Nancy Drew Turns 80
The first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock was published 80 years ago in 1930 and naturally Penguin have released a special anniversary edition. The series was one of the earliest successful detective series written specifically for children and is also one of the most famous. Written by a series of ghostwriters under the author name of Carolyn Keene, the Nancy Drew books were produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which was also responsible for the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. The history of detective fiction written specifically for children is a curious one in that it did not really emerge as a viable force in publishing until well into the twentieth century. Nancy Drew is an important part of that history; as a product of the brilliant marketing mind of Edward Stratemeyer it could hardly fail. The Star makes the case for the influence of the girl detective:
“One of the raps against Nancy was she was a privileged, upper-class white girl who was perfect,” Rehak says. “But children are willing to look beyond that if they like the character.”
All three women who have served on the Supreme Court—Sandra Day O’Connor, 80, raised on an Arizona ranch; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77, who is Jewish, and Sonia Sotomayor, 55, a Puerto Rican, both from New York—cite Nancy Drew as an early influence. [More]
More on Nancy Drew is here and here. My own take on children’s detective fiction is available on my personal blog.
David Fincher’s Zodiac and the True Crime Genre
I’ve just finished watching David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) for what must be the fourth or fifth time, and I found it as mesmerising as ever. The Zodiac killer was a serial killer who murdered five people in Northern California between December 1968 and October 1969. None of the murders were solved and the identity of the Zodiac is still unknown. In fact very little is known about the killer. He identified himself as the Zodiac in a series of taunting cryptograms and cipher letters that were sent to the Bay Area press at the time of the killings. He claimed to have killed dozens of people but only five murders have been directly linked to him. David Fincher created a brilliant and haunting dramatisation of the Zodiac case. Zodiac is unique amongst crime films for several reasons; firstly, all of the murders which are shown occur within the first thirty minutes of the film, and there is no violence in the remaining two and a half hours. Secondly, the narrative subtly and seamlessly shifts from Detective Dave Toschi’s investigation of the murders to San Fransisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who conducts his own investigation after becoming obsessed with the case. The film is based on Graysmith’s books Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). Ultimately, both Toschi and Graysmith become convinced that a man named Arthur Leigh Allen is the Zodiac killer. Whether Arthur Leigh Allen was or was not the Zodiac killer is still fiercely debated to this day, but the brilliance of the film is how it portrays the maddening and all-consuming nature of obsession, as both Toschi and Graysmith have to go on with their lives never being able to fully know the truth of the case.
If I had one criticism of the film it would be that Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt are too trusting of Graysmith’s version of events. I have never believed historical fiction should be factually accurate in every detail. Writers and film directors adapt and fictionalise historical accounts to suit their vision of the narrative. Fincher freely admits to doing this in his DVD commentary to the film, which he ends with the line, ‘We’re not saying Arthur Leigh Allen was the guy.’ What makes one historical account more factually valid than another is a matter of debate, and Fincher’s states he wanted the second half of the film to be Graysmith’s story. But what if Graysmith’s account of the Zodiac case contains more than just a few mistakes? On his website, Zodiac Killer Facts and the documentary Graysmith Unmasked, Michael Butterfield has done an excellent job of compiling all the errors, distortions and just plain lies that Graysmith has peddled about the Zodiac over the years. Did Fincher and Vanderbilt fall for Graysmith’s lies? Or does their position as filmmakers justify the dramatic licence they take with the story, even if it means dealing with a charlatan like Graysmith? Well, the amount of research that was conducted for Zodiac is truly astounding. Fincher and Vanderbilt meticulously and painstakingly reproduced the the late 1960s and 1970s period, and many of the details of the case are taken directly from the police reports. In some instances this is taken too absurd levels: for the Lake Berryessa murder scene, Fincher shot it at the exact spot where Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shephard were attacked. As there were no longer trees at that spot, and as the Zodiac hid behind trees as he was approaching the couple, Fincher had trees flown in and planted at the spot to make the scene more authentic. A tad excessive?
Zodiac is not a documentary, and it is fully legitimate for Vanderbilt and Fincher to regard the established facts of the case as a malleable first draft in order to create a work of historical fiction. On the other hand, the film does benefit from the enormous amount of research that was conducted. It is just a shame that considering the amount of research, Fincher was not prepared to be a bit more sceptical towards a True Crime Writer who has been so thoroughly discredited.
Below is part one of the excellent documentary Graysmith Unmasked. All of the documentary is available to watch on YouTube and forms an almost complete debunking of Graysmith’s investigation:
Wired on Poe
Wired has a short but to the point article about Edgar Allan Poe and his role in the invention and rise of the detective story. Poe’s place in such a history is well established, but what is interesting about this piece is the way it casually namechecks detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Mike Hammer, Jake Gittes from the film Chinatown, and even Batman, the ‘postmodern equivalent’ of Holmes (presumably referring to the recent, post-Frank Miller Batman, since the Bill Finger/Bob Kane original seems to fit a more modernistic world-view). In a piece this short such connections can’t be explored fully, but still there is a case to be made for the wider influence of Poe and it is perhaps time for a reassessment. A thought-provoking read anyway:
This self-referential circularity extended to the story’s composition, in which readers were slowly clued in to the details of the murders through their literary ciphers. It was a mechanism that evoked Poe’s extensive interest in crytopgraphy, notably outlined in “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” published in Graham’s Magazine three months after “Rue Morgue.”
Poe’s fascination and skill with ingenious detection took serious hold after his death, especially in the work of Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887. Holmes has since come to embody Dupin’s gift for inferential logic and deduction. “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed,” Doyle once said. “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
Ray and Cissy: Petition to Reunite the Chandlers
Back in March I wrote about an effort to have the ashes of Cissy Chandler, the wife of Raymond Chandler, moved from their current resting place, on a shelf in a public mausoleum, to the grave of her husband, who adored and idolized her. Loren Latker, of the Shamus Town website, is taking a lot of trouble to bring them together as they wished and the case seems set to be heard by a judge in September in San Diego, near to La Jolla where the Chandlers lived. He has set up a petition which takes only a moment to ‘sign’ and which, if there are enough signatories, should be a huge boost to the chances of the court allowing the move. If you’re a Chandler fan and you have a few seconds spare to pay your respects to the great man, do go over and sign the petition, which you can find here.
The Hannibal Lecter Serial Killer Franchise
In the introduction to the omnibus of the Lloyd Hopkins novels, James Ellroy claimed that he only decided to write a second and third Hopkins book after reading Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon (1981), the first novel to feature the now iconic Dr Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter:
I wrote Blood on the Moon. I read Red Dragon and realized it was a far superior book. I carried the hero of Blood on the Moon on to a second and third novel – Because the Night and Suicide Hill. I hadn’t planned to write a trilogy at first. I did not possess the long-range planning skills I possess today. I finished Blood on the Moon, read Red Dragon and wanted another shot at making Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins as great a character as Thomas Harris’ Will Graham.
Ellroy claims that he wanted to make Lloyd Hopkins as memorable a character as Will Graham in Red Dragon, but the most memorable character in Because the Night (1984) is the sinister psychiatrist John Havilland. And Havilland is at least partly modelled on the serial killer character Hannibal Lecter.
With Harris’ four novels featuring Hannibal Lecter, Lecter becomes increasingly the focus with each novel. But even in the early novels Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) it is Lecter, rather than the leading characters of Will Graham and Clarice Starling respectively, that sticks in the reader’s mind. Lecter is a bizarre and fascinating character, an intellectually brilliant psychiatrist who is also a psychopathic cannibal. In the first two novels, he is a prominent supporting character: he is an inmate at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane after having being declared mentally unfit to stand trial for his killing spree. After his elaborate escape in The Silence of the Lambs, he becomes the main focus in the third novel Hannibal (1999). And in the fourth novel Hannibal Rising (2006), a prequel to the series, the novel follows Hannibal’s traumatic childhood in Lithuania during the Second World War and gradually tells the story of how he became a cannibal. One of the greatest achievements of Harris’ novels is how he makes Lecter an attractive character. He is capable of committing horrific acts one moment but is emotionally controlled and dignified in the next. However, this strength became the series’ fatal weakness. Harris gave up on presenting Lecter as a character with any nuance or ambiguity in the later novels and practically turned him into a hero. The reader is expected to cheer as Lecter foils both the law and his criminal enemies in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. Lecter despatches his victims in increasingly grisly ways, and Harris seems to justify this by making the victims more morally repugnant than Lecter is, for example Mason Verger. Or in some cases, Lecter’s enemies (who inevitably become his victims) are just obnoxious and rude, such as Dr. Frederick Chilton and Paul Krendler. By contrast, Lecter is impeccably polite. Perhaps this decline in quality was inevitable. Once Harris took Lecter out of his asylum cell he had two choices: try to justify Lecter by rationalising his actions, which would make him implausible, or go over the top with the character by making him the hero, which becomes ludicrous. Harris seems to go for something in the middle, and the result is not good. Serial killers are not brilliant intellectuals, and Harris’ coup as a writer was he created a character that made some people believe otherwise. It did not last, and it is rather morally dubious that Lecter becomes increasingly the hero of the series. Serial killers are unquestionably morally repugnant people, but there is still room for nuance and sympathy in how we regard them without resorting to the easy sterotype of absolute evil (or in Lecter’s case heroism). As Ellroy says of serial killers in his introduction to Murder and Mayhem (1991):
Fear the killers; pray for their victims; extend sympathy toward murderers’ childhoods. Think of the line between us and them as fragile and in need of jealous guarding.
Below is a clip from one the most famous scenes of the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs. The Lecter films followed the same trajectory as the books. Good at first, but increasingly violent and ludicrous:
National Crime Fiction Week and Crimefest
James Ellroy used to claim his novels were books for the whole family – if the name of your family is the Charles Manson family! Well there should be enough events to please any crime-fiction-loving family in the forthcoming National Crime Fiction Week. The Crime Writers Association has announced a nationwide celebration of crime fiction beginning on Monday, 14th June. The activities include readings, discussions and workshops at venues throughout the United Kingdom. The CWA has put up a map so you can see the events held closest to you. And as if that wasn’t enough, there is also the forthcoming annual Crimefest convention, which this year is being held in Bristol, 20-23 May.
Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil Memo
The 2008 50th anniversary DVD of Orson Welles’ film noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil includes the three principal versions that exist of the film. Firstly, there is the theatrical version, which audiences saw upon the film’s release in 1958. This version had been re-edited by Universal Studios’ staff editor Aaron Stell after Welles had submitted his rough cut. It also includes several additional scenes that were directed by Harry Keller. After viewing this version, Welles wrote a 58 page memo to Universal’s head of production Edward Muhl, suggesting multiple editing changes and essentially pleading with the studio to respect his original artistic vision. This memo was largely ignored. The second version is the preview version shown to audiences before the film’s release, which incorporated some of Welles’ requests. This was discovered by Universal in 1976, and was regarded as the definitive version for some time. Finally, there is the restored version that was re-edited by Walter Murch in 1998. Murch, along with producer Rick Schmidlin attempted to restore the film to Welles’ original vision by following his suggestions in the memo as closely as possible. The result is impressive and definitely makes for the most dramatically satisfying version of the film. Welles was an extraordinary creative artist, and like many great artists he was also a controversial figure. Whether anyone can truly be faithful to an artist’s conception of his work is of course open to debate. Filmmaking is a complicated process involving hundreds of people. Critics of Welles have argued that his constant battles with the studios over the editing of his films during his career may have been to protect his reputation as a creative genius. Did Welles invent these battles with the studios to protect his reputation? Not in this case. Reading the original memo, it is clear that Welles is trying to restore the clarity of individual scenes and the coherence of the overall narrative. For instance, in the now famous opening tracking shot, the viewer sees an anonymous figure place dynamite set to a timer in the boot of a car. Then, a man and a woman get into the car and the camera follows them as they drive around the border town of Los Robles. This incredibly tense scene loses some of its effect in the theatrical version, as Henry Mancini’s score is the background music, and the opening credits appear throughout the scene, distracting from the car bomb . Welles wanted the music to change as the car passes the various clubs of Los Robles, each club playing different music. As Welles put in his memo:
I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of the picture is temporary…
As the camera moves through the streets of the Mexican border town, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers – the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out its own tune by way of a “come-on” or “pitch” for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a device throughout the entire picture. The special use of contrasting “mambo-type” rhythm numbers with rock’n’roll will be developed in some detail at the end of this memo, when I’ll take up details of the “beat” and also specific of musical color and instrumentation on a scene-by-scene, and transition-by-transition basis.
It is clear from Welles’ words that his vision of the film is so complex and intricate that to remove or change even the smallest detail creates a negative effect which ripples throughout the whole film. What seems curious and unusual in one scene is given perfect clarity by later events in the film. Welles’ artistic vision suffered as he was ahead of his time. Tracking shots have become reasonably common in films today, and DVD releases almost always feature multiple deleted scenes that never made it into the final cut. Welles ended his memo:
I close this memo with a very earnest plea that you consent to this brief visual pattern to which I gave so many long hard days of work.
Now at last audiences can finally see a version of Touch of Evil edited as close as possible to the film Welles intended it to be:
Wellesnet has the full text of Welles’ memo to Universal, with their own annotations. Below you can watch the opening tracking shot as Welles intended it in the restored version:
Mitchum Plays Marlowe
Browsing Roger Ebert’s archive of film reviews at the Chicago Sun-Times I came across a 1975 review of Dick Richards’s adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely. Robert Mitchum, who plays Marlowe, was 57 years old at the time. He was too young for the role in the 1940s, when Dick Powell chose to revitalize his career playing Marlowe in the stylish 1944 Edward Dmytryk adaptation, Murder, My Sweet. Back then Mitchum was making a name for himself in B-Westerns and would probably not have matched the performances of Powell or of Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’s 1946 classic, The Big Sleep. But by 1975 Mitchum was a perfect Marlowe, with his hang-dog expression and tough, world-weary eyes. Where Bogart made Marlowe a real tough guy, we can imagine Mitchum as a Marlowe who is genuinely “tired and full of no coffee”. He was so perfect in fact that he was persuaded to star in Michael Winner’s bungled, transplanted adaptation of The Big Sleep (1978). There Mitchum looked the part, but the film was a mistake.
Roger Ebert’s review of Farewell, My Lovely is glowing. It is worth remembering this often overlooked film as one of perhaps three adaptations of Chandler’s work that manage to do justice to Chandler’s vision. Late in his career Mitchum was a truly great Marlowe. Worth a read:
Los Angeles, 1941. A run-down street of seedy shop fronts and blinking neon signs. Music from somewhere features a lonely horn. The camera pans up to a second-story window of a flophouse. In the window, his hat pushed back, his tie undone, Philip Marlowe lights another cigaret and waits for the cops to arrive. He is ready to tell his story.
These opening shots are so evocative of Raymond Chandler’s immortal Marlowe, archtypical private eye, haunting the underbelly of Los Angeles, that if we’re Chandler fans we hold our breath. Is the ambience going to be maintained, or will this be another campy rip-off? Half an hour into the movie, we relax. “Farewell, My Lovely” never steps wrong.
London in Detective Fiction
Back in November 2009 Esme Miskimmin, the editor of 100 British Crime Writers, gave a talk at the Bishopsgate Institute in London on the subject of “Investigating the City: London in Detective Fiction from the Victorian Era to the ‘Golden Age'”. Her talk is part of the Bishopsgate Institute podcast and is available here, or via iTunes.
The Pitfalls of the True Crime Genre
David Peace gave a recent interview on the US publishing website Galleycat in which he argued that crime fiction writers should focus on real life cases in their novels:
There’s so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand and we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes. The crime genre is the perfect tool to understand why crimes happen.
There is much to admire in Peace’s argument. After all real life crimes have formed the basis for his successful Red Riding Quartet novels and his current Tokyo trilogy. Peace has claimed his biggest literary influence is the novels of James Ellroy, and again there is a strong historical foundation to Ellroy’s LA Quartet and Underworld USA novels. If I were to add one caveat to Peace’s argument it would be that crime novelists should avoid meddling in what is commonly called the ‘true crime’ genre.
After the phenomenal success of his novel based on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia (1987), Ellroy became much sought after for his opinion on theories as to who killed Elizabeth Short. A Los Angeles Times journalist named Larry Harnisch developed a theory in which he named a Dr Walter Bayley as a plausible suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Short. Ellroy endorsed Harnisch’s theory despite the evidence being entirely circumstantial and suppositional. Dr Bayley was suffering from a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease at the time of Miss Short’s murder and died shortly thereafter. Harnisch claims that Bayley’s condition was capable of inducing homicidal urges which may have triggered the murder. Most Dahlia commentators including the crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, believe Bayley’s condition would have rendered him unable to commit such a physically and psychologically challenging act.
In 2003, a retired LAPD Homicide Detective named Steve Hodel was to publish his own theory in the book Black Dahlia Avenger. Steve Hodel’s hypothesis bears striking resemblance to the fictional solution Ellroy posited in his novel fifteen years earlier. Hodel’s father, Dr George Hodel was a physician who was based in LA for many years. Upon his father’s death, Hodel found two photographs in his belongings which he believed to be of Elizabeth Short. This led Hodel to begin an investigation into the connection between his father and the Black Dahlia. Ultimately Hodel came to the conclusion that his father was the murderer of Elizabeth Short, and his mutilation of the body was inspired by the work of the Surrealist artist Emmanuel Radnitsky, better known as Man Ray. Dr Hodel was good friends with Man Ray, and Detective Hodel claims he was inspired by Man Ray’s painting Les Amoureux (the Lovers) (1933) and his photograph Minotaur (1934) in how he tortured and posed the body of Miss Short at the site she was found, an abandoned lot at 39th and Norton, Los Angeles. Aside from the unusual parallels with his own fictionalisation of the murder being inspired by the Comprachios in Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs (1869) , Ellroy was at first reluctant to accept Hodel’s theory. By now Ellroy was a sager judge of the many pitfalls of true crime writing, and he could see flaws in Hodel’s theory that he had not originally spotted in the work of Harnisch. There is contention as to whether the photographs Hodel discovered amongst his father’s belongings are actually Elizabeth Short, or even the same woman in either photograph. However, between the publication of the hardcover edition of Black Dahlia Avenger and the paperback one year later, documents were released which showed Dr Hodel was the LAPD’s prime suspect for the murder during the original investigation. This was enough to convince Ellroy to give a measured endorsement for Hodel’s theory in the introduction to the paperback edition. But the controversy surrounding Black Dahlia Avenger would not end there. Ellroy was angered that Hodel hypothesised that his father’s friend and associate Fred Sexton is a plausible suspect in the murder of Ellroy’s mother. The murders of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy and Elizabeth Short have always been symbiotically and elliptically linked in Ellroy’s work so for a True Crime writer to make the link literal seems both implausible and opportunistic.
Bizarrely, Hodel is not the first writer to theorise a similar connection. In 1992, Janice Knowlton published a much ridiculed book titled Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer. In it she claimed that she witnessed her father murder Elizabeth Short when she was a child, and the memory had only recently resurfaced after years of being psychologically repressed. Upon discovering Ellroy was writing a factual book on his mother’s murder, My Dark Places (1996), Knowlton contacted Ellroy claiming her father also killed Geneva Hilliker Ellroy. Thus, Ellroy the novelist has inadvertently inspired a true crime sub-genre in which two writers have theorised that the murderer of Elizabeth Short is the same man or a man who was connected to the murderer of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy. Both Hodel and Knowlton claimed their father was the guilty man.
The parallels between Hodel’s theory and Ellroy’s original fictional solution in The Black Dahlia may just be odd coincidence. On the other hand, it does highlight the flaws of the true crime genre as a whole. Crime novelists write stories as part of a narrative structure in which, more often than not, the mystery is resolved in the denouement. True crime writers often attempt to do the same thing, but real life is more complex and often does not produce such neat resolutions. Thus, true crime writers often twist the facts to suit their narrative.
Below is a video of Steve Hodel describing the compelling evidence that strongly suggests that his father was the Black Dahlia killer. He also describes his more contentious theories that his father is a plausible suspect in the Zodiac killings and several other notorious murders:
Read my follow-up post, A Message from Steve Hodel on the Black Dahlia Case.
The Venetian Vase 