The books we read that semester included Hammett’s Red Harvest, Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury, John D. MacDonalds The Deep Blue Good-by (the first Travis McGee); and Ross Macdonald’s The Blue Hammer (late Lew Archer). Though it is a spy novel, John le Carré’s Call for the Dead was in there, too, probably because Mish simply liked it. And in the mix was Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake.
I was struck at once, as if socked in the jaw, with Chandler’s descriptive powers, and that he could say so much about the human condition by setting his story in a world mostly shunned by “serious” novelists (I had not yet read Steinbeck. Edward Anderson, Upton Sinclair, A. I. Bezzerides, John Fante, or any of the other social realists I would begin to devour in the coining years). Mostly I was impressed with the clarity of his prose, obviously written to be read and understood by folks who did not know the secret handshake. It was populist literature, and I wanted to be a part of it.
From the early pages of The Lady in the Like, here is the introduction to the dominant female character in the book:
At a flat desk in line with the doors was a tall, lean, dark-haired lovely whose name, according to the titled embossed plaque on her desk, was Miss Adrienne Fromsette. She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man’s tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread. She wore a linked bracelet and no other jewelry. Her dark hair urns parted and fell in loose but not unstudied waves. She had a smooth ivory skin and rather severe eyebrows and large dark eyes that looked as if they might warm up at the right time and in the right place.
Those eyebrows and the “not unstudied” wave of her hair are deft shorthand for the true nature of Miss Fromsette’s character. She, and the brutal cop, Lieutenant Degarmo, are two of Chandler’s greatest creations. The novel ends, hauntingly, in the following manner:
A hundred feet down in the canyon a small coupe was smashed against the side of a huge granite boulder. It was almost upside down, leaning a little. There were three men down there. They had moved the car enough to lift something out. Something that had been a man.
That clinical, unromantic view of death and a distrust of authority figures and politicians, hallmarks of the genre, fit the worldview of a certain segment of my generation, who had rejected the hippie-gone-yuppic lifestyle that emerged as the decade turned and the Reagan years began. The time was ripe for many of us to connect or reconnect with crime lit. Writers like Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Newton Thornburg, and Kem Nunn were turning crime fiction on its head, implicitly telling young hopefuls with ambition that the game didn’t have to be played the same way anymore. Several students in my class had come to the hard-boiled canon through an interest in punk and new wave music. Pre-punk rockers like Warren Zevon had been writing songs influenced by California crime fiction since the early seventies. Reggae and ska bands had hooked into James Bond and spaghetti Westerns, and guitar-is-back bands like the Dream Syndicate and artists like Stan Ridgway were crafting sonic, short-story valentines to Ross Macdonald and Jim Thompson. What the punk ethic meant to me and the prospect of my work was that I didn’t need the pedigree of an advanced writing program degree to, at the very least, try to contribute something worthwhile to the genre. If an untrained musician could pick up a guitar and make righteous noise, I could attempt to do the same thing with a pen and notebook. The fact that I knew nothing about the craft or the business side of publishing actually went in my favor. If I hadn’t been so naive, I might not have given it a try.
I know I’m not alone. If you throw a rock in a room full of modern crime novelists, it will probably hit someone who got ignitioned after reading his or her first Chandler. Or Hammett, Macdonald, Patricia Highsmith. Robert Parker. Lawrence Block, Leonard, Crumley... take your pick. And don’t forget the teachers. I bet there is one good teacher in most of our backgrounds who at one point gave us words of encouragement.
Still, there is no obvious direct line from the grandfathers and fathers of crime fiction to the stories in this collection. I certainly don’t think you will detect anyone here trying to be Chandleresque. Neither are any of the contributors writing in a faux hard-boiled style. Though there are twists and surprises to be discovered, none of these stories are puzzles, locked-room mysteries, or private detective tales. I did not deliberately exclude the traditional. I simply chose these authors because of their original, unique voices. But make no mistake, we are all standing on the shoulders of the writers who came before us and left their indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.
I hope you enjoy these wonderful stories.
George Pelecanos
James Lee Burke
Mist
From The Southern Review
Lisa Guillory’s dreams are indistinct and do not contain the images normally associated with nightmares. Nor do dawn and the early-morning mist in the trees come to her in either the form of release or expectation. Instead, her dreams seem to be without sharp edges, like the dull pain of an impacted tooth that takes up nightly residence in her sleep and denies her rest but does not terrify or cause her to wake with night sweats, as is the case with many people at the meetings she has started attending.
The meetings are held in a wood-frame Pentecostal church that is set back in a sugarcane field lined with long rows of cane stubble the farmers burn off at night. In the morning, as she drives to the meeting from the shotgun cabin in what is called the Loreauville “quarters,” where she now lives, the two-lane is thick with smoke from the stubble fires and the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. She can smell the ash and the burned soil and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou inside the fog, but it is the fog itself that bothers her, not the odor, because in truth she does not want to leave it and the comfort it seems to provide her.
She pulls to the shoulder of the road and lights a cigarette, inhaling it deeply into her lungs, as though a cigarette can keep at bay the desires, no, the cravings, that build inside her throughout the day, until she imagines that a loop of piano wire has been fitted around her head and is being twisted into her scalp.
Lisa’s sponsor is Tookie Goula. She is waiting for Lisa like a gargoyle by the entrance to the clapboard church. Tookie takes one look at Lisa’s face and tells her she has to come clean in front of the group, that the time of silent participation has passed, that she has a serious illness and she has to get rid of shame and guilt and admit she is setting herself up for a relapse.
Lisa feigns indifference and boredom. She has heard it all before. “Talking at the meeting gonna get that knocking sound out of my head?”
“What’s the knocking sound mean, Lisa?”
“It means he was rocking around inside the coffin when they carried him to the graveyard. I heard it. Like rocks rolling ’round inside a barrel.”
Tookie is a thick-bodied Cajun woman with jailhouse tats and a stare like a slap. She is not only inured to financial hardship and worthless men but she did a stint as a prostitute in a chain of truck stops across the upper South. She wears no makeup, bites her nails when she is angry, and doesn’t hide the fact she probably likes women more than men. She is chewing on a nail now, her eyes hot as BBs. “Quit lying,” she says.