THE LADY FROM ZAGREB

This is the tenth novel in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series of detective novels.  It's the first Philip Kerr novel I've read.

The thing which immediately distinguishes this series from just another "hard boiled" detective series (the jacket proudly proclaims that "Philip Kerr is the only bona fide heir to Raymond Chandler") is the setting of the books in Nazi Germany.

Bernie Gunther used to be a real police detective, now he's just another German trying to survive World War II.  The police have now become a part of the SS, and Bernie is on special assignment for the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels.   There is a beautiful actress, Dalia Dresner, that Herr Goebbels has the hots for.  She wants to know whether or not her father in Croatia is still alive and Goebbels wants her for his movies and his bed.

Philip Kerr

Bernie has a real tendency to leave a body trail behind him.  Bernie also likes beautiful women and they like him.  A recipe for a ripping good yarn and a painless history lesson.  As an SS officer in the Third Reich, Bernie has learned that ordinary murders don't mean much when nations are engaged in genocide.  Written in the first person "hard boiled" style, Kerr is skilled in letting his German Sam Spade tell the tale.

It did feel to me like the novel was somewhat padded and overlong.  If  it was about two hundred pages shorter, it would have been a five star novel.  As it is, the Bad Catholic gives it three and a half Sherlock Holmes hats.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

“They threw me off the haytruck about noon.” So begins one of the most famous crime noir novels of all time, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Neither of the two movies, neither the 1946 Lana Turner - John Garfield version nor the 1981 Jessica Lange - Jack Nicholson version, really do this book justice, although the Lange - Nicholson movie follows the novel much more closely. The “hard boiled” style has now been parodied so much that it is hard to realize how new and fresh this writing was in 1934 when Postman was first published.

The plot of Postman is well known. Frank Chambers is a no good drifter who lands at the Twin Oaks Tavern which, as Frank describes it, “ . . . was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California. There was a lunchroom part, and over that the house part, where they lived, and off to one side a filling station, and out back a half dozen shacks that they called an auto court.”

The Twin Oaks Tavern is owned by a middle aged Greek immigrant named Nick Papadakis and his pretty young wife Cora. Cora won a beauty contest in Iowa and came to Hollywood trying to break into the movie business. Although Cora’s looks may have been enough to make her a silent movie star, the recent advent of talking pictures has doomed any chance Cora has of being a movie star.

“They gave me a test. It was all right in the face. But they talk, now. The pictures, I mean. And when I began to talk, up there on the screen, they knew me for what I was, and so did I. A cheap Des Moines trollop that had as much chance in pictures as a monkey has. A monkey, anyway, can make you laugh. All I did was make you sick.”

After washing out in the movies, Cora is forced to wait tables in seedy dives. Cora has married “the Greek” for financial reasons. Although the Greek is a likeable man who works hard and treats Cora well, Cora does not love him and is not sexually excited by him. When the Greek offers Frank the drifter a job working in the gas station, Frank takes it with the idea of trying to seduce Cora. Being bored in her marriage, Cora is easily seduced. There is just a hint of Sado-Masochism in the first sexual encounter between Cora and Frank:

“I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers . . . “Bite me! Bite me!”

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”

This was very racy stuff in 1934. Lines like this and “She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world,” caused this book to be considered scandalous in its time and caused it to be one of those books which was “banned in Boston.”

In any event, Cora and Frank conspire to murder the Greek. Actually it’s more Cora than Frank. Even though Frank is a loser and an ex-con, he is a likeable character. After staying with Frank’s first person narration for the whole novel, the reader comes to feel that Frank is an old friend. Frank is reluctant to kill Nick when Cora first suggests it:

“. . . I’ve made one mistake. And I’ve got to be a hell cat, just once, to fix it. But I’m not really a hell cat, Frank.”

“They hang you for that.”

“Not if you do it right. You’re smart, Frank. I never fooled you for a minute. You’ll think of a way. Plenty of them have. Don’t worry. I’m not the first woman that had to turn hell cat to get out of a mess.”

“He never did anything to me. He’s all right.”

“The hell he’s all right. He stinks, I tell you. He’s greasy and he stinks. And do you think I’m going to let you wear a smock, with Service Auto Parks printed on the back, Thank-U Call Again, while he has four suits and a dozen silk shirts? Isn’t that business half mine? Don’t I cook? Don’t I cook good? Don’t you do your part?”

“You talk like it was all right.”

“Who’s going to know if it’s all right or not, but you and me?”

“You and me.”

Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as Frank Chambers and Cora Papadakis

Cora is really the ruthless one with the least moral scruples. Even though he becomes a cold blooded killer, Frank does seem to have a certain morality about him. Cora is eager to kill the Greek but Frank is a reluctant killer. “He never did anything to me. He’s all right.” But Frank’s lust for sexy Cora outweighs Frank’s scruples.

Jessica Lange as Cora and John Colicos as "the Greek"

This novel is so well known, I feel no need to go through the entire plot in detail. Having been a lawyer in criminal courts for over twenty years, I felt that the courtroom and legal scenes in The Postman Always Rings Twice are very realistic. I noticed that in the 1981 Jack Nicholson movie, the name of the conniving criminal defense lawyer, Katz, had been changed to something less Jewish sounding. I wonder if it was felt that Cain was making an anti-semitic swipe against “Jewish lawyers,” since Katz is interested only in making a big splash and winning his case and has no interest in justice whatsoever.

Since author James M. Cain was writing a morality tale, he couldn't allow the murderers to live happily ever after. Just when it looks like Frank and Cora are really going to settle down and have babies disaster strikes. After having gotten away with murdering the Greek, Frank is wrongfully convicted of murdering pregnant Cora after she dies in a tragic accident while Frank was trying to rush her to the hospital. The novel ends with Frank on death row about to be executed for the murder he didn’t commit.

According to The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain are the father, son, and holy ghost of American hard-boiled literature.” Prior to authoring Postman, Cain was a successful journalist and a not so successful playwright and screenwriter.

James M. Cain

Reportedly, the inspiration for Postman was the Ruth Snyder - Judd Grey case where an adulterous couple conspired and murdered the woman’s husband. There is a famous picture covertly snapped by a reporter of Ruth Snyder dying in New York’s electric chair.

The infamous photograph of the execution of Ruth Snyder

The title has always caused some confusion since there is no postman in the story. Cain had originally named the story “Bar-B-Que” but the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, wanted another title. The “Postman” who “always rings twice,” is God or fate. Frank and Cora got away with murder the first time, but then the postman came back and delivered punishment.

Lana Turner and John Garfield as Cora Papadakis and Frank Chambers

Although Cain continued to write novels up until his death in 1977, he never recaptured the run away success of The Postman Always Rings Twice. His next novel, Double Indemnity (1943), is basically a re-hash of the same story, involving this time an insurance salesman and the wife of a client.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is short, only 35,000 words. Apparently, Knopf had to print it in larger than normal type to make it look like it was longer. As one article which I read on the internet said, “It will take you longer to watch either movie version than to read the book.” Even after all these years, The Postman Always Rings Twice is still able to work its magic on readers. It is still a powerful, gripping story and the sparse, muscular Hemingway-esque “hard-boiled” style can still grab you. The Postman Always Rings Twice well deserves its reputation as a classic.

Hardboiled America

Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (Originally Published 1981, Expanded Edition 1997) by Geoffrey O’Brien is, as the title says, about both the history of the paperback book industry and the men and women who wrote the books.

The paperback book was the direct successor of the dime novel of the 19th Century and the pulp magazines of the early 20th century. Early on, paperback book publishers commissioned artists to do paintings for paperback covers which were designed to do one thing: sell books. And then as now what sells? SEX.

Hardboiled America contains a great collection of prints of paperback covers from the 1940s through the 50s. Many of them are in color. In fact, most of the time, the lurid cover paintings of women with heaving bosoms in various states of undress were much more provocative than what was actually in the book. Many of these artists worked in obscurity but many have been indentified. O’Brien discusses what is known about the artists who worked on paperback covers and discusses their work in detail.

The second half of the book is taken up with a discussion of the authors of “hard-boiled” crime noir and their work. Dashiell Hammett, the grand daddy of hard-boiled detective authors, wrote long before there was any such thing as a paperback book. However, Hammett got his start writing for the pulp fiction detective magazine The Black Mask. Hammett’s novels naturally were exactly the sort of fare that paperback publishers were looking for. Later, in the 1950s, came “the paperback original,” a novel which was never published in hard cover but was written exclusively for the paperback market. Writers such as John D. MacDonald and Jim Thompson pumped out book after book in quick succession as paperback originals. And there were sub-genres like the drug addict story and the juvenile delinquent story which pretended to deal with serious subjects but were marketed to appeal to the prurient interest.

For anyone interested in American popular culture in the mid twentieth century or in crime noir, Hardboiled America is a must read.

For another great review of this book, concentrating on the work of John D. MacDonald, see the blog The Trap of Solid Gold.

COMING SOON: One of the great classics of Crime Noir: James M. Cain's 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

A Bullet for Cinderella

John D. MacDonald was an incredibly prolific author. Over the course of his career he wrote over 70 novels and countless short stories. When MacDonald left the army at the end of World War II he began writing stories for the pulp magazines of the era. In the 1950s MacDonald began churning out one pulp fiction novel after another which were published as “paperback originals.” Living first in Mexico in the late 1940s and then re-locating to Sarasota, Florida in the 1950s, MacDonald is recognized as one of the masters of the “hard-boiled” crime noir genre.

John D. MacDonald


A Bullet for Cinderella (1955) (also published as On the Make) is a story as hard-boiled as a 30 minute egg. Tal Howard has recently been discharged from the army after being captured by the Chinese in the Korean War. While a prisoner of war Tal had met Timmy Warden who told Tal how he had embezzled and hidden $60,000 (a lot of money in 1955) from his brother’s lumber and hardware business. Timmy also told Tal that the only person who knew where the money was hidden was his former girlfriend Cindy.

Armed with the above information, Tal shows up in Timmy’s hometown of Hillston to try to find Cindy and locate the stolen money. When Tal gets to Hillston he is surprised to find Fitzmartin who was also in the prison camp. In prison, Fitzmartin was a weasel who collaberated with the enemy and would not lend any assistance to fellow prisoners. Fitz had overheard Timmy tell Tal about the money. While Tal was still recuperating in an army hospital, Fitz has shown up in Hillston and gotten a job working for George Warden, Timmy’s brother. George, whose no good wife Eloise is believed to have run off with a traveling salesman, has become a down and out alcoholic.

Tal begins to poke around and ask questions and looks up as many of Timmy’s former friends and associates as he can find. Tal begins to be more than friends with Timmy’s former girlfriend Ruth. There’s also Timmy’s old girlfriend, the dirt poor Antoinette Rasi who lived in squalor in a shack next to the river. In the eighth grade Timmy had played Prince Charming and Antoinette had played Cinderella. Antoinette has gone to the big city, changed her name and become a high class call girl for the mob. Timmy used to call her Cindy . . .

The body count in A Bullet for Cinderella goes pretty high with the inept Hillston Police apparently too hapless to do much about it and Tal, who has no experience as a detective, doing a much better job of putting the pieces together. Characteristic of MacDonald, Tal does a good bit of philosophizing about the nature of life and trying to “find himself.” In the end, Tal finds out that the love of a good woman is more valuable than money.

For a thorough discussion of this novel and everything related to John D. MacDonald, visit the blog A Trap of Solid Gold.