A.I. Bezzerides is mentioned every now and then on the list.
Looking back in the archives, I see that in January 2000 it
was mentioned that George Pelecanos, in SHAME THE DEVIL, had
a bad guy reading novels by Bezzerides and Edward Anderson.
One Rik Joel Carter followed up to say he'd met Bezzerides
the night before at a screening of two Bogart movies, THEY
DRIVE BY NIGHT and SIROCCO. Bezzerides also wrote the film
adaptation of KISS ME, DEADLY.
THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940) was adapated from LONG HAUL
(1938), which I just read. It's very short, and I have an old
Dell mapback edition that shows you where Nick, the
truck-driving protagonist, hauls his stuff. Now, the movie,
which I love for Bogey and Ann Sheridan and some of the
character actors and the spicy dialogue in the diner at the
start, is really the first half of the book glued to a remake
of BORDERTOWN (1935). In it, Nick stops driving a truck and
starts working his way up in a hauling company.
In the book, though, he never does. He never gets any luck at
all. It's a tough story, of the 1930s realist school,
sub-Steinbeck. Nick and his brother haul things north and
south, making no money and exhausting themselves, until
there's an accident and the brother can't drive. Nick tries
to make it on his own. He meets a girl (the Ann Sheridan
character, but the Oomph Girl really made her come alive) but
spends weeks at a time on the road without seeing her. He
drives and drives, and after a stretch of two weeks of no
work he gets a trip that's filled with bad luck. He needs to
keep driving, though, he needs to be on the road, and the
book ends with him dying in an accident.
It's a fairly depressing book. The trucking stuff is all well
done, and I certainly got a sense of the hard work it took
and how bone tiring it was. It will appeal most to readers of
trucking novels and fans of the movie adaptation, but it's
also a good example of that school of 1930s tough, realist
writing.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org
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