Forgotten Book - Laura

Laura, by Vera Caspary, is a famous crime novel that became an even more famous film noir, as well as a stage play, and haunting song. The book was originally published in 1942, and it made an instant impact. Caspary was a talented mainstream writer, whose memoirs, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, make fascinating reading. She makes it clear that she wasn't really a mystery fan, but it's noteworthy that her favourite crime writer was Cornell Woolrich, her favourite crime novel Francis Iles' Before the Fact. Suspense appealed to her, in other words, and Laura is a novel of suspense as much as it is a detective story.

When, many years ago, I first saw the film, and read the book, I enjoyed them without fully appreciating them. That was because I paid too much attention to the plot, and although the story has one excellent plot twist, Caspary's strength didn't lie in plotting. On rereading the book after having done some research into Caspary's life, I got more out of it than I did the first time around.

Mark McPherson is called in to investigate the murder of Laura Hunt, a very attractive woman who works in advertising. She is engaged to be married, and her fiance becomes a suspect. McPherson becomes intrigued by Waldo Lydecker, a rather effete older man who was close to Laura, and who is one of the narrators.

In telling her story, Caspary borrowed the narrative device favoured by Wilkie Collins - using different points of view, so as to conceal as well as reveal. It's a device which, when employed with skill (and Caspary was highly skilled), I find engrossing. I've never written a "casebook" novel, but it's something I'd certainly consider at some future date, because the form has a great deal of potential for the crime writer. It's fair to say that Caspary never surpassed Laura, but her other books are also intriguing and well-written, and I'll talk about one or two of them in the future.

Forgotten Book - Suspects

My latest entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books is a novel (or at least, I think it can be described as a novel) which was published in 1985 and is in my experience scarcely, if at all, mentioned in surveys of the genre. Yet it is a truly fascinating piece of work, which will appeal most of all to fans of film noir. The book is Suspects, and the author David Thomson, a notable film critic.

Thomson himself says that the book is both a novel and a non-fiction book about movies. The book comprises a long series of capsule biographies of characters from crime films, starting with Jake Gittes, the private eye from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The first dozen bios include Ilse Lund, from Casablanca, Eileen Wade from The Long Goodbye, and Waldo Lydecker from Laura.

As you read on, you become aware of a loose narrative connecting the disparate characters. It is a peculiarly labyrinthine book, and it concludes with a family tree that highlights a number of key relationships. I read this book when it first appeared in paperback, and quite simply, I have never read anything like it, before or since.

It’s certainly an advantage if you have seen a decent number of the movies to which Thomson refers. If you’d seen very few of them, I guess the story might prove heavy going, and some readers might even wonder, what was the point? But film buffs with an interest in crime will surely be fascinated by this strange but dazzling piece of work. It's a genuine one-off.