Books to Die For Read online

  I came back to the book twenty years later with a feeling of trepidation, having discovered that much of what enthralled me as a teenager (books, music, art, people) had proved, on adult inspection, to be embarrassingly disappointing. Hangover Square was one of the few exceptions: quite simply, a magnificent piece of British noir.

  Laura Wilson’s acclaimed and award-winning crime novels have won her many fans. The first novel in her DI Stratton series, Stratton’s War, won the CWA Ellis Peters Award for Best Historical Mystery. Her fifth novel, The Lover, won the Prix du Polar European, and two of her books have been short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger. Her most recent novel, A Willing Victim, is published by Quercus, and she is the Guardian’s crime-fiction reviewer. Visit her online at www.laura-wilson.co.uk.

  Love’s Lovely Counterfeit

  by James M. Cain (1942)

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  * * *

  One of a trio of writers, alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, credited with creating the hard-boiled novel, James M. Cain (1892–1977) first worked as a journalist before establishing his reputation as an author. Early novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Mildred Pierce (1941), and Double Indemnity (1943, but originally published in serial form in Liberty Magazine in 1936) were notable for their spare prose, authentic dialogue, and dubious morality—the latter, presumably, prompting Raymond Chandler to dismiss Cain as “a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” A long-lost manuscript of Cain’s, The Cocktail Waitress, was published in 2012 by Hard Case Crime.

  * * *

  All journalists know that some stories are just too good to check out. A reliable source recently told me that the film Miller’s Crossing drew its character names from the criminally obscure James M. Cain novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. I had always heard that this atypical gangster film, made by Joel and Ethan Coen, was based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and Red Harvest, but I was happy to run with this new information. Eventually, I ran back to the book, a longtime favorite, and checked it out.

  Alas, my informant was wrong, although Love’s plot and setting do seem to be an influence on the Coens. There is a Caspar in both works, but the roles don’t quite align. And where the film had the Dane, the book has the Swede. But the Dane is a sadistic closeted homosexual, while the Swede is a naïve and emotionally cuckolded politician. Like I said, too good to check out. But I’m glad I did because it reminded me to check in with the book I consider one of Cain’s best.

  Not that I’ve read them all. Who has? I’d venture to guess that only Cain’s biographer, Roy Hoopes, and a few hard cases have made their way through the entire body of work—eighteen books by one publisher’s count, with a previously unpublished novel appearing in 2012. (The number is hard to pin down because of the multiple omnibuses of Cain novels and short stories.) Even well-read sorts would be pressed to list more than six of Cain’s titles. Of those, The Postman Always Rings Twice is the undisputed masterpiece. But, as Cain’s first book, it had the advantage of the shock of the new, the shock of the shock. (Two words: Rip me.) Love is more interesting to me because the action is not driven by a ruinously passionate affair. It begins with a small beef, one man’s betrayal of another. The femme fatale doesn’t arrive until the final act and she’s not calculatingly fatale, just a kleptomaniac who scrapes a curb at an inopportune moment.

  Set in a no-name town somewhere in the American Midwest, Love is a book written by someone who knows how things work—pinball machine concessions, bookie joints, political campaigns, the human heart. Cain was a reporter for a couple of Baltimore newspapers, a legacy we share, and he believed in getting the details right, whether it was the insurance business, the look of a first-rate hotel in a second-rate town, or the temperament of the coloratura soprano. Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, among its other virtues, could be used as a guide to setting up your own illegal video poker enterprise.

  Cain, like his female characters, had a weakness for weak men. Ben Grace, the protagonist of Love, is “full of grievances, some of them, such as his resentment [of the nickname] Benny, trivial, some of them, such as his dislike for gunfire, vital.” He wants to displace the boss, but when he succeeds, he’s not much better than the guy he disdained. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He’s so clever that he tricks his adversaries into letting him die. His death echoes one earlier in the book, the murder of a boy who got in over his head, and brings the book quietly full circle. I reread a handful of Cain titles—Postman, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce—but Love’s Lovely Counterfeit is the one that continues to surprise me.

  Laura Lippman, like James M. Cain, is a registered Democrat. She drinks. Visit her online at www.lauralippman.com.

  120, Rue de la Gare

  by Léo Malet (1943)

  CARA BLACK

  * * *

  Léo Malet (1909–96) was a French mystery novelist and poet who was involved with the Surrealist movement in the 1930s, and counted among his friends the artist René Magritte and the writer and poet André Breton. He is best known for his series of novels featuring the pipe-smoking Parisian detective Nestor Burma.

  * * *

  In the 1990s, while attending a writing conference at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera (I was trying to figure out a story, and to decide if it was worth telling), my eyes were riveted by a small paperback lodged on the rack of English editions. It showed a cover with an arresting black-and-white photo, a night scene of a damp and glistening cobbled street. The title read 120, Rue de la Gare by Léo Malet. Like a magnet, the title and photo drew me. Every town, make it every village, in France has a rue de la Gare before the train station, so what could this mean? It had to be in Paris, I thought, intrigued . . .

  Those Pan British editions are long out of print, and I’ve had to hunt on AbeBooks and in the bookstalls on the quai in Paris for the rest, but I now have almost a complete set of Léo Malet. I blame him for starting me on my life of crime. I’ve since made pilgrimages to the “real” 120, rue de la Gare, and have, with my young son, traveled to the park at Montsouris, where Malet set a famous climax in the reservoir. Over the years, I’ve checked out the dark underpasses near Gare d’Austerlitz, and looked for the old streets of the 1940s. I’ve visited the fun fair at Place de la Nation, also used as a crime scene by Malet, and have walked the same narrow streets that Nestor Burma, Malet’s detective, walked.

  Malet’s first novel, 120, Rue de la Gare, introduced me, and the world, to Nestor Burma; to his smart secretary, la Belle Hélène; to Florimond, the often helpful head inspector of the then Suréte; and to Nestor’s famous Fiat Lux detective office near Place des Victoires.

  Nestor Burma, like his creator, is released from a German POW camp in the 1940s, but before Liberation. Nestor returns to an Occupied Paris instead of the one that he left behind in 1939. The German forces are everywhere, and so is crime: petty and grand larceny, acts of revenge, and affairs of the heart gone wrong.

  That’s the setting and milieu in which Nestor is destined to find himself, but on the way to Paris—on a train carrying former prisoners of war—he stretches his legs on the platform at the Lyon train station. 120, Rue de la Gare starts: “We’d arrived in Lyon—Lyon-Perrache to be precise. It was two o’clock by my watch and I had a nasty taste in my mouth.” Nestor Burma has seen a lot of men die in his time, so when a soldier without a name dies on the platform, uttering the final words “120, rue de la Gare,” he’s only mildly interested. If Nestor doesn’t reboard the train, he won’t get back to Paris for several days. His laissez-passez transit papers will expire in a few hours. Faced with a dilemma, Nestor hesitates. Finally, unwilling to be drawn into the murder and lose his chance to return to Paris, he jumps back on the train. It’s only when a colleague meets his death gasping the same phrase that Burma’s interest—and fury—are fully aroused. It’s time to take out his pipe, discover the secret of this morbid address, an
d nail the murderer in one fell swoop. Vowing to find out more when he gets to Paris, we’re off!

  I was hooked from the first page. I felt the touch of the cracked leather train seats, and saw the weary POWs returning home sharing mégots, or cigarette butts. I heard the blaring of the train whistle, the clacking of the wheels on the tracks, and felt the quiet undercurrent of desperation of an Occupied France.

  To me, 120, Rue de la Gare reads contemporarily in a way that I’ve tried to analyze and have now given up on. Perhaps it’s the way Malet paints a time of hardship with universal relevance from the perspective of a wisecracking detective. The pace moves quickly, and the hunt is on from the first page of the novel, but it is suffused with a psychological depth and Burma’s wry, ironic take on human nature: the frailty of people, the nature of loss, and the road to redemption all passed off with a Gallic shrug.

  • • •

  Léo Malet, creator of the Nestor Burma series—le détective de choc—wrote 120, Rue de la Gare in the 1940s. Formerly an anarchist, a sometime cabaret singer in Montmartre, part of the Surrealist movement in the 1930s in Paris, a poet and a smoker, his books live on in France today and are almost more popular than those of Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. (As with Maigret, several TV versions of the Burma mysteries emerged over the years.) While Nestor Burma might not be as well known in the rest of the world as Maigret, in France Malet continues to reach new generations of readers through the band dessinée graphic novels of his work. Jacques Tardi, the well-known French artist, has illustrated more than twenty-eight of Malet’s novels, and every French bookstore, large or small, carries Tardi’s versions. Throughout, Nestor leads us through the arrondissements of Paris in his investigations, so that they become characters in the novels—as does Paris itself, but a Paris from another time, a lost era.

  Sadly, Malet never completed his planned great cycle of detective stories, Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris (“The New Mysteries of Paris,” a deliberate echo of Eugene Sue’s nineteenth-century Mysteries of Paris), which was to include a novel set in each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris. He managed fifteen, but then gave up. After all, he said, Paris had changed . . .

  The Paris through which Malet takes us has a real sense of place, and the truculence of his detective mouthpiece asserts an aggressively French identity. French crime fiction had come under the sway of the American hard-boiled school, but Malet gave it an ironic energy and a distinctly French voice. Burma is caustic, outspoken, and derisive, but behind the murder, mystery, and corruption we sense a real heart in the détective de choc.

  PS: Thank you, Léo Malet, and to Nestor, for my life of crime.

  Born in Chicago, Illinois, Cara Black is the acclaimed author of the Aimée Leduc series of mystery novels, of which the most recent is Murder at the Lanterne Rouge. Her next book, Murder Below Montparnasse, will be published in March 2013. She lives in San Francisco. Visit her online at www.carablack.com.

  The Moving Toyshop

  by Edmund Crispin (1946)

  RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS

  * * *

  Edmund Crispin was the nom de plume of Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921–78), an Oxford graduate who first came to the public’s attention as a composer, most notably with An Oxford Requiem (first performed in 1951) and a number of scores for Carry On films, including the original Carry On theme. Montgomery took the pseudonym Edmund Crispin from a Michael Innes novel, writing nine novels that featured Gervase Fen, a professor of English at a fictional Oxford college. He published eight novels from 1944 to 1952, but personal circumstances meant that he would publish only one more novel, The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), and a collection of short stories before his death in 1978. A further collection of stories, Fen Country, was published posthumously in 1979.

  * * *

  There are innumerable serious crime novels that I admire enormously, but I hate the snobbery of those who think a book is somehow diminished if it makes you laugh. So here’s my small tribute to Bruce Montgomery, who wrote as Edmund Crispin. He died too young, but he left us some delicious confections.

  I first read Crispin’s novels in my early teens as I was cutting my criminal teeth on Golden Age detectives. I devoured them all: Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and lots more. I even developed an affection for the stolid Freeman Wills Crofts, although taking an interest in railway timetables did not come easily to me. But while I enjoyed and admired all these authors, I fell completely in love first with Michael Innes, and then with Edmund Crispin, because they wrote beautifully and made me laugh.

  As a part of my reading diet, my mother had fed me all sorts of literate nonsense. I could not get enough of the likes of Stephen Leacock, James Thurber, and P. G. Wodehouse. And having been brought up in an academic world, I adored learning that was lightly worn, and the ridiculing of universities and pompous dons. Michael Innes offered me the magic combination of crime and fun, but there was a mad joie d’esprit about Crispin that enchanted me: truly, nothing was sacred. Much later I would write the biography of Victor Gollancz, the left-wing activist and publisher who took his politics deadly seriously. Crispin could not resist poking fun at him in The Moving Toyshop, his third novel and the one that, with difficulty, I’ve selected as my favorite. Which fork in the road should the driver take? “Let’s go left,” Cadogan suggests, in the course of the novel. “After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.”

  The Moving Toyshop is convoluted, preposterous, and ingenious, and a worthy tribute to Dickson Carr, whose locked-room mysteries Crispin admired. But it is not for his plots that I love Crispin, but for the wit, intelligence, gaiety, and decency that informed his writing. The novel is dedicated to his friend Philip Larkin, possibly because Crispin makes fun of poets throughout. While—as always—the sleuth is Professor Gervais Fen, an Oxford professor of English, on this occasion the central character is a poet, Richard Cadogan.

  Explaining to a young woman why poets do not “look like anything in particular,” Cadogan gives some examples. “Wordsworth resembled a horse with powerful convictions; Chesterton was wholly Falstaffian; Whitman was as strong and hairy as a gold rush prospector.” Any sort of man could be a poet, he assured her: “You can be as conceited as Wordsworth or as modest as Hardy; as rich as Byron or as poor as Francis Thompson; as religious as Cowper or as pagan as Carew. It doesn’t matter what you believe; Shelley believed every lunatic idea under the sun. Keats was certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections.”

  There’s a wonderful pithiness about Crispin’s descriptions. Cadogan, for instance, “was lean, with sharp features, supercilious eyebrows, and hard dark eyes. This Calvinistic appearance belied him, for he was as a matter-of-fact a friendly, unexacting, romantic person.” The police “were just horribly kind, the way you are to people who haven’t got long to live.”

  I love the choice of words that no one else would think to use. Fen had “an extraordinary hat” and drove a red “extremely small, vociferous, and battered sports car.” On entering Fen’s college, St. Christopher’s, Cadogan saw “undergraduates staring at the cluttered notice-boards, which gave evidence of much disordered cultural activity. On the right was the porter’s lodge, with a sort of open window where the porter leaned, like a princess enchanted within some medieval fortalice.”

  And which of us has not come across something as frightful as the Mace and Sceptre?—“a large and quite hideous hotel which stands in the very center of Oxford and which embodies, without apparent shame, almost every architectural style devised since the times of primitive man. Against this initial disadvantage it struggles nobly to create an atmosphere of homeliness and comfort. The bar is a fine example of Strawberry Hill Gothic.”

  In church, “The President of the college, isolated like a germ in his private pew, was feeling disgruntled.” The girl Cadogan and Fen were pursuing was “among the altos, hooting morosely like ships in
a channel fog—which is the way of altos the world over.”

  Michael Innes’s characters occasionally played games of such learning and obscurity as to make the reader feel small. But there is no cultural snobbery with Crispin’s characters. I was much taken by Fen’s game, “Detestable Characters in Fiction.” Each has five seconds to think of a character, both players must agree on the selection, if you miss your turn three times you lose, and the characters must have been intended to be sympathetic.

  “Ready, steady, go,” said Fen.

  “Those awful gabblers, Beatrice and Benedick.”

  “Yes. Lady Chatterley and that gamekeeper fellow.”

  “Yes. Britomart in The Faerie Queene.”

  “Yes. Almost everyone in Dostoevsky.”

  “Yes. Er—er—”

  “Got you!” said Fen triumphantly. “You miss your turn. Those vulgar little man-hunting minxes in Pride and Prejudice.”

  Locked in a cupboard, they play “Unreadable Books,” and, to my joy, include Ulysses.

  Along with the comedy and the adventure, there is great humanity. Cadogan is outraged that some unpleasant people regard a particular death as “euthanasia . . . and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness.” When a bad guy fires a shot, “that wanton useless act roused in Fen something which was neither heroism, nor sentimentality, nor righteous indignation, nor even instinctive revulsion . . . it was a kind of passionless sense of justice and of proportion, a deeply rooted objection to waste.”