The Great Whatsit, And The Evil of Mike Hammer

The last month or so, I've been obsessed with Kiss Me Deadly, an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel that might be the rawest crime movie this side of The Killing. I wrote about it. Now you read about it.

I’m a crime fiction addict—honestly and unrepentantly—but I’ve found that some of the classics of the genre fail to get me high.  Raymond Chandler called Philip Marlowe “neither tarnished nor afraid . . . the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” That’s nice enough for Phil, but I always found it disappointing. What’s the point of a tough-talking PI if his hardboiled shell conceals a center of sickly sweet Cadbury cream?

Film adaptations of detective classics tend to amplify their hero’s moral side, making his snark into little more than bluster. No matter how hard Sam Spade might crack wise, we know that Bogie would never really do the wrong thing. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is the exception to this—his Marlowe is truly laid back right until he becomes a killer—but it was made in the ’70s. For years, I have hungered for a film adaptation from pulp’s golden age that did justice to the fact that, to be a private detective, you have to be a motherfucker.

The Only Mystery Is Why I Kept Reading

Murder on the Orient Express, which I took out from the library last week in hopes of learning something about how to structure a mystery. (That reminds me—if anyone out there wants to produce an animal murder mystery called Death In The Monkey House, I'm really the guy you should call.)

After finding the first hundred pages delightful, the book turned into a slog, making me so angry that—in my typical breaking news style—I wrote an angry review about an 80 year-old classic. Behold!

I hate cozy mysteries. I don’t care who poisoned Lord Dalrymple, and it doesn’t matter to me how ingeniously Detective Chief Inspector St. John Woolybottom cracks the case. If a mystery contains a map of a manor house or an elaborate timeline of each suspect’s movements before and after the power went out, I will put it aside and reach for a thriller with some teeth. Chandler, Hammett, Crumley, Cain—these are the men I will take to my desert island. Dorothy L. Sayers can stay home and suck an egg.

But something has always appealed to me about Agatha Christie. I read And Then There Were None in middle school, staying up late at night and finding it made me very afraid of the dark. As tedious as clockwork mysteries are, she is regarded as the best, and The Best is always appealing. After years of ragging on manor house mysteries, I’m writing a play that parodies the form, and I’ve found that orchestrating a large cast of characters—giving everyone a motive, an alibi and a secret—is trickier than it looks. What, I wondered, might Christie have to teach me?

Read on, my pretties. Read on.

And because the article concludes with some Pink Panther talk, you'll want a little Clouseau.

Uploaded by Chris Lappas on 2009-09-11.

Yesterday Was Halloween, So This Is Topical?

I have a long story about the effect the hurricane has had on theaters around the city coming in a little bit. In the meantime, here is this utterly fluffy, not-at-all-topical interview I did with Otto Penzler, asking about The Big Book of Ghosts.

Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop and all-around pulp fiction buff, is also an accomplished editor. Roughly once a year, he edits a collection of stories for Black Lizard Press. Past volumes include The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and Zombies! Zombies! Zombies. This year, he gives us The Big Book of Ghost Stories, a thousand-page tome packed full of spooks and spectres which is perfect for reading round the campfire—or, for our readers in lower Manhattan, round the flashlight. Bullett emailed Penzler last week to ask him some questions about the genre.

When assembling a collection of this length, how do you keep it focused? Is the theme of ghost stories enough to bind it together, or do you need something more? 

Ghosts, or any of the BIG anthologies I’ve done, is pretty well focused. The book has a huge range, from the Victorian classics to the pulps to the moderns. The one overwhelming element I tried to focus on was that they be readable, well-written, fun (that’s three, but they coelesce into one).

I’m a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s over-the-top Gothic storytelling. Who are some less well-known authors who wrote in a similar vein?

Pulps writers, of which there are many in the book, some of whom are relatively unknown. G.G. Pendarves, Paul Ernst, Henry S. Whiehead, Wyatt Blassingame, Greye La Spina, Henry Rousseau—none of them will ever be accused of being restrained stylistically.

There's more. Oh my yes, there's much more. Well, some more anyway.

Please Don't Hurt Me, Henry VIII

View fullsize

​Henry VIII had a lot of wives, a lot of armor, and a lot of gout.

More from Bullett—this'll be a three day a week thing, you realize—this time a short column describing my utter ignorance of popular literature. And unpopular literature, for that matter. Really, if you want my attention, there'd better be a murder, some snappy prose, and a boat or two.

A nerdy pocket of the Internet was abuzz yesterday, as the results came down that Hilary Mantel‘s Bring Up The Bodies had taken home the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The award, given to the best English-language novel written by one of the Queen’s subjects, is notable for its ungainly name and for the fanfare that surrounds it. A Pulitzer winner is given a pat on the back, a fat check, and a huge stack of “Pulitzer!” stickers to put on their paperbacks. But win the Man Booker Prize, the BBC tells us, and £1 million in sales is guaranteed. This is the second time Mantel has bagged the award—her first came in 2009, for Wolf Hall—so it seems her place in the Pantheon—as well as her bank balance—is guaranteed. And so I ask seriously: Why in hell haven’t I heard of her?

Not only am I not illiterate, I consider myself to be the kind of man who keeps up with this sort of thing. I read the arts section of the local paper. I talk to friends about books. I am in possession of a library card. And yet, the name Hilary Mantel never penetrated my brain until yesterday. In my ignorance, I have been happy.

And sadly for the institution of cultural criticism, there's more! 

Interestingly, stage adaptations of the books have already been announced. Perhaps by the time they make it onstage, I'll have shaken my ignorance enough to deliver an informed opinion. I realize it's completely unfair to rag on these books without reading them, but I just can't shake the feeling that they sound terribly dull. Am I wrong? Has anyone out there actually read them? Please comment or tweet and tell me what they're like. I want to learn without reading, and I need y'all to help.

The Case of the Missing Novel: James M. Cain’s Lost Novel Finally Surfaces After 35 Years

Oh dear, I do love James M. Cain. And I'm pretty fond of Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime. Here's a story from September, when Ardai released a previously unpublished Cain novel—The Cocktail Waitress.

At the end of chapter two of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—published in 1934, the same year the Hays Code sanitized Hollywood—a drifter takes a job at a gas station and sees the owner’s wife for the first time. The two find themselves alone for a few minutes. He kisses her, and she begs him—“Bite me! Bite me!”

“I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.” What took the Twilight saga 1,700 pages, Cain got to in eleven.

A failed opera singer turned journalist, Cain became infamous for novels like Postman, Double Indemnity and Serenade, where raw lust compels ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes. By 1950, his best work was behind him, and he spent the next three decades sliding into obscurity. He died in 1977, so alone that he bequeathed his estate to his landlady.