DRY COUNTY Book Launch on October 1st

My novel DRY COUNTY will hit bookstores on October 1st. That night there will be a book launch at City Lit Books from 6:30-8:30. If you're in Chicago or surrounding environs, I hope you'll come by.

HELL ON CHURCH STREET and NO TOMORROW Go To Italy

I'm thrilled to announce that my books HELL ON CHURCH STREET and NO TOMORROW have been acquired for translation into Italian by the publisher Edizioni Del Capricorno. More details to come but for now: Viva l'Italia!

Bloody Fleury and the French Book Tour 2018

I’m heading back to France next week to promote my latest book SANS LENDEMAIN. While I’m there, I hope to see old friends and meet new friends. If you’re around, please come say hi.

I’ll be at the festival Bloody Fleury from February 2-4 signing books and meeting people. On the third day of the festival, I’ll be on the 3 pm panel “When Violence Generates Violence” with Jean-Luc Bizien and Jacques-Olivier Bosco, moderated by Olivier Vanderbecq.

On February 5^th, at 6 pm I’ll do a public presentation at the bookstore Richer in Angers.

On February 6^th, at 7 pm I’ll do a public presentation at the bookstore L’Embarcadère in Saint-Nazaire.

On February 7^th, at 7 pm I’ll do a public presentation at the bookstore Coiffard in Nantes.

On February 8^th at 7 pm I’ll do a public presentation at the bookstore L’Esprit Livre in Lyon.

On February 9^th at 7 pm I’ll do a public presentation at the bookstore Chroniques in Cachan.

ReReading Maigret

I've been on a big Simenon kick for the last couple of years. It started out with his noirs like THE WIDOWER, DIRTY SNOW, and ACT OF PASSION, but it eventually led me back to his Maigret novels. The result of all this reading is a new series over at Criminal Element where I'm going to be rereading the best Maigret novels. You can check out the first installment of the series, Georges Simenon and the Top 6 Maigret Novels here.

Against The Greatest Whatevers of All Time

We need to cycle the cliche "one of the greatest ___ of all time" out of our language. Of all time is a long time. It's a long ass time. It's forever. It is literally forever.

I am guilty of this myself. I'm just a sinner who's seen the light. For instance, in the past I have referred to the odd film as "one the greatest movies of all time" as if the movies themselves were ancient pillars of culture rather than an art form that came along at basically the same time as the toaster oven. (I've seen certain comic book flicks referred to as "one of the greatest superhero movies of all time" which makes the point even more strongly, since, historically speaking, the superhero movie is still teething.)

Like all cliches, the greatest whatever of all time cliche is just a dumbing down of language, an empty superlative in place of an actual opinion. This kind of inflation of language serves different functions. For one thing, it imbues the speaker with a sense of superiority. After all, if I declare some novel one of the greatest novels of all time, then I am claiming for myself the authority not just to declare a novel good or great, but to declare its virtues to be eternal.

This appeal to the eternal is revealing. Our language so often reveals us to ourselves. For instance, I've rarely seen the "all time" cliche bandied about in praise of the works of art that have an actual legitimate claim to antiquity. Homer's ODYSSEY has as good a claim to the mantle of "the greatest work of literature of all time" as anything (if we shrink the eternity implicit in the phrase "of all time" to mean the few thousand years of human life on earth), but we rarely see it referenced that way. Instead, the "greatest of all time" mantle is usually trotted out for rock bands and quarterbacks. And the relative newness of rock bands and football players is, I think, a key to the cliche's appeal. A lot of people love THE ODYSSEY but even its most fervent fans probably don't feel that the epic poem is evocative of their youth. The kind of people most likely to declare The Beatles the greatest band of all time are the kind of people most likely to feel an personal emotional connection to The Beatles. Ditto Joe Montana (or your quarterback of choice).

The inclination to declare something a part of the canon is an inclination to declare your own feelings part of the process by which we decide the canon. I love the Beatles, too. Will their music really hold the same beloved status in another thousand years? I doubt it. I really do. I suspect music, language, and culture will change so immeasurably that the Beatles will be a historical fragment of a bygone society. It's entirely likely that the feelings roused in me by a great Beatles song will no longer rouse feelings in people a thousand years from now. (The opposite is true. There's no reason to think ancient people would have liked the Beatles anymore than old people did in 1965.) Which is another way of saying that our feelings aren't eternal. It's more than possible that the things I've loved will fade in their impact over time.

Perhaps this is why the things that have lasted the longest (in both duration and impact) are the very works of art that claimed actual divine authorship. John Lennon once said that people tried to make a religion out of the Beatles, and he was right. People are still trying.

We say "nothing lasts forever" but we don't really believe it. We're constantly grasping after the eternal. And these things we declare eternal--books, songs, movies, sports figures--are fragments of an ever scattering past, fragments of our own dissipating lives.

What's the Difference?: Some Thoughts on Books and Audiobooks

I posed a question on Facebook the other day. It went something like this:

"Kind of bored with podcasts lately, so I've been listening to more audiobooks. Here's my question: Do you consider that you've read a book if you've only listened to it? It's such a different experience that I don't know. Thoughts?"

I got quite a few responses, with the majority coming down to say that, yes, of course you've read a book if you've listened to a book. Some people were very adamant on this point, and there was some good-natured debate with dissenters.

These results strike me as interesting for a few reasons.

One, it is clearly not true that reading a book and listening to an audiobook are the same thing. You've read a book when you've read a book. To say that you've read a book if you've listened to an audiobook would be like saying you've read Hamlet because you saw it performed onstage. Reading is an active experience where your own limitations as a reader effect the text in terms of pacing and comprehension. Every reader reads a book in a different way. When you listen to an audiobook, you're listening to someone else's interpretation of a text. It is a mediated experience in which other people shape your reception of the text.

Also, when you read, you're looking at words, closed in the experience of the book. When you listen to an audiobook, you're looking at something else. (I was listening to an audiobook of the Russell Banks novel CLOUDSPLITTER yesterday on the train to work. The woman across from me was putting on her makeup. She's now a part of my memory of the scene of John Brown and his sons easing their wagon down a steep mountain pass.) I listen to audiobooks while doing lots of things: driving, washing dishes, shopping. I cannot do those things when I'm reading because reading requires more of my attention and concentration.

Two, audiobooks are a unique art form, a postmodern hybrid of literature and radio.  Some audiobooks go so far as to use music cues and sound effects, and actors and producers decide where and when and how to put emphasis on words and phrases. A good actor can redeem a weak book as surely as a good actor can redeem a weak movie. Someone like audio all-star Edward Herrmann could make a phone book sound interesting. This is not the same as reading a book, where the writing is pretty much the whole show.  

Three, people want credit for having read a book. This was something I noticed in the responses. We're all a little defensive about audiobooks because we don't want anyone to suggest that we didn't really read THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

What is fascinating to me about this is that I didn't mean to imply that audiobooks are a lesser art form than literature, just different. I come to praise the audiobook, not to bury it. Listening to a group of words and reading a group of words are distinct experiences because they utilize different senses. I read CLOUDSPLITTER years ago when it was first published, and now I'm listening to it read by Pete Larkin. It's a different experience, more passive for sure but no less interesting. Larkin's performance shapes characterization in ways that my mind did not. There's no value judgment in noting that reading is harder than listening. Of course it is. Audiobooks interpret the text for you; they do some of the heavy lifting. Perhaps this helps account for our defensiveness about audiobooks. But I think it is more instructive to simply view a book and an audiobook as distinct pieces of art (as different as the text of a play and a production of a play), and we should think more about what audiobooks are and what they're doing. 

HELL ON CHURCH STREET is back!

New edition! New cover! New publisher!

Go get it.

Book Tour In France!

France, I am coming for you.

Jake Hinkson est l'invité de la Médiathèque départementale des Landes et participera à une série de rencontres en France. Vous pourrez le rencontrer :
- le 15 septembre à la librairie Les Mots et les choses de Boulogne-Billancourt
- le 16 septembre à la Librairie du Tramway à Lyon
- les 17 et 18 septembre au Festival Le Polar se met au vert organisé par la Médiathèque départementale des Landes
- le 20 septembre à la librairie Hirigoyen de Bayonne
- le 21 septembre à la librairie Tonnet de Pau
- le 22 septembre à la librairie Campus de Dax
- le 23 septembre à la librairie Caractères de Mont-de-Marsan
- les 24 et 25 septembre au Festival Polar en cabanes à Bordeaux

For more information, check out my author page at the Gallmeister website.

MISCHIEF by Charlotte Armstrong

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.

A Good Man In A Bad Time: THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN

The 1951 crime flick THE RACKET is one of film noir’s great misfires. Robert Mitchum stars as an honest cop trying to bring down vicious crime lord Robert Ryan, and with these two titans of noir squaring off against each other, the film should be a blast. Instead, it’s a disaster. Under the obsessive and erratic supervision of RKO studio chief Howard Hughes, the film was shot, reshot, and reshot again. The story changed every time Hughes changed his mind, which was almost daily. Burning through five directors and countless yards of film, Hughes managed to squeeze all the life out of what should have been a fun little gangster picture. The result, by pretty much any measure, is a mess.

Today, the only fun thing about THE RACKET is the opportunity to observe the interaction of the two stars who, together, define the opposite ends of film noir’s emotional scale: Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. Mitchum was, of course, forever the king of cool, his breezy insouciance acquiring a kind of romantic sheen in classics like OUT OF THE PAST (1947). While Mitchum’s very lack of concern could occasionally curdle into a pathological absence of empathy (in films like THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER or CAPE FEAR), for the most part film noir positioned his detachment as something cool. When Lee Server wrote the definitive Mitchum biography, he snatched one of the actor’s great OUT OF THE PAST lines for his title: BABY, I DON’T CARE

Robert Ryan, on the other hand, wasn’t cool. He was hot. He rarely got to play the good guy, and he had even fewer chances to play romantic leads. He was noir’s man on the edge. He specialized in playing desperation, bigotry, and psychosis (on one occasion he even played a vicious version of Howard Hughes himself). When he did get to portray the hero, in classics like THE SET-UP or ON DANGEROUS GROUND, he brought real fire and passion to his roles. Robert Ryan never played indifference onscreen. Detachment was never his thing. Good or bad, Robert Ryan always cared, baby.

In his wonderful new biography of the actor, THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN, Chicago Reader critic J.R. Jones makes clear that Ryan’s onscreen passion was very much in keeping with his offscreen life. One of the most politically engaged actors of his era, Ryan charted his own course through some of Hollywood’s darkest days, and along the way made himself into an enduring icon of film noir. With THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN, we now have the kind of serious treatment which Ryan has always deserved.

Born into a well-to-do family in 1909, Robert Bushnell Ryan was raised on Chicago’s north side. Jones reveals that Ryan’s father was a successful businessman who was deeply involved in the rough-and-tumble politics of the city’s Democratic machine. Young Bob kept his eyes open, and although he would grow into a far more idealistic man than his father, he inherited a steel spine and a practical streak when it came to navigating choppy political waters.

Unfortunately, while he was still young, a series of tragedies struck his family that would shape his inner life for years to come. When he was still a child, his younger brother Jack died. His parents closed ranks around their surviving son, but Jones notes that they were “Victorian people, reserved even with their own child; and as the years passed Bob learned to keep his own company.” Even as an adult, even with those he loved the most, Jones reports, Ryan would remain “a sealed envelope.”

Bob had gone away to Dartmouth — studying English in the hopes of being a playwright, and becoming a collegiate boxing champion in the meantime — when tragedy struck again. First the stock market crashed, and the Ryan family fortune was wiped out. Not long after, a fire broke out on one of his father’s job sites, killing eleven men and delivering a blow the Ryan family business never recovered from. After graduating from school, Bob kicked around for a few years, scribbling away at his plays and working a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a male model and a failed attempt at gold prospecting in Montana. Out west he worked on a dude ranch and learned how to handle a horse (experience that would come in handy once he started making westerns). He was working as a sailor on the boat The City of New York, making runs between New York, and South Africa, when he learned that his father had died after being hit by a car. With this final family tragedy, Robert Ryan had to settle down and find a career.

He got into acting through the instigation of a friend. Jones quotes Ryan as saying, “I never even thought of acting until I was twenty-eight. The first minute I got on the stage I thought, ‘Bing! This is it.’” He quickly made his way to Hollywood and into the tutelage of the legendary acting coach Max Reinhart. Even more important for Ryan, at the Reinhardt School of the Theater he met an aspiring young actor named Jessica Cadwalader, who would shortly become his wife.

One of the main pleasures of THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN is the attention Jones pays to the fascinating figure of Jessica Ryan. The pacifist daughter of Quaker parents, Jessica was a serious and well-read woman who spurned the Hollywood social set in favor of political and intellectual pursuits. Soon after she married Ryan, she quit acting and devoted herself to writing mysteries (like THE MAN WHO ASKED WHY, 1945; and EXIT HARLEQUIN, 1947). After giving birth to two sons, she began to turn her attention to the field of childhood education. Around the time she gave birth to the Ryans’ third child, a daughter, she had already put plans into motion to open a progressive grade school in North Hollywood. The Oakwood School, as it would come to be called, became a passion for both Jessica and her husband.

Before that time came, however, the Ryans had to get through World War II. When the war broke out Bob’s movie career was just catching fire with a couple of roles that let him take off his shirt and demonstrate his boxing skills. Jessica wasn’t happy when he entered the Marine Corps as a drill instructor; although once the war ended and the Red Scare overtook Hollywood, Bob’s military service would provide him with political cover from conservatives who didn’t like his lefty politics.

The Red Scare, and the blacklist period that it birthed, features prominently in THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN for good reason. The book nicely situates Ryan’s film noir career in the rising turmoil of the postwar world. Ryan didn’t make his first noir until 1947 — the genre’s pivotal year — when he starred in Jean Renoir’s convoluted THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH opposite Joan Bennett. That same year he would make CROSSFIRE for Edward Dmytryk, opposite Robert Mitchum, and the following year he would star in the underrated Fred Zinnemann masterpiece ACT OF VIOLENCE. All three of these noir films cast Ryan as a violent (or potentially violent) ex-serviceman. By 1947, he was practically the onscreen face of what we now know as PTSD.

Of course, 1947 was also the same year the House Committee on Un-American Activities came to town. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization of Hollywood conservatives led by John Wayne, warned the committee against creeping communist influence in the movie industry. Congressional subpoenas were issued. A group of leftist filmmakers, dubbed the “Hollywood Ten,” refused to hand over names of other suspected communists and were sent to jail. When a group of liberals led by Humphrey Bogart flew to Washington to protest the congressional hearings, they faced such a skewering in the press that they immediately backed down. A blacklist was instituted. Jack Warner went before the committee and boasted about firing a dozen suspected communist sympathizers at his studios. The other studios rushed to keep up.

For his part, Ryan had always made his political views clear. To coincide with the release of CROSSFIRE, he’d already published articles in The Daily Worker denouncing anti-Semitism, and now that CROSSFIRE’s director (Edward Dmytryk) and producer (Adrian Scott) were serving time for refusing to testify before HUAC, Ryan appeared before the Jewish Labor Council, a group the government considered to have communist affiliations. He gave a speech at a “Keep America Free” rally organized by the Progressive Citizens of America and told the audience, “We protest the threat to personal liberty…represented by this police committee… We demand, in the name of all Americans, that the House Committee on Un-American Activities be abolished, while there still remains the freedom to abolish it.”

J.R. Jones nicely answers a question that has long perplexed astute observers of film noir. Namely, how did an outspoken liberal like Robert Ryan manage to keep from being blacklisted during the worst days of the Red Scare? Over the course of THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN, Jones identifies three main factors in saving Ryan’s career. One, he’d served in the military during the war, something that many of his outspoken political opposites (like John Wayne) couldn’t claim. Two, he worked at RKO, which was run by Howard Hughes, and while Hughes was a rabid anticommunist, he was also a man utterly controlled by his own unfathomable whims. Hughes hung onto Robert Mitchum despite his notorious 1948 drug bust and Robert Ryan despite his lefty politics because, well, he liked them. Besides, as Jones also points out, Hughes had so sliced and diced the creative roster at RKO (while keeping a virtual harem of pretty starlets on the payroll) that Mitchum and Ryan were practically the only bankable male stars he had left.

The third factor that saved Ryan’s career is that he was willing to do some practical political maneuvering when the need arose. When Mitchum was serving a brief period in lockup after his marijuana bust, it was Ryan who took the starring role in Hughes’s litmus test project, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST (1949). A “redbaiter” that found Ryan duking it out with a gang of wicked commies, the movie flopped at the box office.

“In later years Ryan could barely bring himself to mention the picture,” Jones tells us, but while Ryan hated doing Hughes’s hammy propaganda piece, it helped save his job, and over the course of the late 1940s he managed to star in many of his best films. For director Fred Zinnemann he played a vengeful ex-serviceman stalking a fellow soldier in 1948’s ACT OF VIOLENCE (a film which remains one of the greatest noirs that most people have never seen). For Max Ophüls, he played an insane misogynist millionaire (in the image of you know who) in the excellent 1949 noir CAUGHT.

And for Robert Wise, he made his greatest film, THE SET-UP (1949). Ryan stars as Stoker Thompson, a past-his-prime boxer heading into a bout with an up and coming fighter. The fight has been fixed, but Stoker’s managers don’t tell him because they figure he can’t win anyway. Brilliantly staged and shot, featuring the best fight sequence in classic film, THE SET-UP belongs in the upper echelon of noir films, and at its center, believable and human and tragic, is Robert Ryan giving the performance of his career.

He would give other terrific performances — an obsessive cop in ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1951); a psycho in BEWARE MY LOVELY (1952); a millionaire double-crossed by his evil wife in INFERNO (1953) — but Jones reveals that Ryan’s focus in the early 1950s turned more and more to the school that he had founded with Jessica. They launched the Oakwood School in 1951 as an integrated progressive grade school, and Jones quotes Jessica as saying that they made up their minds “to call a spade a spade — meaning calling progressive progressive, even though the word had lately become suspect.” Jessica would be the driving force of the school, serving as president of the board and helping to write the curriculum. The Ryans sank their money and passion into the school (which is still operating today), and they considered its success their greatest professional accomplishment.

Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Ryan stayed politically active. He gave speeches for the ACLU, the NAACP, and the United World Federalists. He co-founded the Hollywood chapter of the National Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1959, he co-starred in ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, which starred and was produced by Harry Belafonte. It was one of Ryan’s finest films (and his last classic noir), and he and Belafonte would become lifelong friends. Through Belafonte, he would meet and become a supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King.

In the late 1960s, Ryan had achieved the status of elder statesman in Hollywood, but he didn’t rest on his laurels. He stayed relevant in films like THE PROFESSIONALS (1966), THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), and THE WILD BUNCH (1969). In the early 1970s, filmmakers started tapping into his classic noir persona, and he starred in neo-noirs like René Clment’s David Goodis adaptation AND HOPE TO DIE (1972) and John Flynn’s Richard Stark adaptation THE OUTFIT (1973). Appearing on Broadway, he was a mentor to up-and-coming actors such as Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges, and his final triumph was on the stage, in a heralded production of THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973).

Jessica was diagnosed with cancer in 1972 and died only ten days later. Ryan was devastated, but he tried to carry on. He threw himself into working (and drinking), but he would die just a little over a year later, in July of 1973. Following his death, Pete Hamill would write a striking tribute to Ryan, calling him “a good man in a bad time.” By the time J.R. Jones closes out his masterful biography of the actor, the reader can only agree.

 Note: This piece originally appeared at THE LIFE SENTENCE

WARNING SHADOWS: HOME ALONE WITH CLASSIC CINEMA by Gary Giddins

I love a good collection of film essays. In particular, I like to curl up with the work of a single author, watching one mind as it travels through disparate works or genres or eras. As a kid, I was a Roger Ebert fanatic. I used to buy his huge Movie Annuals every year. (My mother: "Another one? Didn't you get one last year?" Me: "You don't understand.") As I got older, I discovered Pauline Kael and Peter Bogdanovich and Eddie Muller, revelations all.

My latest favorite is Gary Giddins' 2010 collection WARNING SHADOWS: HOME ALONE WITH CLASSIC CINEMA. The book has a brilliantly simple conceit. Giddins begins with an introduction that traces the development of cinema from the solitary experience of the earliest Edison nickelodeons to the Golden Age movie palaces to post-studio era multiplexes to the rise of home video and the DVD revolution. He stops just short of the latest earthquake in cinema distribution and exhibition, the era of digital streaming.

I'm glad that he stops at that point, because it allows the book that follows to focus almost exclusively on the act of watching classic cinema on DVD. As much as I think about film, I have to admit that I've never given much thought to the fact that I've seen more classics on DVD than any other format. Giddins--writing for outlets like The New York Sun, DGA Quarterly, and the Criterion Collection--is examining the films within their current context, as part of DVD packages like the Warner Bros. Signature Series which collects the work of a star like James Stewart or the Criterion Collection which assembles packages like THE COMPLETE MR. ARKADIN by Orson Welles. It's fascinating to consider these films not just as works of classic cinema (as if we were beaming ourselves into the past to watch them as part of a double feature at some long lost movie temple) but as works that exist largely as solitary home entertainments. Giddins has a particular insight into the way that this new context has affected the delicate charms of classic comedy. Chaplin and Keaton created movies to be seen by hundreds of people crammed together in the dark, their laughter a communal event. How haunting it is to see them play out in the relative silence of your living room.

The book itself covers a wide range of topics--from great directors (Welles, Hitchcock, Ford, Bergman, ect.) to great stars (Crawford, Davis, Bogart, ect) to genres like the biopic, the musical, and the film noir. Giddins is a deft and daring guide down these well traveled roads. At a certain point, a reader needs a writer to reject the conventional views of artists and works. The way Giddins reframes something like the career of Alice Faye made me want to revisit her work. 

And really a reader couldn't ask for more from a collection of writing on film. Giddins writes about movies that are sixty, seventy, eighty years old and makes them fresh candidates for tonight's movie viewing.

Introduction to KILL JOY/THE VIRGIN HUNTRESS

I'm extremely pleased to announce that I got to write the introduction for a new edition of two books by the godmother of noir Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Coming out on June 24th, the volume collects KILL JOY and THE VIRGIN HUNTRESS two excellent, if lesser known, Holding novels. For newcomers to Holding's work the book will be a nice intro to the two spheres--domestic noir and psycho noir--that she helped to shape in the forties and fifties. For readers who are already fans of her better known books like THE BLANK WALL and THE INNOCENT MRS. DUFF it will be a welcome reminder of what makes her one of the greatest of all crime writers.

ORSON WELLES VOLUME 3: ONE-MAN BAND by Simon Callow

This week I finished the third installment in Simon Callow's projected four volume biography of Orson Welles. If four books on one life seems like a lot, consider the life we're talking about. No matter what one thinks about Welles or his work, one has to concede the point that the man packed a hell of a lot of living into his brief 70 years on earth.

Just consider this: Callow's new book covers the years 1948 to 1965. In that time, Welles worked on three continents (North America, Europe, and Africa), made five movies--three of which are masterpieces (TOUCH OF EVIL, THE TRIAL, FALSTAFF), mounted seven stage productions--two of which (MOBY DICK REHEARSED and CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT) are considered among the best work he did in the theater, and created five television productions--two of which (THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH and AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES) are thrilling experiments in the new medium. During this time he won the Palm d'Or (for his film of OTHELLO), the Peabody Award (for THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH) and the Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance in the movie COMPULSION. During this time he became the hero of critics and directors of the French New Wave, the living embodiment of the film director as artist. 

It was also during this period, unfortunately, that he became enshrined in America as a big fat has-been. One of the reasons Welles makes for an endlessly fascinating biographical figure is that his triumphs were often greeted as failures and his artistic prime was regarded by many at the time as a self-destructive freefall.

The disjunction between Welles's artistic accomplishments and his professional woes is covered thoroughly by Callow in ONE-MAN BAND. Callow is a critical biographer, and one can feel his exasperation at some of Welles's more self-defeating behavior. Yet he never loses sight of the man. For instance, I've read a couple dozen books on Welles, but I don't think I've ever read anyone who better captured Welles's insecurity around the topic of acting. Perhaps because Callow is an actor himself, he is particularly well-attuned to Welles's fear of performance. We think of Orson Welles as being almost supernaturally confident and self-possessed, but as Callow makes clear he fretted his time upon the stage as much as any actor ever did.

Every biography about Welles has to contend with one core question: Was he a self-destructive failure or a misunderstood genius? Callow avoids an easy answer, but taken in whole this book's answer to that question would be "Both."

Welles was his own worst enemy, a "prisoner of his own personality" as Callow once put it in an interview. He worked in art forms like film and theater that require a lot of capital, yet he loathed the money men and found it impossible to kowtow to them. He was a tireless worker, but no one ever accused him of self-discipline. He was always open to inspiration, but that same openness could mean that his attention was fickle. His list of credits is beyond impressive, it's staggering; yet that same prodigious output was often seen by unsympathetic observers as flailing.

Indeed, one thing that Callow's tour through these years makes clear is the way that Welles's triumphs must have all seemed fleeting to the man himself. His greatest accomplishment of this period (and perhaps the greatest accomplishment of his career) was FALSTAFF. It's his masterpiece, but in America it was dismissed out of hand. Welles, Callow reports, was nearly driven to despair by this failure, a failure that came in the wake of the failure of the brilliant TOUCH OF EVIL to rekindle his Hollywood career.

Still, Callow ends this volume on the triumph itself. Welles once said that FALSTAFF was the film he would offer up if he were told that one of his films might get him accepted into paradise. Callow ends his book by reporting that the movie "proved not to be a harbinger of anything; Welles sailed off in other directions. But not before he had secured his place in heaven."

NOIR AT THE BAR-CHICAGO

I'm putting on the newest in our series of Noir At The Bar-Chicago readings. Tough talk and hard drinks. And one hell of a lineup of readers. I'll be hosting, as usual, along with Robb and Liv from the Booked podcast.

Come one, come all.

LONG HAUL is here!

The new edition of LONG HAUL by the late great AI Bezzerides is now available from 280 Steps. The book features my introduction to Buzz and his work. 

Here's a preview:

Buzz just wanted to tell the truth. He didn’t consider himself a crime writer, didn’t really consider himself a genre guy at all. He just wanted to write the brutal truth about struggling for survival in America. Proletarian realism, they used to call it. The truth, Buzz called it. He’d come up hard, had seen the world beat down his old man, and he wanted to put that experience into works of fiction as clearly and candidly as possible. Of course, the fascinating thing is the way that his ambition to be honest just naturally led him to produce books that read like crime novels. Maybe that’s because, to Buzz, life looked a lot like a crime in progress.

He was born Albert Issok Bezzerides in 1908 in Samsun, Turkey—which, at the time, was still part of the Ottoman Empire—the son of a Greek father and an Armenian mother. “I can swear and pray in Armenian and Turkish,” he later told an interviewer, but when he was still just a boy, his parents packed up their son and headed to America in search of a new life. The fruit fields of California might have been advertised as a sun-dappled paradise, but A.I.—or “Buzz” as he was called—grew up working for his father in the fresh produce industry in the San Joaquin Valley, a hardscrabble experience that would mark him for the rest of his life. The young boy’s worldview was forged in the fire of hard manual labor—picking fruit, repairing shabby old trucks, driving all night, and fighting the shysters at the produce markets. “Etched into my soul,” he once wrote, “was the poverty that surrounded me as a child.” 

Coming Soon

Coming Soon From New Pulp Press

Nice review of THE POSTHUMOUS MAN

One of the greatest pleasures that comes from writing a book is watching it travel through the world. I put out THE POSTHUMOUS MAN back in 2012, and people are still discovering it. Sometimes those people are cool enough to take time out and tell the world they liked my work. Doesn't get much better than that.

Check out this great, new, review of the book by Richard Vialet. It made my day.

Interview

The writer Alex Segura was nice enough to ask me to stop by his newsletter Stuff & Nonsense to talk about noir fiction and film. It was a nice conversation, and you can check it out here.

Robert Ryan: A Good Man In A Bad Time

I'm over at The Life Sentence with a piece on the great Robert Ryan. It's an overview of Ryan's life and career, and a review of the terrific new book THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN by J.R. Jones.

Click here to read A Good Man In A Bad Time.

What I'm Reading

I've long been fascinated by Oscar Micheaux, a film pioneer whose life is the stuff of legend, but I've just recently caught up to Patrick McGilligan's masterful biography OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE GREAT AND ONLY. I can't recommend it highly enough. Deeply researched and sharply written, it tells the story of Micheuax through his autobiographical novels and films, as well as letters and interviews, government documents and newspaper achieves. Micheaux was the son of former slaves who headed to Chicago, became a Pullman porter, traveled all over North and South America, and then became a homesteader in South Dakota. All that before he became the key African American filmmaker of the first fifty years of film. Part Booker T. Washington, part D.W. Griffith, and part P.T. Barnum--he was, in the end, all himself, an icon of independence and artistic willpower.