Books to Die For Read online

  Can we ever get enough of him? Not likely. Fortunately, there is more to come. And to all the future authors of Holmes novels, plays, and films, a few words of caution: it’s not a matter of what you should or should not do. Try as you might, you cannot kill him. Try if you like, but he’ll survive you and all your descendants as well.

  He can never die.

  Long live Sherlock Holmes.

  Carol O’Connell writes: I was raised to be a painter, earned a degree in fine arts, and then took a wrong turn somewhere. Failing in my ambition to live as a cliché starving artist and die in a Manhattan gutter, I became a novelist and jettisoned the rent-money job after the success of my first book, Mallory’s Oracle, in 1994. I write every day—but never on Facebook. There’s no website or Twitter account, either, and my cell has a text blocker. I agreed to write this piece in exchange for a bottle of wine, and that should fill in the blanks on bad habits.

  The Assassin

  by Liam O’Flaherty (1928)

  DECLAN BURKE

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  Born on Inishmore on the Aran Islands, Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984) fought for the Irish Guards on the Western Front during World War I, where he was wounded and may have suffered shell shock. A committed socialist, O’Flaherty is best known as a literary author in both English and Gaelic, and particularly as a distinguished short-story writer, although he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Informer (1925), a crime novel filmed by John Ford and released in 1935.

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  In a novel it would have been a peaceful Sunday morning, and the assassins’ target not only a government minister but a minister for justice. The assassins would have been reactionary revolutionaries and the minister on his way to mass, and all of them former blood brothers who had fought the world’s biggest empire to a standstill and then split to become bitter enemies during a Civil War in which the minister had ordered the execution of the assassins’ vengeance-seeking comrades, among them the best man at his own wedding.

  Apart from a couple of commas, that’s pretty much how it really happened. On the Sunday morning of July 10, 1927, the then-Irish minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins, was assassinated by anti-Treaty IRA volunteers as a reprisal for O’Higgins’s role in the execution of more than seventy IRA prisoners during the Civil War of 1922–23, among them Rory O’Connor, who had been best man at O’Higgins’s wedding.

  Interesting times, as the Chinese might say.

  Given all the guns lying around in 1927, and the unsated bloodlust, and the kind of blinkered mentality that believed the execution of a minister for justice was a strategically good idea, who would be mad enough to write a novel about the assassination of a ruthless government minister, from the perspective of the deranged killer, and title it The Assassin?

  Step forward, Liam O’Flaherty.

  Liam O’Flaherty is best known in Ireland today as an important literary writer who occasionally dabbled in genre novels, and it’s unlikely that the author himself, given that he was prone to a supercilious tone when discussing his crime titles, would disagree. And yet, The Assassin wasn’t even O’Flaherty’s first crime novel. The Informer (1925), described as “a little mastermind of its kind” by the Sunday Times, follows the traitorous Gypo Nolan as he scuttles through the rat runs of Dublin’s slums, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of his betrayed comrades.

  “O’Flaherty,” wrote Ruth Dudley Edwards in her essay on the author in Down These Green Streets (Liberties Press, 2011),

  had worked out the plan of The Informer, “determined that it should be a sort of high-brow detective story and its style based on the technique of the cinema. It should have all the appearance of a realistic novel and yet the material should have hardly any connection with real life. I would treat my readers as a mob orator treats his audience and toy with their emotions, making them finally pity a character whom they began by considering a monster.”

  That sneering tone wouldn’t necessarily endear O’Flaherty to crime fiction readers; the dedication of The Assassin (“To my creditors”) suggests that his motives for writing the novel were rather less than noble.

  And yet. Should O’Flaherty’s motives and intentions matter? Should his attitude to the crime novel undermine the impact of what he created?

  It’s worth noting, before we go any further, that the publications of both The Informer and The Assassin predate the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929). Hammett is rightfully lauded for his achievements, for the quality of grim truth he brought to the crime novel, and for portraying a particular reality in, as Raymond Chandler said, “a spare, frugal, hardboiled” way, and for taking murder out of the Venetian vase and dropping it back in the alleyway.

  (Of course, Hammett and Carroll John Daly and their fellow Black Maskers had been publishing short stories since the early 1920s that featured the staccato, brutal style. O’Flaherty, during his wanderings of the world, had spent two years in America, working at a succession of menial jobs, and even at one point as an activist for the Wobblies; it would be fascinating to learn if he had picked up the embryonic hard-boiled style during his stay in the States.)

  The story of The Assassin follows Michael McDara as he returns to Ireland, a merchant seaman shell-shocked by war but now determined to rally his former comrades, the anti-Treaty dissidents with left-leaning politics, with a monumental “holy act”: the killing of the government’s symbol of power, referred to only as “Him.”

  It’s a revenge fantasy and a paranoid thriller, and an exploration of the psychology of a self-loathing killer, and there are times when it feels like reading Patricia Highsmith’s take on Crime and Punishment—that lurid, yes, that poisonously cold, and at times that ludicrously overwritten. But if Hammett is to be credited with kick-starting the hard-boiled crime novel in 1929, Liam O’Flaherty is entitled to his portion, and perhaps as a bridge of sorts between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century crime novel. This, delivered in the pared-down style, could have been lifted from the socially conscious crime narratives of Charles Dickens:

  He entered Capel Street and turned northwards. Now he was in the heart of a slum district. The smells, of which his senses were peculiarly conscious, became more violent and nauseous. But to him they were as sweet and intoxicating as they were unpleasant to the normal citizen. They whetted his appetite for the act he was going to perform. Everything here excited a savage hatred of society in him: barefooted children with a hectic flush on their pale, starved faces, tottering old people with all manner of disease scarring their wasted features, offal in the streets, houses without doors and with broken windows, a horrifying and monotonous spectacle of degrading poverty and misery everywhere. The foetid air reeked with disease.

  Later, the character of Kitty, something of an early femme fatale and the unfortunate subject of religion-hating McDara’s twisted interpretation of the whore-Madonna dichotomy, finds herself in the Shelbourne Hotel, which was then, as now, a haven for the prosperous from the madding crowds of Dublin’s streets:

  She looked back into the lounge. She saw an enormously fat woman, with bare neck and shoulders, reclining in an arm-chair. The woman had jewels on her fat neck and on her flabby hands. Her feet were propped up on a cushion. She had a heavy jowl. She looked unhappy, suffering either from sore feet or indigestion; goodness knows from what she suffered. But Kitty did not pity her suffering face. To Kitty she was symbolical of the degradation of the people, sin and gluttony and acceptance of tyranny. A parasite! Something to be torn limb from limb, to be wiped out, to be burned alive.

  A picture of the starving people came before Kitty’s mind and she saw them pouring into this hotel, after the act, with axes and sledgehammers . . .

  A half-hour passed.

  Few novels, crime or otherwise, possess The Assassin’s quality of prolonged, sublimated rage, of its disgust at the way the world is. It is not a novel that is particularly interested in asking questions of its time and culture, or proposin
g solutions to problems. It is a barbaric yawp, a howl of frustration, and a call to arms, and it is not great art; very much of its time, it has not worn the years well.

  Nonetheless, I would urge you to read it: for its vividness, its whiff of cordite, its utterly compelling psychotic blend of compassion and rage; for the way it not only worms beneath the skin of its time and place, but burrows in under the knuckle, too.

  Read it once. You will not need to read it again.

  Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007), and Absolute Zero Cool (2011). He is the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Liberties Press, 2011), and hosts a website dedicated to Irish crime fiction called Crime Always Pays. His latest novel is Slaughter’s Hound (2012). He lives in Wicklow with his wife and daughter, where he is not allowed to own a cat, or be owned by one. Visit him online at www.crimealwayspays.blogspot.com.

  The Bastard

  by Erskine Caldwell (1929)

  ALLAN GUTHRIE

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  The author of twenty novels, more than 150 short stories, and twelve nonfiction titles, Erskine Caldwell (1903–87) is best known for his novels Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). A Southern writer committed to writing about the dispossessed and marginalized in society, both black and white, Caldwell was ostracized by his peers for betraying his class and culture. On its publication in 1929, his debut novella, The Bastard, suffered problems with censorship, and was banned in Portland, Maine, the city in which Caldwell operated a bookstore.

  * * *

  In the 1990s, while I was working for a bookshop chain, I had the good fortune to have a line manager who persuaded me to read some crime fiction. Up to that point, I’d read mainly literary fiction, and wasn’t aware of what I was missing—luckily, he was. The novel that he recommended to me was Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, a near-future thriller about a violent sociopath code-named Wittgenstein. Well, I blew through the book in no time at all. Immediately, I picked up another crime novel. And then another. And from there, crime fiction quickly became my staple literary diet.

  The more I read, the more I found myself drawn toward novels that dealt with abnormal psychology, and to this day I remain a huge fan of fiction that unsettles the reader. I admire writers who don’t play safe, who allow “unsympathetic” characters to have a voice—often the hugely disturbing voice of a damaged psyche, but that’s the point: violent psychopaths should be disturbing.

  It was a good few years after my introduction to crime fiction that I stumbled across Erskine Caldwell’s 1929 novella, The Bastard. Caldwell (most famous for the best-selling Southern novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre) isn’t known as a crime writer, although there are plenty of criminal types peppered throughout his work. But for his debut, Caldwell decided to write about Gene Morgan, one of the most thoroughly unpleasant protagonists in the whole of crime fiction.

  Caldwell’s book is a character-driven tale about the nomadic Mr. Morgan, the bastard son of a prostitute. He drifts into a new town and we follow him as he gets work, gets laid, meets the love of his life, gets married, and finally we’re by his side when he resolves a difficult situation with one of the most terrifying acts of casual violence that you’re ever likely to encounter.

  Gene Morgan stakes a convincing claim to be the first example of an antihero in noir fiction.

  It’s hard to define noir fiction—many have tried, and most have failed. I associate noir fiction with crime stories that often feature criminals as protagonists (of course detective protagonists do exist in noir—Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor and Ray Banks’s Cal Innes are two of the most oft-cited, although Cal Innes is actually an ex-con). Those protagonists are often doomed. They’re rarely heroic (unlike the often chivalrous detectives of hard-boiled fiction, with which noir is often confused). And they live in a world that’s rotten to the core with corruption.

  Gene Morgan fits that definition perfectly: he’s a multiple murderer, a rapist, a thief; he’s doomed by his own psychopathology; he couldn’t be less heroic—a damsel in distress is a potential target rather than someone to be rescued; and corruption runs through every level of society. (When he spends the night in the can for being drunk, his jailer turns out to be more of a criminal than the unfortunates he locks up.)

  The fact that The Bastard might be the first work of noir fiction ought to make it a key text, and yet it has never received much recognition. It was first published by Heron Press (a tiny New York publisher) and suffered problems with censorship soon after publication, including a ban by the county attorney in Portland, Maine—where Caldwell was living—as a result of which the publisher refused to pay him, leaving Caldwell raging. In later years, the author seemed to be dismissive of the book. In his preface to a mid-1950s reprint edition, he describes the work as “storytelling in a time of youth,” which suggests he thought of it as immature.

  Which it may well be. Debut titles often are, and writers rarely enjoy reading their early work. Writers take time to hone their skills, to find their voices, to mature. You can certainly quite easily pick holes in the book: the main character is over the top; there are too many coincidences; the violence is random and overdone; he falls in love with his wife-to-be, Myra, far too quickly; some of the dialogue reads like it came from a manual of hard-boiled lingo. But what we do see in The Bastard is an early study of a casual psychopath, long before Jim Thompson presented us with Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, or Horace McCoy with his depiction of Ralph Cotter in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Caldwell goes further—the world Gene Morgan inhabits is a godless one, and Gene is far from alone in his appalling callousness and cruelty.

  At one point Gene is in jail overnight when a young girl is brought in. The guard rapes her, and then lets Gene into her cell to do the same. Which he does. He also steals her gold ring. And then he’s let out at midday and goes “home to dinner, whistling all the way.”

  At another point, Gene’s friend, John, kills a worker at a sawmill. The man dies after becoming entangled with the machinery. Their response is to prop his mouth open and pour water down his throat so they can enjoy watching it trickle from the mass of intestine protruding from where a rip saw has bisected his stomach.

  In another incident, a work colleague, Froggy, asks Gene to impregnate his wife (they want children, and Froggy isn’t able to oblige ’cause he’s “broke down . . . with the clap”), then changes his mind as Gene and his wife are about to get down to business. Gene’s none too pleased by the interruption, so he shoots him. When Froggy’s wife asks what Gene did with her husband’s body, Gene replies that he “kicked it downstairs” and that he’ll “dig a hole for it in the morning . . . ” She doesn’t seem too bothered. All she has to say is, “Oh!” and Gene turns out the light so they can get back to business as if nothing has happened.

  The one decent person in Gene’s world is Myra, the woman with whom he falls in love, marries, and has a child. In another book, falling in love with Myra would change Gene for the better. Not in this story. It so happens that the girl of Gene’s dreams is a Morgan, too, and although it’s never spelled out, the suggestion is that they’re related—possibly cousins. Their child, Leon, is born with long-term medical problems that initially present as physical deformities, then manifest themselves as mental health issues. Eventually, Gene concludes that “Leon would never get well . . . If he lived to be twenty or thirty years old he would still be without enough sense to sit in a chair without being tied there.” The doctors agree.

  Myra loves Leon and thinks the doctors will take him away and kill him. It’s her great fear, because “I love him more than anything else in the world, next to you, Gene.” But Myra’s looking in the wrong place. It’s not the doctors she should fear. A true bastard to the end, Gene takes his son out to the park, finds a quiet spot by the river, and drowns him.

  He knows Myra will suffer, and feels sorry for her, repeatedly saying “poor kid”
to himself as he watches her shadow in the window from the street outside their house before he leaves for good. Gene thinks of his final act of infanticide as one of kindness. He knows Myra won’t cope on her own with Leon, and he’s definitely going to leave her, so in his twisted mind, Gene’s making life easier for her. “Now she won’t have to bother all the time about the kid. Hell, the poor kid’d died if she’d stayed up in that damn flat much longer—never going to no more movies or nothing. Hell, I guess I done right.”

  There’s a hint of self-doubt in that last sentence, and there’s the fleeting possibility of redemption as he circles the block where Myra lives one more time. But it’s never realized and Gene remains true to character, the quintessential antihero, a bastard to the end.

  Allan Guthrie is an award-winning Scottish crime writer. His debut novel, Two-Way Split, was short-listed for the CWA Debut Dagger Award and went on to win the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. He is the author of four other novels, Kiss Her Goodbye (nominated for an Edgar), Hard Man, Savage Night, and Slammer, and three novellas, Kill Clock, Killing Mum, and Bye Bye Baby, a Top Ten Kindle best seller. He’s also cofounder of a digital publishing company, Blasted Heath, and a literary agent with Jenny Brown Associates. Visit him online at www.allanguthrie.co.uk.

  The Maltese Falcon

  by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

  MARK BILLINGHAM

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