Noir Fiction and Film: Sources
I’m looking forward to the beginning of my Osher class on Noir Film and Fiction. Meanwhile, I’m assembling a short – really short, and very subjective – presentation on this topic for my friends in Usual Suspects.
Below are four books which for some time now have been my go-to sources for topics touching on noir:
Let’s start with Sleuths, Inc. The book is subtitled Studies in Problem Solvers. Eames includes five storied names in this volume: Conan Doyle, Simenon, Hammett, Ambler, Chandler, in that order.
In the section on Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade, there are a number of memorable quotes. Here’s my favorite. It’s from The American Commonwealth, a work by James Bryce, penned at a time – -1888 – when Lord Bryce was the British Ambassador to the U.S. It concerns California in general and San Francisco in particular:
‘A great population had gathered there before there was any regular government to keep it in order, much less any education or social culture to refine it. The wilderness of the time passed into the soul of the people, and left them more tolerant of violent deeds, more prone to interferences with, or suppression of, regular law, than are the people in most parts of the union.’
The Viscount concludes this wry bit of social/historical analysis thus:
‘That scum which the western moving wave of emigration carried on its crest is here stopped, because it can go no further. It accumulated in San Francisco and forms a dangerous constituent of the population.’
Hammett once commented to a reporter that in California, politics were the most corrupt in the world. Later there’s a quote attributed to James J. “Sonny” Rolph, mayor of San Francisco while Hammett was living there:
“You make a buck, I make a buck.”
The entire section on Hammett is well worth close attention. In fact, I ought to sit down and read the entire book by the somewhat mysterious Mr. Eames. It seems to be filled with startling insights I have not encountered elsewhere.
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Black Mask Boys is a collection of stories that first appeared in the justly famous magazine. Hammett and Chandler are present, and there’s one story each by Erle Stanley Gardner, Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy, and Paul Cain. That’s the whole of it.
It’s a small volume. But William F. Nolan’s introduction is the main attraction:
‘Black Mask, and the fiction it printed, grew directly out of the era between the two wars, when machine guns flashed fire from low-slung black limousines, when the corner speakeasy served rotgut gin, when swift rum-runners made night drops in dark coastal waters, when police and politicians were as corrupt as the gangsters they protected, when cons and crooks prowled New York alleys and lurked in trackside hobo jungles, when Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone made daily headlines and terrorized a nation….
‘The elegant, deductive sleuth, the calm, calculating sifter of clues, gave way to a new breed–the wary, wisecracking knight of the .45, an often violent, always unpredictable urban vigilante fashioned in the rugged frontier tradition of the western gunfighter.’
‘In the pages of Black Mask, the private eye was born.’
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I’ve had Guilty Parties for a long time. Published in 1997, the book breezes through the history of the mystery genre starting with Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin tales and going right up to a lengthy chapter on “The State of the Art.” (I just chanced on a discussion of Colin Dexter’s Morse series, in which author Ian Ousby describes the tv version of the protagonist as “alternately dyspeptic and urbane.” To think that we have by now lost both the inimitable John Thaw as Morse and his creator, Colin Dexter.…)
In Guilty Parties, you will find pithy summations of novels and stories plus wonderful visuals, from the outrageous pulp covers to screen shots from tv series. One of the most enjoyable source books in my voluminous library.
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Finally, A Girl and a Gun by David N. Meyer. Published in 1998, the book is subtitled The Complete Guide to Film Noir on Video. (Were it to be re-issued, I imagine those last two words would be dropped.) In the introductory section, Meyer describes what happened in the 1940s when the clipped, deadpan prose and cynical tone of writers like Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane met up with the heavily ironic, refined sensibilities of refugee film directors like Robert Siodmak, Anatole Litvak, and Fritz Lang:
“The writers created heroes who dealt with spiritual crisis (caused by the emptiness of American middle-class life) by alternating between emotional withdrawal and attack. The refugee directors preferred a more sardonic, alienated approach.” Meyer then concludes: “The combining of these sensibilities helped create one of the great creative outpourings in American history.”
Meyer sums up the characteristics of noir in this way:
“No good deed goes unpunished.
A detached, ironic view is the only refuge.
Crime doesn’t pay, but normal life is an experiential/existential straitjacket.
Character determines fate.
Though love might seem to be the only redeeming aspect of human existence, it’s not.
Kicks count for something.
Alienation rules.”
Meyer names seventeen films that he believes comprise ‘Noir 101-The Canon.’ I won’t list them all here, but several are among my favorites, and possibly yours too: Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, Night and the City, Vertigo. He then proceeds to traverse a much larger group belonging to the noir genre. The stars and directors of the respective works are named, and brief but illuminating descriptions of each are included.
Ron and I have used A Girl and a Gun as a guide for our own home film noir festivals. Writing this post has reminded me that we need to do this again. These films are more available now than they ever were – through streaming, off course, but also via DVD from your local library.
Speaking of which…
None of the four titles I’ve just written about are owned by our local library. Three out of four, however, are available through interlibrary loan. Which one isn’t? A Girl and a Gun. This is unfortunate, because it is a book well worth obtaining – well worth owning, in fact. You can try for a non-network referral through the library, or you can purchase it used on Amazon for as little as $2.23.
Two other titles that are available locally and worth mentioning in this context:
The first of these I haven’t had a chance to look at. I read the Chandler biography when it came out in 2016 and enjoyed it very much. The title, by the way, comes from a passage that appears toward the end of The Big Sleep:
Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.
The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep
It was with some trepidation that I returned to “those thrilling days of yesteryear” – namely, to the novel that some say started the whole noir thing:
I am doing this because I have signed up for a Lifelong Learning course called ‘Trouble Is My Business: Hardboiled Fiction & Film Noir.’ It begins in late February. Fact is, I signed up for it and promptly forgot about it. Then I received an email informing of the reading list.
Reading list? Oh my…
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
The Postman Always Rings Twice
A couple of years ago, Usual Suspects discussed The Maltese Falcon. I wrote a blog post on the occasion. I began the post with a quotation from The American Commonwealth by James Bryce, aka Viscount Bryce:
‘A great population had gathered there before there was any regular government to keep it in order, much less any education or social culture to refine it. The wilderness of the time passed into the soul of the people, and left them more tolerant of violent deeds, more prone to interferences with, or suppression of, regular law, than are the people in most parts of the union.’
The Viscount concludes this wry bit of social/historical analysis thus:
‘That scum which the western moving wave of emigration carried on its crest is here stopped, because it can go no further. It accumulated in San Francisco and forms a dangerous constituent of the population.’
Well, we derive plenty of knowledge concerning that ‘dangerous constituent’ in Hammett’s novel.
So, on finishing this rereading, what’s my overall take? First off, from the get go, I found the writing to be, for the most part, rather pedestrian, with a few flashes of hardboiled brilliance, as in this pitiless description of Casper Gutman:
‘The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all of his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped gray worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.’
At least he’s decently dressed.
As for the plot, it quickly becomes so complicated that by the back stretch of this slender volume, I was pretty well lost. Into the bargain, I was having trouble caring about any of the dramatis personae in the whole tangled mess. And as for the desired object itself, it’s an egregious example of what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin – and not a very intriguing one at that.
There is one thing in The Maltese Falcon that I find fascinating. It has nothing to do with the plot; it’s a story that Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy while they’re waiting for something, or someone. It’s actually more of a parable than a simple tale. It’s about a man called Flitcraft:
Richard Layman, a Hammett biographer, delivered a lengthy and very interesting speech at The Library of Congress in 2005 on the history of The Maltese Falcon. Click here to read it.
I just watched a video on Hammett from 1999. It’s called Dashiell Hammett. Detective. Writer. I found it very interesting. His daughter is interviewed; several other people who knew him also appear:
So, on I go to The Big Sleep. Right off the bat, I’m startled by the difference in the quality of the prose. Chandler’s irreverent wit and colorful figures of speech – perhaps too colorful, at times? – come at you. The carefully crafted sentences – too carefully crafted? – are striking in their precision. You almost want to say, okay, Big Guy, you’re laying it on a little too thick, but it’s such fun, so keep going! 
I love the opening paragraph:
‘It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue socks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.’
The eponymous four million dollars refers to the lavish Sternwood estate, where trouble is brewing, courtesy of two out-of-control daughters. What’s needed is a P.I. to make that trouble go away swiftly and silently, without involving the police.
Philip Marlowe has been summoned to take on the job, if he’s willing and/or able. He’s led by the butler – the Sternwood establishment possesses a surfeit of servants – into a ragingly hot greenhouse, where the aged paterfamilias, known simply as the General, spends his remaining days.
Here’s the greenhouse:
‘The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom….The light had an unreal greenish color like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.’
And here is General Sternwood:
‘Here, in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down and on the rug was a wheel chair an old and obviously dying man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung above the mantel in the hall. The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution….His thin clawlike hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.’
Well…yikes. This passage puts me in mind of Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming:’
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun…That seems to describe Marlowe, as he takes in the sight of this bare wreckage of a man.
Eventually – sigh – the novel settles down to the kind of plot -driven mania that I found so challenging in the Hammett novel. I’m now on page 104 of 231, and I’m darned if I can tell you who’s doing what to whom. Still, it’s fun – good, harrowing, knuckle-biting fun. And the dialog is,, of course, very entertaining. Actually, my favorite snippet of dialog by Raymond Chandler occurs in the film version of Double Indemnity. James M. Cain wrote the novel and Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay. I believe that the famous “How fast was I going, Officer?” exchange was Chandler’s invention:
I think it’s fair to say that as the years have passed, both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep have been overshadowed by the films they inspired.
Click here to read a review I wrote of a biography of Raymond Chandler that came out several years ago. And finally, I can’t resist showing once again Raymond Chandler’s Hitchcock-like cameo in Double Indemnity. His presence in the film was detected separately by two film scholars in 2009. He’s sitting outside the office of Barton Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson:
Michael Grost’s site A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection has long been a great help in guiding my forays into older works in the field. He’s not a great fan of Raymond Chandler’s work; nevertheless, he admits that Chandler can at times rise to great heights. This is never more striking than the concluding passage of The Big Sleep. Of the writing there, Grost allows: “This apostrophe to death is magnificently written, and recalls such Elizabethan essays on the same subject as the finale of Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World (1610).”
Here it is:
‘What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.’
Picnic at Hanging Rock, novel by Joan Lindsay, film by Peter Weir
Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian film released in 1975. I don’t know exactly when I first saw it, although I suspect it was not long after that release date. I do know that ever since that initial viewing, it has haunted me. That this is the case for many others who have seen it, I feel sure.
Set in Australia in the year 1900, this is the story of a group of adolescent girls who attend Appleyard College, a live-in prep school of sorts. It’s an elite institution – or at least, one with pretensions to such a distinction. It is presided over by the eponymous Mrs Appleyard, a classic battle-axe type, played convincingly by Rachel Roberts.
As the film begins, we learn that the girls, along with a young French teacher and their math tutor, are being treated to a special outing: a picnic at the foothills of a striking geological formation known as Hanging Rock. They are excited and eager; they apparently have very few occasions like this to look forward to and enjoy.
The chief substance of the film concerns what happens at Hanging Rock. If you are thinking that it cannot be good, you’re quite right. I will only say at this point that it may the strangest, most evocative tale I’ve ever seen on screen.
In the Wall Street Journal last month, author David Bell recommended the book, written by Joan Lindsay, on which the movie is based (The title is the same.):
This Australian novel has been overshadowed somewhat by its 1975 movie adaptation—a classic directed by Peter Weir—but it deserves better. On the surface it’s a mystery story, set in 1900, about a group of students at a girls’ boarding school who disappear in a remote area of Australia. But affixing the label “mystery” to this tale is inadequate preparation for its complexities.
I immediately downloaded the book – $8.99 on Amazon Kindle. (The local library does not own it; no surprise there.) To be concise, it was not just good. It was terrific. The writing was wonderful. Lindsay spins her narrative with a light, ironic touch that seemed, to me, exactly right for the material. This kind of storytelling, the subtle deploying of a particular tone that enhances the reading experience, is a mark of mastery of the craft of novel writing, a quality I find sadly lacking in much contemporary fiction.
Here, the girls and their two chaperone/ teachers get their first glimpse of Hanging Rock. Irony has receded, replaced by a vivid sense of wonder (Edith is one of the pupils, normally a rather whiny chatterbox.):
The immediate impact of its soaring peaks induced a silence so impregnated with its powerful presence that even Edith was struck dumb.This splendid spectacle, as if by prearrangement between Heave and the Headmistress of Appleyard College, was brilliantly illuminated for their inspection. On the steep southern facade the play of light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, other grooved and fluted by prehistoric wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.
Peter Weir was given this book by an Australian TV personality whom he barely knew. She’d seen an earlier film of his and thought he could make an even better one from this novel. In his own words, in an interview:
I read it from cover to cover, was gripped by it and the fact that there was an unsolved mystery. And I was burning with it, I mean it was just like electricity through my body.
What a great description of the way in which inspiration can grab an artist and not let go until it is fulfilled. It helped, probably, that he was in his early thirties at the time – “…to be young was very heaven!” as Wordsworth says.
Several aspects of the film need to be pointed out. First, the cinematography by Russell Boyd is outstanding. Boyd won the BAFTA Award for this achievement. (BAFTA is the acronym for The British Academy of Film and Television Arts.) Never having been to Australia, I was spellbound by the beauty and strangeness of the place.
It needs to be pointed out that Hanging Rock is a real place; it’s some fifty miles north of Melbourne:
This huge geological formation looms above all the actors in this drama. It is sinister, implacable. It is witness to the truth of what happened that day in 1900.
The acting was excellent, plus I feel like I have to mention the meticulous re-creation of life in the 1900s as it was then lived Down Under. The costumes make a major contribution to this effect. The girls especially, in their white muslin dresses…
The soundtrack was likewise a careful assemblage of original music composed by Bruce Smeaton, Gheorghe Zamfir playing ethereal melodies on his pan flute, and short classical selections from Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven. Over and over, we hear the adagio movement from Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the “Emperor.” This music is, to me, almost unbearably poignant, surely one of the most beautiful and evocative works in the classical repertoire. And here I can’t resist placing my favorite video performance. It features the legendary Maurizio Pollini, with his son Daniele Pollini conducting the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia. The adagio begins at 21:00, but do yourself the favor of listening to the entire piece, and seeing, at the conclusion, father and son together acknowledging the applause.
For the interview with Peter Weir, click here.
For the insightful and informative BAFTA commentary on the film, click here.
The film has an alternate ending, which did not make the final cut. I wish it had. Watch the film first, then watch this clip, and see what you think.
Happily, our local library owns several copies of Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s also available on HBO Max and Amazon. You’ll want to try your local library first, though, as those latter two options are somewhat costly.
Reading the novel and then revisiting the film has been a very gratifying experience. And am I still haunted? Oh, yes…
‘….there must be no room for love in my heart now – I am quite alone, and I must stay quite alone.’ – The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake
I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him …
Thus begins a strange and haunting narrative…
I’ve wanted to read this crime fiction classic for some time, so when I heard that it was being adapted for television, I decided the time had come.
The novel is compelling, but drags in places. It begins with the diary of Felix Lane, the nom de plume of Frank Cairnes, and then about half way through switches to an omnipotent narrator. I found the abrupt change of tone somewhat jarring. Felix/Frank’s diary entries are weighted down with an almost unbearable grief; the second part of the book is given over to a detached, almost clinical recounting of the steps taken to solve the murder. (I’d rather not divulge who’s been murdered, at this point.)
This adaptation is strange in many ways. It retains some elements of the novel, but alters a number of them, most significantly, the gender of the main protagonist: Frank Cairnes becomes Frances Cairnes. And the North Devon setting is changed to the Isle of Wight. Also, Nigel Strangeways (played by Billy Howle), the methodical investigator coolly at work in the novel, is here portrayed as a barely functioning police detective, subject to panic attacks and all manner of other unexplained emotional difficulties and who, near the end of the series, lets loose with a blubbering mass of face-contorting weeping that I, for one, found nearly impossible to watch.
Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis, novelist and poet (Poet Laureate, in fact, from 1968 until his death in 1972), and yes, father of Daniel Day-Lewis. Sean Day-Lewis, Daniel’s much older half-brother, wrote a letter to the The Guardian about the TV adaptation:
….this version of the story is a bit of a travesty. I should know, as I was, in my father’s imagination, the six-year-old Martin or Martie… My father, the then-fashionable poet Cecil Day-Lewis, kept our family going with 20 detective novels written as Nicholas Blake. The father who saw the accident, and swore vengeance, was a detective story writer just like my dad.
In addition:
Considering the filmic attraction of Lyme Regis, it is hard to know why the TV version moves to the Isle of Wight as well as to an aggrieved mother. And by the way, Nigel Strangeways, originally a detective who looked and behaved just like WH Auden, was regularly on hand to achieve justice with mercy in all but one of the stories.
The TV version of The Beast Must Die possesses a bewildering number of characters, but one dark secret lies at the story’s heart. It is encapsulated in the chilling opening lines of the novel, quoted above.
The main reason to watch this series is to witness the performance of the lead actors. Cush Jumbo is a wonderful actress; those of us who followed her progress as the smart, irreverent attorney in The Good Fight already knew that. My husband objected to what might be termed Jumbo’s ‘uglification.’ It was hard to see what purpose was served by her painfully short gray hair and stark makeup. (Was she, in fact, wearing any makeup?) He says, and I agree with him, let’s allow beautiful people to remain beautiful, unless there’s a specific reason to degrade their appearance. Yes, she is grieving, but all the more reason to preserve her comeliness.
Cush Jumbo, as she appears in The Beast Must Die
Cush Jumbo in The Good Fight
A word also about Jared Harris, whose performance as the loathsome George Rattery is chilling and note perfect.He is, in fact, the best screen villain I’ve seen since Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. 
(The British seem to specialize in this species.)
I didn’t feel that the title of the novel needed explaining; nevertheless, Blake/Day-Lewis does explain it, at the very end:
In the first of Brahms’s four Serious Songs, he paraphrases Ecclesiastes 3, 19, as follows: ‘The beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die.’
Grandchildren, and the endless curve of learning and loving
On a recent visit to my son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, the children introduced me to a movie called Song of the Sea. I’m not normally a fan of animated films, but this one, made in Ireland, had a charm and a mystique that was oddly appealing.
One of the characters in Song of the Sea is a Selkie (variant spelling is Silkie). The Selkie legends, a component of Scottish folklore, have come down to us from Orkney and Shetland. It posits the existence of beings who are seals in the sea and, by shedding their skins, become humans on dry land.
I was reminded of the song sung by Joan Baez, The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry. The version she sang was drawn from Francis James Child’s landmark collection of English and Scottish folk songs, a multi-volume work published in the late 1880s. 
The song relates the havoc and heartbreak wrought by a male Selkie during his sojourn upon the land. Song of the Sea, however, ends on a happier note, as you wish stories to do that are told to children.
I cherish this version of the song by the Unthanks, with Julie Fowlis singing in Scots Gaelic.
Anyway – back to the grandchildren: Here they are, going back to school, earlier this month:
Etta, age 7, and Welles, age 4
And Welles turns FIVE today. Happy Birthday, Welles!!
Escape with me to the Twelfth Century….
So this small fellow came to us a few days ago, courtesy of the British Museum Gift Shop:
He is a replica, fashioned in clay, of one of the Lewis Chessmen; specifically, the King piece. Below is a three quarter view of the King:
And here is the back, courtesy of the British Museum’s image gallery:
He is about four inches tall.
In her 2015 book Ivory Vikings, Nancy Marie Brown advances the theory that the famous chess pieces were in fact the work of a woman, specifically an Icelandic carver named Margret the Adroit. 
Well, adroit she must have been, to have created these little marvels made from walrus ivory. (For more on this intriguing story, see The Economist article, “Bones of Contention.”)
Here’s the picture I took of the Chessmen at the British Museum:
Why did I feel the need to own a replica? Author Nancy Marie Brown, who got to handle the eleven Chessmen currently housed in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland, expressed their allure nicely:
Out of their glass display case, they are impossible to resist, warm and bright, seeming not old at all, but strangely alive. They nestle in the palm, smooth and weighty, ready to play. Set on a desktop, in lieu of the thirty-two-inch-square chessboard they’d require, they make a satisfying click.
The British Museum puts out a myriad of publications. Among them is a series of booklets entitled Objects in Focus. I bought and read this one: 
It’s beautifully illustrated and tells not only the story of the discovery of the Chessmen but also the history of the game of chess (a game, I should add, that I’ve never learned to play).
It turns out that there exist several versions of the story of the finding of the Chessmen. I particularly like one that originated in book entitled The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, written by Daniel Wilson and published in 1851. Wilson describes the way in which the action of the sea demolished a portion of a sandbank, thereby “exposing a small stone chamber.”
A local peasant investigated the structure and was alarmed to discover ‘an assemblage of elves or gnomes upon whose mysteries he had unconsciously intruded.’ Shaken and fearing for his safety, the peasant described what he had discovered to his fierce wife, who made him return to the spot and gather up the ‘singular little ivory figures which ad not unnaturally appeared to him the pygmy sprites of Celtic folklore.’
(Naturally I addressed our new acquisition thus: “What about it? Are you a pygmy sprite of Celtic folklore?’ He remained judiciously mute.)
Nancy Marie Brown notes that the Chessmen are clearly identifiable in the first Harry Potter film. Now I’m one of the few humans on the planet who have not seen this movie, but I was able to verify her statement with this YouTube clip:
All of the above has put me in mind of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. In this film, made in 1957 and set in the Middle Ages, a disillusioned Crusader Knight challenges Death to a game of chess. The stakes could not be higher.
Ingmar Bergman’s father was a Lutheran minister, and Bergman recalled visits they had made when he was a boy to various historic churches. Many of these contained distinctive wall and ceiling paintings; this was particularly true of Taby Church in Taby, Sweden:
Brown says that the chess pieces used in the film were modeled on the Lewis Chessmen.
Here is the opening sequence of The Seventh Seal.
From Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in several not so easy leaps
It begins with an achingly beautiful duet: “Marietta’s Lied” from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt:
Korngold based this opera on Bruge-La-Morte, a short novel written by a Belgian, Georges Rodenbach, in 1892:
It tells the story of Hugues Viane, a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges where he lives among the relics of his former wife – her clothes, her letters, a length of her hair – rarely leaving his house.
From the Wikipedia entry for the book. The following is from that same source:
The novel influenced many later writers, including W.G. Sebald. The plot of the book may also have influenced the French crime novel D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Vertigo in 1958.
D’Entre les Morts (Among the Dead) came out in 1954. The authors were Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud; the latter wrote under the pseudonym Thomas Narcejac. 
Of course, that passage above has a decidedly speculative ring to it: “…may also have influenced“…. James Gardner makes the same suggestion, though, in a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Incarnating the World Within.”
Vertigo is one of my favorite films.
More mysterious musings
The noir sensibility would seem to having its moment – again…
I like this trenchant observation made by Megan Abbott in her recent New York Times review of You Belong To Me by Colin Harrison:
Noir has always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia, alternately rejecting the past as a psychological prison and romanticizing it as the lost Eden that predated our fallen present. At its heart, however, the hard, hungry gaze of noir has always been fixed instead on the future. It’s a genre filled with the kind of characters the novelist Laura Lippman calls “dreamers who become schemers.” The dedicated employee who decides to steal from the boss, the drifter who wants the rich man’s wife, the low-rent crooks who try to pull off the big con.
Megan Abbott is the author of the excellent You Will Know Me. As for the subject of this particular review, I immediately downloaded You Belong To Me and started reading it. I’m now 55 pages in – eighteen per cent, as the Kindle Reader helpfully informs me – and let’s put it this way: it’s not my usual thing. For one thing, the thoughts attributed to various characters can be exceedingly harsh, judgmental, and cynical; I’m not comfortable quoting them here. Nevertheless, assailed by a kind of coruscating wit one moment and provoked to astonishment and dread the next, I can’t seem to put the book down! (Judging by where I am currently in the narrative, the novel can best be described as Henry James on speed. It’s a quintessentially New York novel of manners, all right – but updated to the twenty-first century. And what manners!)
Interviewed in the latest issue of Mystery Scene Magazine, writer and critic Eddie Muller offers these thoughts on the essence of noir:
It was the artists who created it and fostered it, not the executives….Some of the films made money, sure–but this had more to do with artists feeling a sense of liberation after the constraints that the Depression and World War II put on them to be “uplifting.” Now they could write adult stories that didn’t have to end well. And that often meant making “bad guys” of the protagonists, which was really the revolutionary, subversive aspect of these films. The central character didn’t have to be a good guy–but he or she was relatable and even someone with whom you could empathize. That’s sort of how I define noir, both literary and cinematic.
Meanwhile, while trying to control my compulsion to devour You Belong To Me in several gargantuan gulps, I’m also reading Earthly Remains, the latest entry in Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti series. From the standpoint of pacing, this novel is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Harrison’s mile-a-minute thriller. I’m a third of the way in – sorry not to be more specific, I’m reading it the old fashioned way – and almost nothing has happened. Brunetti is taking a solo vacation in a house owned by his wife Paola’s wealthy relations. So far, he’s done a lot of rowing, bicycling, reading, and eating. Sounds pleasant, but it doesn’t exactly make for riveting reading.
Still, I’m inordinately fond of Guido Brunetti, so I don’t mind hanging out with him in this way – for a while. And I was deeply moved by the novel immediately preceding this one: The Waters of Eternal Youth.And I do sense the presence of something indefinably ominous in the air. Ah well – pazienza….
Meanwhile, I shall make it my business to get hold of Dark City, Eddie Muller’s highly praised book on noir. And I want to take this opportunity to remind those who have an interest in the subject of David Meyer’s terrific work A Girl and a Gun. I shall here quote Meyer as well as myself, from a post I wrote in September 2011 on the occasion of a discussion of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.
Here’s how Meyer describes the “fortuitous clash of cultures” that gave birth to noir:
As purely an American art form as jazz or the Western, noir sprang from a specific set of social and creative circumstances: the end of World War II, the impact of European refugees on an American art form, the mainstream film studios’ need for a steady supply of low budgets, lurid pictures, and the ascendance of a particular writing style….The hard-bitten, American pulp energy of James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, B. Traven, Raymond Chandler, and others was filtered through the refined, ironic sensibilities of cultured European directors.The writers created heroes who dealt with spiritual crisis (caused by the emptiness of Amercian middle-class life) by alternating between emotional withdrawal and attack. The refugee directors preferred a more sardonic, alienated approach.
Meyer sums up: “The combining of these sensibilities helped create one of the great creative outpourings in American history.”
The title of Meyer’s book is taken from a quote by Jean Luc Godard: “All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.”
“….an existence so so splendid, so compelling, that the paltry realities of this world grew faint by comparison.” – Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, by Kathryn Harrison
This fanciful depiction of the maid of Orleans, or La Pucelle, is one of the images that haunted my childhood. This is another:
Joan of Arc, by Jules Bastien Lepage 1879 [click to enlarge]
I’ve never lost interest in the story of Joan of Arc. So when I read of Kathryn’s Harrison’s new biography, I knew I’d want to read it.
I did. It was wonderful.
Ever since she made her appearance in the historical narrative, shaking that narrative to its core, people have longed to know what Joan of Arc actually looked like. The sole contemporaneous likeness we have is a marginal doodle by Clément de Fauquembergue, a clerk in parliament.
He made this drawing in 1429 without actually having seen its subject.But he was correct in making Joan’s hair black. How do we know this? In the mid nineteenth century, a single strand, inky dark in color, was found embedded in the wax seal of a letter she had dictated.
Harrison tells us that
Likenesses made in her lifetime were destroyed upon her being condemned as a witch, rendering them dangerous devil’s currency.
The image used for this book’s cover is an engraving from the 1903 issue if the magazine Figaro Iluustre: 
The frontispiece of this book contains a single word: the scrawled signature of the Maid of Orleans:
I was stopped in my tracks. You want to trace the jagged letters with your fingers. (I did.)
‘I was only born the day you first spoke to me….My life only began on the day you told me what I must do, my sword in hand.’
Joan speaking to her voices, in The Lark by Jean Anouilh
Pictorial representations of Joan of Arc have proliferated down through the centuries. And the coming of the motion of the motion picture provided a whole new means of bringing to life her remarkable story.
Harrison quotes liberally from the numerous books and plays in which some version of Joan’s life has been depicted, among them Anouilh’s The Lark (quoted above), George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, The Maid of Orléans by Friedrich Schiller, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, Saint Joan of the Stockyards by Bertolt Brecht, and Joan of Lorraine by Maxwell Anderson. In addition, the author place’s the events of Joan’s life in their proper context. The mindset of the people of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages is of course foreign to us in many ways. This is especially true as regards the intensity of religious feeling on the one hand, and the prevalence of superstitious beliefs and fears on the other. (A good way to get a vivid feel for the period is to watch Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal):
Harrison sums up the essence of this stranger-than-fiction individual thus:
Joan’s poise under fire demonstrated what she couldn’t by herself, even had she been erudite as well as literate. It’s one thing to assemble and polish a portrait of oneself, as St. Augustine, a professor of philosophy and rhetoric, and another to demonstrate at nineteen an integrity that a chorus of scheming pedants couldn’t dismantle, their sophistry displaying Joan’s virtues as she could not have done for herself. Few trial transcripts make good reading; only one preserves the voice of Joan of Arc. While the words of the judges are forgettable – all despots sound alike – Joan’s transcend the constraints of interrogation. Even threatened with torture and assaulted by prison guards attempting her rape, she could not be forced to assume the outline her judges drew for her. That was their script, their story of Joan’s life, and, unlike other such medieval documents, it was reproduced, bound, and distributed by her persecutors with the ironic purpose of establishing their punctiliousness in serving the laws of canon.
In other words, she ran rings around her tormenters. Her courage and resourcefulness, both on the battlefield and in court, were almost beyond belief.
It can be seen from the above paragraph that Harrison’s meticulous and powerful prose is more than equal to the telling of this extraordinary story. (I particularly love the locution “chorus of scheming pedants.”) I do have a small caveat, however: Harrison writes this biography from a distinctly feminist perspective, or at least so it seemed to this reader. I was not troubled by this, because while she makes no secret of the gloss she places on certain aspects of this story, she does not harp on ideological convictions. They’re there, in other words, but not to excess. They do not detract – nothing detracts, really – from this incredible tale.
Yet another biography of the Maid of Orleans is due out in May. The author, Helen Castor, is a distinguished British historian. 
A brief biography of Joan with excellent illustrations can be found at Live Science.
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Finally, I recommend the (silent) film The Passion of Joan of Arc. It was made in 1928 by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. The history of this film is in itself rather unlikely. For one thing, it was very nearly lost to posterity. For another its star, Maria (sometimes called Renee) Falconetti did such an uncanny job of bringing Joan to life that it’s almost as though she were channeling rather than acting. Dreyer himself called her “the martyr’s reincarnation.”
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Several full length versions of The Passion of Joan of Arc reside on YouTube. The variations have mainly to do with the soundtrack. Voices of Light, a new soundtrack for the film, was written in 1985 by Richard Einhorn. It accompanies the Criterion release of the film.
Further adventures in true crime
[The first post in this series is Adventures in True Crime, Part One.]
In the course of reading and doing research in the area of true crime, I’ve become fascinated by the way in which actual crimes have served as the basis for fictional narratives. There are quite a few examples of this phenomenon in the literature of suspense and crime fiction – more than I had originally thought. So I decided to come up with some sort of schematic to help organize this information into a coherent form. Another part of my purpose here is to note instances where true crime narratives also exist.
I wanted to include two of my favorite films as well. And of course there’s plenty of relevant material on YouTube. Even an opera made it into the mix!
With the help of my computer whiz husband, I’ve created this grid. The tables were generated by Microsoft Word, and in the process of importing into the blog, I encountered a number of problems with spacing, some of which I was able to correct, but not all.
The project is not quite finished, but here’s what I’ve got so far:
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| The murder of Hannah Willix, New Hampshire, 1648 | Drawn from a one-sentence entry in the journal of Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop, dated June 4, 1648. Source: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-05-21/news/vw-2453_1_strange-death-of-mistress-coffinFrom a blog entitled My Maine Ancestry – http://mymaineancestry.blogspot.com/2012/03/unsolved-murder.html :My 10th Great Grandmother was murdered in New Hampshire in May or June of 1648. Her name was Hannah (or Annah) Willix. She was traveling from Dover to Exeter when she was attacked, robbed and her body “flung” into the river. I found a document online called “New Hampshire Homicides 1630-1774” that contains this information: Hannah “was founde in the [Piscataqua] River dead; her necke broken, her tounge black and swollen out of her mouth & the bloud settled in her face, the privy partes swolne &c as if she had been muche abused &c.” | The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, by Robert J. Begiebing – 1991http://youtu.beRHjr7sjFvhA******************** |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| Murder by James Yates of his wife and four children in 1781 in Tomhanick, NY | “An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J————– Y———– Upon His Family, in December, A.D. 1781” Anonymous article appearing in The New-York Weekly Magazine, July 20, 1796* | Wieland: or The Transformation: An American Tale, By Charles Brockden Brown – 1798 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_%28novel%29 |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| Murder of pregnant mill worker Sarah Maria Cornell, in Fall River, Mass., in 1832 | Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England, by David Kasserman – 1986  |
The Tragedy at Tiverton, by Raymond Paul – 1984  Avery’s Knot, by Mary Cable |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| Murder of Anethe Christensen and Karen Christensen by Louis Wagner at Smutty Nose, in the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire, in 1873 | “A Memorable Murder” by Celia Thaxter, for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine* http://seacoastnh.com/smuttynose/memo.html | The Weight of Water, by Anita Shreve – 1997
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| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| Eight unsolved murders, primarily of African American servant girls, in Austin, Texas, in late 1884 and 1885 | “Capital Murder” by Skip Hollandsworth, in Texas Monthly, July 2000: http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/capital-murder | A Twist at the End, by Steven Saylor – 2000
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| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| The murder of New York City resident Mary Rogers in 1841 | The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the invention of murder, by Daniel Stashower – 2006 |
“The Mystery of Marie Roget,” short story by Edgar Allan Poe – 1842 http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/rogetb.htm |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| The murder of John Hossack in Iowa, in 1900 | “The Hossack Murder,” by Susan Glaspell, in the Des Moines Daily News, 1901* Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland, by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf – 2005 |
“A Jury of Her Peers,” short story by Susan Glaspell – 1917http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| The murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette, in Herkimer, New York (Adirondacks) -1906 | Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited, by Craig Brandon – 1986 | An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser – 1925  A Northern Light, by Jennifer Donnelly – 2003*********Film: A Place in the Sun – 1951 http://youtu.be/wEuFNnJSIw8
An American Tragedy: opera by Tobias Picker – 2005 http://youtu.be/2Um_jfEpjD0 |
| Actual Crime: | True Crime Narrative: | Fictionalized Version: |
| The murder of Albert Snyder by Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, in New York City – 1927 | “The Eternal Blonde,” by Damon Runyan, from Trials and Other Tribulations – 1927*Included in The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum – 2010 | Double Indemnity by James M Cain – 1938****Film: Double Indemnity, from Cain’s novel, with Raymond Chandler writing the screenplay – 1944 http://youtu.be/yKrrAa2o9Eg ********************** |
*Included in True Crime: An American Anthology, edited by Harold Schechter and published by Library of America in 2008
Books to the Ceiling 