Help – I can’t stop reading vintage noir books. Although that’s fine for some people, for professional reasons I have to read other kinds of mysteries, too. Oh, well, let’s see how long I can get away with it.

My latest is another great book from my new favorite publisher MILLIPEDE PRESS (and how come people I say nice things about never google themselves and write grateful e-mails to me? It’s only the people I say mildly negative things about that make the effort to get in touch and hector me – I guess it’s comment on the kind of person who googles themselves). It’s by FREDRIC BROWN and it’s called HERE COMES A CANDLE. It’s an amazing novel from 1950, at once an extreme period piece presciently expressing the anxieties of the fifties – atomic war, the irrationality of Freudianism, good girls/bad girls, Marxism, and the soul killing effects of prosperity at any price – combined with a post modern form which mixes the usual sardonic omniscient narrator with occasional passages in the present tense and first person, with the addition of astonishing sections where the plot is advanced via faux radio scripts, movie scenes, sports broadcasts, live television shows, drama fragments and, finally, a tabloid news story. Whew. It’s a brilliant trip, experimental yet totally noir – just when everything is beautiful it all goes to hell. While I love DAVID GOODIS, he can be a little operatic and melodramatic in spots, a miasma BROWN avoids through his ironic attitude. Yes, it’s life and death son, but don’t take it so serious, it ain’t nohow permanent, a philosophy most revealingly expressed in the brief essay " IT’S ONLY EVERYTHING" appended to the end of the novel. His cool attitude, however, prevents his prose from reaching the lyric heights of GOODIS’S hot riffs, and I didn’t really find too many killer quotes beyond this one:

Krasno shrugged. "Joe, every war up to now has been a war, but the next one won’t be; it’ll be something you can’t picture. It’ll end up with the few of you who are left living in caves and fighting wild dogs – if all the dogs aren’t eaten before it gets that far. And it’s going to happen, Joe. It could happen next week. Just read the papers."

Can I stop now? Heck no – I think I’ll read this great SERPENT’S TAIL edition of GOODIS’S BLACK FRIDAY (which I’ve read) AND SELECTED STORIES (most of which I haven’t) then maybe reread BROWN’S THE SCREAMING MIMI now that I’ve seen the truly bizarre and relatively unfaithful B-movie of the same title. And then there’s the new edition of Cornell Woolrich’s FRIGHT that’s coming out soon. Oh, well – maybe I’ll step out of the shadows someday.

YR PAL,

UBU