As the publisher wrote, “The garden pavilion is in the center of a complicated maze of hedges and shrubbery notoriously difficult to get out of. Bryony knows the maze well, but does not guess the harrowing significance it will come to play in her life as well as that of her phantom lover.”
A family estate in disrepair; peril; danger; a suspicious death; theft; and the age-old story of Romeo and Juliet—all play a part in the novel that introduced me to what has become my favorite genre. But why that novel? What was it about Stewart’s book that stayed with me more than those by Poe, Christie, Hammett, Highsmith, Chandler, and all of the other fine mystery writers I read?
In her 1976 book Literary Women, Ellen Moers coined the term “Female Gothic.” She explained that, in gothic writing, “fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite authorial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to reach down into the depths of the soul and purge it with pity and terror (as we say tragedy does), but to get to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear.”
Indeed it was the gothic genre that reached me on that deeper level. Novels such as Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre were the most dog-eared on my shelves. Certainly the supernatural is evocative and atmospheric. Family curses, wills, inheritances, madness, ghosts, and vampires are frightening. But even more fascinating and often terrifying was the psychology of the characters explored in these novels.
And that was what hooked me.
Since the late 1700s, women gothic writers have symbolically used the heroine’s journey through atmospheric buildings and gardens, through pathways and caverns, as a metaphor for the journey from the innocence of childhood to sexual maturity. The castles or estates themselves, with their grand rooms and circular turrets, functioned as metaphors for the rich, sexualized, and complicated interior lives of the main characters.
The mystery of inheritance is indeed the mystery of our own selves. Stories about young women becoming heirs to estates and setting off to claim or save them are, in fact, stories about young women coming into their own and becoming sexually independent beings.
Anne Williams, in her book Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, wrote, “The affinity between the gender and the genre expresses the terror and rage that women experience within patriarchal social arrangements, especially marriage.” Fear, apprehension, then resolution and relief: such emotional reactions are strong. When we’re finished reading, and if the author has done her job—which Stewart does so well—we’re left deeply emotionally satisfied. It’s difficult to describe the roller-coaster ride a reader experiences in the pages of a good gothic novel and not associate it with a form of sexual awakening.
It’s why so many young women relate to and are drawn to the genre.
The tradition of this genre that takes its name from medieval architecture goes back to the eighteenth century. And, indeed, gothic mysteries usually have strong buildings at their center. Sometimes they are metaphors, at other times mirrors. In Touch Not the Cat, Stewart uses them as both.
But I didn’t think about any of this when I first read Touch Not the Cat, or any of the other fine suspense novels Stewart penned. I didn’t even think about whether this book was a gothic novel, or a thriller, or a mystery, or a romance. On her own website, Stewart writes that she has always been hesitant to categorize her novels. “I’d rather just say that I write novels, fast-moving stories that entertain. To my mind there are really only two kinds of novels, badly written and well written. Beyond that, you cannot categorize . . . Can’t I say that I just write stories? ‘Storyteller’ is an old and honorable title, and I’d like to lay claim to it.”
I, too, have always bristled at forcing books into categories, as both a reader and a writer. I only care about how good a book is. For me, a book to die for is one that keeps me entertained and enthralled, obsessed with the book while I am reading it and, when it’s over, satisfied.
And Touch Not the Cat does all that.
M. J. Rose is the internationally best-selling author of twelve novels, including The Book of Lost Fragrances, and three nonfiction books on marketing. Rose graduated from Syracuse University, spent the ’80s in advertising, has a commercial in NYC’s MoMA, and in 2005 created the first marketing company for authors—AuthorBuzz.com. The television series Past Life was based on her Reincarnationist series. She is one of the founding board members of the International Thriller Writers as well as cofounder of Peroozal.com and BookTrib.com. Rose lives in Connecticut with her husband, the musician and composer Doug Scofield, and their very spoiled and often photographed dog, Winka. Visit her online at www.mjrose.com.
Cutter and Bone
by Newton Thornburg (1976)
GEORGE PELECANOS
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Newton Thornburg (1929–2011) was an American novelist most famous for his 1976 masterpiece, Cutter and Bone, a book that manages to be simultaneously funny, angry, and despairing. It was filmed as Cutter’s Way in 1981, although Thornburg later dismissed the movie, unfairly and inaccurately, as “mediocre.” In an interview in 2005 with the British journalist Bob Cornwell, Thornburg said that he had never considered himself a “pure” crime writer. “Cutter and Bone is a straight novel, no matter how you look at it—strong characterizations, simple plot. I don’t like novels with private eyes—you know, formula ones. I like crime stories, but I like them to be about ordinary people, not crime professionals.” Thornburg continued to publish for the next two decades, sustained mostly by reprints and movie options, but he was cursed by misfortune: his wife of thirty-three years died in 1986, a son was lost to alcoholism, and in 1998 a stroke paralyzed his left side, leaving him physically unable to write. He ended his days in a Seattle retirement home, and his death went almost entirely unremarked.
* * *
Films have always driven me to the novels on which they were based. As a teenager, I was a movie freak but relatively unenthusiastic about reading. Then an English professor at college flipped my switch and turned me on to crime fiction. So Robert Clouse’s Darker than Amber sent me to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series; Point Blank and The Outfit led to the Parker novels of Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark; Ulu Grosbard’s True Confessions convinced me to read John Gregory Dunne’s superb novel of the same name. Such was the case with the film Cutter and Bone, directed by Ivan Passer, which I saw in a DC art house in 1981 at the time of its brief theatrical run. The film made such an impression on me that I knew I had to read the book, but that proved difficult. Nine years later I found a used, Blue Murder–edition paperback in a flea market. The time spent searching for it was worth every minute.
The film of Cutter and Bone is an extraordinary neo-noir character study, with brilliant performances by Jeff Bridges, in fine playboy/post-hippie mode as Bone, a lacerating John Heard as Cutter, and a shattering turn by Lisa Eichhorn as the doomed Mo. United Artists buried the picture and botched its release after a regime change at the studio, and realized too late what it had when the film began to pick up praise and festival awards. The powers that be renamed it Cutter’s Way, thinking that audiences would (mis)take something called Cutter and Bone to be a comedic buddy film about surgeons. It’s a top-drawer movie that is less underrated than it is underviewed, as it soon vanished from theaters and the public consciousness. The novel, written by Newton Thornburg, suffered a similar fate.
Why is it that certain groundbreaking novels often disappear from the radar screen while other, lesser works remain in print? Along with James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source, and most anything written by Elmore Leonard in the early to mid 1970s, Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone seemed to challenge the very foundation of the traditional crime novel when it was first published in 1976.
The New
York Times did attempt to rescue the book from the genre ghetto in its initial review, calling Cutter and Bone “a classy big league act” and “the best novel of its kind in ten years.” But the L.A. Times review was more typical, predictably describing it as “a superlative novel out of Ross Macdonald country.” Well, they got the superlative part right, but the connection to Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, apart from the Santa Barbara setting, could not be more wrong. Macdonald and his fictional detective never did seem to “get” the younger generation; it was, famously, a thread of bafflement that continued throughout the Archer books. In Cutter and Bone, Thornburg not only got young people, he nailed them to the wall.
When we first meet Richard Bone, onetime ad-exec-turned-gigolo/bum, he is shaving with a Lady Remington razor after his latest trick. Bone has been in love only a couple of times, once in adolescence and once, briefly, with his ex-wife. He’s currently in love with Mo, the alcohol-and-pill-freak live-in girlfriend of his best friend, Cutter, quite possibly the most cynical lead character ever to appear in a work of mainstream American fiction. Cutter stepped on a claymore during his tour of Vietnam, and now walks with a cane that complements a reconstructed leg of plastic and steel. What’s left of him is best described by Thornburg with the typical, dead-on, economic prose style that hits the right staccato notes throughout the novel:
What a sight the man made, what a celebration of the grotesque: the thinning Raggedy Ann hair, the wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial Apache dancer’s costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up or sewed but knotted, an advertisement, spit in your eye.
Late one night, walking to his temporary home at the Cutter residence, the drunken Bone witnesses a body being dumped in an alley garbage can by the silhouette of a husky older man. The victim is a young runaway hooker, found with a staved-in skull and semen in her mouth and on her face. The next day, glancing at the newspaper photograph, Bone makes the mistake of telling Cutter that he thinks—he thinks—the man he sees in the news photo, a major business tycoon, is the killer of the girl.
The remainder of the novel involves Cutter and Bone’s attempts to make some sense of the murder and their own wasted lives, but don’t expect a tidy resolution. The idea that a murder can be “solved” is the Great Lie of the mystery novel to begin with, and here the author turns that peculiar notion on its soft head. For once, a writer chooses not to patronize us, singing us softly back to sleep as one would a child awakened by a nightmare. Thornburg tells us, very plainly, that the nightmare is real.
So this isn’t about a puzzle, and though there is a love story, beautifully rendered, the novel describes the death of love rather than its bloom. What the novel seems to be about, ultimately, is America’s festering wound in the wake of Vietnam. Set and written in its time, and remarkably wise without the benefits of hindsight, Cutter and Bone describes a crippled country, chronically high or hungover, shell-shocked but looking forward to “the better days” which will soon arrive—careful what you wish for—in the form of Reagan and Thatcher. Thornburg doesn’t dwell on Vietnam specifically, but he does give one mind-blowing soliloquy to Cutter, describing to Bone the Life magazine photos—My Lai, the napalmed child, those pictures: we have all seen them—of the horror and what it really means:
I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out that you have three reactions, Rich, only three. The first one is simple—I hate America. But then you study them some more and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you finally say, Rich, after you’ve studied them all you can? You say—I’m hungry.
That is flat-out brilliant writing, but Thornburg is not done. If anything, the last third of the book, where Cutter and Bone travel to Middle America Ozark country to confront their suspect, is where the author really turns on the juice, hurtling the reader toward a climax that reads like a paranoid’s fever dream. Guaranteed, the last few pages of this novel will leave you reeling; the ending is both shocking and right.
There are very few novels, in fact, that have rocked my world to the degree that Cutter and Bone did the first time I read it. My original copy, bought in 1990, went through several continents with me more than once, until I put it into the hands of a fellow traveler on a European train. By then its influence had entered my subconscious. In 1994 I published a pulp/noir thriller called Shoedog, which, in its alienated, drifter protagonist and its cut-to-black ending, drew inspiration from Thornburg’s masterpiece.
Many writers spend their creative lives trying to pen that one book that will put them into the pantheon, but the truth is, few succeed. Newton Thornburg did so, in spades, with Cutter and Bone.
George Pelecanos is the author of eighteen novels and served as a writer/producer on HBO’s The Wire, The Pacific, and Treme. He has a full head of hair, searing blue eyes, and drives a special-edition Mustang modeled on the car driven by McQueen in Bullitt. Also, he’s married, with three kids, two dogs, and a house in the suburbs. So much for the myth of the roguish independent author. Visit him online at www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/georgepelecanos/.
The Main
by Trevanian (1976)
JOHN MCFETRIDGE
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Rodney Whitaker (1931–2005), a New York–born film scholar and novelist, chose to write his nonfiction under his own name and his fiction under such a variety of noms de plume that even Contemporary Authors, the usually comprehensive guide, was forced to concede, somewhat ruefully, that it was “difficult to determine how many works he has published with other names.” The pseudonym Trevanian is probably the best known of them, under which he wrote The Eiger Sanction (1972), The Main (1976), and Shibumi (1979), to which the mystery writer Don Winslow recently penned a companion volume, Satori. His books sold in the millions, in no small part due to Trevanian’s gifts for characterization and description, and his desire to avoid the formulaic.
* * *
The flag of the city of Montreal has upon it symbols of the four founding peoples: a fleur-de-lys for the French, a rose for the English, a thistle for the Scots, and a shamrock for the Irish. (Missing is any symbol for the First Nations people who were already there when the Europeans arrived.)
Over the years, though, Montreal became a city of two solitudes—the French and the English, with no distinctions between English, Scots, and Irish.
The literature of the city reflected this separation, as very little was translated from one language to the other. Many English Montrealers may have read Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute and Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater, but that’s about it. Most French Montrealers read . . . well, I don’t even know. One of the most famous English-Canadian novels is Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, published in 1945 and translated the following year into Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, German, and a few other languages, but not into French for another twenty years.
There was also a physical separation in the city, as most French Montrealers lived on the east side of the island and most English Montrealers lived on the west. Down the middle ran St. Lawrence Boulevard/Rue St. Laurent, known as the Main.
Maybe it’s not surprising that it took an outsider to try and bring the two solitudes together in a single book—American Rodney Whitaker writing under the pen name Trevanian—and it was a crime novel in which he did so. What better way to get characters from different social groups to interact than by following the leads in a murder investigation?
The Main was written in the 1970s, as the generation that came of age in the postwar years of Two Solitudes was giving way to a new generation, and dividing walls were beginning to crumble: between English and French Montreal, between generations, and even between conceptions of right and wrong. It’s set in late November during what the characters refer to as “pig weather,” a melancholy time: it gets dark early, and
it’s cold but it hasn’t snowed yet, so it isn’t even fun. It feels like the end of an era.
And the main character is pretty melancholy, too. Lieutenant LaPointe is a widower still mourning the loss of his beloved wife twenty-five years earlier. He continues to live in the same apartment, and has changed nothing. Although he has been promoted many times, he still acts as a beat cop walking up and down the Main. In the book’s first chapter, LaPointe is playing cards with his friends: Moishe, the concentration camp survivor; David, another recent widower; and a priest, Father Martin, who feels that he’s lost his flock. Instead of playing cards, Moishe leads them on a long discussion about the difference between a crime and a sin.
Oh, and we find out early on, before we even get to the body (this is a murder mystery, after all), that Lieutenant LaPointe has an inoperable heart condition and won’t make it through the winter.
When the body finally does show up, it’s that of a truly unlikeable guy: a young man, probably a criminal illegal immigrant just stopping off on his way from Italy to New York, known on the Main for his (too-aggressive) sexual prowess with too-young women. So his murder may not be a sin but it’s certainly a crime, and it’s on LaPointe’s “patch,” so the old cop takes over the case from the homicide detective to whom it’s been assigned, and gives it a full investigation. He also takes over the other detective’s “Joan,” the term given to the young English cop that he was training. This device gives LaPointe the chance to expound on his views, and those views are sort of the left-wing version of Dirty Harry. Yes, the politicians and the police brass, with their political correctness and overconcern for the “rights” of criminals, have made being a cop impossible, but for LaPointe the real problem is that it makes it difficult to protect the citizens of the Main who are never far from his thoughts, those citizens who are too poor to be of any concern to the politicians or LaPointe’s politically ambitious superiors. The Joan, meanwhile, is a college-educated Anglo named Guttmann who would prefer to do things by the book. Still, LaPointe and Guttmann make a good team.