Books to Die For

  But la danse runs a poor second to Hudson’s consuming passion. Having grown tired of the used-car racket, he comes to the realization that he has a desperate need to create a great work of art. But in what form? It doesn’t take him long to narrow it down to the only medium he can imagine: “Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, the writing of a novel—all of these art forms take years of apprenticeship . . . But I knew I could write and direct a movie!”

  iii. The Man Who Got Away

  Willeford’s original title for the novel was The Director, and though Hudson does get his share of casual sex in the book, the publisher’s title is a pure bait and switch. Richard Hudson doesn’t chase women because he doesn’t have to. His stepsister keeps coming back to him until he cuts her off, for fear that her father, Leo, a washed-up director who’s Hudson’s connection to the studio, will find out about it. When the film gets set up, he screws the actress playing the wife of the lead, and he sets about seducing his pretty and virginal secretary Laura, just for the challenge of it.

  So as the car lot he’s supposed to be managing goes straight to hell (in an act of casual assholery, he orders his salesmen to dress in Santa suits in the midst of a sweltering L.A. July), Richard makes his movie, a devastatingly bleak film noir about a truck driver who kills a child and leads the cops on a cross-country chase. The trucker finally manages to escape the suburban life he so despises by being beaten to death by an angry mob.

  To hear Hudson describe it, the movie sounds like a small masterpiece, wherein lies the problem. It’s too short for feature distribution, only sixty-three minutes long, and the studio demands that he add another twenty. It’s perfect, he protests, but the money men have no sympathy for the artist’s predicament and yank the film away from him. Hudson’s revenge is disproportionate and wonderful, and you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is.

  The irony here—and it’s of the cheaper variety—is that Devor’s excellent film version, shot in color but printed in beautiful, high-contrast black and white, played briefly in coastal art houses before being submitted to cable TV. The network insisted on running it in color, and with several key cuts, including the moment where Hudson slugs pretty Laura in the belly after she announces that she’s pregnant.9 I have heard, and perhaps he will correct me if my impression is incorrect, that Mr. Devor objected strenuously to these changes and, like Richard Hudson before him, was informed that his services were no longer required on the film. The cuts were made, the film showed in color, and it has never been released on DVD. Which is a shame.

  iv. A Heavyhanded Discussion of Art and Commerce that Willeford Would Have Loathed

  Like Philip K. Dick, Willeford died at the height of his creative powers, at a time when his books were finally getting some attention from the larger reading public. As stated, the man did a lot of things in his life, and to those of us who are fanatical admirers of his work it may seem absurd that he spent any energy doing anything else other than writing. But he went through long periods without publishing, and it may be that The Woman Chaser is the result of a decade of frustration in dealing with fly-by-night paperback houses, title-changing editors, and troublesome agents. It’s commonplace that the novelist has complete control over his or her work, but in fact there are always forces reminding you that your movie has to be longer than sixty-three minutes, or that you can’t have the star of your movie punch his pregnant girlfriend, or that it can’t be in black and white anymore because these kids today, by God, they want color. I can’t speak for him, and wouldn’t dare, but I like to think that this book is a lovely middle finger extended at the moneychangers in the literary and artistic temples.

  Go read it.

  Scott Phillips lives in St. Louis, Missouri, for reasons he can no longer articulate but that once must have made sense to him. He is the author of any number of depraved books, including The Ice Harvest, made into a film of the same name by Harold Ramis, and most recently the novel The Adjustment, as well as a collection of short stories, Rum, Sodomy, and False Eyelashes. Visit him online at www.scottphillipsauthor.com.

  The Light of Day (aka Topkapi)

  by Eric Ambler (1962)

  M. C. BEATON

  * * *

  First published with The Dark Frontier (1936), Eric Ambler (1909–98) is credited with investing the spy novel with a radical dash of gritty realism. He is best known for The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), Journey into Fear (1940), and The Light of Day (1962), the last of which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Ambler also won two Gold Daggers, for Passage of Arms (1959) and The Levanter (1972), was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers Association of America, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. An accomplished screenwriter, Ambler wrote the screenplays for A Night to Remember (1958), The October Man (1947), and The Cruel Sea (1953). His autobiography, published in 1985, was titled Here Lies. The arrangement of the cover typography allowed it to read Here Lies Eric Ambler.

  * * *

  “It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police.”

  So begin the adventures of pimp, pornographer, and thief Arthur Abdel Simpson, told in the first person. He is the product of an Egyptian mother and a British sergeant father. Arthur is fond of quoting the wisdom of his father’s sayings, such as “Bullshit beats brains.” He is probably one of the most fascinating antiheroes of all time. The miracle of Ambler’s writing is that the reader somehow wants this decidedly unlovely character to succeed.

  The story opens at Athens airport where Arthur spots a likely mark in a Mr. Harper. Arthur gives him his card, with the message “Car waiting outside for Mr. Harper.” On the road to the Grande Bretagne Hotel, Arthur offers his services as a guide. That evening, after a visit to a restaurant and club, Arthur leaves him at a brothel and nips back to the hotel, lets himself into Harper’s room with a forged passkey, and is in the process of collecting several traveler’s check number slips that people keep in case they lose the checks. He plans to use the numbers to collect the replacement checks himself.

  He is caught by Harper, who threatens to turn him over to the Greek police unless Arthur does a job for him. The job is to drive a limousine to Istanbul, but at the frontier the Turks take off the doors of the car and find they are full of arms. Arthur’s only way out is to spy for the Turkish police by finding out Harper’s plans for the weapons.

  Ambler is credited with being the inspiration for John le Carré and Graham Greene. He took the spy story away from the gentleman sleuth. The book was made into a film, Topkapi, with Peter Ustinov playing Arthur.

  Arthur craves a British passport, having only an Egyptian one, which has run out. Although his father was British and he went to school in Britain, he cannot get a British passport because he has a criminal record in Britain. Amusing though the book is, and a real page-turner, Ambler does highlight the dilemma of the stateless person.

  Ambler obviously loves Istanbul and has fond memories of the old Park Hotel, which burned down, the one hotel in the world in which, as it was built on the side of a cliff, you entered the reception area and took a lift down to your room.

  The Light of Day was written in 1962 but is still as fresh as ever.

  M. C. Beaton writes: I have two detectives featured in my books—Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. The new Hamish Macbeth just out is Death of a Kingfisher. I started my career as a fiction buyer for John Smith & Sons in Glasgow and wrote theater reviews for the Daily Mail. I then became fashion editor of Scottish Field and moved on to the Scottish Daily Express as crime reporter, then moving to Fleet Street to be chief woman reporter of the Daily Express. After marriage to journalist and writer Harry Scott Gibbons, and a move to New York and brief spell working for Rupert Murdoch’s Star, I started to write historical novels, but after more than a hundred of those, I changed to writing detective fiction. The new Agatha Raisin, out in October, is called Hiss & Hers. Visit her onli
ne at www.mcbeaton.com and www.agatharaisin.com.

  Cover Her Face

  by P. D. James (1962)

  DEBORAH CROMBIE

  * * *

  Phyllis Dorothy James White (b. 1920) is the award-winning, British-born author of more than twenty books, among them the Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray mysteries; the dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992); and a number of works of nonfiction, including Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), her study of the genre. She is a Conservative life peer in the House of Lords, with the title Baroness James of Holland Park.

  * * *

  Cover Her Face was P. D. James’s first detective novel, published in 1962, and I initially came across it perhaps ten years later, in the 1970s. Having developed an early preference for English detective fiction, I’d read my way through many of what we now refer to as the Golden Age writers—Christie, Allingham, Marsh, Tey, and particularly Dorothy L. Sayers.

  I’m sure I reread Cover Her Face at least once while James continued to publish successive novels featuring Metropolitan Police detective Adam Dalgliesh, as well as the two books featuring private detective Cordelia Gray. I do know that I reread it carefully in the late 1980s, when I was just beginning to dip my own toes into the waters of detective fiction, so it was with much anticipation that I looked forward to reading it once more in preparation for this essay, after a gap of more than twenty years.

  Now a writer of British detective novels myself, I chose Cover Her Face because, in my recollection, it had seemed a watershed novel in the British canon, a leap into modernity from the by then slightly crusty conventions of the British detective novel as it had developed between the wars.

  The book begins, as do most of the later James novels, not with the discovery of a body, but with a careful building up of the setting and the characters, with particular attention paid to the victim.

  In a medieval manor house in the fictional Essex village of Chadfleet, the Maxie family has taken on a new maid, an unwed mother named Sally Jupp. She is employed to help with the housework and with the nursing of the terminally ill Mr. Simon Maxie. The other members of the household are Mrs. Eleanor Maxie; her son, Stephen, a doctor at a London hospital; her daughter, Deborah Riscoe, a widow; a domestic servant, Martha Bulitaft; Felix Hearne, a decorated war hero and friend of Deborah Riscoe; and Catherine Bowers, a nurse who is a family friend but who has had a relationship with Stephen Maxie.

  On the evening of the annual church fête, Sally Jupp announces to the family that Stephen Maxie has proposed to her. The next morning, Sally is found dead in her room, strangled, with the door locked from the inside.

  Only then are we introduced to our policeman. Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is a professional detective rather than an amateur dilettante. While a few of the Golden Age detectives were policemen, perhaps most notably Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, they were also aristocrats and, in a sense, glorified amateurs who played at solving crimes.

  But while Adam Dalgliesh is highly intelligent, educated, and articulate (as well as tall, dark, and handsome, perhaps in tribute to Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy), he is not a “gent.” Nor is murder taken lightly in this first James novel, an attitude that marks a departure from most Golden Age whodunits, as does the fact that the victim is not merely a catalyst for the puzzle. Sally Jupp is never likable, but she is real, a complex young woman whose actions, as we see over the course of the novel, set in motion the circumstances that lead to her death. And when the murderer is finally revealed, it is someone with whom we can feel empathy, even if we don’t condone the crime.

  All these things I remembered, and all, I think, contributed to my sense that this book was in some ways groundbreakingly modern.

  But there were other things that surprised me in rereading it. I’d forgotten just how strongly the book draws on its predecessors. It is a country house mystery in every sense. Its cast of characters includes not only the family of the manor house, but the village doctor, the vicar, the woman who runs a local charitable organization (in this case, a home for unmarried mothers), and, of course, the maid, who is the victim.

  Class distinctions are drawn quickly and brutally. But if the characters are unaware of their bias, the author is not, and it is at least in part the maid’s refusal to stay in her proper place that leads to her undoing. And it is here, in James’s finely and sometimes scathingly drawn portraits of her characters, that we see the already sure hand of the novelist.

  I found it much more difficult than I’d expected to view this first novel out of the context of those that followed. It surprised me to find that the setting was so amorphous. We know that the story takes place in a village in Essex, and the manor house itself has a strong presence, but the book lacks the detailed sense of place that we have come to expect in James’s later novels.

  And then there is Dalgliesh, the prototype of the modern fictional British policeman. How little we learn of the man in this first novel! We know, because he is already a chief inspector, that he is both experienced and good at his job. We are told that, many years previously, he lost his wife and unborn child. We have yet to learn that he is a poet, or just how solitary a man he really is. Throughout the course of the novel, he is seen most often through the eyes of the other characters—relentless in his pursuit of the truth, compassionate when it suits his purpose, comfortable with his own authority. And yet, because he does not confide his thought processes to his sergeant, George Martin, and the reader is not otherwise granted access to his deductions, his arrival at the solution to the mystery (the denouement is played out in the business room of the manor house, which might as well be the library) seems almost omniscient. It is only at the very end of the novel, in a beautifully written coda, that we get our first glimpse of Dalgliesh as fallible, human, and vulnerable. But make no mistake: James plays fair with the reader. All the clues are there, and it’s a credit to the solution that I remembered it in almost every detail even after such a long gap between readings.

  And then there is the prose itself, which then, as now, sets James apart. It is often simple, as in this description of Martingale House as Adam Dalgliesh sees it at the very close of the book, but always moving in its descriptive power:

  The beeches were golden now but the twilight was draining them of colour. The first fallen leaves crackled into dust beneath the tyres. The house came into view as he had first seen it, but greyer now and slightly sinister in the fading light.

  It is P. D. James’s skilled use of language, I think, combined with her unflinching depth of characterization, that firmly marks Cover Her Face as a bridge between the enjoyable but workmanlike whodunits (with the exception of the Peter Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers) of the years between the wars, and the evolution of the British detective story into its modern incarnation, the detective novel, which can take its place with the best of today’s literature.

  New York Times best-selling author Deborah Crombie is a native Texan who writes crime novels set in Britain, featuring Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Detective Inspector Gemma James. The series has received numerous awards, including Edgar, Macavity, and Agatha nominations, and has been published in more than a dozen countries to international acclaim. Crombie lives in north Texas with her husband, German shepherds, and cats, and divides her time between Texas and Great Britain. Her latest novel, No Mark Upon Her, was published by William Morrow in February 2012. She is currently working on her fifteenth Kincaid/James novel. Visit her online at www.deborahcrombie.com.

  The Damned and the Destroyed

  by Kenneth Orvis (1962)

  LEE CHILD

  * * *

  A pseudonym for Kenneth Lemieux, Kenneth Orvis (b. 1923) is one of the very few professional hockey players to turn his hands to crime writing. His novels included The Damned and the Destroyed (1962), Night Without Darkness (1965), and The Doomsday List (1974). In 1985, Orvis published the nonfiction title Over and Under the Table: The Anatomy of an Alcoholic.
r />   * * *

  I bought this as a sixty-cent Belmont paperback in the spring of 1969, along with another pulp item about a fictional rock trio called the Kavaliers. (You think it’s weird to remember what books you bought on a particular day forty-three years ago? Then you’re not a writer.)

  I didn’t pay sixty cents for it, though, because I bought it in Birmingham, England, where I lived. I probably paid less than three shillings for it. What I can’t remember is where. Birmingham had a couple of big, stuffy bookstores, and neither of them would have carried a direct import from the States—especially not one like this. I probably got it at a record store. This was pre-Virgin (which started as a small chain of record stores), but there were hip precursors springing up all over, carrying direct imports of American vinyl, and head shop stuff—and this book matched that kind of inventory very well.

  The cover was a lurid triumph. The title was in white, in lowercase, over a dark red dried-blood color, and at the top was an oil or pastel picture. On the left was a young woman’s face—heavy lidded, messy hair, red parted lips—and behind it and to the right was an orgy: a topless woman (her back turned to us) and couples kissing. The young woman was clearly spaced out. Which went with the first of two strap lines, above the title: “She was beautiful, young, blonde, and a junkie . . . I had to help her!” The second strap line was below the title: “A relentless story of the hell of drug addiction.”

  My kind of thing, back in 1969.