A Leak In The Safe

People like to argue as to when crime fiction first started. To me the mystery is not a fairly recent off shoot of "real" literature, but a mighty redwood in and of itself, and one whose roots anchor it at the very beginning of the popular literature and the English novel. Public executions were very popular and frequent in early modern England, and one of the first viable commercial uses for the printing press was the publication of broadsides now known as gallows literature, which were sensational eyewitness accounts of the hanging and the confession the criminal made on the scaffold. As early as 1563 these single sheets were being printed and distributed either at or soon after the execution.

Obviously timeliness was a factor – with so many executions, the hot villain of today could quickly become passe. It wasn’t always so easy to get a criminal’s confession either, so, naturally enough, printers began to fabricate them. This could cause some problems, as in the case of one Mrs. Windsor, a "baby farmer" accused of the barbarous murder of Mary Jane Harris’s child. A baby farmer was a woman who would look after another’s infant, in many cases an illegitimate one, so that the mother could continue earning her livelihood, often as a prostitute or maid. As the broadside says, Mrs. Windsor had a stern means of foreclosure when the payment stopped coming in:

Or pressing the jugular vein.

In its description of the execution itself the broadside goes on to say that "when culprit and hangman stood side by side a fearful yell rose from the assembled crowd, and the excitement only ceased when the culprit, who struggled but little, ceased to exist." The only problem with this graphic account is that Mrs. Windsor was granted mercy and sentenced to penal servitude, which makes it clear that a very powerful fictive imagination was at work here.

Another way crime fiction masquerading as fact was promulgate was in the chapbook, bound, folded sheets which allowed the account to be somewhat more extensive, as in the eight page one entitled The History of John Gregg and his Family of Robbers and murderers. As Ian Maxted describes it, the book:

…reports how the Gregg family took up their abode in a cave near Clovelly on the north coast of Devon where they lived twenty-five years without visiting any town or city. During this time they robbed above one thousand persons, and ate the corpses of all those whom they robbed. They were eventually discovered and the king himself came with 400 men to hunt them out. Their cave was discovered containing "such a multitude of arms, legs, thighs, hands and feet, of men, women and children hung up in rows, like dry’d beef and a great many lying in pickle." John’s charming family, consisting of his wife, eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grand-sons and fourteen grand-daughters begotten by incest were taken to Exeter and next day conducted under a strong guard to Plymouth where they were executed without trial.

It this weren’t self evidently a complete fabrication, it’s also suspiciously similar to another chapbook called The Legend of Sawney Beane: A General, True History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Famous Highwayman by Captain Charles Johnson. It certainly strengthens my argument as to the deep roots of crime fiction to disclose that Captain Charles Johnson was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, a man generally considered the first English novelist. One his most notable (and enjoyable) works is Moll Flanders, the alleged confessions of a woman of the demimonde who lived by her wits in the early eighteenth century. Henry Fielding, the first English novelist who admitted he wrote fiction also produced a faux confession called The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great Infamous Highwayman.

Kind of makes you laugh when you hear the swells say that crime fiction is a new genre that has nothing to do with the "real literature," don’t it?

YR PAL,

UBU

While I was polishing up the old History of Mystery lecture – and we killed in Canton last night, thank you very much – I ran across a book I’d left out of the precursor group, a great read called Caleb Williams by William Godwin from 1794. It has one of the great feel good beginnings of all time:

My life has for several years been a theater of calamity. I have been a mark for the vigilance of tyranny, and I could not escape. My fairest prospects have been blasted. My enemy has shown himself inaccessible to entreaties and untired in persecution. My fame, as well as my happiness, has become his victim. Everyone, as far as my story has been known, has refused to assist me in my distress.

What follows is basically a fugitive story – a poor man becomes the secretary of a rich man, and through dogged detection discovers his boss was involved in a murder than he pinned on a local. But instead of leading to justice, this knowledge leads to even greater injustice, and the poor guy is framed too, and relentlessly hounded. Godwin was an anarchist and political thinker (not to mention Mary Shelley’s dad), and John Cousin’s Biographical Dictionary of English Literature from 1938 says “many of his views were peculiar and extreme, and even tended, if carried out in practice to subvert morality: but they were propounded and supported by their author with a whole hearted belief in their efficacy for the regeneration of society.” Caleb Williams is meant to illustrate Godwin’s view of the golden rule, i.e., that them that has the gold make the rules. The traditional golden age mystery ends when the bad guy is discovered, but this one only begins there, and the forces of authority are seen as at best only neutral, if not hostile, toward justice. It’s a fascinating point of view, one that wouldn’t be expressed again for about a hundred and forty years with the birth of that funky thang we now call noir.

He also wrote another book that’s worth it for the title alone: Lives of the Necromancers!

People are always asking me who my favorite writer is. I usually tell them something safe like Josephine Tey, Raymond Chandler or James Lee Burke. And I do love those writers and think them great, but they’re just not my absolute favorites. No, I don’t tell the truth because, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, most people can’t handle the truth. They don’t really care what I like, they’re trying to find something that they will like, and as a dedicated book clerk I have to leave my ego behind (and believe me there’s nothing like working retail to rid you of that pesky ego) and guide them to something that will bring them reading pleasure, even if it’s something I’d never read myself.

Sometimes I go out on a limb and say what I really think – that James Ellroy is the world’s greatest living writer. That usually leaves them pop eyed. He’s pretty strong stuff and not for everybody, but noone in American lit since the Beats has been as relentlessly experimental and audacious. Ellroy’s the only one who seems to be able to channel the old pulpy noir spirit of Goodis and Thompson without seeming mannered. I’ve met him a couple of times and he’s one of the few people I’ve encountered whose mere presence seems to short circuit the mighty UBU brain. Unfortunately, despite all the books he claimed five years ago were about to come out in quick succession, his return to LA seems, like so many other writers, to have enervated him and he’s only published collections of his GQ columns since then, and although there’s the rumor of another novel to be published in 2008, there’s no publication date. Hopefully the success of the movie of LA Confidential won’t mark the highwater mark of his career. Maybe he should move back to Kansas City.

While the stares I get when I mention Ellroy may be horrified, at least they’re not blank. I also number Kem Nunn among my very favorite writers, but the few customers I have who are familiar with him have read him only because I’ve judged them hip enough to hand them one of his books. Either you don’t get Nunn or you become a fanatic. I consider it the highpoint of my admittedly pathetic literary career to have a quote from a review I wrote in the Agenda used as a blurb (the eighth one, true, but at least I’m above the guy from GQ) for Nunn’s masterpiece The Dogs of Winter. For a moment Nunn’s fortunes appeared to be rising above cult status, but the HBO series he collaborated on, John From Cincinnati, wiped out quickly. He never responded to the mash note I wrote him (the only guy whose ever gotten one, thank you) with my enclosed review when Dogs was published in hardback, but his agent did call me, and got the review into Scribner’s hands and into the paperback edition. I’m not as worried as I used to be that he’ll disappear under the waves, and although there’s nothing on the horizon, I’m sure somebody will publish his next novel when the time comes.

The guy I really worry about is Jack O’Connell. He had a good start, winning the Mysterious Press first book contest for his amazing Box 9, a work about designer drugs, linguistics, the post office and a million other things. In it he introduced the reader to the decaying, thoroughly corrupt, rusting New England mill town of Quinsigamond, O’Connell’s own personal Yoknapatawpha County, an unappealing slab of the post-industrial whose dark soul was further explored in his next two books, Wireless and The Skin Palace. Although these works were entertaining and also built around provocative themes, they weren’t quite up to the Box 9 standard, reflecting, much like William Gibson’s follow ups to Neuromancer, an author ill at ease with the demands of the traditional genre series. But they were certainly a whole lot better than the silence that followed, and I feared the curse of the three book contract, following which many a good writer has disappeared from view. So imagine my joy when Word Made Flesh appeared from another publisher, and not only was it a Quinsigamond novel, it was a great one, a meditation on crime and memory and the word, all wrapped up in a noir package.

But it’s out of print now too, and the silence extended even longer. Then I got that old thrill again to see an O’Connell book called The Resurrectionist with a publication date of April in the Ingram catalogue. But even better than that, the wonderful people at Algonquin Books sent me a uncorrected proof, which I tore into.

It’s hard to describe how these favorite authors affect me. To be in the middle of their work is like being under the influence of a very fine drug or a very real dream. While it has some noir elements, The Resurrectionist is not really a mystery, and only tangentially enters the Quinsigamond universe. It’s rather driven forward by the unraveling of various mysteries, most of them concerning Sweeney, a hapless pharmacist, who has come to the vaguely sinister Peck Clinic to seek care for his son Danny, who is in a persistent coma. Sweeney is a bitter, unstable character, whose guilt and wounds concerning his departed wife and damaged son are still very close to the surface. Besides Dr. Peck, the director of the clinic (who I can’t help but visualize as Dr. Finklestein from The Nightmare Before Christmas), and Alice, his beautiful daughter, who are into some a little too cutting edge therapies, Sweeney and Danny find themselves of interest to a brutal but metaphysical biker gang, The Abominations. Parallel to the main narrative and intersecting it at odd points is another story, ostensibly from a comic book beloved by Danny called Limbo, the tale of a group of saintly circus freaks and their travails.

The real hero here is consciousness itself, and the action circles its central mysteries like a whirlpool, revealing the answers to many questions even as it raises many more. As reaching the center of the maelstrom and finding final knowledge is, of course, the same thing as annihilation, the common narrative strategy used by authors from Melville to Nunn when approaching this place of no contradiction is to have an observer exit the ship just before the final moment, an Ishmael who survives but is still able to witness Ahab’s destruction. In our debased age, word processors like Steven King dare to present their myopic vision of the realm beyond the looking glass, full of rubber monsters and special effects, leaving nothing to the imagination and at the same time obscenely trivializing the unspeakable. O’Connell, however, takes another, less traveled path, one used by Poe in such works as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and MS. Found in a Bottle – we leave the central character suspended, on shipboard at the moment when everything will become clear and the world as he knows it will cease to exist. Bliss.