One character says about himself that he “looks for philosophy where there is only narrative,” and that’s a good description of The Main: there is more philosophy than narrative and that’s what makes it such a great book.
That, and its setting. It has become a bit of a cliché to say that setting is a character in mystery fiction but there’s no doubt that Montreal, or at least the Rue St. Laurent, is a principal character here, and it is captured extremely well. So, too, is the period in question, the early ’70s. As in so many other parts of the world, there had been great upheaval in Montreal in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and every social structure was being questioned. In Quebec the main issue was, of course, the emergence of French-Canadian nationalism—the Quiet Revolution, as it was called. It may be surprising that a time of such great conflict in Canada produced so little crime fiction, but The Main tackles the issues head-on. In fact, the murder mystery in the novel even turns on a language school and the young, bilingual woman who runs it.
Writing as Trevanian, Rodney Whitaker is best known as the author of the spy novels The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, and Shibumi. It has been reported that Whitaker intended The Eiger Sanction as a parody and was disappointed when critics didn’t see it that way. In some ways, The Main feels like a parody as well: all the clichés of the mystery novel are present, but they’re used with a seriousness of intent.
I have little doubt that if The Main were one of a series, Lieutenant LaPointe would be among the very best and most well-known fictional detectives. As it is, this is the only Lieutenant LaPointe mystery, and one well worth reading.
John McFetridge was born, and grew up, in Greenfield Park, on the south shore of Montreal, and spent a lot of time on the Main before moving to Toronto where he now lives and sets his novels: Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Swap, and Tumblin’ Dice. John’s upcoming novel, Black Rock, takes place in Montreal in 1970. Visit him online at www.johnmcfetridge.blogspot.com.
The Animal Factory
by Edward Bunker (1977)
JENS LAPIDUS
* * *
Edward Bunker (1933–2005) was an American author, screenwriter, actor, and, notably, a criminal for the first half of his life. According to his memoir, Education of a Felon (2000), he was the youngest-ever inmate to be incarcerated in San Quentin Prison, and was regarded by fellow criminals as being so hard and fearless as to border on the insane. Inspired by an encounter with the death row prisoner, and writer, Caryl Chessman, Bunker began to write his own book while imprisoned. It was almost two decades before it was finally published under the title No Beast So Fierce (1973). The money that he earned from writing and, subsequently, acting enabled Bunker to earn a living without resorting to bank robbery or drug dealing. On film, he is most fondly remembered as the doomed Mr. Blue in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
* * *
The crime novels of today describe crime from an investigative perspective. It’s about murder, vicious and cold-blooded, and organized criminal acts. Generally we follow a police detective or a private investigator’s search for the truth. Sometimes we even get to see the world through the eyes of the offender, and we are allowed to engage with the cold, and all too often twisted, reasoning of the criminal mind from an insider’s perspective. In the mainstream crime novel, the end is usually the same: the murder mystery is solved, and the culprit is revealed and can be arrested.
But what happens after the intrigue has been resolved? What happens when the status quo has been restored? What happens to the victims and what happens to the offenders?
These questions are rarely answered, but in The Animal Factory Edward Bunker kicks off where most other crime novels stop. He tries to answer the last question: What happens next to the perpetrators of crime, and how are criminals treated by our society?
Bunker’s point of view may not be revolutionary, but he manages to condense his opinions and make them shine through the story without ever imposing them upon the reader.
From that perspective, The Animal Factory is without a doubt one of the greatest novels about life in prison. It is also a sharp critique of the Western world, especially of the American prison system.
And finally, by extension, Bunker’s ultrarealistic story is about our own vision of man.
• • •
The Animal Factory describes Ron Decker’s life over a single year, or what is supposed to be one, in the “Bastille by the Bay”: San Quentin Prison. Ron has been convicted of a minor marijuana offense but is handed down a disproportionately long sentence. He is of an intelligent and pacifistic nature, and has never before been to prison. Pretty soon he meets gang leader Earl Copen, a scarred “third-timer” with more experience of life behind bars than a tiger at the zoo. In other words, Earl is the opposite of the sweet and protective in The Shawshank Redemption. Ron’s problem, in addition to being a rookie, is that he’s good-looking, something that can lead to serious problems inside San Quentin.
Ron and Earl become friends—and not a second too late. When three other inmates try to trick Ron into a cell to rape him, Earl reveals their plan and talks to them in his own unique way, which quickly makes them lose interest in Ron.
Ron and Earl’s friendship grows, and develops into an almost family-like relationship, which surprises them both. Earl teaches Ron how to keep his balance on the narrow line between the prisoners’ own code of honor and the rules of the prison administration, two completely opposing systems. If you break the code of honor, it could mean death. If you upset the administration, it could mean additional time behind prison walls, which in San Quentin is just the same as death but in a more extended form. At the same time Ron is constantly ruminating about what might be the ultimate cost to him of Earl’s protection.
• • •
Bunker describes the conduct of prison life as accurately as Jane Austen treats the English upper class of the 1800s. It’s a world in which there are only violent solutions to conflict and prison authorities deliberately encourage structural racism. The background noise is always the clatter and tumult of immediate danger.
Bunker’s language is brutal, pragmatic, and credible, which is probably due to the fact that he himself spent a substantial amount of time in juvenile detention centers and jail. However, that does not automatically mean that you can write about such experiences. But Bunker can write: even if he chooses a relatively simple way to express himself, the language reflects his experiences and his time. In addition, he masters the historical details of his narrative to perfection.
In recent decades, a series of novels and films have dealt with criminals and the criminal realm. Sometimes, the descriptions tend to romanticize crime and criminality as a lifestyle. Bunker never falls into that trap. The shit almost rises from the pages, and anything more unglamorous than life in San Quentin is hard to imagine. Running parallel to this is often a kind of envy on the part of the prisoners toward the nine-to-five society, toward the middle class, the ordinary citizens. Perhaps it’s just that the pain of not being a part of the inner clique of society drives a defense mechanism that expresses itself through hatred.
Finally, Ron and Earl plan to escape from prison by an ingeniously contrived route. I won’t reveal if they manage their getaway or not, but I can at least venture to suggest that the system has changed them, an alteration that fundamentally affects their views on the concept of freedom.
Is it possible to compare The Animal Factory with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic of the Soviet Gulag? These books reflect two different systems and their concepts of detention, and two different ways to survive. On a purely literary level, the two works are competing in different sports, yet both authors have a phenomenal sense for the details of incarceration, and both depict the struggle of an individual to maintain his dignity in institutions designed to break one as a person.
The Animal Factory was published thirty-five years ago, but I, who work as a defen
se lawyer in Sweden, feel that its message is still of significance. Prisons in both Sweden and the United States have filled up at an increasing rate over the past decades. The walls have become higher and the climate has hardened. The motivation to care is nonexistent.
Bunker writes that the prospect of rehabilitating those imprisoned in San Quentin is “like trying to make a Moslem by putting someone in a Trappist monastery.” Prisons in the Western world (and for all I know in the rest of the world as well) have been, and still are, factories. We have become experts in producing more dangerous criminals at the end of imprisonment from those whom we throw into the system at the start. We have become better at condemning and degrading young men: we do it at a fearsome pace these days. We excel at creating people who are forced to live in their own system, removed from the rest of society.
The Animal Factory should be mandatory reading for most of us, but especially for those who believe that the world becomes a better place by using rough hands.
Jens Lapidus (b. 1974) is a Swedish criminal defense lawyer. He published his debut novel, Snabba cash (Easy Money), in 2006. He has since published two more titles: Aldrig fucka upp (Never Fuck Up, 2008) and Livet deluxe (Life Deluxe, 2011). The three novels comprise the “Stockholm Noir Trilogy.” Snabba cash was published in English as Easy Money in 2012. The novel was adapted for film in Sweden in 2010, directed by Daniel Espinosa.
True Confessions
by John Gregory Dunne (1977)
S. J. ROZAN
* * *
John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was an American novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose reputation has been partially eclipsed by The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir of mourning that his wife, Joan Didion, wrote about her life in the year following his passing. His most famous novel is True Confessions, a study of power, corruption, and Catholicism loosely based around the unsolved Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles in 1947. It was subsequently filmed with Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro in the starring roles. Dunne and Didion wrote the screenplay, as they did for the movie that gave Al Pacino his first starring role, 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park. Dunne also wrote an acerbic memoir about his later Hollywood misadventures, entitled Monster: Living off the Big Screen (1997).
* * *
In Jewish folklore there is a tale of a rabbi who appeared to die, but was revived. Recovered, he announced that he had, in fact, died, and been granted a brief glimpse of the afterlife. His eager students gathered around him.
“Tell us, Rabbi: what is the punishment in the afterlife for the sins of youth?”
“There is no punishment for the sins of youth,” he answered.
“Then tell us, what is the punishment for sins of the flesh?”
“There is no punishment for sins of the flesh.”
“The punishment for breaking the Law?”
“There is no punishment for breaking the Law. Only one sin is punished in the afterlife.”
“Rabbi, please tell us, what is it?”
“False piety.”
I hadn’t heard that story when I first read John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions. I was a college student, living in the Bronx and working a summer job in lower Manhattan. The job was a snore, and worse, I was working for my father. The only good news was that my hour-each-way subway commute gave me a lot of time to read. I did a book a week that summer, but True Confessions was the only one that knocked me out, the only one I now remember, and the book that focused my fuzzy aspiration to be a writer into an ambition to write crime.
True Confessions is, more than anything, a book about men and women who’ve slid into hopelessly compromised lives. Most don’t notice how the small concessions they’ve made over time—some for a greater good, some for convenience, some for venal gain—have corrupted their souls; or they don’t admit it to themselves; or they don’t think it matters. The book opens and closes in the 1960s, but it’s set largely in the Los Angeles of 1947, and a particular Los Angeles it is: the tawdry, cynical L.A. of noir. One of the fascinating things about True Confessions is that it has a noir setting but not a noir sensibility. A noir story is the account of a not-so-good man or woman who tries, just once, to touch something good, and, because of all that’s come before, fails. True Confessions is something else: a tale of people stretching a little less each day, until their moral reach is nearly nonexistent, and the grasp is all.
Nearly: but not, in the end, entirely. Most of the book’s characters do go to their deaths as compromised as they’ve been all their lives. These are all natural deaths, or suicides: no character we meet in this crime novel is gunned down, knifed, or thrown from a bridge; and the murder on which the book centers is a random killing of someone practically no one in the book ever knew. “She wasn’t a girl, Tom Spellacy thought. She was a headline. Someone to read about who wasn’t your sister. Someone to get your rocks off over.”
• • •
Two men are at the book’s heart: LAPD lieutenant Tom Spellacy, a Homicide detective; and his brother Desmond, a monsignor on the fast track to a bishopric, and the archdiocese’s moneyman, working directly for the Cardinal. In the course of the story each has a crucial moment of recognition of what he has become.
For Tom: “He was not certain of many things anymore, but he was sure of one thing: he was a very good cop. Maybe not always honest, but always thorough.”
For Des: “He did not have to hear regular confessions, but he liked to help out. It made him feel more like a priest.”
Later, at their individual moments of crisis, each makes a choice. One, though he takes a stand, takes it in an unworthy direction; he refuses to rise above the soul-cramped man he has become. The other finds a way back to the man he had planned to be.
Dunne’s writing is deceptively gorgeous: simple and straightforward—not in the mannered way of many tough-guy novelists, but convincingly unadorned, and able to make use of the occasional breathtaking turn of phrase without it being out of place. Speaking of two characters who’ve known and slept with each other for years without ever discussing anything beyond who, in their circle of acquaintance, is banging whom, and for what gain: “It was a slum of a relationship surrounded by acres of indifference.” Or, describing the inhabitants of a desert parish: “Old guys whose tattoos are all faded and whose wives wear hairnets and whose children don’t call much anymore.”
The book opens with first-person narration by Tom Spellacy, a gregarious old man rambling on about what his matter-of-fact tones tell us was a tough but in no way exceptional working-class Irish Catholic life. His opening line is, “None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore.” It seems to be just a passing remark, a way to point up the changes wrought by time. He introduces us to most of the book’s cast in their present-day guises. Then the story shifts into the past, and to a third-person narrator. So that we make no mistake as to this voice’s distance or omniscience, and therefore its reliability, its first words are, “What Tom Spellacy remembered later . . . ” In telling the story, this voice is scrupulous in referring to all of the characters by their full names each time it mentions them. In characters’ own thoughts and musings they refer to each other however they want, but the narrator keeps us at arm’s length from them all, the better to see the emerging patterns.
The story has a locus of evil, a contractor named Jack Amsterdam who is the vague figure behind the soul-rot of both Tom and Des Spellacy; significantly, he barely appears, only stepping twice from the shadows to speak. He’s not the real problem. A man willing to sell his soul, Dunne seems to be saying, can always find a buyer.
The merry-go-rounds aren’t accidental, either. They’re the fantasy, the pretending life; and no, they don’t work anymore, for Tom, Des, or any of the other characters. One of the book’s crucial moments, the intersection of its two story strands, occurs at an amusement park, when Tom Spellacy meets his brother Des’s boss, the Cardinal. The Cardinal observes—to himself—how alike the two men are. This is, in some ways, th
e point. They are alike. We’re all alike in this essential way: we all encounter these choices, reach these moral crossroads. Though as Desmond Spellacy says, “Every priest expected the test at some time or other during his priesthood. Usually in a way where the choice was heroic. Do you still believe in your God? the commandant of the firing squad would say . . . Like a lozenge, that kind of test. Easy to swallow.” The tests these characters face are not so lozengelike. Nor so obvious. No firing squads to stand against, no kingpin crime bosses to put away. That would be asking for too much. What they, and we, face every day are the small choices, the easy compromises. The everyone’s-doing-it, doesn’t-matter-anyway, go-along-to-get-along, it’s-for-a-good-cause decisions that, in the end, pile up, take our shape, and define us.
Tom Spellacy, in his homicide investigation, bats aside numerous confessions by people who did not commit the crime but want the glory, or want to be punished, or want whatever it is they hope to gain by confessing, but are lying. Desmond Spellacy hears confessions weekly (“the calibration of sin was the essential element of his trade”) but he knows that what he hears doesn’t come near the actual sins of which the speakers are guilty. None of these are true confessions. Nor, until right at the end of the book, is any confession by any character, including either of the brothers, whether out loud, or in the heart. It’s all false piety, and, in various ways, that sin is punished.