THE BASTARD is a non-investigative novella about a guy, Gene
Morgan, who's a literal and figurative bastard. We're told
his mother, a prostitute, had to be tied to a tree to avoid
killing him with a steak mallet when he was born. He doesn't
like her much (surprise, surprise), but when a guy shows him
naked pictures of her (it's definitely her: 'there too was
her left breast, nippleless where some drunken horseman had
severed it with his teeth') our
non-sympathetic-but-vastly-engaging protagonist fires 'three
slugs of steel-jacketed lead into the stranger's lungs.'
That's all on page one. There's a lot of extremely
transgressive behaviour thereafter.
BODIES ARE DUST is a superb novel about a corrupt cop who
deliberately gets his best friend killed and marries the
deceased's wife. But it's not a procedural -- in fact, in
NOIR FICTION, Paul Duncan calls it a 'devastating use of
domestic melodrama'. Stylistically, it's Hammett -- , but it
sinks into a level of emotional pain that's rare even for the
likes of Goodis. Makes your eyes bleed and your appendix
explode, so take care when reading. Until I just looked up
the entry in NOIR FICTION, I didn't think it had been
reprinted, but it was, in 1960 as HELL COP.
Are they hardboiled crime novels? They're both full of
various crimes and are written in a tough and colloquial
manner, so I guess so. They're also noir.
Al
----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff Vorzimmer
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 4:42 PM
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Early Noir
> Burnett's criminal-as-protagonist LITTLE CAESAR
(1929) could be called
> noir,
> and if Caldwell's THE BASTARD (1929) and Wolfson's
BODIES ARE DUST
> (1931) aren't noir, I'll eat my
underwear.
But are they hardboiled crime novels such as Red
Harvest and Little Caesar?
I'm asking I've not read either books.
Jeff
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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