Note: This piece originally appeared at The Life Sentence.
All literary genres tempt their
authors toward certain shortcuts — not just clichés of plot or characterization
but clichés of meaning. Whereas the western often basks in white male
triumphalism, and the romance leans on selective notions of destiny, the roman
noir slouches toward a simplistic form of pessimism. Another way of saying this
is that all genre fiction can be guilty of telling us what we want to hear, and
this is no less true of a gloomy genre like noir than it is of a sunny genre
like the romance. Pointing this out is not to indict noir, just to acknowledge
the nature of the beast. The laziest purveyors of noir truck in a kind of
reflexive cynicism that is every bit as false as a tacked-on happy ending. What
great noir writers do, in contrast, is to explore the tension between order and
chaos, revealing the danger and doom they see lurking beneath society’s
reassurances about law and order. They reveal the darkness at the edge of the
light without denying the light or turning the darkness into a gimmick.
Take Charlotte Armstrong, a
writer whose books are a mixture of light and darkness, hope and hopelessness. In
her best work, people grapple for meaning and stability in a world that seems
to be flying apart. Her books seldom end in utter despair, though. Instead, Armstrong
was the master of lingering dread. Even when her plots resolved themselves in
reassuring ways, her characters were left with a hard won knowledge of life’s
precariousness.
Armstrong’s mastery of these
different tones has its roots in her previous writing life. Although she was
eventually heralded as one of the genre’s greatest writers, she actually came
to crime fiction rather late. Before she published her first novel, she’d
written journalism, poetry, and plays. By all accounts —and this is no surprise
— she was good at every literary endeavor she put her hand to, but it was the
need to make a living that finally steered her toward the potentially lucrative
field of mysteries. She was 37 when she published her debut novel LAY ON,
MACDUFF! in 1942. In her early novels, fairly conventional whodunits featuring
an historian-turned-detective named MacDougal Duff, one can see Armstrong
getting her footing in the mystery genre. While the Duff books are
entertaining, if she had stayed with them it’s doubtful she would be remembered
as fondly as she is today. She soon abandoned the whodunit in favor of more
complex suspense stories, and once she began writing books that we now define
as noir, Armstrong hit her artistic stride.
She was an immediate hit, and Hollywood
came courting early when director Michael Curtiz adapted her novel THE
UNSUSPECTED in 1947. Although Armstrong got enough work in movies and
television that she moved to California to be closer the business (where she
wrote for Alfred Hitchcock and Ida Lupino, among others), she never stopped
writing novels. In 1963 alone she published four books. Even more striking than
her prolificacy, however, was the consistent quality of her work. In 1968, for
example, two of her books were nominated for the Edgar for Best Novel. By the
time she died of cancer in 1969 — finishing her final novel quite literally on
her deathbed — she was a legend.
It is fitting, then, that
Armstrong is among the writers being honored by the Library of America in the excellent
new collection, Women Crime Writers of the 40s and 50s. Edited by Sarah Weinman,
the boxed set includes a murderer’s row of noir greats represented by some of
their best works: Vera Caspary (LAURA), Helen Eustis (THE HORIZONTAL MAN), Patricia
Highsmith (THE BLUNDERER), Dolores Hitchens (FOOL’S GOLD), Elisabeth Sanxay
Holding (THE BLANK WALL), Dorothy B. Hughes (IN A LONELY PLACE), and Margret
Millar (BEAST IN VIEW).
Armstrong’s addition to the
collection is her slim masterpiece MISCHIEF. While she was never afraid of a
convoluted plot (her 1946 novel THE UNSUSPECTED has a plot so labyrinthine it
could have been designed by Daedalus), here she keeps things deceptively
simple.
Ruth and Peter Jones are from the
small town of Brennerton, where Peter is the editor and publisher of the local
paper. They’re visiting New York so Peter can give a speech at a convention of
newspapermen. When the babysitter for their young daughter Bunny cancels at the
last minute, the hotel’s friendly elevator operator, Eddie, offers his niece,
Nell, for the job. But Nell is not what she seems…
As Jeffrey Marks writes in his
book ATOMIC RENAISSANCE: WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS OF THE 1940s AND 1950s, “MISCHIEF
would do for babysitters what PSYCHO did for the shower.” Nell seems to have
been born inside every parent’s worst nightmare. She starts out slow: banishing
Bunny to bed, rifling through the Jones’ things, trying on Ruth’s negligee and
perfume, prank calling random housewives by asking to speak to their husbands.
Then things escalate. When she spies a handsome stranger through the window,
she invites him in for a nightcap.
The man’s name is Jed Towers, and
he’s in for the worst night of his life. He’s just had a fight with his
girlfriend, Lyn, and he’s all too happy to be invited up to a pretty woman’s
room for a couple of drinks. As soon as he’s in the hotel room and the booze
starts flowing, however, things spiral from strange to crazy to outright
terrifying. The woman is younger than he thought, weirder than he thought. When
little Bunny wanders in on their little scene, Nell flies into a rage that
turns Jed’s odd night into an outright nightmare. Jed thinks he’s a
freewheeling man of independence until he meets someone who truly doesn’t care
about anyone but herself.
The most striking element of the
book is its expert construction. Armstrong has an unerring instinct for the
right place to break a scene, the right time to shift perspective. Either
dramatically or subtly, every scene adds to the rising tension. The book also
shows off Armstrong’s ability to perfectly capture characters in a line or two.
She writes that the would-be ladies man Jed is “one of those young men who had
come out of the late war with that drive, that cutting quality, as if they had
shucked off human uncertainties and were aimed and hurtling toward something in
the future about which they seemed very sure.” In contrast to this macho
self-assurance she describes the elevator operator Eddie as an “anxious little
man, the kind who keeps explaining himself though nobody cares.”
MISCHIEF moves with such expert
precision that it’s easy to miss how much it’s doing. The book in some ways is
a study of the way people carry themselves and the way anxiety bubbles beneath
every façade. Everyone is anxious: Peter is nervous about his speech, Ruth is
nervous about her daughter, Lyn is nervous about Jed, Eddie is nervous about
Nell. Even the smooth Jed spends the entire book thrown off his game, first by
Lyn’s insistence that he’s “cheap cynic” and then by Nell’s nihilistic
instability.
The only person who doesn’t spend
the book choking with tension is Nell. When we first meet her, she’s a strange,
quiet girl, 19 or 20, with hair “the color of a lion’s hide.” Peter is too
distracted by his upcoming speech to pay much attention to her, but Ruth is
immediately unsettled by Nell’s complete lack of affect. “Eddie’s interposing
chatter was nervous, as if it covered something lumpish and obstinate in the
girl, who was not helping.” Peter is able to convince his wife to leave, but
Armstrong tells us, “Not all of Ruth went through the door […] A part of Ruth
lay, in advance of time, in the strange dark.”
Nell isn’t simply a psychopath
who terrorizes a little girl and threatens to ruin the life of a hapless man.
She is a trigger for the fears of everyone around her; her very lack of concern
throws everyone else into chaos. The thing that makes Ruth suspicious of Nell
to begin with is her lack of underlying anxiety, a complete absence of a need
to please. This oddness might be written off as mere rudeness, or even a sign
of deep self assurance. Later when Jed is trapped inside the hotel room with
her, however, he has a subconscious realization of what exactly is missing in
her, the ability to connect her actions with their consequences:
[T]here
is something wild about total immersion in the present tense. What if the
restraint of the future didn’t exist? What if you never said to yourself, “I’d
better not. I’ll be in trouble if I do?”
Not subject to any underlying
middle-class fears, and oblivious to the possible repercussions of her actions,
Nell is pure id, a vision of teenaged recklessness raised to a nightmare
boiling point. To understand the anxiety of a decade that would produce the
juvenile delinquent movie to compliment a trend in increasingly authoritarian
crime films, look at the terror represented in this emotionally unhinged babysitter.
MISCHIEF was a hit when it was
first released in 1951, and it earned raves from the critics, including a
reviewer for the New York Times who called it “One of the finest pure
terror-suspense stories ever written.” Hollywood snapped up the book, and the
following year Marilyn Monroe had her first starring role as Nell in an adaptation
of the book called DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK.
In the decades after her death,
Armstrong, along with writers like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Margaret
Millar, never fully disappeared from public view, though their posthumous fame
dimmed quite a bit when compared to someone like Patricia Highsmith, whose fame
has only grown since her passing. Happily, with the release of the Library of
America’s Women Crime Writers of the 40s and 50s, Charlotte Armstrong and MISCHIEF
are poised to gain a new generation of fans.
