, insists that Ingham tell the truth about the (possibly) fatal meeting with the burglar.

The Tremor of Forgery is a crime novel only indirectly. After the movie deal falls through, Ingham works on -- and eventually finishes writing -- a novel he at first calls The Tremor of Forgery about an embezzler who steals from his company, gives the money to people in need, and can never quite understand that he is a criminal. He is a man, in other words, without a clear identity, a kind of Ingham in action. "The tremor of forgery," Highsmith tells us, is the slight shake that even the most expert forger produces at the beginning and the end of his false signatures. But nothing is certain; nothing is resolved. Ingham changes his novel's title. In the end, there is no Tremor of Forgery in The Tremor of Forgery.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Noircon Day 3: The Tremor of Highsmith

Back when I read Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, I noted one critic's suggestion that Highsmith had abandoned character almost entirely for the political by the time she wrote the book.

I suspect Highsmith biographer Joan M. Schenkar might disagree; she took a more personal approach in her talk Saturday at #Noircon2010. Schenkar stressed the importance of forgery in Highsmith's fictional world, for example, particularly in the person of Tom Ripley, protagonist of The Talented Mister Ripley plus four additional novels and a number of film adaptations.

The Tremor of Forgery, Highsmith tells us, is the slight shake that even the most expert forger produces at the beginning and the end of his false signatures. A novel whose title conceit undermines a theme so important in the writer's work? Sounds pretty personal to me.

Even better: The novel's murder weapon — if indeed the victim has been killed — is a typewriter and the protagonist/killer a writer. The machine, Schenkar says, is identical to Highsmith's own, a typewriter the author treasured. (The apparent murder renders the machine inoperable, an especially suggestive state of affairs.)

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Later, fellow Noircon attendee Richard Edwards interrupted a Star Wars techie chat with Mike "Cashiers du Cinemart" White that had begun in a hotel bar long ago and far away and offered welcome news: Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir, the podcast series Edwards hosted with Shannon Clute, will resume this summer. Unfortunately, their Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed series is not coming back.

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Overheard at the hotel bar: "Bitch-slapping the synapses of your brain," upon which another fellow attendee, knowing what I do for a living, asked, "Does bitch slapping take a hyphen?"

(To which I should have replied: "Bitch-slapping takes a hyphen — and likes it." )

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Douglas Sanderson: World's toughest sort-of Canadian

Douglas Sanderson is said to have been inspired by Mickey Spillane, but his 1959 novel Cry Wolfram reminds me more of Peter Rabe or Patricia Highsmith.

Like Rabe's The Box and Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, Cry Wolfram is a story of foreigners at loose ends in a warm country just as likely to bite them in the ass as it is to give them a suntan. (In this case the foreigners are in Spain chasing down a lucrative concession to mine wolfram — also known as tungsten — hence the book’s delicious pun of a title.)

Like Highsmith and Rabe, Sanderson offers a convincing portrait of a setting outside his own country. Scenes of bull-fighting, religious festivals, and the eerie calm of a small town at night, and of how the latter can scare the bejeebers out of a visitor, are beautifully rendered. While these scenes may not want to make you visit Sanderson's Spain, they will surely give you a vivid picture of what to expect if you do

Cry Wolfram also reminds me a bit of Charles Williams. Like Williams and Rabe at their best, Sanderson could write gracefully and artfully enough to satisfy the demands of a “literary” novel without, however, sacrificing suspense and tough-guy credibility. (Highsmith, of course, was so good as not to need mentioning in this respect.) In only one paragraph — one sentence, really — does Cry Wolfram come even close to literary preciousness. Disregard those eight words, if you like, and enjoy the rest of the book.

(Sanderson came by his knowledge of Spain honestly. Born in England, he moved to Montreal as a young man, then hit the road, settling eventually in Spain, where he married and had a son, according to the good folks at Stark House Press, who publish Cry Wolfram in a twofer edition with Sanderson’s Night of the Horns.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

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.

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 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

Project Noir Songs goes to Brazil

I knew Elizeth Cardoso’s “Ocultei” was a great melodramatic noir song before I understood the words. (Cardoso and the song are Brazilian, and she sings it in Portuguese.)

Atmosphere was everything: the languid, matter-of-fact singing of the opening verse giving way to vocal tremor, then building to intensity a good deal stronger than that of your average torch song. The jacket photo of Cardoso, eyes closed in concentration as she sings, a bead of sweat (or a tear) below her left eye.

Then I learned what she was singing (Lyrics translated freely if not downright ineptly by your humble blogkeeper):

  Ocultei
  Um sofrimento de morte
  Temendo a sorte
  Do grande amor que te dei

 (I blocked out
  A torment of death
  Fearing the fate
  Of the great love I gave you – and this is the matter-of-fact part!)

  Procurei
  Não perturbar nossa vida
  Que era florida
  Como, a princípio, sonhei

 (I tried
  Not to disturb our life,
  Which was going so well
  As I, at first, dreamed – A note of foreboding as sure any in a good '40s or '50s melodrama, the pause between third and fourth line adding to the effect.)

  Hoje, porem,
 Abri as portas do destino

(Today, however,
  I open the doors of destiny – and we skip to …)

  O meu ardente desejo
  Que Deus me perdoe o pecado
  É que outra mulher ao teu lado
  Te mate na hora de um beijo

  (My most ardent desire
– May God forgive me the sin! –
   Is that another woman, by your side,
   Kill you during a kiss.)

She loves him, she hates him, she begs forgiveness, she fantasizes another woman into his arms even as she dreams of his death. That's enough seething emotion to burn holes in the page or on the screen, I'd say.

And now I'm happy to be able to say you can listen for yourself. Though written by Ary Barroso, one of Brazil's best-loved popular composers, "Ocultei" is one of his less-recorded songs. I bought my copy in Brazil twelve years ago, and I'd never been able to find another recording or clip of Elizeth's version — until yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizeth Cardoso.

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I'll be presenting Project Noir Songs at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia in November, a preliminary act for a Newport Folk Festival 1965's worth of crime-fiction talent including Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, and Joyce Carol Oates. Yes, I'm excited!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Paul Hardisty, plus the covers of Crimefest

Paul Hardisty at Crimefest
2015, photo by your
humble blogkeeper

Paul Hardisty's books include The Economics of Groundwater Remediation and Protection, Environmental and Economic Sustainability (Environmental and Ecological Risk Assessment), e-Study Guide for Environmental and Economic Sustainability, and The Abrupt Physics of Dying.

 I don't know about the first three, but ...Abrupt Physics..., Hardisty's first novel, reminds me a bit of Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery or Pater Rabe's The Box.  The book is that good at evoking the sense of being lost in a hot country one is alternately sure one knows well, and despairs of ever knowing.  A bit of Graham Greene in there, too?

The land is Yemen, the protagonist an engineer in country to check water quality for an oil company, and you know what happens next: restive tribesmen, a violent and oppressive central government,  a venal corporation,  a military veteran questioning his own past, a— but I don't want to make the book sound more melodramatic than it is, because Hardisty portrays the milieu (its rugged topography and, in judicious glimpses, its history) so well. Now, let's see how he handles the book's recently introduced potential romantic interest.

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Clash of titles.

I met Hardisty at the recent Crimefest 2015 in Bristol, as I did the authors of the books pictured at left.

Another novel I bought at Crimefest, by another author I had not previously known, is The Human Flies, by Hans Olav Lahlum. Since Lahlum sets the book in Oslo, I feel an urge to call it East Side of Norway Story. I don't know why.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Two set in Tunisia

This is too good to pass up. I've just returned from an archaeology tour of Tunisia, and I discovered Lyn Hamilton's The African Quest, about a series of murders on an archaeology tour of Tunisia. I hope to get some comments from my fellow travelers to Tunisia, none of whom has ever been party to a murder, as far as I know.

It took that vacation to get me reading Patricia Highsmith, though I'd long loved Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, based on a Highsmith novel. The Tremor of Forgery is about a youngish writer left to his own devices in Tunisia when a movie project fails to materialize. It's a thrill to recognize the settings in the first chapter. Beyond that, the chapter is a superb piece of mood-setting for the strangeness that no doubt will follow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006
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