Sallis Difficult Lives - Hitching Rides

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-85730-257-1
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books. We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

James Sallis has published sixteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. He has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sallis, James

Leseproben

Portable Worlds:
The Original Paperback Novel

I was six or seven, I guess, when I first began noticing it. It sat for years on one of the end tables, not too far from a framed photograph of General MacArthur, in a living room closed off from the rest of the house except on holidays. No one ever read it, I’m sure. I no longer recall what was depicted on its cover, but I remember it with surprising physicality: the weight of it, that yellowing waxy cover, its smell, the block of urgent words on the back, Complete and Unabridged on its front. It had become an object of mystery to me, an emblem of a world beyond that Fifties house where we never locked doors and doubted no one’s values because they were, after all, had to be, the same as ours.

It was, I know now, a Pocket Books reprint of Hammett’s The Glass Key, a book which would re-enter my life some twenty-two years later in a flat off Portobello Road in London where, fortified with immense cups of tea, I read all morning, wrote all afternoon and evening.

Paperbacks had begun their subversive life five years before my own birth, in 1939, with Pocket Books’ release of ten trial titles such as Lost Horizon, Wuthering Heights and Topper. Ten thousand copies of each were printed, and the books were to be sold only in New York. With the phenomenal success of paperbacks and their rapid growth as an industry, early praise for Pocket Books’ democratic spirit in making literature accessible to the masses changed to cries of scorn and horror at this degradation of mass taste, suggesting that general attitudes were not too terribly different from those which had occasioned an 1898 editorial in The New York Times concerning the earliest paperbacks, intended for travelers:

The torn cover bears the soil of the journey, and even after the story is forgotten, the book yet spells sandwiches, cinders and satchel to tired eyes as long as it lies on the table. In desperation you stick it in the bookcase, but all the world can see that it’s a parvenu. The choice vellums draw away from it, the daintily bound essays and poems will have none of it, solemn history frowns on it, polite fiction scorns it, well-fed reference books turn their backs on the waif of the station. Even the recherché travel (its fortune in leather) fails to take pity on this poor ‘little brother of the rich.’ Though you put all the paper-covered volumes on a shelf by themselves, the result is not better, for you have incorporated a little slum district in the literary community.

True, it’s a long bus ride from Shakespeare to Swamp Girl. And the paperbacks took their little ghetto, their slum district, to heart, setting up barricades and launching a direct assault on ‘polite fiction.’

Every culture, every society, has its outlaw literature, its specific vision of life’s underside: crocodiles floating half-submerged in supposedly calm waters. Medieval Europe’s bawdy farces, Regency England’s gothics, Victorian penny dreadfuls, American dime novels and Depression-era pulps all filled this function. In a demotic society such as ours, paperbacks became the breeding ground and natural home for a demotic literature. Parenthetically it’s of interest to note that the democratization of evil (Hammett’s relocation of it to the urban, quotidian scene), that of style (the Black Mask writers) and that of literature itself (the paperback book) occurred more or less simultaneously.

From the first, paperbacks embraced their subversive role. In his remarkable tribute to them, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks, Geoffrey O’Brien writes: ‘These novels, and the covers that illustrate them, speak of the ignoble corners of life beyond the glow of Jane Powell, Father Knows Best, and the healthy, smiling faces in magazines advertising milk or frozen dinners or trips to California.’

Even the cool, cynical tough-guy tone adopted by most of these books was an antidote to American bombast and self-touting. That tone, coupled with sharp dialog, gave hardboiled fiction a double-impact immediacy that instantly hooked the reader and ultimately found purchase in the greater culture. David Madden argues:

Events and conditions of the Twenties and Thirties were a cause that produced the Hammett ‘Black Mask’ kind of detective and they in turn were the cause of certain attitudes that produced behaviour in the Twenties and Thirties. [These stories] provided not only escape from conditions but criticism of those conditions as well. They provided simultaneously American dreams and American nightmares.

Madden implies here that this fiction, this genre, actually changed our perception of the world, giving us new templates for our lives, a new, twentieth-century, urban mythology. Our enduring fascination with hardboiled stories and their immediacy of voice, with the subterfuge and subterranean suspensions of guilt at their heart – this, and particularly the recent resurgence of noir fiction – bear him out.

Fifties paperbacks, O’Brien writes, likewise were a microcosm of American fantasies about the real world, investing ordinary streets, dives, tenements and cheap hotels with mystery, with a kind of obdurate poetry. Popular culture, after all, is history in caricature; these books are thimble-size monuments, frozen sections of our culture’s history, ‘the dream America made of itself, a few decades ago’ and the nightmares welling up beneath. If we look hard (O’Brien goes on) we can still discern in these tiny figures the heroes and demons of a generation, the archetypes of an era haunted by unspeakable violence and tormented by desires it cannot fulfill.

Shamelessly exploitative, they made their points with a maximum of directness. No trace of subtlety was permitted to cloud the violent and erotic visions that were their essence, and that very lack of subtlety lifted them out of this world.

Tawdry – with just a hint of transcendence.

* * *

The style of our own time, when we look back years from now, may well be like something from MTV, mannerist, hard-edged and a bit surreal, wildly eclectic: iconic images that seem to have no center, no meaning. Pound was right, every age demands its image; and the Fifties are those paperback covers – ‘flat, bright, violent surfaces devoid of character but brimming with emotion’ – posted like warnings at the threshold: Enter At Your Own Risk, Abandon Pretense All Who Enter Here, No Serious Readers Allowed.

Mysteries in 1945 comprised half of all paperbacks published. By 1950 this figure was down to 26%, 13% by 1955. A new beast had come about and now slouched towards the drugstores, sidewalk news stands and truck stops of America. Ephemeral as the newspapers and candy wrappers in whose shadow it sprouted, it was not a mystery in any traditional sense yet came spring-loaded with action, awash with violence and illicit (if mostly implied) sex.

Harry Whittington in 1948 had quit his government job of sixteen years and, leaping in ‘fully clothed, where only fools treaded water,’ set up as a writer.

At that precise moment, the publishing world was being turned upside down by the Fawcett Publishing Company. When they lost a huge reprint paperback distribution client, they decided to do the unheard of, the insane. They published original novels at 25 cents a copy. Print order on each title: 250,000. They paid writers not by royalty but on print order. Foreign, movie and TV rights remained with the writer. They were insane. They were my kind of people.

Once called ‘king of the paperback pioneers,’ Whittington published dozens of novels in all categories, stark westerns, tightly plotted action-suspense stories, unrelievedly noir fiction – edge literature, all of it. Like others such as David Goodis, suddenly he found it possible to sustain himself writing more or less what he wished, producing a body of work unified by its author’s preoccupations and instinctive feints. He had wanted to be the next Fitzgerald but after writing a mystery story on Monday, mailing it in on Tuesday, and receiving a check for $250 on Friday, switched horses. For better than two decades Whittington sold every word he wrote; at one point he contracted to provide a 60,000-word novel each month for over three years.

It all seemed so great at the time: Doing what I wanted to do, living as I wanted to live, having the time of my life and being paid for it. I worked hard; nobody ever wrote and sold 150-odd novels in twenty years without working hard, but I loved what I was doing.

Cornell Woolrich is another writer who early dreamed of becoming the new Fitzgerald, and who remains a kind of exemplar of the paperback novelist. Initial promise and success with chronicles of the Jazz Age such as Cover Charge (1926) and Children of the Ritz (1927) were followed by a long decline: failure at Hollywood scriptwriting, an ill-fated brief marriage, alcoholism, self-imprisonment in cheap hotel rooms and the ruins of his memory. Yet finding in the mid-Thirties, in mystery publications like Black Mask and Dime Detective, a voice for his own loneliness, fear and despair – a container he thought might hold them – Woolrich went on to turn out a dozen novels, several of them remaining continuously in print, and well over 200 stories and novellas, one of which provided the source for Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Michael Avallone’s thumbnail biography of Woolrich could easily be a description of one of Goodis’ or Thompson’s...