There’s a point in a reader’s life where he can take only so much angst, so much navel contemplation and so much soul-vomiting confession in his literature. The brain freezes up, short-circuits and runs to a book where the major redeeming factor is that the cover isn’t a soft focus photo of a plant or close-cropped part of anatomy. I realize that in these unsettling times it’s good to find tales of self-discovery and revelation. But, damn it, do we constantly have to read about every dysfunctional family? We’re living it for real, for goodness sakes!
Admittedly, I stopped reading most contemporary literature in the ’90s (I believe it was The Bridges of Madison County that did me in) with some exceptions (The Book Thief by Markus Zusak still haunts me after three years). So I’m not the most reliable source for today’s literature.
I’m a mystery fan. I’ve covered the gamut from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell and P.D James. I seem to be spiraling backward, however. Wilkie Collins is my new hero. I’ve just read The Moonstone for a second time. I’ve finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, who is a modern writer for sure but tells the true story of a murder in a small town in England in 1860 (an event that inspired such writers as Collins, Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle).
Yes, I’m oversimplifying, but sometimes we readers just need a rest. This is where my guilty pleasure comes in. The crude, fast-fisted, hard-boiled gumshoe is on my bedside table right now. Pulp fiction was never great stuff but there is some that rise to the top and, if you take away some of the “dames” and hard drinking, it can be as artful and poetic as any “literary” writer today.
Take Mickey Spillane, for example. Here’s a description of the rain in the opening of chapter 3 in his One Lonely Night:
The rain. The damned never-ending rain. It turned Manhattan into a city of reflections, a city you saw twice no matter where you looked. It was a slow easy rain that took awhile to collect on your hat brim before it cascaded down in front of your face. The streets had an oily shine that brought the rain-walkers out, people who went native whenever the sky cried and tore off their hats to let the tears drip through their hair.
Or the opening of The Big Kill:
Two drunks with a nickel between them were arguing over what to play on the jukebox until a tomato in a dress that was too tight a year ago pushed the key that started off something noisy and hot. One of the drunks wanted to dance and she gave him a shove. So he danced with the other drunk.
She saw me sitting there with my stool tipped back against the cigarette machine and change of a fin on the bar, decided I could afford a wet evening for two and walked over with her hips waving hello.
“You’re new around here, ain’t ya?”
“Nah. I’ve been here since six o’clock.”
“Buy me a drink?” She crowded in next to me, seeing how much of herself she could plaster against my legs.
“No.” It caught her by surprise and she quit rubbing.
“Don’t gentlemen usually by a lady a drink?” She tried to lower her eyelids seductively but one came down farther than the other and made her look stupid.
“I’m not a gentleman, kid.”
“I ain’t a lady either so buy me a drink.”
So I bought her a drink…..
The prose is lively and rhythmic, creating a perfect counter-point to a seamy, smarmy world that I’ll never know (or perhaps never existed except in pulp fiction). I read it aloud to myself, something I rarely do. It seems to be meant to be read aloud, especially with Benny Carter’s sultry Angel Eyes playing somewhere in the background.
If some of you still want some penetrating self-reflection, try this on for size, again from One Lonely Night:
That was me… There in the muck and slime of the jungle, there in the stink that hung over the beaches rising from the bodies of the dead, there in the half-light of too many dusks and dawns laced together with the crisscrossed patterns of bullets, I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization.
Great stuff.
The plots can be convoluted and predictable. I know the bad guys will usually lose. And there will be lots of dead bodies strewn across the landscape. But who cares? You’re drawn into a world with its own rules and rhythms, not knowing who the bad guys really are. Heck, nobody is really a good guy. But then, I’m not reading for plot mostly, just language and atmosphere.
I’ll return to modern writers someday, trust me. Too many friends and readers I respect tell me about books I should know.
But in the meantime, I’ll pull my homburg tighter on my head, pull up the collar on my raincoat and take my literature hardboiled.
Straight. No ice.
Buy ya a drink?
Doug
Cushman is a former Redding artist and author who now lives and works in Paris. He was born in Springfield,Ohio,and moved to Connecticut with his family at the age of 15. In high school he created comic books lampooning his teachers, selling them to his classmates for a nickel apiece. Since 1978, he has illustrated and/or written more than 100 books for children and collected a number of honors, including a Reuben Award for Book Illustration from the National Cartoonists Society, New York Times Children’s Books Best Sellers, and the New York Public Library’s Best 100 Books of 2000. He enjoys hiking, kayaking and cooking (and eating!). Learn more at his website, doug-cushman.com.
