This post will only be a review of three of the novels in this collection. I have reviewed the Talented Mr. Ripley here.
And you can listen to some crazy music by John Cage here. Cage was a twentieth century composer who strove to redefine music. His most famous "piece" is "Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds". You can listen to it here on Youtube or simply listen to silence for the same amount of time, unless you like watching someone sit in front of a piano doing nothing for, you guessed it, four minutes and thirty-three seconds. If you do watch it I hope you will appreciate the guy who coughs in the beginning and gets shushed by someone.
Judging by the "bravos" at the end somebody enjoyed it, but I found it a trial of endurance. The best part was when the artist stood up and bowed, acknowledging the clapping and hollering and thanked the crowd.
Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
OK. This is the third and last time I am going to write this review. If it disappears yet again, too bad.
First of all, I did not even like this story. It is about two people who can think of nothing better to do with their lives than get drunk and finally, out of the emptiness and despair relentlessly gnawing at their souls from which they can no longer run they agree to kill themselves.
This does not go as smoothly as they anticipated; however, one of them succeeds in dying and the other one gets to spend a lot of time getting examined by psychiatrists and sitting in jail cells.
The story was about as interesting as following two alcoholics around and watching them drink. The last sentence of the story provides a crucial detail that forces the reader to consider the entire story in a new light. It is something that was probably considered shocking in the 1950s but today would be regarded as merely surprising.
If Crime Noir is your cup of tea, then you may very well enjoy this novel and I won't judge you.
View all my reviews
Down There by David Goodis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I find Crime Noir hard to get into. This one took a little warming up, however, I did find myself caring about the characters as their personalities developed and we begin to see them as humans with vulnerabilities as they yearn to matter to other people and to themselves.
A man named Turley staggers into a bar bleeding and dazed. He grabs a chair and pulls it up to a man playing the piano. The piano man's name is Eddie and a disheveled, injured man sitting near him and trying to talk to him, does not seem to disturb him.
That is because Eddie has had a lot of experience shrugging off uncomfortable experiences. In fact, he has chosen to shrug off tragic experiences. Which explains his indifference to a man sitting next to him who is in trouble and also his brother.
Granted he hasn't seen his brother in many years and for good reasons. Both his brothers are selfish louts that can't stay out of trouble. Turley is currently trying to escape two mobsters he cheated. Before long, the mobsters arrive at the bar. Turley runs out the back with the mobsters in hot pursuit.
Without knowing exactly why, Eddie stands up, walks over to a pyramid of beer cans and topples them directly into the path of the mobsters. Now he is on their radar. Eddie becomes involved in a dangerous drama he did not anticipate or desire.
He does not have to go it alone however. Lena, the waitress comes to his rescue, much to Eddie's annoyance. He likes being alone and does not want to be rescued by anyone, much less a waitress, even if she is beautiful.
She is also dumb as we find out. Not that she is meant to be viewed that way, but I found her to be dumb and I don't care if Lena doing stupid things was a device to move the plot along. It did not make her look tragic, it makes the reader think, "What did you think was going to happen?"
The strength of this story is the psychological analysis we receive by reading the inner thoughts of certain of the characters. It is what ultimately makes the story poignant.
The author, David Goodis, is as interesting as his stories. His life is somewhat of a mystery. After a brief period of popularity in Hollywood and pulp fiction magazines, he returned to Philadelphia to live with his parents and care for his schizophrenic brother. He spent nights prowling the boweries and ghettos of Philadelphia where he got much of his material for his fiction. He died, probably due to injuries sustained a couple of days prior while resisting a robbery.
If you like Crime Noir, you may like this one, especially if you are someone who wants to care about the characters.
View all my reviews
The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this Crime Noir better than usual, since I have discovered that Crime Noir is not my favorite genre.
A white man is at a bar in Harlem looking around. Why is he there? This is Harlem in the 1950s and he is the only white man in the bar. A black man approaches him with a switch blade saying that he knows why the man is there and he's not going to "diddle his little gals". He slashes at the man with his knife.
The bartender prevents the man from injuring the white man by seriously injuring the man with the knife. I won't go into it but it is really violent.
The white man exits the bar but is accosted by another man named Sammy who yells, hey, you're the one that was with my sister and pulls a gun on him. The white man runs down the street with Sammy in hot pursuit.
A gang of teenagers called The Real Cool Muslims, see what is happening and join the chase. Sammy shoots at the man and he goes down. By this time two local policemen arrive and run up to the white man who is now dead. They get ready to arrest Sammy but also ask the gang members questions. The young thugs are belligerent and one throws perfume in the face of one of the cops. This cop, Coffin Ed, is terrified. His face is already scarred from having acid thrown in his face before. He shoots the youth dead before realizing it was only perfume. Now there are two dead people lying on the street.
During the confusion after the second death, the gang and Sammy run off. Coffin Ed and his partner Gravedigger Jones, have already confiscated Sammy's gun and they discover that it is only a stage prop and could not have killed the white man. So who did?
The rest of the story is the police investigation but mostly it is a commentary on life in Harlem. The gang of Muslims are not really Muslims but black teenagers. The story spends a long time with them showing what makes them tick. Just what little it takes to make people violent when they know nothing else and cannot imagine a life greater than being a gangster.
The story is dark, violent and extremely sad, probably because even though it was written in 1959, it is sadly reflective of reality in poor neighborhoods today. Only now it is worse because instead of knives, young people are killing each other with automatic weapons.
Chester Himes writes about what he knows. He spent several years in prison for armed robbery where he began writing fiction. Later he achieve literary success and many of his stories were made into films. The Real Cool Killers is one of a series called the Harlem Detective novels with the black detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed. In At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing, Wendy Walters describes the detectives as "viable folk heroes for the urban community."
Himes later moved to Paris where he became good friends with Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Eventually Himes and his second wife, Lesley, a beautiful white woman of whom he described as "the only color-blind person I met in my life" moved to Barcelona where they lived until he died from Parkinson's Disease in 1984.
View all my reviews
You may have surmised by now that hard boiled fiction is not my favorite genre and I will probably be reading few if any more Noir books in the future. But, there are still oodles of books to be read and I will be racing through my library to read them all before I die. Here's to a long life!
And you can listen to some crazy music by John Cage here. Cage was a twentieth century composer who strove to redefine music. His most famous "piece" is "Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds". You can listen to it here on Youtube or simply listen to silence for the same amount of time, unless you like watching someone sit in front of a piano doing nothing for, you guessed it, four minutes and thirty-three seconds. If you do watch it I hope you will appreciate the guy who coughs in the beginning and gets shushed by someone.
Judging by the "bravos" at the end somebody enjoyed it, but I found it a trial of endurance. The best part was when the artist stood up and bowed, acknowledging the clapping and hollering and thanked the crowd.
Pick-Up by Charles WillefordMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
OK. This is the third and last time I am going to write this review. If it disappears yet again, too bad.
First of all, I did not even like this story. It is about two people who can think of nothing better to do with their lives than get drunk and finally, out of the emptiness and despair relentlessly gnawing at their souls from which they can no longer run they agree to kill themselves.
This does not go as smoothly as they anticipated; however, one of them succeeds in dying and the other one gets to spend a lot of time getting examined by psychiatrists and sitting in jail cells.
The story was about as interesting as following two alcoholics around and watching them drink. The last sentence of the story provides a crucial detail that forces the reader to consider the entire story in a new light. It is something that was probably considered shocking in the 1950s but today would be regarded as merely surprising.
If Crime Noir is your cup of tea, then you may very well enjoy this novel and I won't judge you.
View all my reviews
Down There by David GoodisMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I find Crime Noir hard to get into. This one took a little warming up, however, I did find myself caring about the characters as their personalities developed and we begin to see them as humans with vulnerabilities as they yearn to matter to other people and to themselves.
A man named Turley staggers into a bar bleeding and dazed. He grabs a chair and pulls it up to a man playing the piano. The piano man's name is Eddie and a disheveled, injured man sitting near him and trying to talk to him, does not seem to disturb him.
That is because Eddie has had a lot of experience shrugging off uncomfortable experiences. In fact, he has chosen to shrug off tragic experiences. Which explains his indifference to a man sitting next to him who is in trouble and also his brother.
Granted he hasn't seen his brother in many years and for good reasons. Both his brothers are selfish louts that can't stay out of trouble. Turley is currently trying to escape two mobsters he cheated. Before long, the mobsters arrive at the bar. Turley runs out the back with the mobsters in hot pursuit.
Without knowing exactly why, Eddie stands up, walks over to a pyramid of beer cans and topples them directly into the path of the mobsters. Now he is on their radar. Eddie becomes involved in a dangerous drama he did not anticipate or desire.
He does not have to go it alone however. Lena, the waitress comes to his rescue, much to Eddie's annoyance. He likes being alone and does not want to be rescued by anyone, much less a waitress, even if she is beautiful.
She is also dumb as we find out. Not that she is meant to be viewed that way, but I found her to be dumb and I don't care if Lena doing stupid things was a device to move the plot along. It did not make her look tragic, it makes the reader think, "What did you think was going to happen?"
The strength of this story is the psychological analysis we receive by reading the inner thoughts of certain of the characters. It is what ultimately makes the story poignant.
The author, David Goodis, is as interesting as his stories. His life is somewhat of a mystery. After a brief period of popularity in Hollywood and pulp fiction magazines, he returned to Philadelphia to live with his parents and care for his schizophrenic brother. He spent nights prowling the boweries and ghettos of Philadelphia where he got much of his material for his fiction. He died, probably due to injuries sustained a couple of days prior while resisting a robbery.
If you like Crime Noir, you may like this one, especially if you are someone who wants to care about the characters.
View all my reviews
The Real Cool Killers by Chester HimesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this Crime Noir better than usual, since I have discovered that Crime Noir is not my favorite genre.
A white man is at a bar in Harlem looking around. Why is he there? This is Harlem in the 1950s and he is the only white man in the bar. A black man approaches him with a switch blade saying that he knows why the man is there and he's not going to "diddle his little gals". He slashes at the man with his knife.
The bartender prevents the man from injuring the white man by seriously injuring the man with the knife. I won't go into it but it is really violent.
The white man exits the bar but is accosted by another man named Sammy who yells, hey, you're the one that was with my sister and pulls a gun on him. The white man runs down the street with Sammy in hot pursuit.
A gang of teenagers called The Real Cool Muslims, see what is happening and join the chase. Sammy shoots at the man and he goes down. By this time two local policemen arrive and run up to the white man who is now dead. They get ready to arrest Sammy but also ask the gang members questions. The young thugs are belligerent and one throws perfume in the face of one of the cops. This cop, Coffin Ed, is terrified. His face is already scarred from having acid thrown in his face before. He shoots the youth dead before realizing it was only perfume. Now there are two dead people lying on the street.
During the confusion after the second death, the gang and Sammy run off. Coffin Ed and his partner Gravedigger Jones, have already confiscated Sammy's gun and they discover that it is only a stage prop and could not have killed the white man. So who did?
The rest of the story is the police investigation but mostly it is a commentary on life in Harlem. The gang of Muslims are not really Muslims but black teenagers. The story spends a long time with them showing what makes them tick. Just what little it takes to make people violent when they know nothing else and cannot imagine a life greater than being a gangster.
The story is dark, violent and extremely sad, probably because even though it was written in 1959, it is sadly reflective of reality in poor neighborhoods today. Only now it is worse because instead of knives, young people are killing each other with automatic weapons.
Chester Himes writes about what he knows. He spent several years in prison for armed robbery where he began writing fiction. Later he achieve literary success and many of his stories were made into films. The Real Cool Killers is one of a series called the Harlem Detective novels with the black detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed. In At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing, Wendy Walters describes the detectives as "viable folk heroes for the urban community."
Himes later moved to Paris where he became good friends with Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Eventually Himes and his second wife, Lesley, a beautiful white woman of whom he described as "the only color-blind person I met in my life" moved to Barcelona where they lived until he died from Parkinson's Disease in 1984.
View all my reviews
You may have surmised by now that hard boiled fiction is not my favorite genre and I will probably be reading few if any more Noir books in the future. But, there are still oodles of books to be read and I will be racing through my library to read them all before I die. Here's to a long life!
10 comments:
the only noir detective stories i've been able to stomach are the ones with some kind of point: either a mystery to solve or a psychological conundrum that makes sense... i like Mike Hammer because he's sort of a comic strip character, not to be taken seriously... and some of Dashiel Hammett, somewhat for the same reason; not all of his, though... he was quite uneven, imo... egregious violence seems pointless, almost always...
i listened to the JC: extraordinary how he was able too capture what i was thinking about...
I have read almost no Noir. I am always saying that I want to give it a try. I will do someday. I will probably start with something that has gotten a lot of acclaim.
Pick Up sounds grim even by the standards of this genre. Fictional depictions of self destructive behavior can be worthwhile, but they can also be gratuitous.
Thiough I find that John Cage had some interesting ideas, I also find Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds difficult to sit through.
Sharon, life is too short and too many books are out there, so don't bother with more of the same species of hard boiled noir. However, what about Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald? Have you read them? They might be more to your liking. But now you have me wondering: What was it about the 20th century that sent writers and readers into the dark, gritty world of hard boiled noir crime fiction. Perhaps wars, Depression, and the acceleration of lifestyles were the culprits. Thoughts?
I've never heard of crime noir, and I guess from reading In Cold Blood, I don't like crime anything. Gives me the chills. These sound like the Netflix shows my husband loves to watch.
Yep, we're in the race to read as many books as we can!! Long life to you!
Ha, Mudpuddle. You crack me up! You are a true "Avante Garde" connoisseur. I do like some avante garde but I think John Cage was a case of the Emperor is naked.
I think my main beef with crime noir, besides the utter lack of morals or value for human life, is that the people just aren't real. They're types.almost cartoons, which is perhaps why they're so easy to parody. I want to believe in the characters, care about them. I don't find this possible with a lot of Crime Noire stories.
Yes, John Cage's music is interesting. But now you can say you "heard" the famous "Four minutes and thirty-three seconds." (insert a big smile and a wink)
I was like you. I had heard about Crime Noir and wanted to give it a try. On an impulse buy, I bought to volumes of the most famous ones from the thirties, forties and fifties. I have read them all to the bitter end and I am now finished.
I am glad I read them, though, because they gave me something to think about.
I have read Dashiell Hammett, in fact I have a Library of America collection of some of his famous stories. I haven't finished reading them yet, so I guess I'm not finished with Crime Noir after all.
You raise a really good question. I have read a little on the topic about how Noir developed. One was the WWs I and II brought about a great sense of disillusionment and broke the boundaries of traditional morals.
I really hold the opposite view. There have always been wars, horrible ones, but the difference is before people clung to their faith which gave them hope and an eternal perspective.
With the advance of Darwin's theories that life came about by accident and then the logical conclusion expounded by Nietzsche that man is the highest point on the evolutionary chain (and Super Men are higher than other men), when wars broke out by men who considered themselves "Super Men"-Kaiser Wilhelm in WWI and Hitler in WWII and their followers-it left people in a wilderness where life no longer had meaning or purpose. At least to the intellectuals who subscribed to those philosophies. It's easy to see how life can only be dark to certain writers.
But let's be real honest. These authors were fascinated with the underbelly of society and some of them knew how to make it commercially profitable.
Which leads to another question: Why was (is) Crime Noir so popular? Of course a lot of best sellers today make crime noir look like kiddie literature.
Hi Ruth! There is definitely an admonition in the Bible about not giving an audience to evil and I will at least say that though these stories are dark, they do not compare to the graphic violence in many of today's best sellers.
Still, I think I'll stick with the classics and mysteries.
And a long life to you as well. May we read all we can, as much as we can, howsoever long we are able!
Sharon: don't forget funny... i've gotten an uncountable amount of pleasure from Wodehouse, Jerome, Bryson, Adams, and others: the humorous side of man is in some way the best side, imo...
You're right, Mudpuddle. In fact, I have not read any Wodehouse in a while. I need to rectify that!
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