by Jack Higgins

361

by Donald E. Westlake
Hard Case Crime
$6.99


We all know "chiaroscuro" is Italian for "light-dark" and refers mainly to the art style in which bold contrasts in light and dark are used to create depth. It can be used to describe literature in the very same way, however, and that is how we use it here. While these two novels are not in the horror vein, they are surely two examples of the chiaroscuro style as used in literature. Film noir is a phrase we use liberally, and noir literature is (depending on who you ask) either another name for hard-boiled fiction or a subgenre. In both cases, noir ("black") refers to an inherent grimness, a sense of futility and/or nihilism, possibly sexual obsession, betrayal, reversal of good and evil, and—perhaps to spice things up—femme fatales and tough guys who always make the wrong choices. That's an oversimplification, of course, but it'll do as introduction to these two very different older works which still fall under the noir banner.

Jack Higgins (one of Harry Patterson's best-known pseudonyms) has his detractors, I'm sure, but when I was growing up and lusting to become a writer, in my eyes there were damn few better at telling a rip-roaring story. Higgins did eventually fall into a repetitive mode and followed his own easy formula a few times too many, but he'd written several dozen novels by the time I got to him, under as many as six or seven pseudonyms, so I kept peeling off one layer to find another. I liked his brand of adventure, in which he almost always romanticized his anti-heroes with an Irishman's knack for nostalgia. His good guys were blunt and flawed, but always noble even in their forced dishonor. They were ex terrorists, ex-patriots, ex-military, ex-spies, and always weary, angry, and deadly. Occasionally he'd throw a monkey wrench into the formula, shaking it up by setting the stories in WW2, like The Eagle Has Landed and Storm Warning—but even then, he played with your emotions, making you "root for the bad guy" because in some of those books the good guys were Germans, and that just wasn't done. What guts! You read Eagle and you find yourself hoping they get away with kidnapping Churchill, because Steiner and his group of loyal paratroopers and the IRA man who's helping them are the "better" guys, the guys whose nobility is layered on a bit thickly, but somehow still moving. It's also interesting to think that a writer would humanize the enemy we were always supposed to hate, no questions asked.

Hell Is Always Today is the middle of three Nick Miller police thrillers originally published in the mid to late '60s. Call it "Brit-noir" because it differs from the Chandler-Hammett-Cain school of American hard-boiled thrillers in some key ways. Its heroes are cops rather than outsiders, though Higgins wisely makes his cop an outsider of sorts, a cop who doesn't have to be one. Detective Sergeant Miller is a strong and silent loner type whose sense of morality makes him a kind of knight-errant, righting wrongs just because they should be righted. He's sarcastic, cynical, and more than a little resistant to authority. It's a good bet a young Michael Caine would have pegged him well in a movie version.

In a rainy city which might be London, random murders of women have been connected and the killer has been dubbed the Rainlover by the press. Miller is at odds with a superior, Scotland Yard inspector Mallory, as to how to proceed when a rather well-known and highly eccentric sculptor becomes a suspect in the Rainlover killings. Mallory prefers the latest victim's boyfriend-pimp, whereas Miller's instinct tells him Faulkner, the sculptor, has something to hide. Meanwhile, "Gunner" Sean Doyle, an ex-boxer turned burglar who's been doing time, escapes from his hospital bed. In typical Higgins fashion, the action takes place in a compressed amount of time and he blurs the lines between good and evil, bringing in a romantic angle to tame one of his bad boys, and orchestrating a fateful climactic (some might say melodramatic) encounter of all the principals on a rain-slick roof high above the street. Employing his normal romanticized good-bad guy routine and imparting concise moral lessons, Higgins might be overlooked as a noir writer, but all the elements are there, if somewhat scrambled and perhaps a mite self-conscious. Still, it's the kind of novel for which they coined the term page-turner, and it works just as well today if taken as period piece, ignoring its dated technology and mid-'60s references (not all of them laudatory).

The new and interesting line of books called Hard Case Crime, which seems to be fueling a mini-resurgence of the pulp hardboiled-noir style, gave me a reason to revisit another old friend, Donald Westlake. As Richard Stark, Westlake also gave us the Parker series, and it's certainly his greatest creation. Parker is the original "root for the bad guy" character, and Mel Gibson's movie "Payback," based on Point Blank, even made an ad campaign out of it. But besides Parker, Westlake also produced funny caper novels about Dortmunder and his gang, and countless stand-alones which rival the best of the hard-boiled school for toughness and all-around grimness.

361, reprinted by Hard Case Crime in a handsome paperback with lovely pulp-era style cover painting (as they all are), is a rocket of a novel that portrays a young man's descent into a hellish netherworld of crime he didn't even know existed—and to which he didn't know he was connected. Just out of the Air Force and home from postwar Germany, Ray Kelly is met by his father and looks forward to being a civilian. While driving, a gunman in another car kills Ray's dad and severely wounds Ray, thereby giving Ray a rage for revenge. It's not shared by his brother, but when his brother's new wife is run down and killed, Ray and Bill realize that someone is out to get them. Survival is added to vengeance, and they soon learn more than they want to know about their dad and his youth during prohibition. Following one lead after another, Ray comes closer to the truth and is himself eternally transformed by what he does and who he comes close to. Lean and miserly with adjectives and descriptions, 361 is a gut punch of a novel in the best possible hard-boiled noir tradition, playing with its hero's moral code and indeed his humanity while taking the reader on a ride through a criminal world that was changing even when the novel was written, and now seems as quaint as a black and white movie on late-night television. The fact that a 40-year old story of a young man's love for his dad turned to rage by nearly random events and channeled into revenge and a moral decline can still thrill and challenge is testament to the skill of Donald Westlake, possibly the only remaining equal to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (with apologies to Lawrence Block, who is in the running). Raising crime and punishment to an almost Shakespearean level, keeping the narrative crisply poetic in its sparseness, and building characters on skillful brush strokes, Westlake proves that the dark crime novel, like horror, totals more than the sum of its parts.

Whether your taste runs to the more dashingly romantic noir of Jack Higgins, as best represented in the Nick Miller trio (Hell Is Always Today, The Graveyard Shift, and Brought in Dead), or the never romanticized hardnosed toughness of Donald Westlake as beautifully represented in the truly tough-as-nails 361, you'll find yourself itching for more. Thankfully, it appears we're due for more, both reprints and originals from Hard Case Crime and others who are transporting us back in time to when the shades of gray between the light and dark meant everything. Perhaps we'll realize that it's still like that . . . when you get past the glitz of millions of colors—the best stories are still told in shades of gray.