Dry Ice Factory

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This is the second time I've read In a Lonely Place. The first time was because I loved the famous film noir adaptation so much and was curious about its source, and I was astonished at how different the movie was from the book -- starting with the fact that in the book the protagonist, Dixon "Dix" Steele, is a serial killer of women, whereas in the movie he's just a tormented guy with a violent streak who is a suspect in the murder of one girl. The novel struck me as a tour de force in its first-person depiction of a psychotic personality. This second reading was because I'm working my way through the Library of America's Women Crime Writers of the '40s and '50s omnibus, and this time I was able to identify some of the strands that the film-makers took hold of as they transformed the crime novel into a personal story about how the Hollywood Dream Factory crushes dreams. In the book Dix claims to be a writer, and in the movie he really is one -- a bona fide artiste, in fact, who detests Hollywood's focus on selling popcorn. The novel also does have a love affair between Dix and his neighbor, Laurel Gray, who has dabbled in acting in both the book and the movie, but who primarily seems to be looking for a man she can love. In the movie, Laurel leaves Dix because she's afraid of his violent temper, although she still loves him.

Having now watched the movie again since re-reading the book, it's interesting how the book is changing my view of the movie. I've always loved the tragic romanticism of the movie: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." The novel is if anything anti-romantic. Compare Hughes' description of the end of Laurel's love for Dix: "He knew but he did not admit. It might have been a week. It might have been a day or two, or perhaps there was no time. But the restlessness was coming into her. She could not be content too long to be bound within the confines of his dream. It might have been the way her shoulders moved to a dance orchestra over the radio. It might have been the small frown as they sat again for dinner in the living room. It could have been her evasion to his questions about her hours of that particular day. Or the way in which she stood in the doorway, looking out into the night." The transition is more dramatic in the film, more dreamlike in the novel.

But perhaps more importantly the two main female characters, Laurel and Sylvia (the wife of Dix's best friend, Brub, who is also the detective investigating the murders, in a clever touch from the novel) are both stronger characters in the book. This is debatable when it comes to Laurel, who, as Curtis Hanson points out in a featurette on the DVD I have, basically becomes the point-of-view character in the second part of the film. We go from sympathizing with the tormented Dix to fearing for Laurel, as his paranoid anger transfers to her. That's a very powerful switch, but the novel never portrays Laurel as a woman-in-peril. Instead she's ahead of the game, knows Dix is trouble, and teams up with Brub and Sylvia, who also recognizes immediately that Dix is a psycho. Laurel is an ambivalent character in the book -- she clearly has gold-digger tendencies -- but she's been around the block enough to know that Dix can't be trusted. Sylvia is a severely reduced character in the film, although I'll give the film-makers credit for beefing up the role of the housemaid, Effie, and creating an interesting masseuse/confidante for Laurel who may be a lesbian and who recognizes Dix as a disaster in the making.

Like the other two books in the LOA omnibus, this one has a pretty blunt take on sex and sexuality. Dix is a rapist as well as a murderer, whereas the film explicitly says that the murder of Mildred Atkinson is not a sex crime. Dix and Laurel have a torrid sexual affair. This is hinted at in the movie, with some suggestive shots of Gloria Grahame in the shower, naked in bed under the covers, and getting a massage, but the novel makes no bones about it. Dix relishes the physical intimacy and yearns for it when he loses it. As in the film, there's a suggestion that the sexual fling reduces the tensions inside of him, and he stops his predation on women while he's with Laurel. It's also interesting that in the novel Dix is shown to be very fashion conscious. ("He dressed in the suit he liked best; he didn't wear it often. It was distinctive, a British wool, gray with a faint overplaid of lighter gray, a touch of dim red.") He's always very precise about what clothes he's wearing, and he frequently notes what other people are wearing and judges them for it. I'm not sure whether that's just Hughes indulging her own interests, or whether we're supposed to read anything into it.

The main thing about the novel is the way Hughes captures Dix's psychosis, the ebb and flow of his frantic emotions, the tides of his self-confidence, his constant scanning of the people around him to try to read their thoughts and reactions. Dix is constantly pretending, constantly preening about his awareness of what's happening and his ability to control how other people perceive him. (Is *that* part of the fashion consciousness?) When he's feeling good, the world is his oyster and there's a kind of romanticism akin to the movie, but when he's feeling out of control, his paranoia turns the world into a giant closet full of monsters. Hughes' great triumph is her ability to capture the way his mood swings and flows, unhinged from everything but his own deranged caprice. Dix is almost a textbook case of hysteria, and that may be Hughes' secret joke/irony: the murderous misogynist with the classic feminine dis-ease. He's so nervous and twitchy he reminded me of an AE van Vogt character: "He felt Sylvia cringe at Laurel's use of the word dick for detective. He didn't see it; he saw nothing. His mind was knotted too tightly, so tightly the room was a blur. He steadied himself against the table."

Hughes is perhaps a little too obvious at times in pointing out the variety of lonely places in her story, but it's still a potent metaphor for psychological isolation, post-war social alienation, romantic abandonment, and even the kind of dark coastal gully or suburban cul-de-sac where someone might get away with murder. It's a remarkable novel that was turned into a remarkable movie that's about something completely different.

This is the first novel by China Miéville that I've read, and I was certainly impressed. I read it because it's the book of honor at this year's Potlatch. The basic conceit is that two vaguely Middle European cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, exist as separate cities in the same geographical space. Inhabitants of one city "unsee" the inhabitants and buildings of the other in order to maintain a fiction of separateness. A mysterious organization called Breach enforces the separation and the unseeing. The plot of the story involves the murder of a woman whose body is found in Besźel but who appears to have been killed in Ul Qoma. Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in Besźel, is ultimately required to work with his counterpart in Ul Qoma, as they begin to wonder if the legends are true about an invisible third city named Orciny existing in the interstices between the other two.

While the murder mystery is treated with full seriousness and given all the requisite genre trappings, to a large extent it also functions as an excuse to investigate the nature of the dual city, and Miéville has here created an endlessly fascinating sociological and political conundrum. It works like a piece of extrapolated science fiction even as it feels like something more Ruritanian. It's a what-if that could be located in the here and now. When you throw the crime story on top of that, you get a cross-genre work of the sort that used to be called slipstream and now sometimes gets classified under the category of interstitial arts. What is particularly clever about the book is that it's precisely about the virtual borders that cross-genre works live to straddle. The dual city occupying a single space becomes the perfect metaphor for the type of fiction Miéville has created here.

My only complaint about the novel is that the final reveal of the murderer is a monologue by Borlú that wasn't very interesting, at least dramatically. This is a problem for a lot of convoluted mysteries, where the explanation is less interesting than the mystery itself, and fortunately Miéville doesn't end on the reveal but gives us a coda about Borlú that's much more satisfying. The real raison d'être is the dual city, and the book does full justice to it. Each city is individual and eccentric, full of odd characters and odd details that leave a powerful feeling of lived-in polyglot history. Perhaps even more impressive is the way that Miéville grounds these cities in contemporary details and pop references, so it feels like part of our world of cellphones, internet, and globalization. It enhances the sense of estrangement by giving it a familiar 21st century context. This is not Cold War Berlin, or a segregated city in Jim Crow America, or even modern day Jerusalem, but it's a beautifully conceived imaginary city/city that makes us think about those historical cities and many other divided social spaces as well. I found it utterly captivating and alive.

Before I start cleaning the house in preparation for tonight's party, I thought I'd whip off a quick review of this crime novel by Leigh Brackett, which was first published in 1957. It felt like an exploitation flick to me, sometimes reminiscent of Cape Fear. A married woman is kidnapped by a drunken lout, tied up and beaten senseless. Her husband is a lawyer who is handling the divorce case for the drunken lout's wife, who is in hiding from her abusive husband. The lout wants to trade one wife for the other.

The novel moves from one character point of view to another, chapter by chapter. The most interesting characters end up being the abusive husband, Al Guthrie, and his panic-stricken wife, Lorene. The insight into the controlling male psyche and crushed psyche of his no-longer-willing victim is quite vivid. The other characters are less interesting, although the lawyer apparently became the basis of a short-lived TV show called Markham (not the character's name in the book). The pursuit of the villain, especially once the cops get involved, feels very much like standard TV show fare. (Brackett may have been writing for TV by this time.)

It's hard-boiled, but in that sleazy way that I associate with the '50s and Mickey Spillane. It's short, too -- only 138 pages in the small-typeface setting of the 1961 Bantam paperback that I have. The constant point-of-view shifting leaves it feeling a little unfocused, but it's well-paced at the same time. Very efficient and compact.

I probably liked this better than the crime stories (and eponymous novel) collected in 1999 in No Good from a Corpse, but I'm still not feeling much love for her crime fiction. Not my cuppa, perhaps.

And now I've got to take a break from Brackett to prepare myself to write something about Homer Eon Flint. I do at least want to get back to Brackett's later science fiction, although I have one more crime novel by her and am interested in her Western, Follow the Free Wind, too.

Now, to the vacuum cleaner!