Found Pages: The Remarkable Harold Ernest (“Darcy Glinto”) Kelly, 1899–1969.

From 1930 on, the world depression, the coming of Nazism, and the events in China opened our eyes. … The first years of the great world Peace suddenly had to be regarded as the years between wars. Each sign of promise which we had greeted had to be seen as a threat. Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we had abandoned ourselves to it trustingly and it was leading us to a new war with secret rapidity, with a rigour hidden beneath its nonchalant air.

One of the best British novels of the inter-war years, brilliantly entering into the strange but recognizable minds of supposedly “innocent” children (here a mid-Victorian group aboard an anachronistic pirate ship). Their patterns of concern are very different from those projected on them by their parents, with small things bulking large and large things, including death, only shadowy, like that of brother John, falling from a height.

Thirteen-year-old Margaret, small for her age, is made the sex-toy of the eccentric but likable captain and mate. Ten-and-a-half-year-old Emily mortally slashes a bound and helpless man who scares her and subsequently, as memories fade and adults impose their version of the children’s experiences, allows the captain and others to hang for it.

As her father watches her asleep in her bedroom before the trial,

In 1938 Hughes will publish In Hazard, an impressive reworking of the central situation in Conrad’s wartime “Typhoon.”

Later, writing painfully slowly, he will produce The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), in which Germans in the 1920s and early Thirties, including Adolf Hitler, are rendered from the inside with extraordinary plausibility.

He understands both exterior and interior tempests and the blurring or dissolution of conventional categories.

I include this only for the gap between English (fictive) gangs and American. The work appears in that long-lived weekly The Thriller, large pages, triple columns, tiny print, the only touch of colour the red on the front cover.

For details, see Note 45.

The gangland rise and fall of a socially inept and much less politically skillful Capone, Rico Bandetti, whom Burnett called “a gutter Macbeth.” According to Steve Holland it was “a perennial favourite” in England, “boosted by the regular appearance of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in cinemas.” (THJ, 72).

The nameless short, fat Continental Op, hired to clean up the Western copper mining town of Personville, sets gangster against gangster in the ultimate gunfire-and-gang-war novel.

Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars are descendants, as is Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing.

Jonathan Latimer wrote the screenplay for an unmade filming of it.

An anti-militarism classic.

Unfortunately, the 1914–18 butchery whose nature, dimensions, and duration no-one, not even H.G.Wells, had foreseen, encouraged the belief in Britain that the only respectable alternative to militarism, if rational conflict-resolution failed, was pacifism, as voiced, for example, in the infamous 1933 debate of the clever young gentlemen at Oxford—a stance of less than zero utility when it came to dealing with the fascist adventurism in the Thirties.

Actually I’ve been using Michael Hoffmann’s brilliant Penguin translation, with its refreshingly candid introduction.

No, this isn’t some kind of proto-Nazi celebration of blood and iron and glorious deaths. There are deaths a-plenty, and wounds, a number of them Jünger’s own, but they aren’t glorious, though not lingered morbidly over either. The book is very much about living.

Young Lieutenant Jünger is a noticer, whether of military or pacific doings. At times he’s scared, as he admits, but it passes. Death is always present, but not worth brooding about. The here-and-now gusto reminds me of the free-spirited energy that Richard Hughes’ young British protagonist in The Fox in the Attic is impressed by in the early Twenties when he stays with an aristocratic German family on their estate.

It’s very much an officer’s book, with a lot more attention to terrain and combat plans and the needs of his men than you normally get, and more individual freedom within a changing framework. There’s epicurean eating and drinking, times-out during the lulls (even, at one point a bit of sunbathing in a shell-hole), a more casual attitude towards enemy shells and mortars. You have a fair idea of where they may land and their range of serious damage.

He attacks boldly, but has discretion, seemingly, in assessing the odds in particular situations. There’s no sense of an impersonal machine stupidly grinding out death.

Depending on one’s mood, there can be almost too much “concreteness” here— nature notes, character sketches, clothing, decision-making, dodging along trenches, missiles hitting and missing, etc.. This isn’t like The Red Badge of Courage, building thematically through symbolic incidents. A lot of it is one thing, and another thing, and another.

But towards the end, with its memorable long battle episode, we indeed have what Hofmann calls

As has, one might add, the recognition that Germany has lost the war.

But there’s no talk of stabs-in-the-back or next time.

A very Gauloises-and-aperitifs, man-of-the-world, journalistic account of exploring the White Slave Trade, here principally the organized flow of girls from Poland and France to Buenos Aires, which in Londres’ presentation (corroborated in Edward J. Bristow’s massively researched Prostitution and Prejudice, 1983) sounds like the world capital of prostitution in the 1920s. Lots of “verbatim” conversations with pimps and girls. A trade like any other, with pimps taking hungry poor girls and smartening them up so that they can proceed to earn good livings for themselves and their guardian angels. Entrapment? Violence? Mais non, only occasional black eyes for misbehaviour.

But some of the pimps come across as more unsavoury than the author seems to realize, and darker waters can be glimpsed from time to time in the casual trading of girls among pimps, the very uneven dividing up of their earnings, the problems for the occasional girl who does try to break away, and Jewish girls from desperately poor homes in Poland servicing sixty or seventy clients a day in order to have money to send back home.

Eight reprintings by 1938. Probably the book that put the words “Buenos Aires” indelibly on the erotic map.

A play about Capone-figure Tony Perelli. No less a critic than Q.D. Leavis calls it “nearer to art and survival than anything that is likely to be in Jack London’s fifty volumes, perhaps because [Wallace’s] lack of ideals, his shrewd newspaperman’s knowledge of character and his friendships in the criminal underworld qualified him to be the dramatist of this society.” (Scrutiny, VII, 1939, p. 479)

As a 317-pp. hardcover, this is a substantial read and, for me, a slow one. There is very little signposting to what is coming, and little in the way of what feel like genre conventions. American gangs, two of them, have set up shop in a recognizable London with lots of place names, and are primarily concerned with a massive theft of bullion from the Bank of England organized by master Chicago gangster Warbeck, a suave, literate, and ruthless figure with some factual overlaps with Al Capone.

The British police team is headed by handsome young Billy Carew of the Yard, who after a bit is given without any fuss those expanded police powers that are desiderated in Edgar Wallace’s When the Gangs Came to London two years later. A lot of cops are now armed with handguns.

The opening sentence is promising—“Sunshine flooded Piccadilly when Les Stanton was shot dead on the corner of Old Bond Street”—, with mystery woman Jenny Trent brought immediately into the action, who is trying to infiltrate the gang in order to get close to Warbeck but becomes a love interest for Carew. Other subplots or sub-narratives involve characters like super-fence Mose Kilinski, fence’s runner Danny Brill, Warbeck’s rival, crack racing-driver Sarn (which looks typographically like “Sam”), Italian-American gunman Pete Tetrano, and escaped American convict Oliver Trent.

The impact of the narrative is slightly muffled by Hunter’s bad ear for American criminal speech. At times he seems simply not to be trying. We are told, for example, that Tetrano speaks broken English, but he rarely does so in these pages. Nevertheless, there is a pervasive feeling of danger (even if no breath-stopping accounts of violence), an abundance of incident, and a plot that keeps pushing along with something of the gusto of a Fantomas serial. One can “see” through Hunter’s rather too mannerly prose to the events and emotions that he is describing.

If the American gangsters here have a salient feature distinguishing them from the domestic criminal fraternity, it is that they are GUNmen, with no compunction about killing and no remorse afterwards. They also seem a lot more accustomed to fast driving.

When three young employees in a London advertising agency face the dreaded sack after a superior catches them out in a bit of chicanery, the large, energetic, and ambitious, ringleader kills him (shooting him in his garden from a distance on bonfire night), follows it up by disposing of the guilt-ridden weaker of his two co-conspirators, and, as he rises in the firm, turns his sights on his unsatisfactory wife and the other former conspirator. The slightly ironical tone would be appropriate to a narrative of the rise and fall of a American gangster.

But this is Depression England, the land of narrow opportunities, and his luck runs out, though not because of any action on the part of the authorities. A curious book, not quite “English” in the decisive violence of its (Jewish?) protagonist and the ineffectiveness of the police.

No wonder the British young were interested in high-energy American gangsters like Capone. No wonder Forester himself, who had done a Golden Age “English” murder in Payment Deferred (1926), preferred the larger-scale lethal activities of a Hornblower.

The novel that Ben Hecht adapted almost out of recognition for the movie of that name. A largely sympathetic tracing of the career of a figure with a lot in common with the one described in Robert J. Schoenberg’s Mr Capone (1992)—violent at times, but essentially an organizer in a business with violent competitors.The speech patterns seem a bit too formal, but the narrative prose isn’t doom-laden mannered. There is mention of the fact that individuals being taken for a ride might be tortured before being killed.

In the uniquely horrific, hallucinatory second section of this brief novel, slow-witted pug Blondy Niles, who’s just made a rigged comeback, is psychologically trapped in an abortion mill operated with total callousness by huge Mrs. Boxx, where he does the housework, mops up the blood after operations, carries dead and pitifully dying victims down to the basement to make room for new ones, and shares Mrs. Boxx’s bed at night with the effete Jackie.

Mrs. Boxx’s garrulous husband, who was castrated in North Carolina after raping a farm girl, tells Blondy of the underground city where the dead from all ages carry on their social and sexual lives, and warns him that Mrs. Boxx and Jackie intend to castrate him. Which they will have no trouble doing, since he is as powerless to resist Mrs. Boxx as a bird hyponitized by a snake.

The book first appeared in a luxury limited edition with erotic illustrations. It could only have been American. You could not have had either the cruelty, the insatiable greed, the blatant operation of the lethal abortion mill, or the moral affectlessness on Blondy’s part (he’s made only mildly uncomfortable by the sufferings of the victims of botched operations), in a British novel from this time.

A brief lucid book by the husband and wife who had been responsible for bringing the Mui Tsai child-slavery system in British-administered Hong Kong to public attention in the early Twenties (see 1920 above). Carefully details the questions asked and promises made in Parliament, reproduces official communications to and from Hong Kong, and analyzes how in fact the laws have simply not been administered, British Governors obviously not wanting to tangle with rich and powerful Chinese or risk being accused of violating traditional cultural practices. By the end of the book new laws against this literal slavery have passed, but to what effect remains to be seen.

The following is the nearest thing to a report of atrocities in the book, but it’s enough:

Edward G. Robinson as Rico, assisted initially by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., rises in the rackets and dies yellow in a hail of lead.

Gets over fifty references in the index to Ado Kyrou’s Le Surréalisme au Cinéma (1963) and a seven-page eulogy. The intermittent gasping embracings (clothed) of Gaston Modot and Lya Lys still carry an erotic charge. But the opening segment on the Med feels like home movies, with Max Ernst and others dressed perfunctorily as “bandits” (or is it “pirates”?) violating Bunuel’s own later cardinal rule that to produce surrealist effects in the cinema you show normal-seeming people behaving oddly.

But at the time there was right-wing vandalism during the screening at Studio 28 on the Left Bank, and a newspaper campaign against it, and one can see why back then, and during its ensuing years of virtual invisibility, it should have figured as a major anti-clerical, anti-bourgeois-decorum work of Surrealist provocation.

A masterly expansion of his play, in which the novelistic parts are obviously providing information that was in Wallace’s mind while he was writing the play. A three-dimensional presentation, with the past frequently entering in, of the complicated interactions of sentimental, charming, vain, ruthless Capone-figure Tony Perelli and a variety of other gangsters, women, and cops. The actual Capone, or at least the Capone of Robert J. Schoenberg’s Mr.Capone (1992), was less wicked.

For quotations, see Sidebar 6.

The dynamics of civic corruption observed non-judgmentally by gentleman-gambler Ned Beaumont, best friend of city boss Paul Madvig. Payback time comes for the best-known beating (of Beaumont) in crime fiction.

Small, white-faced, chinless, automatic-carrying, psychopathic, sexually impotent bootlegger Popeye Vitelli rapes fast-living seventeen-year-old college-girl Temple Drake (a judge’s daughter) with a corncob after a car accident has deposited her among bootleggers, and hands her over to Memphis whorehouse madam Riba Rivers for safe-keeping, where she has hot sex (“nekkid as two snakes”) with nightclub bouncer Alabama Red as Popeye stands drooling at the foot of the bed. After being “rescued,” Temple perjures herself at a trial that results in the lynching of an innocent white bootlegger.

A reviewer called it “a sadistic story of horror—probably the most sickening novel ever written in this country” and said it had had “quite a large sale.” Contains two of the most horrific sentences in serious fiction:

In an AbeBooks blurb it is described as:

Harold Kelly and a fellow journalist (unnamed and working for Reuter’s—John Ramage Jarvie?) are co-founders.

It’s a 20-page weekly, approximately 12” x 9”. The first issue reads for the most part as if it were the newspaper of a small city, with lots of ads (particularly for men’s and women’s tailors), local news and notes, advice for women, reviews of amateur theatricals, music recitals, sporting events, “philosophical” columns, and so forth.

However, the principal article on the front page is “Hitler and the London Banks: Envoy’s Private Meetings,” about a visit to London by Alfred Rosenberg, described here as Hitler’s chief lieutenant, and opening:

As the anonymous writer points out,

The unsigned front-page article of the final issue names names about politicians and other public figures (British) with links to the armaments industry. It concludes with:

For more about the paper, see Sidebar 10 and Supplementary.

An unscholarly grab-bag of horrors without any obvious point, though there seems to be some anti-Catholic bias (the Inquisition, the wars of religion, etc) and an anxiety about the resumption of torture.

Too much of the book is in the form of brief descriptions that numb the mind and sensibility. But a long quotation from Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Tower of London (1840) demonstrates what horrors were deemed acceptable later in “educational” reading.

An experienced crime reporter describes appalling violences inflicted on criminals who appear at times to have phenomenally high pain-thresholds, and discusses the workings of police corruption, political patronage and the sanctions for cops who offend politicians or violate the police code of omerta.

During the interrogation of some alleged kidnappers in an attempt to save a kidnaped boy’s life,

We also (cf. the third-degreeing in No Orchids for Miss Blandish) have the interrogation of a powerful youth during which at one point

America!

Tom Powers (James Cagney) makes his way up in the bootlegging business, only to be caught off guard by a well-placed machine gunner, snatched by rivals from the hospital where he is recovering, and delivered to his home as a mummy-like package in a final shot from which we can infer that his death was not an easy one.

A fine pre-Code movie, with a rich variety of sharply-observed social types (where did all those bit-players come from?), and so much going on inside each frame that little camera movement is necessary (no montage at all, I think), and Cagney at his best as an emotionally insecure, at times appealingly boyish, but explosively dangerous roughneck.

A boundary is breached when the Monster drowns a little girl. Dwight Frye’s Fritz provides some unabashed cruelty. The Monster intrudes into the bride-to-be’s bedroom. We have entered zones of the unprecedented, the dangerous. The Baron’s “creature” has a will of its/his own.

Four years later The Bride of Frankenstein is Code-governed and the Monster loveable rather than marvelously strange and private. Whale’s contempt for the square citizenry stands out in the screeching, would-be-humorous over-acting he permits to Una O’Connor. The Middle-Europeans are now pure Hollywood and Count Zaroff a manikin in a jar.

Pabst brilliantly films the Brecht-Weill opera from the point of view of Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) and his cheerfully larcenous and efficient gang in late-Victorian London, at odds with the odious fence Peachum, but hand-in-glove (hands-in-pockets) with Chief of Scotland Yard “Tiger” Brown.

A homicidal pedophile, his compulsions brilliantly conveyed by Peter Lorre, is hunted by police and “normal” criminals, the latter with their own organization and kangaroo-court justice system.

A precursor of McQ (with John Wayne, 1974) and its British TV follow-up series, Dempsey and Makepeace. Of no interest stylistically, and with no gripping moments, but of some interest thematically.

An American cop, Captain Jiggs Allerman, comes to England to help cope with the activities of an American gang, and is impatient with British police methods He says things like, “That’s the kind you don’t know in England—killers without mercy, without pity, without anything human to ’em.” (p.19) and “When the shooting starts, it’ll start good and plenty, and all the theories about this sort of thing not being done in England will go skyward.” (p.25). To which a British chief constable predictably retorts, “American methods are all very well in their way, but you can’t expect American police officers to understand the routine of work in London.” (p.107)

At one point, Allerman breaks down a hoodlum with ten minutes of private third-degreeing (undescribed) (p.141), demanding of the police chief, afterwards, “Are you putting the tender feelings of this man before the lives of your friends and fellow citizens?” (p.142). Later he recommends—unsuccessfully—having the two masterminds of the gang shot while trying to escape. “You’re not going to beat these birds by any gentlemanly methods.” (p.242).

When asked for his advice by the Home Secretary, he replies:

But basically, though tommy-guns blast and pineapples explode at a few points, the book, as the blurb points out, is “Not a gang story but a detective mystery…,” an extrapolation from the pattern of Wallace’s The Four Just Men (1905), in which designated target figures are murdered despite police protection.

The mysterious gang of over two hundred members, big enough, as Allerman suggests, to have a representative on every floor of the big hotels, is more like an invisible Dr.Mabuse-like conspiracy than an American gang dealing in prohibited substances and activities (booze, gambling, “white-slavery,” etc). We see only a tiny handful of its members, and have no idea of its social organization, where the members live, how they pass the time when not criminalizing, what womenfolk they have, and so forth. Everything is told from the point of view of its targets and adversaries—the Establishment, one might say.

Also, despite the official recoil from “American” methods, the British lion isn’t wholly toothless. As Allerman reflects at one point, “The British were a peculiarly savage people in moments of crisis, and, if not savage, they were certainly ruthless.” (p.173). The new legislation that is passed mandates

I seem to recall that a point was made of the addition of the cat to some sentences for robbery with violence in the 1930s. In any event, British “decency” stopped at the gates of penal hells like Dartmoor, as recalled in the memoirs of professional criminals. One of them explains that an advantage to opting for the cat in prison for the infraction of rules, rather than solitary confinement on bread and water, was that it wasn’t accompanied by further sanctions. One of the memorialists reports that the cat was less painful than the birch.

The problem of how to deal with violent men who themselves didn’t observe the rules of fair play would continue with respect to “American” methods, particularly the Third Degree.

For details see Note 51.

A famous autobiographical account of Hell by a Northerner who in the early Twenties had helped rob a store of the equivalent of a hundred or so of today’s dollars and was sentenced to ten years in the Georgia chain-gang gulag with its back-and-spirit-breaking manual labour, rock-bottom amenities, agonizing punishments, pitiless guards, and merciless parole boards.

The author escapes, enjoys seven years of good-citizenry in Chicago, allows himself to be talked into returning to Georgia in the expectation of perfunctory re-imprisonment leading to pardon or parole, only to be double-crossed and thrown back into Hell again, from which he escapes a second time, making his way back North to survive in the shadows (the hellhounds of Georgia still on his trail), plus considerable publishing notoriety and sales.

For more about the book, see Sidebar 4.

In the principal plot, Joe Christmas, a Black who’s passing, has an intensely erotic relationship with genteel menopausal Joanna Burden, after whose murder he is shot and castrated (emasculated?) by a straight-arrow National Guardsman called Percy Grimm.

Hawks responds to the success of Public Enemy as later he will respond to Casablanca with To Have and Have Not and High Noon with Rio Bravo. The machine gun at the end of Wellman’s movie was a tripod-mounted Vickers. Scarface is the first and ultimate Tommy-gun movie, with Tony Camonte blasting his window-shattering way to power in a pre-Code movie rich in characters whose names end in vowels and with hints of an incestuous sister-fixation. Much more intense and concentrated than the novel, and much cruder in its treatment of its hero-villain.

An admirable demonstration of the virtues of pre-Code Hollywood.

Clothes have a well-worn look. The principal younger women are faintly pretty and not bothered by unmarried sexual relationships. The convicts are neither macho nor cutely buddy-buddy with the new fish. The guards are credibly brutal without being shown constantly inflicting pain (after some early punching and kicking and an effective off-screen strapping).

Muni doesn’t repeat his Scarface over-acting, and developments in his character are conveyed in forward jumps from one time-spot to another that don’t need explaining.

The members of the parole board feel credible, as do the prosecutor arguing against Muni’s release. So does the silver-tongued gentlemanly representative of the unnamed Southern state assuring Burns and his well-wishers in Illinois that if he returns, there will simply be three months of painlessly pro-forma re-imprisonment before he receives a pardon; and an inconclusive ending.

Since Burns himself was advising during the filming, we get valuable fillings-in of the look and feel of things while the convicts are sleeping (chained), eating, working, and occasionally relaxing.

The thrill of the hunt and the kill, followed by (in intention) the ecstacy of rape on Count Zaroff’s South Seas island. But this is not an invitation to sadistic fantasies by the male viewer. Fay Wray’s vulnerability is an extension of Joel McRae’s, and we urgently want them both to escape from Leslie Banks’ suavely crazy Cossack count—two wholesome, brave North Americans, in contrast to the drunken all-American boor played by Robert Armstrong, who pays horribly for his social sins.

A French critic (Michel Caen in Midi-Minuit Fantastique?) praised the Count as a Sadean figure who plays his deadly game rigorously, or was it scrupulously? What movie had he seen? Zaroff’s human prey are sent out, armed only with a large knife, into a terrain about which they know nothing. Zaroff, who knows it perfectly, comes after them with projectile weapons. When Rainsford (McCrea) makes things a bit difficult for him, he replaces his bow with a high-powered rifle and calls for his pack of hounds. When Rainsford survives past the deadline that he’s given him, he tries to kill him anyway.

A glimpse of a coastline stretching away as far as the eye can see makes nonsense of the talk about the island’s smallness. The fragile bridge that Rainsford constructs across a chasm would have been immediately visible as a fake. The so-called infallible trap of the falling tree depends on someone actually treading on the vine across the path. The Island of Lost Souls is a better movie as a whole. But The Most Dangerous Game is still a classic, with Leslie Banks and Joel McCrea beautifully antithetical as two types of hunter, and Fay Wray a spunky heroine.

An exemplary sufficiency of glimpses, when what is shown feels real—the stokehold crew panicked and screaming as steam and inrushing sea ravage them; a shark speeding underwater with deadly impersonal grace before the skipper goes under; a rotting head in a bottle in Zaroff’s trophy room. Shock-effect unfairness (in movie terms)—the opening group on the yacht, whose arguings and joshings we’ve been drawn into, suddenly all snatched away. Hinted-at horrors—the sinister tongueless servant’s skill as a torturer. The hunting horn. The baying of hounds.

Above all, the incomparable Zaroff of Leslie Banks, perfect in accent and body English, segueing in the pre-hunt part between good-host attentiveness, aristocratic annoyance, erotic gallantry, hunter-to-hunter camaraderie, deadly intent momently revealed, and insane pseudo-reasonableness about his own “fairness.” Hurrying after the hounds, his whole body quivers bowstring-taut with lust for the kill.

Sarban’s 1952 novel The Sound of His Horn is an interesting spin-off from it, set in a quasi-feudal estate some time after the Nazis won the war, whose master enjoys the power of life and death—and hunting human prey with surgically altered human hounds.

Dr. Moreau on his South Seas island, marvelously incarnated by Charles Laughton, plans an interesting mating experiment for reluctant guest Edward Parker’s fiancée and one of the larger beast-men, but ends up screaming on the operating table in the House of Pain.

A powerful and unique movie employing actual side-show freaks, and concluding with a horrific bit of (unseen) Grand Guignol action. My own guess is that the outrage the movie created was because it showed the “freaks” as three-dimensional human beings feeling normal sexual desires. What, the inflamed and disowned imagination demands, is going on in the nuptial bed after one of the two Siamese-twinned girls gets married?

A miraculous pre-Code offering from later oh-so-All-American-wholesome MGM. As if an exiled-in-Hollywood decadent poet had been commissioned to throw in as many power-effects as possible from other horror movies and exceed them in outrageousness.

So we have mummy-wrapped figures emerging from British Museum sarcophagi to kidnap archaeologist Sir Lionel Barton, a descent into a desert tomb, a graveyard digging at night, an extended session on the operating-table, a dance of bolts of electricity between two poles, an opium den, a Central-European-type covered cart, an impending virgin sacrifice, a death-ray gun flooring men like a fire-hose.

Plus (here we go) enough fiendish torments to bear out Nayland Smith’s comment, apropos of the unfortunate Sir Lionel, that “They have ways in the East of shattering the strongest courage”— the torture of the reverberating bell (from Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden?) from which Sir Lionel isn’t rescued (but daughter Sheila gets his hand back), a pair of screens with long sharp spikes closing in towards another savant fastened on a stool, a cantilevered beam inexorably lowering Lewis Stone’s Nayland Smith into a pit of crocodiles, and a whipping by two loin-clothed Nubians of suspended bare-to-the-waist Terrence, fiancé of virgin Sheila, under the command of erotic-sadistic dope-smoking Myrna Loy (“Faster! Faster!”), who intends to have him for herself and dispose of him, interestingly no doubt, when sated.

All this as the creation of Karloff’s magnificent Doctor Fu-Manchu (doctorates from three American universities), relishing the sufferings, actual and to be, of his captives, lusting after the excavated golden mask and scimitar of Ghengis Khan that will ensure him world mastery, and full-throatedly exhorting the assembly of Mongol chieftans in his palace hall, “Conquer and breed. Kill the white man and take his women.”

Compared with all this, in its spectacular Chinese-type decor, the group of American captives are a pretty pallid and helpless bunch, and screechily over-acting dishwater-blonde Sheila simply doesn’t have it in competition with Myrna’s marvellous Tah Lo See. According to the American commentator on the now re-released uncut copy, who predictably (in contrast to the Surrealists) views the whole thing as a camp caper, an incentive for the movie was William Randolph Hearst’s felt need to awaken us to the Yellow Peril. But obviously that wasn’t what was in the minds of the three delirious script-writers. It’s little more than last-minute luck, rather than the moral and intellectual superiority of the West, that leaves the crocs unfed, the spikes unbloodied, and the virgin un-immolated.

The super-villains of the Bond movies are all the more a schoolboy silliness beside this sexually sophisticated cultural subversion. No wonder The Mask of Fu Manchu had multiple censorship problems and vanished for a good many years. The sanitized version re-released by the studio some years ago on tape or disk is pretty dull.

A sign of the pre-Code times, with Mae West in a small part. Gangster George Raft, elegant in a nouveau way, runs the biggest classiest speakeasy in town in the former family mansion of socialite Constance Cummings, who visits it to wander down memory lane during the days before she’s due to marry for money a man she doesn’t love.

Raft is smitten, dinner-dates her (along with the middle-aged academic from whom he’s trying to acquire a touch of verbal class), mistakes a sociable peck on the cheek for love, goes to her Park Avenue house intending to ask her to marry him, is high-hatted by her and, on being told by her about the marriage-to-be, sneers at her as just another phoney after money, and exits permanently, as he thinks.

Enraged, she returns to the former mansion, memorably smashes up pictures, mirrors, etc, in his bedroom (which used to be hers), is fiercely kissed by him (struggling, struggling) when he interprets the vandalism as repressed love declaring itself, and, when rival gangsters raid the club downstairs and Raft becomes the man of criminal action handing out the guns to his own guys, yieldingly acknowledge that, yes, she does too love him. The End.

Crime pays.

Just a Saint book (three long-short stories), irresistible in adolescence, and displaying the advantages of concision in a basically comedic mode. I include it here for the following passage, drawn to my attention by Benoit Tadié in his admirable article on British ways of coping in fiction with American criminality in the Twenties and Thirties:

Incidentally, where did the stylistic tic of good-guy characters smiling “sleepily” and “dreamily” come from? Sam Spade does it at one point before knocking out Joel Cairo. The Saint does it passim. Paul Cain’s Kells does it. What does it look like?

A curious anarchic work. Someone is killing inoffensive coppers on their beats, usually, if I remember correctly, with a knife. No private detective comes to the rescue. It’s simply police work trying to hunt down a serial killer who makes only a brief appearance at the end.

Another Thriller novel with “American” elements. See Note 45.

Opens (virtually) with a three-page white-slavery rape-and-abuse episode in an all-red underground room in a clandestine Paris brothel: The narrator is one of Orwell’s fellow plongeurs (dish-washers). The episode has nothing to do with the rest of the book, but I don’t imagine it hurt sales.

A Hammettesque urban novel (cf. The Glass Key) that is so packed with abrasive action, has such a complicated plot, moves so fast, with so little description of settings and the ongoing looks of characters, and contains so little in the way of characters with whose aims one can empathize (Gerry Kells is no Ned Beaumont) that it is likely to be hard for the ordinary pleasure-seeking reader to get through it. It defeated me, anyway. The rigorously adhered-to technique, taken over from The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon, of never describing internally what a character “thought” or “felt” didn’t help for me.

But obviously it’s all deliberate, an impatient paring away, in the interests of speed and puzzlement, of the elements that enabled Hammett, in the books I’ve just named, to move in a more leisurely fashion. It would obviously have been be studied by other writers. The short stories in Cain’s Seven Slayers are less experimental.

For a much more favourable appraiusal, see Paul Cain, Fast One in Supplementary.

A powerful and socially influential novel, by a Georgian with official access to prison records, about the workings of de facto economic slavery for Georgia Blacks and the horrors of the chain gang. Centered around a young Black and his family, it has an experiential texture that I Am a Fugitive lacks, and no happy ending. According to a prefatory note in Glinto’s Deep South Slave, it was the inspiration for the latter.

See Sidebar 4

Nick Adams recalls coming upon the dead after an attack in the Italian campaign

Opens with three finely described and seemingly unrelated murder incidents in four pages. Out-of-work stunt-man Doolin figures out that they were all witnesses to a gangland shoot-out and gets himself taken on as a bodyguard by rich suck Halloran who, as Doolin figures, will be next on the list, at risk from young hit-man Martinelli. Doolin gets the facts of the situation wrong.

A richly-detailed 350-page documenting, by means of summaries, newspaper reports, lists, statistics, official statements, personal testimonies, and reported cases, of the Nazi machine of intimidation at work in politics, education, the arts, medicine, etc. The Nazi rhetoric is out-front odious, the lying barefaced, the cruelty frightful, with power flowing ultimately from the S.A. man’s rubber truncheon.

See Sidebar 13.

“[An] exhaustive and objective survey made by Dr. Raper and the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching. For two years, the author and members of the commission visited the scene of every lynching that took place in 1930 and early 1931, assembled statements and opinion from witnesses, public figures, newspapermen, religious figures, and law enforcement officers” (Abebooks description)

A hateful book, miasmic with the self-congratulatory irony that comes when, as in other books of pseudo-history like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, an imaginary writer is looking back from a distant and better future at the muddles of the past.

“History,” the story of the conflicts of nation states, is all a silliness, too often a homicidal silliness, occasionally illumined for an instant when someone glimpses the need the end of wars and nationalisms, and their superseding by a World State governed by a benign dictatorship of dispassionate scientists and social engineers.

Wells loves Lenin, likes Mussolini and Stalin, and despises Hitler as a ranting, clownish nobody. England stays out of the Second World War, which begins (in 1940!) with an attack by militaristic Poland on Germany, including a gas air-raid on Berlin.

A book serving to weaken the will of the democracies (which he despises) to resist the take-overs of Hitler, whom he doesn’t understand, in the rest of the Thirties.

This is the year in which, in the most prestigious debating society in the world, the Oxford Union, the motion that "This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country" passes by 275 votes to 153.”

A now unavailable (but in DVD process?) filming of Sanctuary with Jack LaRue and Miriam Hopkins that had many censorship problems.

Thomas Doherty provides a detailed description of the plot in Pre-Code Hollywood; Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (1999), pp.114-118. There is more about it in Mark A. Viera’s Sin in Soft Focus; Pre-Cody Hollywood (1999)

From an idea by Edgar Wallace. Brute power eroticized. A helpless maiden (literally, probably) screams her powerless way deeper and deeper into the terrifying unknown. Subsequently Kong bites individuals in half, snatches a woman from her high-rise bedroom and drops her screaming to her death, and devastates a trainload of commuters. The ”primitive” isn’t just picturesque costumes and superstition, to be mined for “civilised” entertainments.

Noteworthy for a first-person narrator—drifter, petty criminal— without any pretensions to virtue, not even the “guy” kind. Impossible to quote briefly, since the prose consists of more or less simple (but not Hemingway-mannered) statements that together build up a relatively complex picture of the thought-processes, often unverbalized or barely verbalized, of a couple of self-centered and rather superstitious working-class individuals fumbling their way towards murder.

Apart from the unwanted, amiably slobbish husband being struck on the head a couple of times and killed in a fake car accident, there are no what would conventionally be called violences.

Marvellous irreverent intransigent sardonic horrifying funny tragic kinetic buoyant poetic novel, the first-person account by an American sailor of what happens after he’s stranded in post-war Antwerp without papers and hence without (for bureaucrats) identity—funny-frustrating in the first part as he’s shunted back and forth across frontiers, coping dead-pan with cops, trying to talk American officials into helping him, doing a painless stint in jail, the archetypal Wobblyesque figure refusing to be awed by the State.

In the second and longest part, gears shift as he experiences life aboard the only ship that will take him without papers, the battered, rusty, gun-running tramp-steamer the Yorikke. Working conditions in the stokehold are atrocious and at times literally lethal. (Stokehold Kurt, frightfully scalded while performing a heroic task, “screamed himself to death.”) But this isn’t simply “protest” writing. The outlaw Yorikke has a kind of grandeur as an emblem of universal exploitation, and the crew members, surviving once they’ve adapted, are emphatically not seen through Marxist-Leninist lenses. But it is a very powerful voicing from the under-class, and, much translated, it sells in the millions.

The editor at Knopf who handled Traven’s first two manuscripts, the other being for The Treasure of the Sierra Madr recalled them years later as being, stylistically, not by a native American. But he kept editorial revisions and suggests to a minimum, he said, and had Traven’s approval.

Who was Traven originally, before he came to the Americas? To judge from the Web, the jury is still out and may never return. But the Traven of the novels, whoever he was, is to love, and a reminder that noir pessimism and bleakness, and Marxist-Leninism, were not the only intellectually valid ways of coping. I’m surprised that the Surrealists seem never to have mentioned him.

“When it was published in 1932, this then-shocking and revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Céline one of France's--and literature's--most important 20^th-Century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.” (Description on the Web.)

Werfel’s great historical novel (Tolstoyan, Dostoevskian) about the heroic resistance of Armenian villagers to the attempted deportation by the Turkish army in 1915. Some obvious analogies with the Nazis treatment of the Jews.

In 1946, Q.D. Leavis says:

A novel about—and emphatically against—flogging in German women’s prisons, bringing out convincingly the non-pleasurable suffering of the beaten body. Traces of the book are discernible in Kafka’s ”In the Penal Colony.” R.A. Caton’s Fortune Press was a one-man fringe operation that combined curiosa with giving a number of young writers, especially poets, their first break in print, Philip Larkin among them.

A disquietingly sympathetic presentation of disquieting ideas.

First authorized English edition.

A lightweight book by, as he explains, a friend and admirer of Albert Londres, who died in a freak accident at sea. Promises far more titillation than it provides. A narrative of how he travels from Marseilles to Shanghai by ship (he doesn’t arrive till p. 157), trying to test the reports he’s heard that white women, especially French women, are now greatly in demand in China, and ascertain how they get there, and whether it’s by force or voluntarily.

Lots of “verbatim” conversations, chiefly with traffickers, madams, pimps, colonial administrators. No sensuousness. Apparently the white women go out there voluntarily, for the money.. A touch of horror in six-page chapter XVII, short on details, about current child-slavery in British Hong Kong, tacitly ignored by the administration. Seven pages about a visit to a swarming red-light district in Shanghai.

I think I read that the book sold well.

A compelling in-depth analysis of the growth and operations of the international armaments industry, with its trans-national conglomerates, its links with governments, its master-agents like mystery man Sir Basil Zaharoff, its vast sales., its resistance to talk about disarmament.

The authors conclude that:

Irresistible-seeming energy and solidarity of the New Germany, with an effective vulgarization of the images of heroic workers in the Russian silents. A movie assignment from Hell—make a British Triumph of the Will featuring then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald!

The savagery of revolutionary Mexico effectively conveyed with a pre-Code freedom in places, though obviously there were cuts. Wallace Beery excellent as Villa.

A wincingly perfect encapsulation of some English class patterns, continuing those of the Great War—the ideal good-sports, service-middle-class nuclear family (cheerful, undaunted Leslie Banks), the stiffer upper-echelon cops doing the social controlling, the NCO-type bobbies marching instantly towards the besieged house when told to and getting shot down for their pains. Plus “political” foreigners who use guns and aren’t sportsmen.

Based on the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, East London, in which two members of the Gardstein Gang (Latvian anarchist burglars) armed with Mauser automatics hold off under-armed police, supplemented by Scots Guards marksmen until they are killed.

I have described some of the tortures inflicted in this hell-hole upon soldiers of France for mere disciplinary offences. But the tortures inflicted upon the Riffs, in order to get information out of them, and so on, I cannot describe. They are indescribable (p.204).

Echoes of Latimer can be heard in at least three of James Hadley Chase’s early novels. But the episode from which the passage below comes is unique, in my experience.

These lines would be excised, along with a number of others, by the editors of the Dell Great Mysteries edition, 1952.

Fictional analysis of the workings of the technically legal (and hypocritical) system whereby Mexican peasants are secured as virtual slave labour for concentration-camp-like plantations around 1909 in Porfiro Diaz’s Mexico.

Plenty of flesh-creeping here, but the most terrifying anthology in my own childhood experience was Switch On the Light, which included H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls.”

The first thing that grabs your eyes after the ads is a large swastika on the left side of the two-page drawing of a top-hatted, masked, evening-dressed figure swinging a large axe which will descend on the neck of a kneeling blonde with her head on an execution block. The consciousness of the American protagonist of Robert Leslie Bellem’s “The Executioner” shifts after an accident into that of his twin brother, a headsman for the Nazis and, after a brief meeting with the Fuhrer, he executes unwittingly the lovely blonde with whom he has fallen in love.

In Mindret Lord’s “Hostage to Pain,” a sadist with financial motives, assisted by two Germans wanted in Germany for murder, prepares to do some torturing to death.

The hero manages to kill one of the Germans, and rescue comes in the nick of time. But potentials, at least in “exploitation” genres, escalate into actualities. The unthinkable becomes thinkable and then do-able, and soon there will be stories in which help does not arrive in time.

The first six chapters are remarkably violent, and at times in the present-past-tense narration one catches glimpses of the Carter of Ted Lewis’s Jack Carter’s Law. The rest of the book is weaker, and the revelation that the violent, callous, and ungrammatical narrator, Lemmy Caution, is actually an FBI agent is absurd. Cheyney’s dominant procedure in the handful of other novels that I’ve read is stringing together one-on-one conversations and trusting to his phonetic spellings (“gotta,” “hafta,” the omission of terminal “g’s,” etc) to create the feeling of vernacular speech that isn’t there in the speech rhythms.

(See Sidebar 6.)

The only novel by this new-realist writer that I’ve been able to get hold of. The description of it on the inside cover of the 1946 orange-Penguin edition (“serious,” meaning depressing, fiction) is worth quoting from for its post-war attitude towards the British criminal classes::

The first half is a dullish walky-talky-drinky-talky-walky-drinky-sleepy narrative of someone moving around alone in named London streets and cafes, the speech patterns unconvincing.

But it starts picking up with a burglary that goes wrong, and picks up further with the protagonist’s fear of being charged with murder, his arrest (some police violence), the conversations with cops, the magistrate’s language when he’s brought for trial after securing an alibi by confessing to another burglary. The protagonist (who’s read some Marx) still doesn’t feel fully rounded, though.

“Spiv. a man who lives by his wits without doing any regular or honest work, esp. one engaged in petty, shady dealings.” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary, fourth ed., the word probably a corruption of “spiffy.”)

Hare-lipped Raven, killer for hire, coldly shoots a middle-aged couple at the outset in their apartment, and later is on the run himself.

But Raven’s speech is hopelessly wooden, characterless, and implausible. Do people really still take Greene seriously as a “serious” writer? Yes, I know that by his own account he intended this as a money-making “entertainment,” but one with pretensions.

In his most entertaining pre-war novel, Ambler takes the generic persona of “Carruthers,” attaches it to an externally colorless and inhibited Professor of Physics by means of a car accident (he has been reading a thriller shortly before), and turns him loose in a Europe of real, or at least realer, conspiracies, killings, tortures, in which, as observed by a Watson figure, he does surprisingly well.

(See Sidebar 13.)

Various parties are in pursuit of an embalmed body stolen from a Chicago morgue. Detective Bill Crane comes close to having a thumbnail extracted with a pair of pliers.

Chandler’s best piece of thriller prose, Carmady’s narration uninfected by Marlowe’s compulsive wisecracking. Cannibalized and expanded in Farewell My Lovely. But Carmady too doesn’t reflect that the half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker, particularly if topped up, would make a better cosh than the spring that he laboriously extracts from the bed. Hammett does it better in The Glass Key—make an incision in the mattress with an old razor blade, pull out stuffing, set it alight.

From the climax of “The Man Who … “

The real target in the bombing of a barber-shop is corrupt cop Costain, whom his civilian partners-in-crime want to get rid of.

Very tall thin private-eye Oscar Sail down in Florida on an insurance investigation spends most of his time by, on, in, or under the water in permutations with three baddies and a couple of cops, handicapped early on by seriously cracked ribs. Handguns and knives come and go.

Briefly reviewing Paul Cain’s Fast One, Orwell quotes:

In the 1987 Black Lizard edition, the part within brackets is missing.

Orwell comments:

The one-on-one violences in fictions like H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor. Moreau, and “The Cone” had not been chivalrous. But then, Wells, who sensed futures coming, didn’t write old-style English novels.

Presumably the Yank Mags are ones like Black Mask and Dime Detective.

The first public edition. Lawrence is flogged by Turkish soldiers with a peculiarly vicious whip (plus implied rape?) Glimpses of a village after a massacre by Turks, with a pregnant woman skewered face-down on a low wall by a bayonet. Young Arab males in Lawrence’s group prefer to slake their desire in quivering hot embrace on the sands, rather than go with prostitutes.

(See Sidebar 13.)

Argentina and Shanghai are the two places where girls are most in demand for brothels, also Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, and Egypt. Scott pooh-poohs the (melo)dramatic image of women kidnapped, confined, brutalized, and held as literal slaves as involving too much trouble for the procurers and brothel-owners. Most women who go out to those parts, says he, are already prostitutes, or are content to do the work.

But hold on a minute.

When he talks about girls taken out as singers and dancers, and then, after a bit, being “compelled” to prostitute themselves (p. 164), and about madams who keep girls constantly in debt, and about how girls can expect no help from the Law in the countries to which they have gone, and have effectively no other employment options, the line between metaphorical and literal slavery starts to blur a bit. Nor does the following do much to support the pooh-poohing:

That seems remarkably close to the (melo)dramatic version.

Savage America. Lang’s first American movie, against-lynching. Powerful in the section in which we see rumour spreading from face to face among the good citizens of the town where nice-guy stranger Spenser Tracy (later overacting like a trial run for his 1941 Mr. Hyde) has been arrested on suspicion of murder. The power of the mob.

How will the democracies, as represented by that ideal Englishman Leslie Howard, fare when obliged to deal with Dillinger-type gangster Bogart in a symbolic one-set desert eatery?

Attitudes and Their Relation to Human Manifestations, Copac

Consciousness and Character; True definitions of entity, individuality, personality, nonentity. Copac

Self-Improvement Copac

The Three Memories and Forgetfulness; What they are and what their true significance is in human life. Copac

Fitness and Your Self Copac

During Harry Morgan’s shipboard fight with some Cubans,

A British journalist becomes involved with Continental plotters and counter-plotters, including the rather too-too all-round charming, brave, resourceful, and forgivably devious Soviet agent Andreas Zaleshoff, who seems to be modeled physically on Sergei Eisenstein, with may a dash of master Communist propagandist Willi Munzberger

See also Sidebar 10.

A Four Square Thriller, first published in the States in 1936. Other writers in the British series, listed opposite the title page, include Edgar Wallace, Sydney Horler, John Creasey, Bruce Graeme, and Armitage Traill. You came here for what you couldn’t get in the green-and-white crime Penguins. I would guess that Too Tough to Die was much the most violent in the series.

It’s an interesting read, very Hammettesque, in a blend of the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and The Glass Key, but without obvious pastiche, and less staccato than Fast One. There are blurrings that you’d never find in Hammett (“His eyes were suddenly polished steel. His hands took the envelope, and they were suddenly like steel tongs.” (p. 138), The characters aren’t as individuated as they might be. Private-eye Red Lacy seems a bit put together for a series that didn’t materialize. But the action moves along at a good clip, with counterfeiting, blackmail, a faked kidnapping, a movie actress, several bad guys with thugs in their employ, and lots of violence.

Lacy wields a mean blackjack (“There was a violent second when the air in front of the little guy’s face was filled with spurting blood, false teeth, and smashed flesh,” p.86), and has no qualms about picking up a crooked blonde, literally, and throwing her against the wall. A third-degreeing occupies three pages, the details mainly about the searing floodlight. A corpse’s face is methodically cut away to hide its identity. Chase and Glinto must have known the book, which if the claim of “43rd Thousand” is truthful, did well, for Messrs. Hutchison.

Orwell doesn’t mention the book. I know nothing about the author. His Claim of the Fleshless Corpse (1937) opens promisingly with a tough-guy insurance investigator doing the narrating, but settles down after a bit into a conventional whodunit with an arrogant savant and a lot of scientific expertise.

The first British publication, maybe the first publication anywhere, of a sardonic brief novel presenting a fictional lynching in Maryland, in which the principal characters are familiar with the by now established scenarios for lynchings.

The dumb Black youth who’d been high on moonshine knows he’s going to die. The white-trash prostitute whom he attacked knew that she was going to die. The lynchers, especially their savage leader, know they don’t want the Law’s delays. The sheriff would prefer a proper trial but resents the media machine and knows that outside help won’t arrive in time and that he’ll duly try and hold back the mob but be swept aside. The newspaperman is out for a scoop, The two Communist Party officials are looking for another “protest” case. The ineffectual young man of good family, who believes in the innocence of the accused, has good intentions—only. The National Guard major has an image in his head of the mob quietly dispersing before the bayonets and resolve of his men.

The Black youth (who had at one time saved the boy of good family from drowning) is skewered to the inner wall of a barn by a spike driven, it would appear, through his scrotum, the barn is set on fire, and he is left in there with a knife in his hand, with which to cut himself free. But the others do not get what they’re hoping for.

At the center is the irresistible mob, five-thousand-strong, with its ferocious local-guy leader, out for blood and pain.

Presumably this is as much about Hitler’s Europe as it is about savage America.

First published in Britain. Apparently that edition was subsequently revised, so I don’t entirely trust my quotations from a 1998 edition.

British suspicions about America are confirmed. Idealistic, impractical young journalist Dolan feels that

He starts his own small paper and sets out to expose the misdeeds of local power figures. He is undeterred by a beating. At a meeting of a Klan-like organization to which, apparently, everyone who is anyone belongs, he witnesses a Black being methodically tarred and feathered and a white offender castrated/. Refusing to be bought off, he is permanently silenced in the final page.

James Hadley Chase presumably derived his “Grisson” in No Orchids from a “Grissom” here, and there is a prefiguring of the No Orchids third-degreeing. Dolan is speaking (a little oddly, perhaps, for an anti-fascist):

Spanish Civil War horrors.

See Sidebar 11.

Starts promisingly as another of Greene’s cinematic entertainments (“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”), and focuses on the principal public arena of British gang activity, the racecourse “protection” racket, in which bookies, exposed and defenceless beside the blackboards on which they write the odds, pay not to have their business disrupted.

But after a chapter or two, as Greene himself recalls, the narrative becomes terminally infected with Significance.

The success of this mannered novel about the violent seventeen-year-old Catholic-born leader of a small English gang may have helped stimulate James Hadley Chase to undertake No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The two books have nothing in common stylistically or thematically.

However, Pinkie Brown’s ambitions and frustrations are done from the inside and unironically. It would have been easy for a different writer to have kept pointing to parallels between this low-life and a Hitler. (cf. Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui ). But the hunger for power and plenitude is not in itself ridiculous here, nor is Pinkie’s Catholic-derived sense of an ultimate importance in his actions, beyond English business-as-usual common-sense and, in the person of barmaid Ida, cheerful hedonism.

Despite Greene’s later anti-Americanism, there is an “American” pattern here. Greene himself, after all, had been an enthusiastic movie-goer and reviewer at a time when movies, especially gangster movies, meant Hollywood. And the Mr. Colleoni of the novel, comfortably ensconced in his crime-does-pay suite in the grand hotel in which tacky class-bound Pinkie is hopelessly an outsider, and exuding suave authority, is in effect, and given his Italian name, an “American” or quasi-Capone role-model for Pinkie as he gazes upwards.

A more actual Pinkie would have been an avid movie-goer, with Cagney, Bogart, Edward G. and others in his consciousness. But the movies, despite their presence in the movie-like opening, are never mentioned in the book, preventing the kind of put-down that occurs in Gerald Kersh’s depressing Night and the City with respect to his also aspiring small-timer

Apparently Colleoni was partly based on Charles “Darby” Sabini (1889-1950), who for a time had a suite in the Grand Hotel at Brighton, and of whom Fergus Linnane says in London’s Underworld (2003) that his gang

For more on the Sabinis, see Note 31

But Darby, who had not been a public figure in the British social landscape, declared himself bankrupt in 1936 and later, shattered by the death of his son in the Battle of Britain, retired to the much less glamorous Hove, next door to Brighton, where he apparently earned a modest living as a bookmaker. (Murphy, p.154)

Young out-of-work and apolitical English engineer Nicky Marlow (echo! echo!) takes a job as a sales rep to Italy for an international armaments corporation, and finds himself getting a dangerous education in the ways of Fascist Italy and Axis espionage, from which he only escapes with the help of Soviet agent Zaleshoff, still as charming, brave, etc. as in Background to Danger.

One of the new-style “realistic” British crime novels, it is more about crookedness than about criminality, with pretentious pseudo-Nietzschean/Darwinian reflections by narrator and characters. (“The world is still no good, just because people have been too concerned with resting and comfort.” “The few things we know and remember are like a pinch of dried salt on the shore of this ocean of knowledge that flows in chaos within us.”).

Bottom-feeders in grubby Depression-era London are constantly on the prowl for a bit of money or even at times simply a bit of food, in a period when a five-pound-note is a windfall. Kersh’s physically little, pseudo-American Harry Fabian, scrabbling upwards with some wrestling promotion and night-club activity, has nothing but the name, the wrestling, and over-optimistic expectations in common with Richard Widmark in Jules Dassin’s strong post-war movie of that name, which by Dassin’s own later admission in a movie interview he made without having read the book.

Widmark wheedles and steals from Gene Tierney, his girl-friend. Kersh’s Fabian, near the end, is getting set to sell her prostitute opposite number to white-slavers. And always the “Americanness.”

Playing poker dice, “He loved this game, which smacked somehow of the gangster films, about which he had constructed all those elaborate affectations which went to build up his life.” (Ch 25)

Kersh has a good eye and ear for the mechanics of manipulation, such as in the instructions given a night-club hostess for separating suckers from their money, and the show-biz fakery of new-style wrestling, in contrast to the genuine bone-breaking and fortitude of old-style.

At the back of the Hutchison first edition (hardback) are twenty-one pages of announcements. This book alone is described there as “An important novel.” It is by the prestigious author of the prestigious social-realist novel Love on the Dole.

Personally I found it an intolerably slow and tiring read, because it seems as though it ought to be significant but doesn’t, so far as I’m concerned, get off the ground.

Its 256 pages are filled with a complicated plot involving a number of characters, both crooks and cops, with lots of episodes, lots of agonistic dialogue, the names of lots of streets, some probably ‡ clef night clubs, and a general air of giving the skinny on Soho, as distinct from East End, crookdom, based on a good deal of first-hand observation. It is less mannered than Brighton Rock and Night and the City in the same year and testifies to the reading public’s presumably considerable interest in the milieu.

But the execution isn’t up to the plotting, into which a lot of work has obviously gone. There’s a fatal slight blurriness to the prose. A tough will say “Gosh!” No-one ever uses the word “hell”; instead, it’s “What the devil!” Sentences like “An icy hand seemed to clutch at Gino’s heart, a vague premonition, a fear, on tiptoe, put a stare in his eyes” are allowed to slip by. Descriptions of night-clubs are unsensuous.

The characters fade as one’s attention slackens. Having described them physically when they’re first introduced, the author appears to feel that now we will immediately visualize them whenever they’re mentioned. The dialogue between low-lifes feels too grammatical. Nor is there much violence—some, not a lot. The milieu doesn’t feel dangerous.

The following is intriguing, though.

The end-papers are decorated with clippings from dailies like the Express, the Star, the Sun-Chronicle, with headlines like “3 policemen shot. Revolver Battle Last Night Round A Car in London Street” and “Thames Watch on Alien Smuggling To be Tightened,” and statements like, “Scotland Yard is greatly perturbed at the growth in this country of the ëgang protection’ racket so rife in America.”

A suspenseful thriller about the London kidnapping of a child whom we believe the kidnappers are quite capable of killing. Another grain of sand for René Raymond’s oyster?

London private-investigator Slim Callaghan asks questions of a beautifully attired crooked lawyer on whose biceps he’s kneeling.

Later Callagham himself is asked some question.

The greatest fictive narrative since Conrad’s “Typhoon” of a well-appointed ship barely surviving the ravages a monstrous and, in this instance, wholly unexpected hurricane.,

Céline’s greatest novel. The narrator (same as in Journey to the End of the Night) grows up the only child in a tempestuous petit-bourgeous family desperately trying to make a living in frenetically-paced commercial Paris before WW1, the new-style commercial exigencies making nonsense of the father’s traditional romantic-classical rhetoric.

After a point, overdriven by the conflicting demands of delivery-boy work in a filthy Paris on swollen stinking feet and his father’s calls for self-improvement, Ferdinand gives up and goes literally mute during the whole episode of his time in England in a grotty little prep school that itself is falling apart.(Some sexual passages there resulted in blank spaces left by excisions in the French edition.) Subsequently he finds satisfaction with a shyster but invincibly optimistic inventor (recalling Uncle Ponderevo in H.W. Wells’ Tono-Bungay) and ends up as protector of a feral pack of displaced orphans.

The book is uncontaminated by the raving anti-Semitism of Bagatelles pour un Massacre (Trifles for a Massacre), which appeared the year after the French first edition and, at 226 pages full of print, is misleadingly referred to as a “pamphlet.”

Orwell, returning wounded from Spain, makes himself unpopular with readers of the New Statesman, members of the Left Book Club, and other peace-lovers, their cortexes massaged by Willi Munzenberg’s propaganda machine, who do not want to hear the disillusioning truths that he reports about Communist activities in Spain.

The autobiography of a London prostitute, who says of herself at the outset, “I am neither a beast nor a machine. I have thoughts and feelings and emotions like everyone else. And like everyone else, I take my job for granted—my job as a prostitute. Living would be intolerable if one didn’t.” (p,7) Withdrawn from publication by Messrs Routledge as the result of a campaign by the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror (with the encouragement of the Spectator), it is then published in the same year by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in Paris.

For more, see Note 51

The kidnapping-and-potential-rape aspect of this largely playful novel is very likely a prime stimulant for James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. See Sidebar 1, section X.

So, perhaps, is the tone, cooler than Hemingway’s in To Have and Have Not, with which the violences in the two final chapters are described.

Chandler being tougher than he is for Black Mask.

First publication in Britain (a new translation, Fortune Press). For contents, see above, 1931)

A terrifying example of the moves and manners of Reason, here legal reason, overlying, first, the extraordinary spectacle of a group of Old Bolsheviks from the highest level of government being led by Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky through a series of seemingly free confessions to outrageous plans for sabotaging the works of State that they had done so much to create, and below that, as we know, the most ruthless coercion, up to and including physical torture.

The culminating performance by Nikolai Bukharin, the most intelligent and at one point important Communist theoretician after Lenin and Trotsky, is particularly puzzling in the West. He engages in a good deal of unintimidated sparring with the odious, reptilian Vyshinsky (later prominent in the United Nations) and yet in his long final address to the court, phrased with considerable subtlety at times, he confesses to having been, he too, an enemy of the State.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, two years later, is a major attempt to figure out the intellectual and personal dynamics that could have produced this seemingly uncoerced signing of his own death sentence.

For more on Scott, see Note 25

An impressive 288-page book, compiled and edited by the Chinese correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Substantial eye-witness accounts by Europeans of the horrors that occurred in Nanking and elsewhere are followed by 428 brief abstracts of statements made by individual Chinese, a list of the Japanese Army units busy in those areas, some correspondence with the Japanese authorities, and a breathtaking example of barefaced official lying.

For more details, see Note 48.

The daughter (no first name) of a Meat King millionaire in 1930s Kansas falls into the hands of the Grisson [sic] gang and is made into the sex-slave of Ma Grisson’s sadistic son Slim.

For more about this seminal text, see Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2.

Tough newly-fired newspaper photographer Bill Duffy, who has been conned into taking photos to be used for blackmail purposes, only to have them stolen and be severely beaten by people seeking them, sets out in search of them himself in the hope of making big bucks, and engages in complicated manoeuvres involving attractive women and ruthless men. The earlier chapters are remarkably solid and American-feeling (at least in the Panther edition), with occasional assists from Latimer, principally The Lady in the Morgue.

Did Latimer later echo Duffy’s friendship with Sam and Alice McGuire in his Sinners and Shrouds?

A cultural gap is closed. A Buchanish British aristocrat is tortured by the Gestapo after trying to assassinate Hitler at Berchesgarten, escapes back to England, and is hunted by an upper-classish Nazi.

But, unlike Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, he cannot turn to the Establishment for help, and becomes trapped in a muddy burrow in Dorset where he must cope with the mind-games of his opponent, who is “merely,” as one gentleman to another, seeking a written acknowledgment of guilt that will of course never never be used against him or his government.

The psycho-drama plays out in an English countryside going comfortably about its normal business.

Of his initial interrogation he remarks very Britishly,

I can’t recall the 1941 Fritz Lang movie of it, Man Hunt, in any detail. The more recent made-for-TV (I think) version with Peter O’Toole is intelligently scripted and surprisingly faithful to the book.

Lemmy Caution, down in Mexico where shootings and explosions happen, in a novel into which Cheyney puts more substance than he often does, asks some questions of a lawyer.

I’ve no idea what’s in this book by the author of The Sheik, but couldn’t resist the title.

An example of how the nostalgically overrated Code-governed Thirties were cruder than what preceded them. Cagney is now the “good” gangster and sneery Bogart is the “bad” one. Easy to forget how unpleasant he was back then, before The Maltese Falcon, in movies like Dead End and Kid Galahad.

A remarkably good prison movie, in which Cagney’s irritating mannerisms are held to a minimum and George Raft is given real substance, in this intelligent script intelligently realized by gangster-movie-veteran Keighley.

It feels as though it’s from the early Thirties, partly because the actual penitentiary that’s obviously being used is older and not fully streamlined. Framed investigative journalist Cagney is able to meet with girlfriend and mother (the latter not the uncomprehending little Irish Ma of Public Enemy) in a small room where they can embrace and where a guard simply pulls up another wooden chair and sits sideways to them as they talk on theirs. The machines in the work area, dealing with bundles and mounds of, I think, flax, are unfamiliar-looking.

Big George Bancroft (himself a memorable gangster in Underworld), 1927, is convincingly a tough but basically decent pre-reform governor going by the rules of a brutally punitive system.

The inmates aren’t stereotyped, and there’s almost no in-your-face aggressiveness. In town, we have one of those visits with half-a-dozen gang members taking their shirt-sleeved ease in an apartment (card table, etc) that Keighly also provides in G-Men (models, I’m sure, for Chase and Glinto). And the story-lines are complex enough to engage one’s empathy with a number of characters.

So the prison brutalities when they occur—a vicious old guard in charge of the workshop, guards beating up Cagney to get him to squeal on Raft, the horrors of the Hole where you’re chained, standing, to the bars (we see a con who’s mind has been destroyed by the process)—are all the more disturbing and the moral issues of “character,” loyalty, etc, matter all the more.

We see convincingly in Cagney a “decent citizen” (albeit with a news-hound’s corner-cutting) becoming a con, fitting into the con culture without role-playing, and reduced after months in the hole to the “animal” savagery that the governing classes saw as a characteristic of lower-class criminals. The relentless hail of National Guard machine-guns suppressing a minor prison riot has never been louder or more frightening.