Archive for April 17th, 2009

The best Noir crime books-04

Posted in Writing on 04/17/2009 10:24 pm by Simon

Cold Caller by Jason Starr (No Exit, 1997)

 ’On most days, I wouldn’t have said anything. Like the typical New Yorker, I’d have given her a couple of dirty looks, maybe grunted a little, and minded my own business.’

It’s a corporate crime chiller about ex-advertising executive, Bill Moss, who’s slumming it in a telesales job but will do *anything* to get back on the career ladder.

I bought it just cause of the blurb – I was working in telesales – and was rewarded with my introduction to that distinctive noir universe of long shadows and seedy rooms, inhabited by hapless, trapped characters doomed by their desires – the dark side of the American dream.  

The book is narrated in first person in a flat, uninflected style that leads you straight into Bill’s flat, uninflected mind. Desperate to maintain his yuppie lifestyle, poor Bill discovers that some days, the office really can be murder, but by the time he’s on that excruciating slide to hell you are right there riding down with him – all the way to one of the best (and most cruelly ironic) endings ever.  

This book blew me away when I first read it – it was a revelation to discover that writing could be so simple, strong and direct, there to do nothing but tell the story. And Moss is a great tragic sordid hero – one whose time, now that the credit crunch is really biting, has come again.

 

The best Noir crime books-03

Posted in Writing on 04/17/2009 10:21 pm by Simon

 
 

 

‘As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony.’


Roy Dillon, a charming young man, is a dedicated ’short con’ artist. His lover Moira wants them to work the ‘long con’ together; but Roy’s mother, the poisonous Lily, who works a horse racing scam for gangster Bobo Justus, wants her out of the way.

Thompson wrote flashier crime books, such as the Getaway, but I reckon this is his best, and it’s certainly the best book ever written about con-artists. It reveals not just the details of their schemes but their twisted pathology and alienation: these characters might be bound by love and blood but they just can’t trust each other, and their antagonisms have murderous and, well, ‘Oedipal’ consequences.

This is  more than just an acute chronicle of the low life; it feels as if these three people live and breath, and you can’t help but be drawn into their twilight world.

And it’s another book that made a great film.