Pulp Fiction and America
"What's one Hebrew, more or less?" (police chief in Miller's Crossing)
I was bingeing through Elmore Leonard novels, having a fine time, in and around my slog through Harrington’s “Socialism.” The inspiration was an essay by literary hot-shot Martin Amis, who strongly recommended Leonard. There is a fun interview between them online, wherein Amis calls Leonard “the Dickens of Detroit.”
After plowing through Leonard’s Djibouti, Get Shorty, Killshot, SWAG, Out of Sight, and Cuba Libre, I decided to switch up and read some Hammett. I’m sorry I did. The book I landed on is “The Glass Key,” which happened to be the first in a free Kindle anthology I procured that includes more well-known books: The Dain Curse, The Thin Man, and Red Harvest. It proved a burden, since once I begin one of these I have to finish it. It got tedious. Leonard’s books I just rip through.
Leonard was also the mind behind the Raylan Givens novels that were the basis for the “Justified” TV series, on which I also doted. (Recently revived, set in Detroit.) In all of the TV episodes, the lead character always gets the drop on his enemies, though never unpersuasively. You never have to suspend disbelief in these books. The other interesting thing in “Justified” is that the protagonist, U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, is a quick-draw artist who always gives the bad guys a chance to come along peacefully, an opportunity they often reject, to their regret.
I’m reminded that in Kojak, that I watched back in the day, the star always ends up gleefully and pitilessly gunning down the bad guy. Contrast Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander portrayal; he weeps profusely when he is absolutely forced to shoot somebody. I much prefer the original Wallander Swedish series, available on DVD. Branagh’s Wallander is too wussy for me. The Swedes are tougher (there are two different actors in the lead, in alternate seasons).
The best thing in Justified is the garrulous Walton Goggins character; by contrast, the lead Timothy Olyphant is pretty colorless. Olyphant was also the star in Deadwood, the nice HBO Western series, where he is again the unfortunate victim of upstaging by the ferocious Ian McShane.) Another strong point in Justified is the gritty vividness of the Appalachian background, one not often seen on television.
Hammett’s novel “Red Harvest” is one that I read a few months ago. I’ve read it was the inspiration for the Coen brothers’ film, “Miller’s Crossing,” one of my favorite movies. I like almost all of the Coen brothers’ movies and would watch any of them again. They also inspired the epic “Fargo” TV spinoff from their equally great movie of the same name. I’ve said the final 15 minutes of the Fargo series’s most recent season is the greatest 15 minutes of television ever, though to appreciate it you have to watch the entire season.
Red Harvest’s plot I found difficult to follow, with many twists, manipulations, and double-crosses. The story in Miller’s Crossing is easier to follow. The basic setting in The Glass Key and Red Harvest is rival gangsters maneuvering for control of a small town. The protagonists are consiglieres who are smarter than all of them, in Miller’s Crossing it’s the Gabriel Byrne character.
Hammett’s period is the 20s and 30s, Leonard the 60s and 70s. In all of them the locations are unglamorous, sordid, and populated with low-lifes. The contrast with sunnier stories, or at least stories where characters are not chronically broke and living in squalor, is stark. The sun never shines in these books, not even in Florida.
Leonard’s novels have spawned many movies, my favorites of which are the most recent — Get Shorty and Be Cool — but Hammett’s novels led to some older classics as well, including The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. Leonard can be very funny, which lightens up his narratives. In The Glass Key, Hammett is never funny.
Hammett was a serious lefty, a more interesting man than Leonard. He stood up to his McCarthyite persecutors in the 1950s and did some prison time. He had a relationship with the playwright Lillian Hellman, another red. Wikipedia suggests that some thought Hammett’s books have a kind of Marxist critique. If so, it’s a naive, reductionist one. Marx is not really about garden-variety corruption, though that may be a common, untutored view.
The politics in all these stories provoked this note. In all of the stories, governance is totally corrupt. In Leonard, the emphasis is more narrowly on the corruption in law enforcement, the flexibility practiced by authorities when they are convinced they have their guilty man. Leonard’s Marshall Givens, however, usually follows the rules. Even so, it’s all a civic nightmare. Is that what people really think about the U.S.A.? The image of the national level, until the beginning of this year, seems to have been much more positive. Now we’re in the gutter, from top to bottom.
You don't mention Walter Mosely, in particular his Easy Rawlins series about a Black PI in postwar LA. The later books declined to comfort reading (if you were familiar with the characters) but before that point, they achieved a high level. I discovered them from the movie "Devil in a Blue Dress", starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle.
A worthy heir to hard-boiled mystery fiction is Chester Himes, whose uneven Harlem detective novels feature two very tough black plain-clothes policemen, known by their sobriquets: Grave Digger and Coffin Ed. Only the first of the series was initially published in the US, as FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE, later reprinted as A RAGE IN HARLEM. The rest were first published in France. For me, the first is by far the best, although I remember also liking THE HEAT'S ON.
I'm aware of a couple of movies from his novels: A RAGE IN HARLEM which seemed outright bad to me (perhaps because the book remained so vivid in my mind). Also COTTON COMES TO HARLEM which I barely recall, but which I remember thinking mediocre, as opposed to worse than mediocre. But then, the source novel isn't so great either.
I read an interview with Himes by John A. Williams, "My Man Himes," in AMISTAD I. Himes had long been an expatriate, living in Spain at the time of the interview. Williams commented admiringly on how well Himes reproduced Harlem's geography in these novels
It's because the Harlem in these novels resembles the nowhere towns of Leonard, and of Hammet's less famous novels, even though it's a part of NYC, that I thought to mention the series. White characters, and white America, make only rare appearances, and official corruption doesn't figure, at least in my recollection.