Gustav Hasford: crime novelist, war chronicler and book thief
Part 1
I have a weakness for writers who, having overcome odds of one kind or another, produce something worthwhile, even if just a single novel. The end result might even be flawed, but, then, these days I’ve become increasingly less interested in perfection, while, on the other hand, having developed a wild-eyed aversion to anyone touted as the latest “great writer.” I’ve got a particular fondness for writers who can’t help but bite the hand that feeds them, or who impulsively criticise the spectacle of everyday life. It hardly matters how effective they are, so long as they go at it with a certain flair. The infamous Gustav Hasford fits this bill perfectly. Not only did he take on, and get the better of, one of the great megalomaniac directors in modern cinema history, but he even managed to write two excellent novels, at least one of which was a crime novel, and the other a Vietnam War novel.
Hasford is, of course, best known for the latter book, entitled The Short-Timers, which Stanley Kubrick would turn into the film Full Metal Jacket. When it was published in 1979, Newsweek called the novel "The best work of fiction about the Vietnam War." Though Hasford, Kubrick and fellow-Vietnam war writer Michael Herr would share screenwriting credits, it was basically Hasford’s script. As well as The Short-Timers, Hasford also wrote A Gypsy Good Time (1992), a Southern California crime novel which is thankfully a far cry from Raymond Chandler. The product of a disturbed but engaging intelligence, it remains, for me, an unforgettable book, which, despite its flaws, I instantly took to. In fact, it was that book, which I read some ten to twelve years ago, that prompted me to look into Hasford’s life. What I found was not only a writer of considerable talent- and a crime writer at that (even Short-Timers, since it’s about one of the great state crimes of the twentieth century, qualifies, as far as I’m concerned, as a crime novel)- but a harmless, small-time criminal persecuted far beyond the call of duty.
A Gypsy Good Time centres on Dowdy Lewis, a man who deals in rare books, consumes large amounts of alcohol and is haunted by memories of a war which, for some ten years, divided America. Books, alcohol, Vietnam: these are subjects that obsessed Hasford, a man who could not help but wear his heart on his sleeve. Have a look at the following quotes with their world-weary romantic dissection of the modern condition:
“In California people toss the word love around like a frissbee. You lose your faith in love, I guess. You meet somebody, you think- she’s so nice. But you’ve been there before. You know that in the end she’ll turn out to be just another neurotic man hater, gold digger, or emotional black hole. Loving somebody who can’t love you back is like pouring yourself into a hole. So after a while, you figure, why get your hopes up? Why not cut yourself some slack? You owe it to yourself. Why not save yourself the wear and tear?”
“All of the regulars are in the bar tonight, the walking wounded, moaners, bleeders, and nonstop talkers, the consumptives, syphilitics, and nickel-and-dime underworld slime, the drifters and weepers and hawker of church-bell scrapings and pieces of the one true cross (imported from Taiwan), the chain smokers and chronic masturbators, the tweakers, the bikers, the loan sharks and costumed extras from The Night of the Living Dead, the hookers and the hitters, the hungry, the hurting, the dying and the lying and the dry-eyed crying. Half of these people look like they just came back from the moon, and all of them are sworn witnesses for the prosecution on the charge that Earth serves as Hell for some other planet.”
Has anyone, save Nathaniel West or Myron Brinig (Flicker of an Eyelid), penned a more venomous analysis of Hollywood
“Hollywood is still the cannibal’s kiss. Hollywood is the town where your chips get cashed, and your parking stub is validated for every single day remaining in your life, or your exit visa gets stamped real hard and in black....In Hollywood, life is hard, then it turns into television and you die for thirteen weeks. My father used to deal with these movie people. Movie people lie when they talk in their sleep. Movie people swim around Catalina Island with a knife and a fork, hoping to meet a shark. In Hollywood, people walk up and steal the food right off your plate. Movie people will suck the marrow out of your bones for a penny, then they give you a bad check for the penny. Then they dig up your dead grandmother and sell her for a souvenir.”
But The Short-Timers is the book for which Hasford will be best remembered. As far as I’m concerned, it ranks up there with Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories when it comes to portraying the horrors and insanity of war. It was also, as I think I said in my book Neon Noir, the short of book that would influence crime fiction during the 1980s, and writers such as James Crumley, Kent Anderson, and George Pelecanos. For The Short-Timers is, with the possible exception of Dog Soldiers and Cutter’s Way, the darkest Vietnam tale of them all. It begins in 1968:
“Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is. Nobody asks why we’re smiling because nobody wants to know. The ugly that civilians choose to see in war focuses on spilled guts. To see human beings clearly, that is ugly. To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere. Ugly is the face of Victor Charlie, the shapeless black face of death touching each of your brothers with the clean stroke of justice.”
After Full Metal Jacket’s release in 1987, Hasford, Kubrick and Herr were, not surprisingly, nominated for the best screenplay adaptation of 1987 by the Writers Guild of America and a week later they were nominated for the Academy. Despite the film’s notoriety, and the director’s reputation, it would be Full Metal Jacket’s only Academy Award nomination. Though Hasford suddenly became a celebrity, he would within a matter of months be arrested and sent to prison for harbouring anything from 800 to ten thousand library books in a rental locker in San Luis Obispo, California.
Hasford had never hid the fact that he had over 10,000 volumes in the rental locker. He called it his “research library.” For this was a man who not only loved books, but had various projects in mind, including a biography of Ambrose Bierce. He loved Bierce, particularly his story “Chickamauga.” He also planned a mutli-volumed saga on the Civil War, and books on Twain, Van Gogh, Lincoln, and the Alamo. He was also planning a sequel to his novel The Phantom Blooper, a series of crime novels, and a novel about an American woman president, and which, when it appeared, really did live up to its name, blooping in the hands of any reader unfortunate enough to read it.
Hasford had grown up in the South where he began writing at an early age. While still a high-school student in backwoods Alabama, he published a nationally distributed magazine for writers called Freelance. At 18, to escape the South and his mother, who, even at his funeral, maintained that she had never really understood her son, he joined the Marines where he gained the experience that would go into “Shorty”, as he called his Vietnam novel. As anyone who has read the book knows, Hasford manages to convey in that book a burning antipathy for the military hierarchy and power as such. When he finally returned from Vietnam, he moved up and down the West Coast taking one dead-end job after another, all the while writing and rewriting the book that would change his life. With his anarchist leanings, Gustav felt out of place in America, claiming to like only its used book stores and Sizzlers, a chain of formica infested coffee shops. His long term plan was to move permanently to Australia.
Hasford had already written a film script for The Short-Timers when Kubrick decided to buy into the project. But it wasn’t Kubrick who would approach the writer. Hasford was living in his car when a businessman from Munich appeared out of nowhere, and with seemingly no connection to the movie world, optioned the screen rights to the book. Of course, the businessman was secretly working for Kubrick. Realising he stood to make a substantial amount of money on the royalties to world-wide literary rights alone, not to mention the prestige from being involved with Kubrick, Hasford signed on. He celebrated the occasion by buying a one-way ticket to Australia.
Hasford eventually met Kubrick in London, and, having done so, returned to California in May, 1983, moving into a run down motel in San Louis Obispo so he could be near his books. It was at this time that Hasford fell in love. Like every other venture in his life, it would prove to be a messy experience. For the woman in question did not quite share Hasford’s feelings. This did not stop him from writing long letters to her and showering her with gifts. Around this time he befriended Sam, a small-time con-man who was so enamoured with Hasford’s prowess as a writer that he offered to go to England to sort out a recalcitrant Kubrick once and for all. Hasford and Sam traded books and, as it would turn out, competed for the same woman. In the meantime, fame had hit Hasford with a vengeance; he now had to decide whether he should purchase a Rolls Royce or go on welfare. He sensed that fame might ruin him as a writer.
Hasford’s relationship with Kubrick turning prickly. At first, Hasford was over awed by the director, and taken in by his notoriety. He compared Kubrick to Moses and spoke of himself as the burning bush. As for Kubrick, he was already renown for the cavalier manner in which he treated writers, whether Jim Thompson, Calder Willingham or Terry Southern. He would court them, dangle substantial amounts of money before them, squeeze them for what he could get, before throwing them away. If the writer was lucky, they received an “additional dialogue” credit, but, more often than not, they failed to get any credit at all. This is no doubt how he envisioned treating Hasford, who, as no one’s idiot, quickly realised what was happening. Fortunately, Hasford was obsessive enough to fight Kubrick every inch of the way. This dynamic first surfaced when Hasford saw that Kubrick had a different conception of the book’s narrative. While the director wanted a satisfactory ending, i.e., something that wouldn’t be too upsetting for audiences, Hasford was forced to point out that the war did not end all that satisfactorily, so anything else would be a lie. While Kubrick threatened to abandon the project, Hasford countered by refusing to sign his contract. He was adamant that, if this was his screenplay, he was going to receive credit for it. And, as long as he was on the project, the film would have to remain faithful to his book.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Monday, September 18, 2006
A Thin Line Between Poetry and Pulp: David Goodis’s Short Stories
I've been reading Goodis for over forty years but have only come across a handful of his short stories. This even though a few years ago I did manage to get through a French collection, only to conclude that it was a poor substitute for the original. Now, thanks to Serpent’s Tail, a volume of Goodis’s short fiction, Black Friday and Selected Stories, is finally available. Whether it’s a representative collection, only someone familiar with a good deal of Goodis’s short fiction would be able to say. After all, using various noms des plumes, Goodis wrote hundreds of stories, ranging from the ridiculous- his aviation adventure stories- to the sublime.
This collection concentrates on a sixteen year period, beginning in 1942, the year Goodis arrived in Hollywood, and ending with those published in 1958, when Goodis’s most important work had seen the light of day. However, Goodis had been publishing short fiction as far back as 1935, some four years before his first novel, Retreat to Oblivion, would see the light of day. Moreover, all the stories in this collection fall under the category, quite intentionally, of crime fiction, which leaves aside all those adventure stories written by Goodis over the years. Understandably, the stories collected here vary; but, saying that, one need consider the periodicals in which they appeared- Ten Story Mystery Magazine, New Detective, Manhunt, with only “The Road to Tarim,” published in Colliers, aimed at a more up-market readership. Likewise, the majority of these stories appeared while, or after, Goodis was a Hollywood screenwriter or back in Philadelphia carving out a career as a writer of paperback originals.
One suspects that it wasn’t simply for monetary gain that prompted Goodis to continue contributing to the pulps through the 1950s, but because he was also interested in maintaining his persona as a writer of pulp fiction, and the romantic image he held regarding that role. Embracing that guise, rather than aspiring to a more high-brow literary tradition, is, in part, what makes Goodis’s writing interesting and allows his writing to cut so close to the bone, create a grand gesture genre that skirts the boundaries of cliché, and openly celebrates marginality, obsession and human frailty. It’s what makes him unique and, ultimately, a model for the likes of Charyn, Pelecanos (who once told me one of his ambitions was to remake The Burglar) and Sallis. But, of course, these modernists are unable to write from the same perspective as Goodis, much less recapture the urban anxieties of the era. Not only have the night clubs, boxing arenas, strip joints and city spaces where those on the margins once congregated, disappeared, replaced by car parks, office buildings and strip malls, but so has a particular way of writing about the those places and people.
Of the the twelve stories here, five are extremely good, while the others are never less than interesting. One, “The Professional Man” (which Steven Soderbergh adapted in the Fallen Angels TV series), might be as good as anything Goodis ever wrote, while “Never Too Old to Burn” (1949), “Blue Sweetheart” (1953), “Black Pudding” (1953), “The Plunge” (1958), concerning desperation and revenge, are not far behind. All five stories were published, if not written, while Goodis was living in Philadelphia, long after his divorce from Elaine Astor, and his disillusionment with Hollywood. In fact, in “Blue Sweetheart,” published in 1953, the period the protagonist has spent in San Quentin corresponds to the time Goodis spent in Hollywood. Moreover, it’s only after his divorce and escape from Hollywood that Goodis’s writing was to reach its fruition, attaining the level of cynicism, obsessiveness and fatalism that we associate with the writer.
These later stories are also the most poetic in the collection. In fact, Goodis is often described as a poet of the gutter or the poet of noir. But do such terms carry any meaning or are they usually deployed for effect? Is poet, in this case, simply a synonym for Goodis’s underlying romanticism? Certainly if poetry is language at its most intense, condensed, rhythmic and meaningful, and the short story is the most condensed form of fiction, then it should follow that the best of Goodis’s short stories should be his most poetic.
Sure enough, “The Professional Man” reads like a prose poem:
“Freddy pressed the button. The blade flicked out. It
glimmered blue-white. He pushed the blade into the
handle and tried the button again. He went on trying
the button and watching the flash of the blade. It was
quiet in the room as the blade went in and out, in and
out. Then from the street there was the sound of a
horn. Herman said, ‘That’s the taxi.’ ...As he moved
towards the girls who stood at the cocktail bar, he could
feel the weight of the knife in the inner pocket of his
jacket. He was looking at Pearl and saying, ‘Come on, let’s
go,’ and as he said it, the blade seemed to come out of
the knife and slice into his own flesh.”
Appearing in Manhunt in 1953, the year in which Moon in the Gutter and The Burglar were published, “The Professional Man” is told in an exacting, hallucinatory style, moving as if time was about to stand still. It concerns Freddy, a seemingly mild-mannered elevator operator who moonlights as a tough as nails hitman for a local club owner. The story takes the same line as Richard Stark’s Point Plank. Namely, if organised crime functions as any legitimate business, then its workers will be similarly alienated. But whereas Stark’s Parker wreaks havoc on the world, Freddy destroys himself and those close to him.
What Goodis’s work, as well as that of other pulp noirists, such as Paul Cain, McCoy and Thompson, illustrates is the connection between noir pulp fiction and poetry, for both begin at writing degree zero, creating tension and intensity by condensing the language. While “The Professional Man” has reminds one of Fearing’s narrative poetry (translating into The Big Clock), even the earliest story here, the 1942 “The Dead Last Laugh” contains echoes of the short Kenneth Patchen poem, “State of the Nation.” Whether a poet or someone who merely writes poetically, Goodis was an unrepentant romantic, who was able to convey the poetics of marginality. With only a thin line separating poetry and pulp fiction, Goodis, at his best, was able to move from one to the other with ease. Clearly, this is a subject that merits further investigation.
I've been reading Goodis for over forty years but have only come across a handful of his short stories. This even though a few years ago I did manage to get through a French collection, only to conclude that it was a poor substitute for the original. Now, thanks to Serpent’s Tail, a volume of Goodis’s short fiction, Black Friday and Selected Stories, is finally available. Whether it’s a representative collection, only someone familiar with a good deal of Goodis’s short fiction would be able to say. After all, using various noms des plumes, Goodis wrote hundreds of stories, ranging from the ridiculous- his aviation adventure stories- to the sublime.
This collection concentrates on a sixteen year period, beginning in 1942, the year Goodis arrived in Hollywood, and ending with those published in 1958, when Goodis’s most important work had seen the light of day. However, Goodis had been publishing short fiction as far back as 1935, some four years before his first novel, Retreat to Oblivion, would see the light of day. Moreover, all the stories in this collection fall under the category, quite intentionally, of crime fiction, which leaves aside all those adventure stories written by Goodis over the years. Understandably, the stories collected here vary; but, saying that, one need consider the periodicals in which they appeared- Ten Story Mystery Magazine, New Detective, Manhunt, with only “The Road to Tarim,” published in Colliers, aimed at a more up-market readership. Likewise, the majority of these stories appeared while, or after, Goodis was a Hollywood screenwriter or back in Philadelphia carving out a career as a writer of paperback originals.
One suspects that it wasn’t simply for monetary gain that prompted Goodis to continue contributing to the pulps through the 1950s, but because he was also interested in maintaining his persona as a writer of pulp fiction, and the romantic image he held regarding that role. Embracing that guise, rather than aspiring to a more high-brow literary tradition, is, in part, what makes Goodis’s writing interesting and allows his writing to cut so close to the bone, create a grand gesture genre that skirts the boundaries of cliché, and openly celebrates marginality, obsession and human frailty. It’s what makes him unique and, ultimately, a model for the likes of Charyn, Pelecanos (who once told me one of his ambitions was to remake The Burglar) and Sallis. But, of course, these modernists are unable to write from the same perspective as Goodis, much less recapture the urban anxieties of the era. Not only have the night clubs, boxing arenas, strip joints and city spaces where those on the margins once congregated, disappeared, replaced by car parks, office buildings and strip malls, but so has a particular way of writing about the those places and people.
Of the the twelve stories here, five are extremely good, while the others are never less than interesting. One, “The Professional Man” (which Steven Soderbergh adapted in the Fallen Angels TV series), might be as good as anything Goodis ever wrote, while “Never Too Old to Burn” (1949), “Blue Sweetheart” (1953), “Black Pudding” (1953), “The Plunge” (1958), concerning desperation and revenge, are not far behind. All five stories were published, if not written, while Goodis was living in Philadelphia, long after his divorce from Elaine Astor, and his disillusionment with Hollywood. In fact, in “Blue Sweetheart,” published in 1953, the period the protagonist has spent in San Quentin corresponds to the time Goodis spent in Hollywood. Moreover, it’s only after his divorce and escape from Hollywood that Goodis’s writing was to reach its fruition, attaining the level of cynicism, obsessiveness and fatalism that we associate with the writer.
These later stories are also the most poetic in the collection. In fact, Goodis is often described as a poet of the gutter or the poet of noir. But do such terms carry any meaning or are they usually deployed for effect? Is poet, in this case, simply a synonym for Goodis’s underlying romanticism? Certainly if poetry is language at its most intense, condensed, rhythmic and meaningful, and the short story is the most condensed form of fiction, then it should follow that the best of Goodis’s short stories should be his most poetic.
Sure enough, “The Professional Man” reads like a prose poem:
“Freddy pressed the button. The blade flicked out. It
glimmered blue-white. He pushed the blade into the
handle and tried the button again. He went on trying
the button and watching the flash of the blade. It was
quiet in the room as the blade went in and out, in and
out. Then from the street there was the sound of a
horn. Herman said, ‘That’s the taxi.’ ...As he moved
towards the girls who stood at the cocktail bar, he could
feel the weight of the knife in the inner pocket of his
jacket. He was looking at Pearl and saying, ‘Come on, let’s
go,’ and as he said it, the blade seemed to come out of
the knife and slice into his own flesh.”
Appearing in Manhunt in 1953, the year in which Moon in the Gutter and The Burglar were published, “The Professional Man” is told in an exacting, hallucinatory style, moving as if time was about to stand still. It concerns Freddy, a seemingly mild-mannered elevator operator who moonlights as a tough as nails hitman for a local club owner. The story takes the same line as Richard Stark’s Point Plank. Namely, if organised crime functions as any legitimate business, then its workers will be similarly alienated. But whereas Stark’s Parker wreaks havoc on the world, Freddy destroys himself and those close to him.
What Goodis’s work, as well as that of other pulp noirists, such as Paul Cain, McCoy and Thompson, illustrates is the connection between noir pulp fiction and poetry, for both begin at writing degree zero, creating tension and intensity by condensing the language. While “The Professional Man” has reminds one of Fearing’s narrative poetry (translating into The Big Clock), even the earliest story here, the 1942 “The Dead Last Laugh” contains echoes of the short Kenneth Patchen poem, “State of the Nation.” Whether a poet or someone who merely writes poetically, Goodis was an unrepentant romantic, who was able to convey the poetics of marginality. With only a thin line separating poetry and pulp fiction, Goodis, at his best, was able to move from one to the other with ease. Clearly, this is a subject that merits further investigation.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Inc- Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism was every bit as good as I thought it would be. My only problem with it is her rather freewheeling use of sources that derive from newspaper articles. Call me cynical, but I find it difficult to totally trust articles without knowing more about the background of the journalists who wrote them. Particularly when you think that some might have been written in the heat of the post 9-11 moment. So there were instances when I wondered about the accuracy of her information, or the bias of those supplying the information. Though I was also willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. As one would expect, Terror Inc paints a depressing picture of the world as it exists today, just how endemic terror is, and how intertwined it is with free market capitalism. It also makes clear the extent of the legal- honey, property, acacia gum, the stock market, etc- illegal- drugs, arms, smuggling, money laundering, etc.- and semi-legal sources of Bin Laden’s money and financing of al Qaeda. Of course, Bin Laden is not the only player here. After all, as Napoleoni points out, terror is a $5 trillion a year industry. Reading her book makes one think that Marxists might well be right about capitalism carrying the seed of its own demise. With its creation of shell-states and using the deregulation of capital to their advantage, the terror network, which, like corporate capitalism, overlaps with organised crime, is comprised of some very smart people who seem capable of using and running rings around the moronic ideologues (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) who, for the most part, run America. Talk about noir. There are scores of plots to novels in this book.
By the way, what Petit’s The Passenger is not about is the official version of the Lockerbie disaster. His view is more or less corroborated in Napoleoni’s book. So why was Libya willing to take the fall? To come out of the international cold, helped not only by the compensation they supplied but by the post 9-11 information they gave to the West. I wouldn’t want to spoil the book for anyone but, in answer to a couple enquiries, what’s most important in understanding The Passenger is realise that it takes place within the forty-five seconds it took for the plane fall the sky and hit the ground.
By the way, what Petit’s The Passenger is not about is the official version of the Lockerbie disaster. His view is more or less corroborated in Napoleoni’s book. So why was Libya willing to take the fall? To come out of the international cold, helped not only by the compensation they supplied but by the post 9-11 information they gave to the West. I wouldn’t want to spoil the book for anyone but, in answer to a couple enquiries, what’s most important in understanding The Passenger is realise that it takes place within the forty-five seconds it took for the plane fall the sky and hit the ground.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Reading James Sallis's recent novel Drive, prompted me to post the following review of his previous novel Cypress Grove which, for some reason, never appeared in the magazine for which it was intended.
Exit Lew Griffin, and the cross-cultural transgressions, dark rainy New Orleans nights and trickster-like narratives one associates with that particular protagonist. Enter Turner, a Vietnam vet and ex-Memphis cop, who, while in prison for killing his partner, obtains a degree in psychology, and, on the outside, does a short stretch as a practising therapist. Having seen the worst in people, this jack-of-all hardboiled trades finds himself at the end of the road, metaphorically as well as geographically. It’s only when the sheriff of a nearby small southern town seeks his assistance regarding a murder, that Turner begins to rejoin the world and, in doing so, finds a Capra-like redemption. In other words, as we’ve come to expect from Sallis, it’s a case of investigator, investigate thyself.
Cypress Grove is only slightly less dark and brooding than the Lew Griffin novels, and no less engrossing. As with the Griffin books, it’s the setting, as much as the main character, that creates the tone and pushes the narrative. And it’s the town, rather than Turner’s bucolic refuge, that is the more idealised. Though the sign on its outskirts says “Pop. 1280,” Turner hasn’t wandered into Jim Thompson territory, nor is the sheriff a conniving sociopath, but a compassionate soul all-too-willing to admit that he’s inexperienced when it comes to homicide. Not only are murders a rarity here, but perpetrators are considered neither evil, nor contorted by social conditions, but simply unfortunate victims of circumstance who’ve unknowingly stepped over the edge.
So idealised and engrained in popular culture is this town that it might be a parallel universe, the kind one finds in a Jonathan Carroll novel, in which something is slightly out of kilter. Maybe it’s because this town seems untouched by the Bush’s, Cheney’s and Enron’s of the world. Neither is there a corrupt official is sight, much less any sign of the Klan. Other than the murder, and a bad tempered waitress who comes out of countless films, from Five Easy Pieces to Reservoir Dogs, the most serious crime occurs when a woman half-heartedly wounds her wayward husband. As for Turner, he’s something of an alien invader, arriving to find this world not only recognisable, but more agreeable than he could have imagined. That being the case, the narrative, gliding between past and present, has a dream-like quality, like those B movies about invasions from outer space, prison breakouts and small town paranoia that threaten to subvert one’s expectations, if not the culture, and which Turner stumbles across as he progresses in his investigation. At the same time, who would not want to believe that redemption is possible or that there exists outside mainstream America a town that a stranger can wander into and immediately be accepted? Or is this town just a product of the narrator’s imagination, and the narrative one of those utopian novels written in a time of strife?
Though this seems to be Sallis preparing to move into new territory, one finds the author’s usual array of discrepancies and diversions. In fact, I was, at times, so engrossed in Turner’s observations- “Coffee burps and burbles in the maker, aroma spreading insidiously through the room like an oil spill. I’m fascinated by the fact that the door to the sheriff’s office is locked. One of those weird things in life that seems to be the setup for a punch line you never quite get to.”- and music references that I occasionally lost the thread of a not very complicated plot. But then, when it comes to a Sallis novel, that comes with the territory. Yet the plot gains momentum, taking several turns as Turner is himself turned by it. “[We] want to believe...” says Turner, “that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We’re ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses.” Turner might as well have been talking about the writing process. That we are the product of our history is as true for Turner as it is for Sallis or his readers.
Exit Lew Griffin, and the cross-cultural transgressions, dark rainy New Orleans nights and trickster-like narratives one associates with that particular protagonist. Enter Turner, a Vietnam vet and ex-Memphis cop, who, while in prison for killing his partner, obtains a degree in psychology, and, on the outside, does a short stretch as a practising therapist. Having seen the worst in people, this jack-of-all hardboiled trades finds himself at the end of the road, metaphorically as well as geographically. It’s only when the sheriff of a nearby small southern town seeks his assistance regarding a murder, that Turner begins to rejoin the world and, in doing so, finds a Capra-like redemption. In other words, as we’ve come to expect from Sallis, it’s a case of investigator, investigate thyself.
Cypress Grove is only slightly less dark and brooding than the Lew Griffin novels, and no less engrossing. As with the Griffin books, it’s the setting, as much as the main character, that creates the tone and pushes the narrative. And it’s the town, rather than Turner’s bucolic refuge, that is the more idealised. Though the sign on its outskirts says “Pop. 1280,” Turner hasn’t wandered into Jim Thompson territory, nor is the sheriff a conniving sociopath, but a compassionate soul all-too-willing to admit that he’s inexperienced when it comes to homicide. Not only are murders a rarity here, but perpetrators are considered neither evil, nor contorted by social conditions, but simply unfortunate victims of circumstance who’ve unknowingly stepped over the edge.
So idealised and engrained in popular culture is this town that it might be a parallel universe, the kind one finds in a Jonathan Carroll novel, in which something is slightly out of kilter. Maybe it’s because this town seems untouched by the Bush’s, Cheney’s and Enron’s of the world. Neither is there a corrupt official is sight, much less any sign of the Klan. Other than the murder, and a bad tempered waitress who comes out of countless films, from Five Easy Pieces to Reservoir Dogs, the most serious crime occurs when a woman half-heartedly wounds her wayward husband. As for Turner, he’s something of an alien invader, arriving to find this world not only recognisable, but more agreeable than he could have imagined. That being the case, the narrative, gliding between past and present, has a dream-like quality, like those B movies about invasions from outer space, prison breakouts and small town paranoia that threaten to subvert one’s expectations, if not the culture, and which Turner stumbles across as he progresses in his investigation. At the same time, who would not want to believe that redemption is possible or that there exists outside mainstream America a town that a stranger can wander into and immediately be accepted? Or is this town just a product of the narrator’s imagination, and the narrative one of those utopian novels written in a time of strife?
Though this seems to be Sallis preparing to move into new territory, one finds the author’s usual array of discrepancies and diversions. In fact, I was, at times, so engrossed in Turner’s observations- “Coffee burps and burbles in the maker, aroma spreading insidiously through the room like an oil spill. I’m fascinated by the fact that the door to the sheriff’s office is locked. One of those weird things in life that seems to be the setup for a punch line you never quite get to.”- and music references that I occasionally lost the thread of a not very complicated plot. But then, when it comes to a Sallis novel, that comes with the territory. Yet the plot gains momentum, taking several turns as Turner is himself turned by it. “[We] want to believe...” says Turner, “that our actions come from elevated motives. From principles. When in truth they only derive from what our characters, what our personal and collective histories, dictate. We’re ridden by those histories, the same way voodoo spirits inhabit living bodies, which they call horses.” Turner might as well have been talking about the writing process. That we are the product of our history is as true for Turner as it is for Sallis or his readers.
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