It’s tough to talk about detective novels without talking about plots and thereby giving away the ending. However, I really enjoy these books. Stories focusing on the gritty or noir side of crime are especially engaging – the language, the locations, the atmosphere, and the unpredictable storylines combine to make books to curl up with on a winter’s night. Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Red Harvest are three such books.
Double Indemnity by James Cain. Like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity is stylized and atmospheric. Both novels feature snappy dialogue and interesting characters with distinctive personalities. In Double Indemnity, Walter Huff is an insurance salesman who wants a little something extra in his life, so he conspires with a psychopath to kill her husband, after selling him a life insurance policy. Walter and Phyllis (the psychopath) plan to split the money from the life insurance policy – double indemnity for an accident. In this case, the accident is an “unlikely” fall from a moving train.
Phyllis is quite a woman … sultry when she needs to be, but downright cold and calculating at the core. She manipulates Walter to perfection, getting him to help her dispose of her wealthy husband. And we find out that she has some other skeletons in her closet. Walter is a bit of an interesting guy – he is obsessed with Phyllis (and the money and excitement) at first, but then his attention and affections shift to the murdered man’s daughter. He seems to be driven by something, though it’s not really clear what.
The film version with Barbara Stanwick and Fred MacMurray is snappier and more noir-ish, I think. The movie dialogue is so distinctive that I was a little disappointed that the book was a little less stylized. On the other hand, the film seemed a little over-the-top at times, so the book felt a bit more real. Both are great fun and provide an entertaining break from real life!
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. What a fun book. The movie with Humphrey Bogart was quite true to the book and I could hear his voice in my head as I read. Sam Spade, the gritty private detective deals with international criminals, self-serving thieves, and a complex plot that references Constantinople, Hong Kong and several other exotic locals – all in search of a certain black bird. The story focuses on four men and one woman who are all on the trail of the falcon while trying to one-up each other and come away with millions of dollars.
All a bit sleazy, the gang of thieves ensnares Spade and his partner, Miles Archer, who pays a high price for being taken in by the lovely and dangerous lady crook, who uses feminine wiles on, well, most everyone in one way or another. Spade is such a great character – I wish I could read people and situations as well. Only once does he slip up and is temporarily taken out by drugged whiskey. He manages, for the most part, to stay one step ahead even while he’s trying to figure it all out. Lots of twists and turns, though if you’ve seen the movie, you’re a little spoiled. It’s ok, though, because it’s a fun ride to familiar ground.
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. This was a new story for me, unlike The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. The writing was straight-forward but descriptive, with a bit of the banter often found in noir narratives. This is an interesting story, despite the massive body count (24 dead over the course of a couple hundred pages). It starts out with a hard-boiled private detective who goes to a town to find that the guy who hired him has been killed. Although he seems to wrap up that case pretty quickly, he becomes involved in an old man’s plan to clean up the town from rampant corruption. At this point, it starts to be challenging to figure out who is aligned with whom.
The factions of criminals and the scope of criminal activity pits everyone against everyone and many are caught in the cross-fire. The main character (Ops or Operations from Continental Detective Agency) is reminiscent of Sam Spade, though Ops came first! He is world-weary, cynical, distrustful and tends to rely on his gut and street smarts to lead him through a chaotic cast of characters. Just when it seems he has it figured out, we find that he was wrong about something from earlier in the book!
What I enjoyed about this story was that while Ops kept himself somewhat removed from the goings on, eventually he became a part of the plot. He no longer watched from the sidelines, but was in the middle of things and actually directing the action at many points. I wanted to believe in him when things went wrong, but there was nagging doubt. I’m not sure I felt like I knew or liked Ops – he was often a jerk to people. It was like a movie or TV show where I yell at the screen but the characters don’t listen and end up where they shouldn’t be.
The story provoked interesting questions: how far would you go to clean up a town … to get rid of the corrupt officials … to get information … to win? In some ways it reminded me of the movie The Untouchables when Eliot Ness says that he has broken every law he had sworn to uphold … and he was ok with that. There is an element of that in this story. Ops had to ask himself how far he would go and who he was willing to rat out and whether he was prepared to see it through. The town in the story is technically Personville but everyone called it Poisonville. Pretty much says it all. It was a somewhat different take on the hard-boiled detective motif and in some ways is weaker than Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, but looking at some of the underlying aspects of the story, there are compelling lines of thought that added something special.
