Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

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 Grifters by Jim Thompson (1963)

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

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.

Double Indemnity by James M Cain (1940)

 
‘I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.’

You know how they almost always make shit films out of good books? And just occassionally they make good films out of pretty mediocre books (Jaws and Rosemary’s Baby come to mind).

How often is something both a good book and a good film? Almost never? Nooooo – noir is the exception to that rule - loads of good books crossed over into film really well – just off the top of my head, the Getaway, The Grifters, The Maltese Falcon, the Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, The Third Man… generally when they make a film from a noir book, it’s a good one.

I think it’s cause noir tends to be written in that cool, laconic ‘stay on the surface’ style, where characters are revealed only through what they do and what they say – like in a screenplay. None of that interior monologue stuff that novelists like to write but can’t be filmed. None of the atmospherics. Just head on in there and describe specifics. And it can’t hurt that most of the stories feature snappy dialogue and lots of violence.

Double Indemnity is one of the best films ever, and it’s a great book too, with lots of the aforementioned. Walter Huff is an insurance salesman who gets too close to the wife of a client, Phyliss Nirdlinger (love those crazy names) and together they plan to do her husband in. Oh you’ve heard that before? That’s cause this book’s been ripped off a thousand times, it set off a whole mytheme all by itself. But it’s still never been beat for its description of the paranoid nightmare ride taken by murderous lovers.

‘Double Indemnity’ is when your life insurance pays off double for certain unusual circumstances, like falling off a train. But Huff doesn’t even seem that interested in the money: his motives are simply lust for her, and the desire to put one over on his boss by pulling off the perfect crime.

But with grim inevitability, his plan all goes tits up, and the book becomes the literary equivalent of watching a slow motion train wreck: it’s horrible, but you can’t avert your eyes… 

These are my favourite noir crime books. All of them are brilliant.

Please read them soon…

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins (1972)

‘Jackie Brown at twenty six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’

That is such a great start and it gets better as we hang around, ear-wigging on Eddie Coyle the gun dealer and ‘friends’ such as Dillon the hitman, Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Valantropo the bank robbers, and corrupt cop Dave Foley.

The style is flat and dry and lean and the whole thing is done almost entirely in speech, with most chapters a dialogue between two of these ne’erdowells, who are constantly shooting the shit while they’re wheeling, dealing, cheating and stealing. Higgins doesn’t need to describe his characters – just from the way they talk, you feel you can smell them.

There’s a fantastic bank robbery, a couple of vicious murders, and colourful minor characters such as black panthers and hippies with M16s. Of course, as in any good noir, it all goes tits up, but following these guys down is a gripping ride.

Elmore Leonard learned plenty from this book (he called it the best crime novel ever written), and I reckon Tarrantino did too. Read it, and you’ll be glad you don’t have these guys lives but wondering if you could ever sound that cool. An unjustly obscure crime classic.