Black Dahlia Avenger II
Black Dahlia Avenger II
I have just finished reading Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger II. For those of you unfamiliar with Hodel’s research and writing on the Black Dahlia case, let me give you a little background. Steve Hodel is a retired LAPD Homicide Detective. Hodel’s father, Dr George Hill Hodel, died in 1999 at the age of 91, and Steve Hodel subsequently found two photographs amongst his father’s possession which he believed at the time to be of Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, the victim of the most brutal and notorious unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. Hodel started an investigation which examined the potential connections between his father and Elizabeth Short. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that his father murdered Elizabeth Short after being inspired by the Surrealist art work of Man Ray. Hodel puts his thesis forward convincingly, and thrillingly, in the original Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). I first came across the Black Dahlia case after reading James Ellroy’s celebrated novel The Black Dahlia (1987). I would heartily recommend Hodel’s book as compelling in its vivid portrayal of LA and the LAPD in the 1940s and 50s. Hodel maps out connections between the Surrealist art movement, Hollywood, organised crime and the LAPD. His research has become influential, inspiring more books on the topic, such as the excellent Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss. In Black Dahlia Avenger II, Hodel presents a follow-up to his original investigation. It is not as groundbreaking as the original, but it is full of interesting research and a must-have for anyone who is fascinated by the Black Dahlia case.
Lunchtime Classics
Readers in the Merseyside area might be interested in this. I’m giving a talk on James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and a reading from the novel at Waterstones, Liverpool One, in July as part of their Lunchtime Classics series. I’ve posted the details below, including other talks in the same series:
Tuesday 19th June, 12pm: Dr Angie Macmillan (The Reader Organisation, editor of the A Little Aloud, anthologies) on Tove Jansson’s ‘The Invisible Child’.
Tuesday 10th July, 12pm: Andy Sawyer (Director of MA in Science Fiction Studies at University of Liverpool, Science Fiction Foundation Collection librarian) on John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
Wednesday 18th July, 12pm: Steven Powell (Ph.D researcher, University of Liverpool, editor of Conversations with James Ellroy) on James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential.
All events will be held at Waterstones, Liverpool One, 12 College Lane, Liverpool, L1 3DL.
All welcome!
Killer on the Road
I’ve written a piece on James Ellroy’s overlooked novel Killer on the Road for the blog LaeLand. The editor of LaeLand, Lae Monie, has also kindly published an author spotlight piece on me. You can read it here.
On a different subject, fellow VV contributor Chris Routledge has republished Simon Nash’s Dead of a Counterplot (1962). Nash was the
pseudonym of Raymond Chapman, and Dead of a Counterplot was the first of five novels featuring academic and amateur detective Adam Ludlow. I read Dead of a Counterplot this weekend and found it to be a thoroughly entertaining combination of mystery and good humour. I can’t wait to read the next four in the series. You can find out more details of this project on Chris’ blog.
What Do Crime Fiction Fans Do on Vacation/Holiday?
I like this photo of Megan Abbott looking retro
It was my husband that brought me back to crime fiction after childhood dabblings in Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes, and our mutual interest has spurred some unusual holiday choices. When his research took us to the US in 2009 to meet James Ellroy in LA, we included a day of visiting famous murder scenes (my father’s SAT NAV and Ellroy’s My Dark Places came in handy here). But this year, in the spirit of austerity, our ‘staycation’ will also involve crime fiction. Most notably, we’re on our way to Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate from July 19-22nd. We’ve booked tickets to see my favourite Crime Fiction author (and fellow former suburban Detroiter) Megan Abbott, whose novel Die a Little will be part of the reading list on my Women in Crime Fiction course next year. If you can’t make it to the festival, but are looking for a great summer read, Abbott’s intense, almost poetic prose can’t be beat. Here are some reviews I’ve done on her novels: Die a Little, The End of Everything and The Song is You. Although the courses for 2012-2013 Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool aren’t listed yet, you can keep an eye on what’s coming through this link.
Cross-posted from The Prevailing Westerlies.
Crime Fiction: A Testimony
I recently came across a piece by J. Kingston Pierce for the Kirkus Reviews in which he describes how his interest in crime fiction began in his teenage years and grew to become the focus of his writing career. It’s an excellent piece, here’s the link, and it made me wonder about my own discovery of the genre.
This cover of American Tabloid caught my attention in a Bournemouth bookshop, if it hadn’t my life might have been very different
At school I struggled with maths and sciences. I enjoyed subjects such as history, religious education and sociology, where ideas could be debated and nuance and conflict shown. No subject combined all of the ‘big ideas’ of life more thrillingly than English Literature. But, as in most English literature curriculums, the focus of my high school literature course was almost exclusively on authors in the literary canon. Genre is, or at least was, a dirty word. So I had little concept of modern popular fiction until I started reading my father’s collection which included Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventure series and Bernard Cromwell’s Sharpe novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. These novels liberated my sense of reading. For the first time I began to experience the excitement and danger of the narrative as though I were a character in the story. I learned that great stories could be told through action, rather than just thought and dialogue, and still possess the potential for leaving a profound emotional impact on the reader. But I was soon to read a novel which kickstarted my fascination with the one genre that brought together my favourite character-types of genre fiction: spies, adventurers and detectives.
At some point in my mid-teens I was holidaying with my parents in Bournemouth in South West England. In a bookshop I noticed a book on the shelves and recognised the front cover as being an artist’s impression of the Mary Moorman photograph depicting President Kennedy’s assassination. The book was titled American Tabloid and was written by James Ellroy, who I knew very little about. A novel about the Kennedy assassination seemed interesting, so I bought it and started reading straight away. I was immediately hooked. The portrayal of intrigue and corruption in the Kennedy era was riveting. Ellroy told the story from the perspective of protagonists on the very fringes of society: Mob hitmen, rogue intelligence agents, Cuban exiles. The men who, in his fictional version of events, eventually conspire to kill Kennedy. It was from reading this novel that my obsession with and knowledge of crime fiction began to develop. Reading the novel felt like being plunged into a secret world where different rules apply. To understand these rules I needed to go back and read earlier crime novels. After reading all of Ellroy’s novels, short stories and articles, I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to trace the development of the hard-boiled private detective, and how these stories were a reaction to the quaint style of the predominantly British Golden Age of Detective Fiction. I came to appreciate how Ed McBain discarded the private eye and developed the police procedural sub-genre with his 87th Precinct series. I was floored by the works of Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins, and how they moved the genre away from mystery plotlines towards dialogue-driven storytelling with an emphasis on humour and sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of violence. I began reading contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction and British espionage thrillers.
That being said, I maintained my interest in canonical literature and studied for an MA in Victorian Literature. However, upon completion of my MA, I returned again to the writer who had first introduced me to the world of crime fiction, James Ellroy. So I’m now in my final year of PhD studying the life and work of James Ellroy. I’ve edited a book about Ellroy, details here, and have edited an anthology about American crime writers released later this year. My obsession with crime fiction has gradually transformed into my profession, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
If anyone else remembers fondly how they first discovered crime fiction, please share your story in the comment thread.
Scenes from Norway and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman
As the popularity of Scandinavian noir continues to rise, I have recently started reading the work of Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo. Nesbo has become one of the biggest stars of crime writing of our time with his series detective Harry Hole rivalling Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who novels in popularity. Nesbo’s writing style has an almost gleeful disregard for realism. Even so, in novels such as The Snowman (2007), the reader gains a fascinating insight into Norwegian culture. Hole is a maverick detective who has become an expert on serial killers after training with the FBI. Like previous novels in the Hole series, Nesbo uses a straightforward crime story to examine the repercussions of a sudden outbreak of violence in a country renowned for being peaceful and prosperous, a theme which is particularly moving and topical in light of the 2011 attacks in Oslo and Utoya island in which 77 people were killed in what amounted to Norway’s most violent day since the Second World War. In the novel a series of women are abducted and murdered and a snowman is always found at the crime scene. Hole becomes convinced he is dealing with Norway’s first serial killer case, despite the scepticism of some of his colleagues:
‘And we still haven’t seen a serial killer in Norway.’ Skarre glanced at Bratt as if to make sure she was following. ‘Is it because of that FBI course you did on serial killers? Is that what’s making you see them everywhere?’
‘Maybe,’ Harry said.
‘Let me remind you that apart from that nurse feller who gave injections to a couple of old fogeys, who were at death’s door anyway, we haven’t had a single serial killer in Norway. Ever. Those guys exist in the USA, but even there usually only in films.’
‘Wrong,’ said Katrine Bratt.
The others turned to face her. She stifled a yawn.
‘Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Russia and Finland. And we’re only talking solved cases here. No one utters a word about hidden statistics.’
The Snowman succeeds not by avoiding the clichés of crime fiction, but by embracing them. Hole is such a maverick that practically none of his investigative techniques would lead to admissible evidence; he breaks into a suspect’s office, then her house. He drives his car through a huge glass door during a chase scene. In one gloriously comic scene, Hole’s superiors march into his office with the intention of firing him and find Hole seemingly injecting drugs. The perfectly composed Hole informs them that he is injecting water, not drugs, as part of an experiment in which he proves that one character’s supposed suicide by drug overdose was in fact murder. As the narrative progresses, the clichés become more pronounced as Nesbo unleashes an anarchic style upon the story’s thrilling but preposterous climax.
Anders Breivik in Court
Part of the appeal of ‘Scandi-Noir’ in the UK and US is it gives the reader a glimpse of the dark underworld of societies which we have somewhat naively regarded as almost utopian. However, reading the coverage of the Anders Breivik trial, I cannot help but feel that Norway is still years ahead of us on some social issues. Despite committing mass murder, Breivik can by Norwegian law serve no more than 21 years in prison (unless he is declared insane), and the prison where he will serve his sentence will not be some fearful penitentiary but an institution in which prisoners are treated humanely with a focus on rehabilitation. Granted the Norwegian system was not designed for killers like Breivik, but to make it more repressive runs the risk of playing in to Breivik’s own demented views. By contrast, here in the UK people are now being given prison sentences for saying stupid and offensive things on twitter. A needlessly harsh reaction to a minor problem. Nesbo has said his country’s reaction to the Breivik case has made him proud to be Norwegian. You can read some of Nesbo’s views on the Breivik case, and how it will influence crime writing, here.
Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fiction
This May sees the release of Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fiction, a new collection of essays on crime writing edited by Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley. This is a great book for which I was thrilled to contribute an essay. The full list of contents are:
Introduction; V.Miller & H.Oakley
From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction; D.Schmid
The Fact and Fiction of Darwinism: The Representation of Race, Ethnicity and Imperialism in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; H.A.Goldsmith
‘You’re not so special, Mr. Ford’: the Quest for Criminal Celebrity; G.Green & L.Horsley
Hard-Boiled Screwball: Genre and Gender in the Crime Fiction of Janet Evanovich; C.Robinson
‘A Wanted Man’: Transgender as Outlaw in Elizabeth Ruth’s Smoke; S.E.Billingham
Dissecting the Darkness of Dexter; H.Oakley
The Machine Gun in the Violin Case: Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets and the Gangster Musical Art Melodrama; M.Nicholls
In the Private Eye: Private Space in the Noir Detective Movie; B.Nicol
‘Death of the Author’: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Police Procedurals; C.Beyer
‘Betty Short and I Go Back’: James Ellroy and the Metanarrative of the Black Dahlia Case; S.Powell
Index
You can find out more details about the book here.
Call Me Dog
I have two speaking engagements coming up which may interest readers in the Merseyside area. The first is titled, ‘”Call me Dog”: My Interviews with James Ellroy’ in which I will talk about interviewing Ellroy and editing Conversations with James Ellroy. This will take place at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Liverpool, 2 May, 1pm-2pm. Details on booking for this event can be found here.
Then, as part of Waterstones ‘Lunchtime Classics’ series I shall be reading from Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and talking about the novel. This will be at Waterstones Liverpool One store on 18 July at 12 noon.
All welcome.
Ring Twice for Laura: Vera Caspary’s novel and film Laura
I imagine that I am like many people who, once they have seen the film based on a novel, struggle to return to the book and ‘picture’ the character the way the author had originally intended— a compelling dramatic performance has the downside of limiting our imagination through memory. This I found to be very true when reading Vera Caspary’s Laura (originally serialised as Ring Twice for Laura )(1942).
The novel and the film both begin with Detective Mark McPherson visiting renowned columnist Waldo Lydecker to question him about the murder of Laura Hunt. The backstory introduces us to a woman adored by the men around her. The proofs of Laura’s attractiveness, which give the men in her life motive and make them suspects, are made plain to the detective, who in turn, develops morally dubious and unprofessional feelings for Laura.
Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker and Dana Andrews as Detective McPherson
It was not the eponymous heroine, nor Detective Mark McPherson, that I had trouble revising when I began Caspary’s novel, (perhaps because in the film McPherson is a close-lipped, hard-boiled type, and Laura seems ephemeral, and changeful, a point emphasized by her adapting to each man she is with). Instead, it was the cultured essayist Waldo Lydecker that proved too difficult to break from Clifton Webb’s 1944 performance. In the film, Webb sparkles with the acerbic wit of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. He is at once loathsome and entertaining, pathetic and controlling. The audience’s own interest in him absolves Laura for not seeing his faults more clearly. In the novel, Waldo is fat from his indulgence in fine cuisine, and his physique is compared to McPherson and Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s intended, in a way that makes his inferiority seem too great a hurdle to overcome even in the duality between riches/poverty and brains/brawn that Waldo and Shelby represent as competing forces. Webb’s confidence in the film, however, is ebullient. That is not to say he’s unaware of his age, and his relative frailty, but that he thoroughly believes his intelligence will eventually win out.
Yet in the novel, Waldo, and Laura’s fiancé the impoverished Southern gentleman Shelby, are given the additional flaw of being of the wrong era. Caspary creates an unfavourable comparison between Victorian and Modern ages that aligns Laura with McPherson. I don’t think I’m spoiling the ending by saying that one-third of the way through the novel it is revealed that Laura is not dead. Diane Redfern, a love rival of Laura’s, has been killed and her corpse initially mistaken for Laura, who becomes a suspect once she turns up alive. In a fight between the newly resurrected Laura and Shelby, the characters make explicit references to ‘Victorian’ and ‘hardboiled’, creating tension between the Golden Age detective fiction and the hardboiled style:
Shelby: ‘He [McPherson] ought to be hardboiled. You’d expect him to be tougher. I don’t like him trying to act like a gentleman.’
‘Oh, pooh!’ I said.
‘You don’t see it. The man’s trying to make you like him so you’ll break down and confess. That’s what he’s been working for all along, a confession. Damned caddish, I’d say.’
I sat down on the sofa and pounded my fists against a pillow. ‘I hate that word. Caddish! I’ve begged out a million times to quit using it.’
Shelby said, ‘It’s a good English word.’
‘It’s old-fashioned. It’s out of date. People don’t talk about cads any more. It’s Victorian.’
‘A cad is a cad, whether the word is obsolete or not.’
‘Quit being so Southern. Quit being so righteous. You and your damn gallantry.’ I was crying. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped off my jaws. My tan dress was all wet with tears.
McPherson’s thoughtfulness crosses the class divisions important to the tropes of the Golden Age, but his character is not typical either of the hardboiled style, i.e. he is interested in reading and high culture. Shelby fights against such subversion. Waldo, likewise, uses class and his education of Laura as a means to defeat his opposition. Yet in the novel, Laura is a gutsier, more defiant woman, who will not be bound by past structures; however, her cinematic counterpart is more malleable, and she almost remains a creation of the men around her even after her reappearance.
In Caspary’s novel, the narrative is out of Waldo’s control, an important point to her ‘defeat’ of the Golden Age/Victoriana through him. Caspary’s unique and unsettling approach breaks from a tradition of trusted narrators to rotate between the main protagonists, with Waldo offering a part of the story. By contrast, in the film Waldo is the only narrator, a shift created and fought for by the director Otto Preminger. Although the other characters reveal their feelings through conversation and interrogation, the story remains his, even in his downfall.
Very Inspiring Blogger Award
I am delighted to have been nominated for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award by David Mattichak Jr. David has his own fine blog which you can read here, and was actually one of this site’s first followers, subscribing shortly after Chris Routledge and I started the blog. The Venetian Vase has had several contributors over the past few years, and we hope to have more in the future, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed and made the site informative and entertaining for crime fiction fans.
Anyone who is nominated for the Inspiring Blogger award is required to say a few things about themselves and nominate some bloggers who have inspired them. Here goes:
I was born in Chester, UK, and I have spent many a pleasant day walking on Chester’s famed Roman Walls and Tudor Rows. I now live in Liverpool, which is a mere twenty miles away, but, as any Liverpudlian or Cestrian will tell you, worlds apart in terms of culture. I enjoy the busy, vibrant lifestyle in Liverpool, but I still like to escape every now and then to quaint old Chester.
Crime fiction is my main passion in life, but I did once harbour ambitions of becoming an actor. Although I was nowhere near good enough to become a professional, I was fortunate to act in many amateur theatre productions in Chester and several at the University of Liverpool. One of my friends and fellow thespians from those days is now on the brink of movie stardom.
If I ever decide to emigrate, it will probably be to Thailand (where my wife lived for five years) as it is the most beautiful country I have yet visited. I have written some thoughts on one of Thailand’s most enduring mysteries which you can read here.
Regular readers will be aware that my first book, Conversations with James Ellroy, was released in February and my next book, 100 American Crime Writers, will be released later this year.
Of the blogs I follow here are a few which I find to be inspiring:
J. Kingston Pierce’s The Rap Sheet is essential reading for any crime fiction researcher or fan. Pierce posts almost daily updates of crime fiction news, promotes the work of many of his fellow bloggers, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre.
Steve Hodel is a former LAPD homicide detective who wrote one of the most extraordinary true crime books I have ever read, Black Dahlia Avenger. He blogs about the Black Dahlia case and many other LA based cases at his Squad Room Blog.
I began following The Great Balancing Act when its author, Susan, started chronicling her struggle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After six months of chemotherapy she has now made a full recovery.
The Venetian Vase 