What, nothing by Dashiell Hammett? How about Red Harvest, the basis for Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, and Last Man Standing? It starts off as a simple murder mystery, but as the book continues on you see the nameless main character pitting everybody against each other in a nasty little town called “Poisenville”, like a politician sent straight from the deepest pits of hell. Most of the time I didn’t know why one guy was trying to kill another.
I recently put down Fast One, by Paul Cain down because I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on
So Hammett, Chandler, and now Paul Cain all mentioned as blatant indecipherables, at least on occasion. Wouldn’t this seem to point to a subtle disdain, if not flat-out disgust, these guys had for the mechanics of the genre that made them household names? (Cain wasn’t a household name, but Fast One is regarded as something of a classic among hard-boiled aficionados.)
Maybe that’s the crux of it, a hard-bolied thing. Tough boozers like H. and C. who couldn’t be bothered with wrapping it up at the end in a pretty bow. You’d certainly never catch any of the golden age Brits (or even Ellery Queen for that matter) plotting so haphazardly.
Inspired by the thread which mystery has the most complicated premise, I wondered which mystery/crime novel has the most elegant or cleverest premise?
My nomination is by Donald E. Westlake. It’s called Dancing Aztecs. 2 small time hoods run a smuggling service through a warehouse at Kennedy Airport in New York. They are instructed, by a man with a Spanish accent, to pick up crate A and bring it to a certain location. The crate is one of 13 identical crates that supposedly contain copies of a valuable pre-Columbian statue, the Dancing Aztec. In fact, the real statue is in crate A.
They get to a garage where they are to drop off the crate and there are 2 men there. One is the man who set up the pick-up. The other is the recipient of the delivery. They pull the crate out of the truck and the man with the Spanish accent tells them they’ve got the wrong crate. They protest that he asked for crate and this one is clearly marked crate A. The man with the Spanish accent tells them that the crate is crate"Ah", not crate “Eh”. They head back to the airport to get the right crate but it’s already been sent to an art dealer. They’re they were unpacked and shipped out to the people who had ordered replicas, one of whom now has the real statue.
This sets off a frantic scramble on the parts of several competing groups, it doesn’t remain a secret very long that someone has the real one, to find the real Dancing Aztec.
I defintely gotta agree with L.A. Confidential. You need to read it to understand what an outstanding adaptation was done to make into such an excellent movie. Ellroy himself never thought it could be made into a movie.
Convaluted and confusing doesn’t necessarly mean bad. I love Hammett and Chandler myself, and I’m sure many other formites responding in this thread do too. I like the introspective characters and cool dialogue. Plus, it’s cool when a story is just on the edge of being apprehended and understood. You can almost make everything out in these books, but not quite…I hated Fast One
Actually,there is a scene in The Big Sleep that has Bogart explaining everything to the cops…and it was a lot of explaining.Anyway,Warner Brothers decided to play up the Bogart-Bacall angle(since the attraction was adding a spark to the movie).The explanation scene was sacrificed.I saw it on some tv program but it was a few years ago.
It has nothing to do with being hard-boiled or boozy. It has to do with the sort of story they were writing. Chandler, in particular, was writing about loneliness, and despair, and other things that are beautiful to read about, though not to live. He was evoking mood. He was speculating on how a good man can remain good in a world like ours, and still manage to do anything worth doing. He wasn’t writing parlor mysteries.
The readers who were shelling out for them at the time, though, likely figured they were getting mysteries in the purest sense. And rightly so, since that’s how they were marketed- more importantly, that’s how Chandler allowed himself to be marketed. I’d be willing to bet that, dazzled as many readers may have been by Chandler’s writing, their hardcore mystery itch felt more faintly rubbed than satisfyingly scratched.
Chandler was a great, great writer. He tried to have it both ways, though. As I say, his storycraft betrayed a can’t-be-bothered attitude with the genuine whodunit (which I respectfully disagree with you about it having nothing to do with the American tough guy persona- it’s no coincidence that these guys adored Hemingway), but he wasn’t willing to roll the dice as a “mainstream” novelist. Which, as you point out, is what he was at heart.
I didn’t mean that Chandler wasn’t writing in the tough-guy persona, but looking at what I posted earlier, I can easily see how it would have been taken that way. So let me rephrase: the density of the plot of Chandler’s work isn’t simply because of the machismo wich that work undeniably shows.
It is Five Red Herrings, and I can’t read the parts that go on about train timetables without thinking of the Monty Python sketch.
I think the most complicated of Sayers’ mysteries is Have His Carcase, in which everyone involved in the murder (which was originally set up to look like a suicide) seems to have at least one or two alternate identities, back-up stories, or false alibies. I love it as a mystery novel, but I can’t really believe anybody would plan out a murder that way.
This is highly unlikely. Hardboiled mysteries had been around since the 1920s, when the genre began in the pages of Black Mask magazine. It became popular almost immediately and a number of big names - especially Dashiell Hammett - became famous by the early 1930s.
Chandler was part of the second generation of this crew, but still started in the magazine. As I noted earlier, The Big Sleep was comprised of novelettes first published there and put together as a book when he became a big enough name.
Although I suppose there could be a few people who thought he was a standard mystery novelist, by the 1940s there couldn’t have been too many who didn’t understand the difference between a private eye book and a whodunit. I’d also like some cites that his books were marketed as “mysteries in the purest sense”. I don’t believe it, but marketers have always had their heads up their asses so I suppose it could be possible.
Not a particularly complicated plot – more of a convoluted mystery --but I was in the dark about the secret of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. It wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought I guessed it early on but I was wrong.
I never realized that manners and decorum and complying with the expectations of your social class could ruin your life. Guess I haven’t read enough Jane Austen.
I don’t know, I think you may be assuming a lot. Even if Chandler is, as you say, technically considered a “second generation” Black Masker, the private eye *novel * by 1939 was still in its relative infancy. Remember, I wasn’t referring to Black Mask readers, but the general book-buying population. Were there really enough tough guy detective novelists around by '39/'40 for these readers to, as you say, immediately distinguish a “private eye book” as something special and separate from a traditional whodunit? Short of going back in time to conduct a Life Magazine survey, my guess would be no.
What I meant by “marketed as mysteries in the purest sense” was that they were being placed in bookstores and advertised to the general mystery lover. Again, I find any speculation that advertising campaigns for The Big Sleep, The Glass Key, Farewell My Lovely, * et al. singled these works out as brooding, violent meditations on the state of modern man–that is, that their bookflaps touted them as much beyond being superior mysteries– suspect. And as mysteries, with all the discipline and craftmanship that term had come to signify by the late thrirties/early forties, they are more than a little flawed.
From the inside flap of my 1943 Grosset & Dunlap copy of The Lady in the Lake: “Again Chandler proves that he is one of the most brilliant craftsmen in his field, and that his Marlowe is one of the great detectives of fiction.” Riight. Just don’t ask this brilliant craftsman or his great detective who killed the chauffeur in dat first book. Because when it comes down to it, neither of them could really give a sht!
A title that just occurred to me: The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers, which ends with one heck of an amazing solution that nonetheless makes sense – but really, only in retrospect.
I’m still hoping it’s given it’s proper due on the screen one day.