Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives - Edited by Sarah Weinman

This was a Christmas present from my mother (what is it about Christmas that brings out a need for a bit of noir?) and is a particularly good collection of short stories, possibly the best collection I've read for a long time (and I've read some really good ones). In short I'm very enthusiastic about it.

At more length there's a lot to love here. It's a collection of 14 stories from the 1940's through to the mid 1970's, most of them are American with the exception of one British effort, and include contributions from Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (these are the writers I'd head of or read before and who initially attracted me to the book). The sub title is 'Stories from the trailblazers of domestic suspense' and mostly this means some sort of crime though there are two which break this mould; the utterly charming 'Everybody Needs a Mink' by Dorothy B. Hughes which I read rather more as a sort of Cinderella/wish fulfilment tale. There is also Margaret Miller's 'The People Across the Canyon' which was unsettling but with a super natural element which for me was at odds with the rest of the collection.

There are two long, almost novella length pieces, both of which stand out. Vera Caspary's (her 'Bedelia' is a particular favourite) 'Sugar and Spice' about two cousins - one all sugar the other less so - and their struggles over the same men. It ends murderously but who is responsible? And Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's 'The Stranger in the Car' which charts the sudden disintegration of certainties and security whilst a mother recuperates in hospital.

The one that has most stuck with me is Helen Nielsen's 'Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree' which is absolutely chilling, I keep trying to find a solution for the heroine even now a couple of weeks after reading it, but there are a couple of others which stick in the same way. Nedra Tyre's 'A Nice Place To Stay' written in 1970 feels like it could have been taken from a feature in any of the broadsheets weekend magazines - a woman finds herself with a nice place to stay in for the first time in her life and she's prepared to kill to stay there, it's just not quite the nice place you expect.

Each story comes with a potted biography of it's author and a brief introduction, there's a recommended reading list at the end, and just generally this is an exceptional collection which is absolutely worth seeking out. I can't recommend it highly, or enthusiastically enough.

The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett

My reading still has a vaguely Christmas-y feel at the moment as I'm working  through the books I bought myself to get in the mood but didn't get to before the big day (not to mention the ones I was given as well - a whole pile of treats awaiting attention). Long dark nights and crappy weather make me crave classic Noir, I don't mind if it's in book or film form but I've got to have some. 'The Thin Man' has a particularly appealing blurb as well: "Ex-detective Nick Charles plans to spend a quiet Christmas holed up in a hotel suite with his glamorous wife Nora, their pet Schnauzer and a case of good Scotch. But then a bullet - riddled corpse and a missing inventor (not to mention a beautiful young woman) force him out of retirement..."

Despite several bullet ridden corpses this isn't an especially festive read (Christmas only gets the barest of mentions) but it is good Noir. Hammett is the man credited with inventing the genre, Raymond Chandler called him "The ace performer" and he worked for Pinkerton's detective agency - so there's a chance it's not all fiction. Chandler treads very similar ground and I don't think anyone does hard boiled quite as well as he does - (but then without Hammett would there have been a Chandler?) it took a few chapters to shake off the comparison (Hammett has more humour) but eventually the ace performer came through.

Hammett himself has quite a history - detective, veteran of both world wars, communist (black listed and jailed), TB and no stranger to a drink or two. The most striking feature about 'The Thin Man' is the amount of alcohol consumed - it was published not long after prohibition ended but is set against a background of speakeasy's and spectacularly heavy drinking -whisky for breakfast and then drink after drink - it's almost a surprise that anyone was sober enough to plan and commit murders, more of a surprise that Nick Charles is sober enough to solve a crime - especially one as ingenious as this.  

What makes the book, as with all the best Noir (and this obviously reflects my own personal preferences) are the one liners, Hammett would have held his own in conversation with Mae West and Gypsy Rose Lee. He's smart and funny with an eye for absurdity as well as a general world weariness, there is no doubt that Hammett believed things could be better and was angry that they weren't .

Penguin keep slipping these little Noir gems out ('In a Lonely Place', 'If I Die Before I Wake' a whole lot of Chandler...) and I can only hope that they both find more and that someone (I'm looking at you amazon recommends) makes more effort to bring them to my attention. Potentially good news is that Johnny Depp is involved in a project to remake 'The Thin Man' - the old black and white films are brilliant but these are cracking good books and some remakes could be fun. 

The Blackbirder – Dorothy B. Hughes

‘The Expendable Man’ is one of my favourite Persephone books – it’s a pitch perfect thriller which I found unbearably tense and almost equally thought provoking. It has one of the best opening sequences of any book I’ve ever read and is generally a cracking good read that I can highly recommend. It was also my first brush with Dorothy B. Hughes and ever since I’ve been vaguely looking out for her books.

Some cursory research revealed that Hughes was a reasonably prolific writer of Noir fiction and that most of her books are in print one way or another and so I did precisely nothing about it until I picked a second hand copy of ‘The Blackbirder’ which I was quite excited about and then proceeded not to read for a couple of months. However a combination of the weather which has been begging for something a little bit Noir, and just finishing Trollope’s Dr Thorne and wanting a total change of pace, made this feel like a good time to pick it up again.

‘The Blackbirder’ was written in 1943 and is set about the same time; it starts in a New York rathskeller then careers across the country ending in Santa Fe. The heroine Julie, a refugee from occupied Paris, is running for her life from the Nazi’s, from her family, and from the FBI. She keeps bumping into a grey man who claims to be a recuperating RAF pilot, but may be Gestapo, or possibly FBI. There are also a couple of corpses – they may have been Nazi’s, or they may just have been standing between Julie and her pursuers either way she has to keep moving before the police get involved. Oh and there’s a diamond necklace and of course the Blackbirder himself – a shadowy figure who’ll smuggle you in or out of Mexico for a price.

If that sounds confusing it was. In another mood this book would have appealed far more to me, but a mix of high expectations and a head full of Barchester affairs didn’t do it any favours. The hard boiled style felt almost like parody which is unfair because it isn’t, but I do think it’s a bit of an odd beast born out of a specific time and place in history. Julie the heroine is a good example of this; bought up as Julie Guille niece of the Duc de Guille (a sneaky collaborator) she is also Juliet Marlebone heiress to her father’s fabulous fortune (which the Duc has designs on). She uses both identities and despite having fled Paris alone and unaided at the age of 19, crossing Europe on foot whilst evading the Gestapo, escaping to Havana, and then being smuggled into the USA the best part of 3 years later it seems she can’t leave her room without bumping into an old acquaintance, none of whom fail to recognise the fashionable young thing in her present guise of a poor and badly dressed refugee.

Julie thinks nothing of raiding a corpse for possibly incriminating evidence, travels with her toothbrush in case she needs to make a run for it, can fly, shoot, likes to sing whilst she irons, can look glamorous with the change of a hat, is not put off by finding herself trapped in a house full of Nazi’s in a Santa Fe blizzard, has no compunction about stealing cars, and can expertly knock out a rival with a torch. Americans don’t seem to expect much of their women.

Now reading all that back I find myself thinking that it sounds brilliant, just my cup of tea, but I would have liked this better if the paranoia had been taken down a peg or two, and if there hadn’t been quite so many plot twists. Not knowing which side someone is on is one thing, but there are too many contradictory explanations from the author and far, far, to many coincidences for me to enjoy the whole thing at face value. It does make me wonder however just how concerned Americans were about fifth columnists and what their home front was like. I’m very used to thinking that the war didn’t touch the USA in anything like the way it touched Europe but ‘The Blackbirder’ has made me think that perhaps I should bother to find out a bit more about it.