Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Strangers on a train, Patricia Highsmith, 1950

The train tore along with an angry, irregular rythmn

Guy is good egg; a talented young architect on the up – the only flaw in his life is his vicious estranged wife. On a train journey he meets decadent mother’s boy Bruno, who impulsively plans the perfect double murder – he’ll knock off Guy’s wife, if Guy takes out his father. Without apprarent motive, they’re bound to get away with it…

This was the first and maybe the best of a long list of psychological thrillers. Instead of the traditional antagonist/protagonist Highsmith gives us two men locked in a destructive bond. The strange relationship that develops between Guy and Bruno is like an illicit gay affair; they are said to be joined ‘closer than brotherhood’. Bruno says he loves Guy but after he kills Guy’s wife insists that Guy honour his half of a bargain that was never made – then blackmails the man until he cracks. Guy can never quite break away from Bruno’s grip; in one sequence he even saves Bruno from drowning. Cornered, forced into murder and about to be caught, Guy can still describes Bruno as ‘his own cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.’

As in many of Highsmith’s books, the interest is in the perverse psychology of the characters. Her novels are always astute, well written and twisted. Graham Greene called her a ‘poet of apprehension’.

Hitchcock filmed this one, of course, and though it’s a decent film he neutered its perversity by having Guy refuse to kill anyone. Shame.

Deliverance, James Dickey (1970)

Now let’s you just drop them pants.

Alright, that’s not the first line, but it’s the one everyone knows, made famous by the film version. Indeed, that film is so well known it seems to have rather obscured the book, which is a shame, as it’s really a great piece of Hemingwayish, boys-own-adventure kind of writing.

Dickey, a poet, brings an exquisite sensibility to his story of four guys on a wilderness canoeing trip who have to fight for their lives after tangling with some horny hillbillies. The narrator seems half in love with Lewis, the survivalist who’s leading the expedition, but he has to take over when Lewis is injured, and it becomes a macho tale of city man discovering his hunter-killer side.

It’s all kept brilliantly simple – the whole thing takes place in a couple of days and there are only a dozen or so scenes. There’s something of ‘Heart of Darkness’ about it – both in subject – a river trip into the wilderness – and style – everything is described with hallucinatory clarity; a personal favourite is a passage on the narrator’s thoughts as he lays in ambush with a bow and arrow that goes on for ten pages.

I guess it isn’t very noir, but I would contend that it is certainly crime, and one of the lost classics of the genre. Shame Dickey didn’t write anything else that comes close to its freakish brilliance; after it, he got waylaid by poetry and booze.

The Vanishing, Tim Krabbe (1984)

Steady as spaceships, the cabins full of tourists moved south over the long, broad road.

The Vanishing is a short sharp shock of a novel with a nightmarish ending. Rex Hofman is on holiday with his fiance Saskia, when she simply disappears. He can’t understand it, and years later he’s still restlessly looking for her – then a man called Lemorne calls, claiming to be her abductor. He offers a Faustian pact – you’ll find out what happened to her if you let me you do the same thing to you…

It’s very simple, split basically into four parts – the vanishing, Rex years later, a flashback that shows you Lemorne’s life up till he kidnapped Saskia, then what happens when the two men meet.

This is a gothic tragedy, full of twisted psychology, but it all seems horribly credible, and banal details are built up to make the horror seem real – great, for example, that Saskia disappears at the most mundane location, a petrol station.

And that ending still gives me shivers. Best not leave it in the bedroom – one of those books to keep in the fridge. And if you’re going to watch the film version, seek out the Dutch one from the 80s, not the terrible Hollywood remake.

Miami Blues by Charles Willeford (1984)

Frederick J. Frenger, Jr, a blithe psychopath from California, asked the flight attendant in first class for another glass of champagne and some writing materials.

Willeford wrote pulp noir books throughout an eventful life (including time as a hobo and a tank commander) but he didn’t make his rep till he was in his Sixties, with four books about put-upon cop with bad teeth, Hoke Moseley. They’re not police procedurals though, more like westerns. This was the first.  

Freddie in ‘Miami Blues’ is one of fiction’s great outlaws, a psycho fresh from prison who flies into Miami with no idea but to go on a spree till he’s caught again. In chapter one he kills a Hare Krishna for hassling him at the airport, and this pointless murder sets Hoke on his trail – well kind of… the plot meanders all over the place. But it’s great fun to follow these two who are haphazardly locked together – the cop who’s hemmed in by the rules and the psycho who doesn’t have any.

The deadly, if oddly guileless, Freddie, his hick girlfriend Susan, and the unlucky Hoke are all outsiders, and make great guides to the city. Willeford has a killer way with detail and absurdity, and an anthropologist’s acute eye for Miami’s urban tribes, be they Cuban refugees or genteel retirees.

Lots of crime fiction gets set in Miami – maybe cause it’s so tacky and over-the-top – but for my money this is the best. Willeford deserves his increasing fame, shame he’s dead. Still, nice to see a guy doing his best work in his Sixties, means there’s hope for us all.

Get Carter by Ted Lewis (1965)

‘The rain rained. It hadn’t stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you’re doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows.’

Jack Carter, hitman for a gang of London pornographers, goes home to Doncaster for his brother’s funeral. Mild Frank died drunk in a car crash – but Frank didn’t drink. Suspicious Jack starts poking around, and the local firms don’t like that at all…

The noir private eye genre is peculiarly American – this is the only British attempt at it that is any good that I can think of. Making the ‘detective’ a gangster outside the law was a masterstroke, as it’s at once an investigation and a revenge thriller that comes across like a western. As in its American models, sense of place is vitally important; the whole thing takes place in pool halls, smoky pubs and grimy back to backs that are described so vividly you feel the need to shower while you read – it’s grim up north.

this is not the care-free side of the swinging sixties – the characters are teenage prostitutes, bouncers, council tenants; the gangsters are fighting over a slot machine empire; the plot hinges around a porn film featuring Frank’s daughter called ‘Schoolgirl Wanks’. The book has lost none of its power to shock with laconic descriptions of causal violence and poverty.

The best British noir, bar none. And made into the best British noir film too, of course; only in the book, Carter doesn’t die at the end, and Lewis wrote a couple of sequels set in London.