Forgotten Book - A Penknife in My Heart

Nicholas Blake's A Penknife in My Heart, first published in 1958, is highly readable, but in some ways a curious book. It's very well-written on the whole, as you would expect from this author, yet there's something slightly amateurish about the way he jumps from one viewpoint to another in a single scene, and in the way he tends to "tell" rather than "show". I suspect this may have been because he did not put as much effort into his novel writing as he did into his poetry published under his real name, Cecil Day Lewis.

Another oddity is that the central situation, of an exchange of murders, replicates that of Strangers on a Train. By the time Blake's book came out, Patricia Highsmith's classic was several years old, and had been successfully filmed by Hitchcock. Yet Blake insists he was unaware of this, and is clearly embarrassed by the coincidence that he also used two of the same character names that appear in Highsmith's story. In a preface, he thanks Highsmith for "being so charmingly sympathetic".

Some may think that it beggars belief that Blake was unaware of the earlier book. I am happy to take him at his word, even though it may be that some information about the film, if not the book, had seeped into his subconscious. It's common for different writers to come up with much the same idea, quite separately. And it's also the case that Blake's story develops in a rather different way from Highsmith's. Some commentators prefer Blake's book, but I think Highsmith's stands the test of time better.

All that said, I did enjoy this story. It's a good, fast read, and I devoured it in a single sitting. It's interesting that Simenon is name-checked in the story; he clearly influenced some of Blake's post-war fiction. Since Blake's book was published, several novels, by authors as diverse as Evelyn Berckman, Sheila Radley, and Peter Swanson, have used the exchange of murders concept in a variety of ways. And it's a concept with rich potential. One of these days, I'm tempted to have a go myself...   

Forgotten Book - Stalemate

Two men, each of them burdened by a wife who is no longer loved, but who refuses a divorce. How can they rid themselves of the inconvenience, and make the most of life. The two men do have a slight acquaintance, but it isn't widely known. They confide in each other, and one of them has an idea. Why don't they help each other out, by killing each other's wives?

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This is an idea that has cropped up in crime stories time and again over the year. Of all the variations on the theme, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train is by far the most renowned, though other good examples have been produced by the late Sheila Radley and the American thriller writer Peter Swanson. The book I'm referring to, however, is Stalemate. It was written by Evelyn Berckman, an expatriate American based in London, and published here in 1966.

My interest in Berckman was fired when I watched a film based on one of her books, Do You Know this Voice? It prompted me to acquire some of her other novels. And although the premise of Stalemate isn't original, it's handled in a fairly original way. The key twist is foreseeable, but it becomes clear by the end of the book that Berckman's interest is in character rather than puzzling her readers. And she is pretty good at characterisation.

I was particularly impressed by the quality of the writing in the first half of the book. Berckman has a pleasing turn of phrase, and there's an intensity about her prose which is appealing. In the later stages, there are one or two scenes which are perhaps over-wrought, and I was slightly surprised by the way she shifts focus from the main actors in the drama to a member of the supporting cast. So despite its familiar premise, it' becomes quite an unusual story. Not a masterpiece in the Highsmith class, but interesting.

Carol - 2015 film review

Carol is a highly acclaimed film from last year based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. The storyline has some elements familiar to Highsmith fans, but it's not a crime story, even though a gun makes an appearance during one tense scene. The book was originally titled The Price of Salt, and Highsmith published it under a pen-name (Claire Morgan) in 1953 after her existing publisher rejected it.

At Christmas time, an aspiring photographer called Therese is working in a department store when she has a brief encounter with an older woman, an elegant customer who is looking for a present for her young daughter. Therese has a boyfriend who wants to marry her, while the customer Carol, is married to a wealthy man who is prepared to use their daughter as a pawn in an increasingly acrimonious custody battle if Carol persists in her determination to end the marriage. The lead roles are taken by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchettl and they are both superb.

Therese and Carol are drawn to each other, but as their relationship blossoms it becomes increasingly evident that the course of true love is unlikely to run smooth - even when the couple throw caution to the winds and go off together to such not-exactly-exotic locations as Waterloo, Idaho. There are some parallels between this relationship and those between the male protagonists of so many other Highsmith novels, including Strangers on a Train and The Two Faces of January; but there are also important differences.

This very well-made film cast fascinating, if depressing, light on the moral climate of the time. Highsmith wove autobiographical elements into her story, well documented in Andrew Wilson's excellent biography of her, Beautiful Shadow, while anyone intrigued by the account of lesbian life in Fifties America may also like to take a look at Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties (2003), a memoir about her doomed affair with Highsmith. Meaker's book I found fascinating, although regrettably less than kind abotu her former partner. Highsmith was a troubled woman, clearly very difficult to live with, but truly gifted. Carol is an excellent adaptation of a very good love story - and if you want to know whether it has a happy ending, you'll have to watch it to find out!.

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Forgotten Book - Eleven

Continuing my exploration of the work of Patricia Highsmith, I recently re-read Eleven, which I came across originally in the Seventies - it was published in 1970, and is a collection of eleven short stories, with a foreword by Graham Greene. In comparison to her better known work, it's a book that I think does count as a Forgotten Book, but it shouldn't be. I admired it when I first read it, and I was even more impressed the second time around.

Greene says, rightly I think, that Highsmith is "a poet of apprehension rather than fear" - in fact he relates this specifically to her novel The Tremor of Forgery, which he greatly admired, and which I discussed a few Fridays ago. He praises her short stories warmly, pointing out - which I hadn't realised before - that some in this book were written even before her first published novel, Strangers on a Train. As he says, "we have no sense that she is learning her craft". He picks out "When the Fleet Was In at Mobile" as his favourite, and it's certainly a poignant story, as well as being as dark as the other ten in the book.

Where I might part company with Graham Greene is in his remark that readers may sometimes be able to brush her stories off more easily than her novels, because their brevity means that we haven't lived long enough with them to be totally absorbed. For me, Highsmith is at least as brilliant a short story writer as a novelist. In fact, I'm tempted to say that her gifts were even better suited to the short form. I doubt whether this is a widely shared view, but I think it's no coincidence that, as her career wore on, she struggled to come up with dazzling new ideas for novels - returning to Tom Ripley time and again, for instance, and repeating some themes of earlier books - whereas she continued to write very memorable short stories. For my taste (and judging her by high standards), some of her weaker novels drag a bit. This isn't the case with her short stories..

Certainly, Eleven is full of dazzling, haunting stories. Two feature snails, and one a terrapin, but each is unique and splendid. "The Quest for Blank Claveringi", in particular, is one of the most horrific and gripping stories you could wish to find; it really is a horror story, but it also tells us something about human nature, in Highsmith's customary subtle way.  There isn't one story in the eleven that is anything less than excellent.

Forgotten Book - The Blunderer

The Blunderer, by Patricia Highsmith, was first published in 1954. By that time, she had already made her name, with her brilliant debut novel Strangers on a Train. She'd also written, under a pseudonym, a lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, later (wisely, I think) re-titled Carol. A year later she would publish her other great masterpiece, The Talented Mr Ripley. So she was clearly at a very productive and intense stage of her career. And The Blunderer illustrates her strengths pretty well, though it also reveals some of her limitations.

The set-up is, as usual with Highsmith, intriguing. In the first chapter, an unpleasant chap called Kimmel murders his wife, having first taken the precaution of trying to set up an alibi. Attention then shifts to the life of Walter Stackhouse, an affluent, good-looking and personable young lawyer with a rather irritating wife. In due course, the lives of Stackhouse and Kimmel will collide, with devastating results for both of them.

This book begins really well, and I found the central premise fascinating. Unfortunately, I became increasingly irritated with Walter's behaviour. He is a prime example of a Highsmith protagonist who behaves in a manner that is not only self-destructive, but also so obviously so that it is difficult to maintain sympathy with him. The same pattern recurs in books like A Suspension of Mercy and Those Who Walk Away, which I reviewed recently. Highsmith deploys various techniques in her attempt to persuade us to suspend our disbelief. In this early book, I think she is less successful than in the later books. I found my sympathy for Walter draining away, and this diminished my interest in his fate.

That said, Highsmith was an admirably ambitious writer, and even her failures (and this book isn't, in my opinion, really a success) are more interesting than many books where the author is much less daring. More than sixty years after its first appearance, I feel that its prime interest is as an example of a relatively inexperienced novelist grappling with challenges of technique. But this is much more interesting than it may sound. I had very mixed feelings about The Blunderer, but I'm still glad I read it.

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson - review

The Kind Worth Killing is a new crime novel written by Peter Swanson and published by Faber. It's also one of the most gripping thrillers I've read in a long time, thanks to a quite dizzying series of plot twists. I've not come across Swanson before, although his previous book, the intriguingly titled The Girl With a Clock for a Heart evidently did very well, but I'd be amazed if a film-maker didn't snap this one up. It's a story that would make an extremely suspenseful movie.

The opening is self-consciously reminiscent of Strangers on a Train. A rich man, Ted, meets a beautiful woman at an airport, and confides that he wants to kill his unfaithful wife. To his bewilderment, she starts to encourage him. The link to Patricia Highsmith is made explicit by the fact that the woman, Lily, is reading The Two Faces of January, and it turns out she's a crime fiction fan - Christie and Sayers are among her favourites. But what else is she? And what will Ted do about that wife of his?

One or two reviewers have complained that Swanson isn't as fine a writer, in terms of literary style, as Highsmith, and that's true. But then let's face it - few of us are. Swanson proceeds to make very different and imaginative use of the basic premise, while displaying a consistent ingenuity that wasn't really Highsmith's forte. In particular, he plays risky games with viewpoint. The way he plays one particular trick not once but two or three times is audacious in the extreme. Some people won't care for that device (to discuss it would be a spoiler) but I think he gets away with it. The key question is - which of the characters will get away with murder?

I think he could have made even more use of Lily's fondness for crime fiction in the second half of the book, while the very last twist reminded me rather of ironists like Anthony Berkeley.But above all, this is a fast-moving story that is compelling despite the fact that (as is not unusual in novels of psychological suspense) one struggles to identify with the main characters. I really enjoyed it from start to finish. And I bet that, had Hitchcock still been alive, he'd have loved it.  

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Forgotten Book - The Third Lady

My Forgotten Book for today is one of the few Japanese novels that I’ve read (in translation, I hasten to add.) It is The Third Lady by Shizuko Natsuki, and I learned of it from John Norris’s brilliant blog. John raved over it, and when I saw that Ed Gorman – someone whose literary judgment is irreproachable – had also admired the novel, I simply had to read it.

And I wasn’t disappointed, though I must say I thought the translation by Robert Rohmer had one or two infelicities here and there. But it’s a story of “murder by proxy” which takes the basic idea of Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train, but puts a very different spin on it.

This idea of giving a fresh twist to an old idea is one that appeals to me. After all, most ideas have crossed someone else’s mind in the past. And Natsuki does very well to turn this story into a sort of moral fable, while giving the tale an excellent twist.

The premise is that a man and woman have a fleeting encounter and tell each other about someone they hate and whom they wish dead. The man, Kohei Daigo, finds that his enemy is killed by a mystery woman. He’s sure the killer is the woman by whom he is now quite obsessed. But can he bring himself to kill her enemy? It’s cleverly done, and I enjoyed reading the book. First published in 1987, it certainly doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

And here’s a question. What other “murder by proxy” stories are out there? I can think of at least two, and that isn’t counting the embryonic story I dreamed up when visiting Dublin last year!

Strangers on a Train

I’ve watched Hitchcock’s classic movie Strangers on a Train more than once, as well as reading the book by Patricia Highsmith on which it was based, but this is a film which is so masterful that it was good to see it again the other day. And as I watched, I reflected that, after almost half a century, it has lost little of its power.

The story-line of the ‘exchange of murders’ is now very familiar, and it has been referenced countless times subsequently (my favourite is the Peter Lovesey story called ‘Strangers on a Bus’). As with many of Highsmith’s plot ideas, the material is melodramatic, but the story is developed brilliantly, and although Hitchcock made some changes for the film, he was able to capture, in his own way, the chilling, obsessive atmosphere of the literary source. Apparently he approached Dashiell Hammett to write the screenplay at first, then gave the job to Raymond Chandler, but the pair did not get on, and little of Chandler’s writing survived in the final version. Famously, Highsmith was only paid $7,500 for the rights - not much for one of the classics, really.

Farley Grainger plays Guy, the likeable tennis player with a faithless wife, and Robert Walker is the superficially charming but sociopathic Bruno, who wants his own father dead. Ruth Roman does a decent job as Guy’s girlfriend, and her younger sister is played by Hitchcock’s own daughter, Pat. I was sorry to learn that Walker, whose performance is quite brilliantly spooky, died not long after the film was screened; he suffered serious psychiatric problems. Grainger, however, is still alive.

There are lots of wonderful touches in this film, and the climactic scene on a merry-go-round is superb. This is one of the best Hitchcock films, which means, quite simply, that it is one of the best crime films ever made.

Short Stories and Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff is a significant figure in the literary world, but I must confess, a writer I haven’t got round to reading in the past. The other day, though, I was given a copy of his short story ‘The Chain’, taken from a collection called The Night in Question, with the recommendation that I’d like it.

And I did. The opening is dramatic – a man called Gold, who owns a not very successful video shop, sees a vicious dog on a chain (but an excessively long one) lunge after his young daughter, with potentially disastrous consequences. Gold rescues the girl, who is not harmed, but the incident preys on his mind. He confides in a friend who offers to deal with the dog. And after hesitating, Gold accepts the offer.

This sets off a chain of events (‘chain’ has a double significance in this story) which leads to murder. There’s a touch of Strangers on a Train about the first part of the story, but overall the effect is highly distinctive. I enjoyed it, and I will definitely read more Tobias Wolff.

In fact, reading ‘The Chain’ reminded how much I love short stories – even if they don’t fall within the conventional parameters of the crime genre. I have a great many favourites, but possibly the number one in my list is another story which isn’t conventional ‘crime fiction’ and yet deals with a sort of crime. It is Shirley Jackson’s brilliant ‘The Lottery’.

So, I wonder, what is your favourite short story?

Beautiful Shadow

The experience of listening to the Ripley Mysteries on CD sent me hurrying back to Andrew Wilson’s exhaustive biography of Ripley’s creator, Patricia Highsmith. Beautiful Shadow was first published six years ago.and it is a diligently researched and most capably written study of a writer who intrigued yet perplexed Wilson, as she did most of the people she met – as well as many of her readers.

Wilson is an experienced journalist, but this was his first book. It’s quite an achievement, and benefits from very extensive research. Wilson draws on Highsmith’s very extensive archive of unpublished personal papers, as well as on frank interviews with many close friends, to paint a portrait of a woman who, for all the richness of her life experiences, seems to have suffered a great deal of unhappiness. Wilson charts her often troubled sex life, her various health problems, and her curious upbringing - as well as her obsession with snails.

All that the book lacks, for my money, is a real sense of Highsmith’s place in literary history, and an assessment of her contribution to the development of the crime genre. She possessed a remarkable talent, which is shown not only in the Ripley books and Strangers on a Train, but also in that splendid study of a murderer, Deep Water. I believe her influence can be seen in the work of notable contemporary writers such as Ruth Rendell, but Wilson doesn’t explore this. He is to be congratulated, though, for having written an important book about a major novelist.

One unique feature of the book also deserves a quick mention. This is the only biography of a woman crime writer that I’ve read that includes a topless photo of the subject. You wouldn’t find anything similar in a book about Christie or Sayers, that’s for sure. The picture, taken when Highsmith was about 21, shows an attractive young woman, which makes it all the more sad when Wilson relates that, in her later years, Highsmith’s plainness of appearance came in for comment. Time didn’t treat her kindly, but it should do no harm to her literary reputation, which in the case of such a remarkable writer really ought to be assured.