The Mysterious Romance of Murder

Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir

David Lehman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501763625
• eBook ISBN: 9781501763632
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade; Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales—crime and crime solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies—some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados—with style, wit, and passion.

Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir—cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards—and offers five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

I

KILLER STYLE

1

Cracking Wise

A double bill of The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) makes for a perfect initiation into the romance of the hard-boiled 1940s shamus as well as to noir as a cinematic style, though purists might object that neither movie technically qualifies as a noir, for neither film is a eulogy to human failure. On the contrary, the hero in both films emerges intact, if the worse for wear. But the black-and-white style of the films, the look of the actors, the hooch in the pocket flask, the patrician in the wheelchair confined to his greenhouse, the wild daughter, the guns, the shadows, the cigarettes, the background music—all work together to create a template for noir.

In The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor is the vixen who plays the helpless-female card, uses her body to best advantage, and pulls the trigger on Sam Spade’s partner. In The Big Sleep, Lauren Bacall in peek-a-boo haircut, beret, and houndstooth check shows off her legs and her comic talent, and sings “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” (“She’s a real sad tomato, she’s a busted valentine”). Peter Lorre (Joel Cairo) and Sydney Greenstreet (Kasper Gutman, the “Fat Man”) lend their considerable talents to The Maltese Falcon, in which the gunsel, played by Elisha Cook Jr., takes it on the chin. Fate doesn’t treat poor Elisha much better in The Big Sleep, in which, however, his character shows rare nobility and courage. In both movies, Humphrey Bogart plays essentially the same fellow with wide-brimmed fedora, trench coat, and perpetual cigarette, though his name is Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep.

Not blessed with the looks of a Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, Bogart had been good as a hoodlum or bootlegger, a Cagney sidekick in flicks of the thirties, or an unlucky truck driver playing second fiddle to George Raft in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940). With his matchless ability to leer, wince, flash a fiendish grin, and blow his top, Bogart excelled as a paranoid or psychopath, whether cast as a homicidal painter married to Barbara Stanwyck (The Two Mrs. Carrolls, 1947) or a prospector in Mexico (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948). In Nicholas Ray’s noir classic In a Lonely Place (1950), Bogey plays an embittered Hollywood screenwriter, who may love Gloria Grahame but, when transported by rage, may direct a friend to tighten his wrists around a surrogate woman’s neck in a choke hold. In The Caine Mutiny (1954), Bogart is Captain Queeg of the US Navy during World War II, who obsesses over strawberries and plays with marbles while metaphorically losing his own. But it was as a brokenhearted café owner in Casablanca and a private eye in The Maltese Falcon that Bogart attained leading-man status. And it is Bogart as the detective hero, stripped of his illusions, equipped with a derisive wit, and handy with a gun, that defines his place in cinema history. A cynic with a sentimental streak, he is virile, quick on his feet, comfortable in his body, never at a loss for a wisecrack; and though he makes you wonder, in the end he can be counted on to do the right thing.

Not until he was forty-one did Bogart become a leading man. In Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), for which John Huston wrote the screenplay, Bogart plays Roy Earle, nicknamed “Mad Dog,” an ex-con on the lam after a heist goes wrong. Roy dies on a mountain-top, but not before winning the love of Marie (Ida Lupino). Even Bosley Crowther, the film critic for the New York Times, with his astonishingly low batting average, had good words for Lupino and Bogart: she was “impressive as the adoring moll,” and he displayed “a perfection of hard-boiled vitality.” Then, these concessions aside, Crowther was his usual self, adding, “As gangster pictures go—if they do—it’s a perfect epilogue.” The right word would have been prologue, as what followed was a whole new genre of crime and noir movies. The Maltese Falcon was the next picture Bogart made.¹

Huston’s Maltese Falcon was true to Dashiell Hammett’s novel; Hawks’s Big Sleep was a fantasia on Raymond Chandler’s. Having at its center a priceless artifact that turns out to be a fake, The Maltese Falcon has some of the qualities of a parable. The film is as tightly plotted as the book; Huston had the good sense to reproduce Hammett’s dialogue. The plot of The Big Sleep is, contrarily, even more incoherent and hard to decipher than the novel on which it is based. (At one point the screenwriters, who included William Faulkner, wrote Chandler to find out who killed a certain character. Chandler cabled back, “I don’t know.”) The principal actors go in and out of character, but it doesn’t matter, because the dialogue is unmatched for sexy banter. When Bogart hails a cab, the taxi driver turns out to be a pert young woman, to whom he says, handing her a tip, “Here you are, sugar, buy yourself a cigar.” She hands him her card. “If you can use me again sometime, call this number.”

“Day or night?”

“Night’s better. I work during the day.”

The Maltese Falcon ends with Mary Astor imprisoned behind the bars of an elevator going down. The snap in Bogart’s dialogue with her is not merely decorative. “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you,” he tells his costar, somewhat to her disbelief, because she has always had her way with men. If The Maltese Falcon is not a genuine noir, it is because Bogart resists Mary Astor. She can be resisted because she is not Marlene Dietrich or Barbara Stanwyck. And besides, Bogart won’t play the sap for anybody.

Asked by a cop what all the fuss was about, Bogart, holding the sculpted bird, gives Shakespeare the last word: “the stuff dreams are made of.”

“Thin as an Honest Alibi”

It was one of Hammett’s achievements to have fashioned a murder mystery that would satisfy the requirements of the form in a fresh idiom, an urban setting, and without the moral complacency of the country mansion sort of novel against which the hard-boiled crime writer was rebelling. The cold-bloodedness in Hammett makes for a nice corrective to the lure of gentility and ivory tower self-satisfaction that you may find in an intricately plotted murder mystery written by an Oxford don under a pseudonym. Of his boss, the overweight operative in one of Hammett’s stories says, “We used to boast that he could spit icicles in July, and we called him Pontius Pilate among ourselves, because he smiled politely when he sent us out to be crucified on suicidal jobs.” The writing has speed and immediacy: “For the next six hours I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.” Two operatives tail a criminal duo: “If they split, I’ll shadow the skull-cracker, you keep the goose.”

Hammett was Chandler’s acknowledged master, but as a sheer stylist the student surpassed the mentor. Chandler’s similes and sarcastic hyperboles (“a stare that would have frozen a fresh-baked potato”) are full of attitude in the contemporary New York sense. They describe two things: the thing they’re supposed to describe and Marlowe’s reaction to it. A girl in Farewell, My Lovely gives him “one of those looks which are supposed to make your spine feel like a run in a stocking.” The wealthy area known as “Idle Valley” makes Marlowe feel “like a pearl onion on a banana split” in The Long Goodbye, and the television commercials he watches “would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.” Such wisecracks are classic figures with the prettiness removed, defense mechanisms raised to an aesthetic ideal. Yet Marlowe can also be insistently literal, as when he encounters a piece of modern sculpture. Its owner “negligently” identifies it as “Asta Fial’s Spirit of Dawn.” Marlowe replies, “I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny.”

The wisecrack may be the modern American equivalent of the French aphorism, and some of your best examples will have come from Chandler. With his cracks, similes, and muted hyperboles, Chandler established a rhetorical style. Consider, from the story “Trouble Is My Business” (1939): “She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella.” Sometimes the effect is deliberately incongruous, but more often what these similes communicate is a world-weary snarl accented by a certain amount of resentment, misanthropy, and misogyny. “Faces like stale beer,” “thin as an honest alibi,” “unperturbed as a bank president refusing a loan”; a woman’s laugh likened to “a hen having hic-cups,” a man’s smile “as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.” In The Lady in the Lake (1943), an elevator “had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.” In Playback (1958), Marlowe describes himself as “old, tired, and full of no coffee.”

In The Real Cool Killers (1959), Chester Himes adapts the hardboiled simile to the Harlem of detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Street thugs “were jabbering and gesticulating like a cage of frenzied monkeys.” When a white woman with a “high-pitched proper-speaking voice” reports a crime, it is with “the smug sanctimonious of a saved sister.” On the avenue, “red-eyed prowl cars were scattered thickly like monster ants about an anthill.”²

“As Romantic as a Pair of Handcuffs”

From the movies, I would offer this very abbreviated supplemental list of wisecracks and other rhetorical flourishes:

• Colorful similes. “He was as helpless as a sleeping rattlesnake,” Orson Welles says of his employer in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Sometimes the analogy conveys more than the speaker may have intended, as when, in The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), Gloria Grahame tells Glenn Ford, “You’re about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs.”
• Local slang. “Cow on a slab,” the waitress shouts to the short-order cook when a customer orders a steak sandwich at a diner in Try and Get Me (Cy Endfield, 1950).
• Gallows humor, pointed puns. As a verb “split” means “divide,” but as a noun it denotes the parceling out of ill-gotten gains. Thus, in André de Toth’s Crime Wave (1954), the trigger-happy mob boss (Ted de Corsia) says, “Wait till you see the split we get,” and the reluctant robber (Gene Nelson) replies that if things go wrong, “we’ll split the gas chamber.”
• General bitchiness: In White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), Virginia Mayo complains, “Cody, my radio ain’t working again,” and Cody (James Cagney) snaps back, “What do you want for it, unemployment insurance?”
• Insults and a thumb in your eye: Vera (Ann Savage), the fatal female in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), tells off Al (Tom Neal), the male accomplice she has only just met: “Shut up. You’re making noises like a husband.” Vera wants them to sell the car that belonged to the deceased fellow foolish enough to pick up hitchhikers. Al wonders whether she would expect a “small percentage” of the profits. Vera: “Well, now that you insist, how can I refuse? A hundred percent will do.” Al: “Fine. I’m relieved. I thought for a moment you were gonna take it all.” Vera: “I don’t wanna be a hog.”

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1. Bosley Crowther, “‘High Sierra,’ at the Strand, Considers the Tragic and Dramatic Plight of the Last Gangster,” New York Times, January 25, 1941.

2. The style endures. Reviewing Knives Out (2019), a mystery movie that “bears a sheen of smugness,” Anthony Lane writes that the sleuth in the movie “smokes cigars as long as fountain pens” and that the survivors of the deceased “are about as lovable as the flu.” Anthony Lane, “Pastiche and Politics in ‘Knives Out,’” The New Yorker, December 2, 2019, 76–77.

2

Paradise of the Damned

EIGHTEEN NOTES ON NOIR

1. The Dark Mirror

“What is noir?” In Somewhere in the Night, his 1997 study of the genre, the poet Nicholas Christopher phrases his answers as questions to indicate their inadequacy. “A state of mind, an aesthetic school, a philosophy, an ethos, a sensibility, an attitude, a symbolic system? Something undefinable—a kind of raw poetry, like the snatch of a ghost sonata one hears at the outskirts of the necropolis? Or is it, first and foremost, a style?”

Noir ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: The Mysterious Romance of Murder
• Part I. Killer Style
• Part II. The Elements of Crime
• Part III. Auteurs
• Part IV. Dreams That Money Can Buy
• Part V. The Imp of the Perverse
• Author’s Note
• Authors and Books Index
• Film and Television Index
• Copyright