Liberal Bias in the Arts? Not in Crime Fiction
The Daily Telegraph recently reported with considerable glee that crime novelist and Tory peer PD James had given BBC Director Mark Thompson an unforgettable grilling on Radio 4’s the Today programme. Baroness James was highly critical of the bureaucracy and the huge salaries at the BBC and Thompson was left struggling to find a decent answer to her criticisms. The Telegraph seemed overtly happy with what must have been an uncomfortable interview for Thompson because, as a newspaper with a conservative editorial position, it is often critical of the perceived left-wing bias in the media generally and at the BBC in particular.
This may be issue in which crime fiction is once again bucking the trend. Literary critics do not carry the same assumption that crime novelists are as left-wing as their contemporaries in other arts, which is perhaps why some critics do not consider crime fiction to be an art form. There are many crime novelists who are left-wing by nature but there are also perhaps more who are conservative in their politics. Mickey Spillane was only slightly less right-wing than his most famous creation, Mike Hammer. The more measured conservatism of Joseph Wambaugh is rooted in his former career as a policeman with the L.A.P.D. Some crime writers have proven almost impossible to define politically. James M. Cain was a registered Democrat for most of his life, but he supported the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 presidential election as he considered, quite prophetically as it turned out, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt to be in too poor health to be President. In the 1948 presidential election Cain returned to the Democrats and backed Harry S. Truman in the election no one thought Truman could possibly win. Cain felt Dewey had become too hubristic in his second challenge for the White House. Truman won. Cain was appalled at the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 50s, but as a veteran of the First World War he resented the fact that many communists were writing for the movie studios at the time.
As in the case of James M. Cain it should be remembered that not every writer fits neatly into a category of left or right, liberal or conservative. In an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, Gore Vidal said of the Bush administration: ‘They were not conservative. I consider myself a conservative.’ One writer who is all too often dismissed as a right-wing lunatic is James Ellroy. I am currently studying the many interviews Ellroy has given over the course of his literary career, and I have found he often expresses complex and nuanced social views in an eloquent manner. On the other hand, there is Ellroy’s Demon Dog literary persona which allows him to give outrageous and wilfully obscene opinions designed to offend everybody.
Below is a clip of Ellroy in brash and extroverted mood on a German television show. He is joined by fellow writer Bruce Wagner and the actress Rose McGowan, and they are discussing the then forthcoming 2008 Presidential election:
Dick Francis (1920 – 2010)
The bestselling thriller writer Dick Francis has died at the age of 89. Francis was a former professional jockey who famously rode Devon’s Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National. His novels, set in the world of horse racing, were derived directly from his own experiences. Yet throughout his literary career, Francis was dogged with rumours that his wife secretly wrote all of his novels. You can read the Guardian obituary of Francis here and the Telegraph obituary here.
The Observer Discovers Crime Fiction
The Observer newspaper, Sunday sibling of The Guardian has discovered crime fiction. Again. Stephanie Merritt, one of its columnists, has written a crime novel (under a pseudonym, naturally) so now the landscape has changed and crime novels are acceptable. It’s certainly true that at universities crime fiction (and genre fiction in general) is still not taken as seriously as it might be. But outside the academy I’m not convinced about a sudden ‘acceptance’ of crime fiction among readers. It’s always been popular, hasn’t it? Merritt seems to suggest so in fact. Here’s some of what Merritt has to say in her novel’s press release article:
It was only when I came to apply to university that I discovered that the detective novels I loved were regarded as somehow second-rate. Crime novels, I was given to understand, would not impress in our ancient universities. If I wanted to be considered well read at my interview, I must replace my PD Jameses and Ruth Rendells with “literary” fiction. That which was popular, entertaining and sold well, I learned, had – almost by definition – little value as art.
This artificial division persisted in the literary world I came to work in after university. Crime and thrillers were dismissed as genre fiction, which was – in those days, at least – scorned by the literary establishment. There was no prestige, it seemed, in writing genre stuff; even when such respected “literary” authors as Julian Barnes and John Banville turned their hand to crime novels they did so under a pseudonym (Dan Kavanagh and Benjamin Black respectively). I always wondered if this was because they were slightly embarrassed about it.
…
Meanwhile, the public appetite for crime stories and thrillers, fuelled by the popularity of television murder mysteries and police procedurals, seems only to have grown in proportion: a successful ongoing series, with a central character who can engage readers’ sympathies sufficiently to create a desire for new episodes, is an attractive proposition for a publisher in such uncertain times.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on Film
The Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens in British cinemas on March 12th (March 19th in the US). Here’s the trailer:
One of the downsides of people communicating with each other through Twitter, texting and email is that it has all but destroyed the art of letter writing. I have just finished reading A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967-74, and I had almost forgotten how beautifully crafted and sometimes openly and crudely emotional a letter can be. We are losing this form of writing and it is a shame. Dan Rowan was an American comedian who had a long running night-club act playing straight man to his zany comedy partner Dick Martin. Rowan and Martin performed their act touring nightclubs for around twenty years before they met their greatest success on the hit television show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Rowan was also a huge fan of the work of the crime novelist John D. MacDonald, and through the advice of mutual friend Virginia Caldwell (wife of the famed author Erskine Caldwell), Rowan and MacDonald began a letter correspondence despite the fact that they had never met. Rowan and MacDonald became close friends and the letters cover from 1967 until their friendship suddenly ended in 1974. The correspondence almost exactly covers the years Laugh-In was on the air, and as a consequence, Laugh-In forms the bulk of their conversation.
Laugh-In revolutionised American television comedy in ways not dissimilar to how That Was The Week That Was and Monty Python’s Flying Circus changed British comedy. Laugh-In’s title is derived from the ‘Love-ins’ and ‘Be-ins’ that were culturally important in the 1960s. The immediate style of show was vaudeville, like most musical/variety shows of the time, but it had a improvisational, anarchic and quickfire style that was new. Rowan and Martin were the hosts of the show. Rowan’s exasperated straight man persona is always being undermined by the zany imbelicity of Martin. Neither host pretends to have much control over events on the show as a form of anarchic and comedic mayhem breaks loose, as one sketch follows another with little or no narrative thread. Another novelty was to have big name stars making cameos but then downplay their appearance on show, such as putting John Wayne in a big bunny outfit and then follow it with a completely unrelated sketch.
Rowan and MacDonald’s letters form one of the most fascinating exchanges that has ever been published into the workings of a television show. Although MacDonald was only six years older than Rowan he is definitely the father- figure of the two and frequently gives Rowan advice and ideas for sketches, some of which make their way onto the show. Rowan had never experienced success as big as this before, and he frequently conveys anxiety and nervousness at keeping up the high ratings and quality of a show that very few people thought could last. Laugh-In defied the critics and ran for six series and one hundred and fourty episodes.
Other matters that Rowan and MacDonald discuss in their letters is MacDonald’s phenomenally successful Travis McGee series of novels, Rowan’s failing marriage to Australian model Andrea Van Ballegooygn, the sybaritic lifestyle of Dick Martin, and the Watergate cover-up. Rowan and Martin had a perceived public closeness with Richard Nixon. Nixon had made a well-received guest appearance on Laugh-In during the 1968 Presidential election. The result of the ’68 election was so close that some commentators claimed Nixon’s appearance on Laugh-In just tipped things in his favour. In one letter Rowan describes attending a reception at Nixon’s California home:
Last night Rowan and Martin and their wives, along with Paul Keyes and his wife, were invited to attend President and Mrs. Nixon’s reception at their home in San Clemente, La Casa Pacifica, or as it’s termed among the Republican press, the Western White House. We picked up a pair of choppers in the NBC parking lot, flew to Camp Pendleton, and were driven by Marine sergeants down to the house. He has a beautiful spread there and the party was attended by something like 400 guests. Mostly Republicans, of course, but a substantial number of the Hollywood liberal contingent. Nothing meaningful happened politically, but it was very interesting and I’m happy we went. I was given a pair of cuff links with the Presidential Seal on them, and since I was unable to get 2 pair, I will give you one link and keep one link, since I know how anxious you are to have a Nixon souvenir.
This was Rowan’s little joke. MacDonald was not a Nixon admirer and was constantly ribbing Rowan for being seen as a Nixon man. MacDonald said of Watergate: “It fascinates because it is a morality play and man has never tired of those. Also, it is a detective story.”
The letters end as abruptly as their friendship ended. The reason for this is complicated. Rowan was feeling bitter and miserable as Laugh-In was coming to an end, and he knew his career was on the decline (he worked very seldomly after Laugh-In). Also, he was going through a very expensive divorce to Van Ballegooygn and he appealed to MacDonald for sympathy. Unexpectedly, MacDonald almost completely takes Van Ballegooygn’s side, and the two exchange harsh words. What makes the letters so moving and thrilling to read is that it is possible to see both men’s points- of- view with sympathy. Rowan’s behaviour does sink into immaturity, as he is going through the emotional pain of divorce, but one is left with the feeling that perhaps MacDonald was just a little too harsh in his attempts at tough advice. The two men finally reconciled, ironically in a similar way to how they had met, at the suggestion of a mutual friend. Perhaps as a symbol of this reconciliation, they agreed to publish their letters in a book. The book came out in 1986. Both men wrote a separate introduction to the book. Rowan writes in his introduction:
I don’t know about you, but in a busy, varied and much-traveled life I have not made so many solid and worthwhile friendships that I can afford to lose one. I am happy that we are friends again, John D. and I. It’s not like before. But neither are we. I miss the time we lost. I hold dear the time we had. I look forward to what’s to come. Thank you John.
Alas, neither man had much time left to live. MacDonald died of complications of heart surgery during Christmas 1986. Rowan died of lymphona in 1987. It is a touching epilogue when reading this book to know that the two men reconciled before they died.
Below is an audio recording of a telephone conversation in which Nixon thanks Rowan and Martin for performing a comedy sketch at his sixtieth birthday party. Nixon’s reference to Haldemann and the tapes is unintentionally hilarious!:
Read my follow-up post, Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald’s Idea for a Television Show.
Fred Otash – Private Eye to the Stars
I have just finished reading Investigation Hollywood! (1976), the memoirs of Fred Otash, Hollywood’s most famous Private Detective. Throughout the 1950s and 60s– when Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Lew Archer and a hundred other literary P.I.’s were popular with the American public– Otash was the chief investigator for the tabloid scandal rag Confidential. During that time, he made a considerable amount of money on assignments that included arranging abortions for the mistresses of movie stars.
Otash appears as a character in several of James Ellroy’s novels. Ellroy knew Otash well, and Otash told Ellroy the contents of his files on J.F.K., which had been confiscated by the F.B.I. Otash had been hired by the Mob to wiretap Kennedy in a rendezvous with his mistress. Otash only refers to the incident elliptically in his memoir, but he seems to have done a good job for the Mob, as he told Ellroy that Kennedy was a ‘two minute man’ and was ‘hung like a cashew’ . Kennedy, according to Otash, used his bad back as an excuse for his lack of virility in the bedroom. In Ellroy’s novel American Tabloid (1995), Kennedy is referred to as ‘Badback Jack’.
Ellroy thought Otash to be good company but not trustworthy. Ellroy had been considering making Otash one of the leading characters in American Tabloid. He was going to pay Otash money with the stipulation that Otash would not publicly contradict how Ellroy portrayed him in the novel. But Ellroy never trusted Otash to keep his word, thus he created Pete Bondurant (one of his greatest characters) for the role that he originally conceived for Otash in American Tabloid.
Reading Investigation Hollywood! it is tempting to concur with Ellroy’s opinion that Otash is entertaining, but you’re never really sure whether or not he’s telling you the whole story. Still, Investigation Hollywood! is a fascinating glimpse into the seedy side of Hollywood in the 50s and 60s. The book features an introduction by Mickey Spillane and reads like one of the sleaziest editions of Confidential. It is also the only book, that I know of, in which the author boasts about how he would have committed the Watergate burglary properly!:
If I were going to engage in that kind of illegal activity, the first thing I would do is have a key made for those locks. My man could look at a lock and give you a series of sixteen master keys.
I would have had a key for each of the offices and I would have used sound equipment so sophisticated that the thing could have been hidden in the inkwell, a picture frame, or under a chair – someplace where you can wire the equipment beeper for months and where it would transmit to a receiver two or three miles away.
And the idea of using their xerox. Another blunder. Nothing is ever xeroxed anymore. You use your own equipment. Camera equipment is superior to anything else. You set the camera and then just keep sliding the papers under it, photographing to your heart’s content. You walk out with nothing more than a roll of minifilm that may have a thousand documents recorded on it.
I still can’t believe the Republican party could have hired such a bunch of idiots. First off, the people in party headquarters are not going to do much talking about anything strategic because they probably don’t know that much anyway. If you really want to know what’s going on you put a tap on George McGovern’s phone at home. That’s where all the important conversations are taking place.
You have to hit two or three phones – like the campaign manager and the finance manager who is hustling all the funds to see what deals he’s making for the candidate.
Those are the people you want. That’s the way you find out what’s happening!
The University of Texas has a video available online of Otash being interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1957. It is clear from this interview that Otash consider himself, quite simply, as man doing his job. You can watch the interview here.
Robert B. Parker 1932-2010
Robert B. Parker, author of 37 novels featuring the Boston-based private eye Spenser, has died, aged 77. Parker is credited with reviving interest (and sales) in the hard-boiled private eye novel, which by the 1960s had begun to seem anachronistic and played out. Parker, as J. Kingston Pierce puts it in the interview included in this tribute, had “the misfortune to be overeducated”. He wrote a PhD dissertation on Hammett and Chandler and was a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. When I began my own PhD on Chandler in the early 1990s Parker’s was one of only a few then written on the subject. For good or ill, as an indirect result of Parker’s influence on the popularity of crime fiction in general, by the end of the decade the number of academic papers was growing fast.
Parker began writing the Spenser novels in the early 1970s because he wanted more stories about Philip Marlowe. He later completed Chandler’s unfinished eighth Marlowe novel Poodle Springs and could channel Chandler like no other; a difficult task given the ease with which Chandler can be parodied. But his writing is also distinctively Parker and in novels such as 1980’s Looking for Rachel Wallace, as smart as any.
A great deal has already been written about Parker and his legacy. In particular Sarah Weinman is doing a great job rounding up the tributes and obituaries as is J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet.
Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane
As the author of the Eliot Ness and the Nathan Heller series of novels, Max Allan Collins has a deserved reputation as being one of the most creative and prolific of contemporary American artists. There is a strange irony to this as Collins has spent a large part of his career defending the work of one of the most commercially successful and critically reviled writers of the twentieth century, Mickey Spillane. Collins co-authored the first (and to my knowledge only) scholarly monograph on Spillane, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984). He directed the award-winning documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1998). He gave Spillane acting roles in the films Mommy (1995) and Mommy’s Day (1997). Collins was good friends with Spillane, and when Spillane was close to dying he handed over to Collins unfinished manuscripts, which Collins completed and prepared for publication, Dead Street (2007), and the final Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008).
Collins has definitely helped improve Spillane’s reputation. Yet even now, defending Mickey Spillane can be a dangerous business. In Collins’ introduction to The Mike Hammer Omnibus: Volume One (2006), he stated:
For over four decades now, I have found myself in the unlikely position of being perhaps the chief defender of one of the most popular writers of all time. Because of my boldly expressed high opinion of Mickey Spillane, I have been involved in screaming matches; I have nearly been in several fistfights; and I have been dissed and dismissed because of the taint of Spillane on my own work. As beloved as Spillane is – and no other mystery writer has touched readers in so deeply personal a manner – so in some quarters is he so roundly despised.
Poe and Highsmith in the New Yorker
January 19th is the birthday of both Edgar Allan Poe and Patricia Highsmith. In the New Yorker Ian Crouch makes the case that they are similar as writers too:
Like Poe’s work, Highsmith’s has been hamstrung among critics by its limited set of obsessions—murder, impersonation, mystery, and suspense. Much of Highsmith’s work either fits into, or was influenced by, popular genres. Offering remarkable insight, Joan Schenkar reveals how Highsmith’s early work as a comic-book writer—when she crafted stories for such characters as “Jap Buster Johnson”—was reflected in her novels. Though she gamely maintained that the likes of Henry James and Dostoyevsky also wrote “suspense” novels, Highsmith’s reputation was such that Norman Mailer once told Schenkar: “Remind me, Joan…what was Highsmith? A high-class detective novelist?” (Had he confused her with Agatha Christie?) Poe has suffered similarly. Schenkar points out that E. L. Doctorow once called Poe a “genius hack,” and “our greatest bad writer.”
1. Outside – A Noir Album
Town Full of Losers wrote a post on David Bowie to mark his 63rd birthday on January 8th. Reading this post made me revisit my favourite Bowie album No.1 Outside (1995). No.1 Outside is a concept album like no other album ever made. Bowie reunited with writer, musician and record producer Brian Eno, with whom he had collaborated on the famous ‘Berlin Trilogy’, and began writing a series of songs in which he noticed, almost by chance, that a narrative was emerging.
The narrative is deliberately obscure and not easy to follow. It is loosely set in a future in which a new government bureau has been created to investigate the phenomenon of art crime. Murder and mutilation have become part of an underground art craze. The leading character, Nathan Adler is determined to ascertain what is acceptable as art, and what is simply criminal. The songs are interspersed with the monologues of several characters, which are designed to clarify the narrative. In my opinion, the monologues are pretentious and the weakest part of the album. The best songs simply allude to the narrative, as a good album should not be overplotted. The numeral is in the title as Bowie planned to make a whole series of concept albums based on a similar narrative theme, to be titled 2. Contamination and 3.Afrikaan. Sadly, no follow-up album was ever produced.
Despite these minor flaws 1. Outside is a remarkable musical achievement, one of the only albums to my knowledge to successfully adapt a crime narrative. It is fitting then that the cult film director David Lynch chose one of the best songs from the album, ‘I’m Deranged’ as the opening and closing song for his surreal neo-noir thriller, Lost Highway (1997):
The Venetian Vase 