MARK STRAND: THE LOST TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

I wrote the following piece in early December for the Daily Telegraph, but for some reason it didn't appear in the paper immediately, and then it just drifted onto the spike. I was never taken with Strand's poetry, though I did enjoy his book on Hopper. But researching his obit made me appreciate some of the convergences between his life and his work. I was particularly fascinated with the idea he studied with Josef Albers, and then moved from art to poetry via Wallace Stevens: as if placing a cube in Tennessee...

Mark Strand, who has died aged 80, once said 'Poetry tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self.' Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has died aged 80. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand seems to be looking at the world, and at himself, from the outside. 'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world,' Strand said, and at his best he achieved the paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright grant took him to Italy to study 19^th century poetry; when he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa, America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright, and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in their shared roots in painting.

He published three more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970), The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978), as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade. 'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet in his own poems.

His 1998 collection, Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation 'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel (2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29 November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao, his daughter Jessica and son Thomas.

'Poetry tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self,' Mark Strand once told an interviewer. Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has died aged XX. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand seems to be looking from the outside, at the world and at himself. 'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world,' he said, and at his best Strand achieved the paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright grant took him to Italy to study 19^th century poetry; when he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa, America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright, and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in their shared roots in painting.

He published three more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970), The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978), as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade. 'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet in his own poems.

His 1998 collection, Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation 'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel (2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29 November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao, his daughter Jessica and son Thomas. As he wrote in Blizzard Of One, in the poem 'A Piece Of The Storm':

A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.

That's all there was to it. No more than a solemn waking

To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,

A time between times, a flowerless funeral.

A PAINTER OF DISTANCES, A POET OF MOVIES AND DINERS

Today I saw a post reminding us that we celebrate the birthdays of Edward Hopper and Raymond Chandler on successive days this week, and a brief essay of his which begins with a very apt comparison of Chandler's 'Red Wind' with Hopper's 'Nighthawks'. Check out Agnieszka Holland's version of the former, with Danny Glover and music by Jan Garbarek, from the Showtime series Fallen Angels, if you doubt it. Anyway, it reminded me of an essay I wrote, reviewing two books about Hopper, probably in late 1997 or early 1998, and which was published with very English indecent haste and minuscule payment, in London Magazine halfway through 1999. Which is 15 years ago, but it sprang to mind immediately when I read that post. So here it is... 

A POET OF MOVIES AND DINERS

One scene from Wim Wenders’ recent film The End Of Violence meticulously recreates Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”. Since much of Wenders’ violent vision of Los Angeles is filtered through the peeping electronic eyes of a network of surveillance cameras, this ought to evoke the Hopperesque sense of our being intruders when we enter into a painted scene. Instead, Wenders’ appropriation of “Nighthawks” rings hollow, a conceit reflecting Hollywood’s love of both Hopper and classic film-noir, but confusing and conflating the two, as if the violence and powerlessness of that film genre were somehow Hopper’s too.

 

We know that Hopper and his wife Josephine were inveterate movie-goers. We know from Deborah Lyons’ research that Hopper began “Nighthawks” the day after seeing Burt Lancaster in Robert Siodmak's film of Hemingway’s The Killers. But knowing that is not, in itself, enough to transform Hopper into Norman Rockwell’s evil twin.

 

The editors of Edward Hopper And The American Imagination have made the same false connection. These stories, poems, and essays were either written with Hopper in mind or supposedly reflect the spirit of his work. Most, ranging from a 1940 story by Norman Mailer to an excerpt from Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, deal with bums, hobos, and stiffs, and have at least an undercurrent of overt violence. Grace Paley’s Italian cop shoots his adulterous wife, his kitchen and himself. Walter Mosley’s black youngster kills his retarded playmate. This is about as close to Hopper as the kitsch poster, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, which pre-empted Wenders and this book by inserting Elvis, Marilyn, Bogart, and James Dean into “Nighthawks”.

 

It's as if Hammett or Hemingway were filtered through the grist mill of 40s movies and 50s pulp novels, melodramatic in a way Hopper simply is not. Only James Salter’s story “Dusk” comes close, in its uncomfortable, awkward intimacy between two people still alone, and its imagery of light and shadow, to a Hopper scene. No story rings as false, however, as Tess Gallagher’s “From Moss Light” an embarrassingly self-absorbed poem, inevitably recalling Raymond Carver. Lines as arch as “a woman fond of wearing hats opined, 'chic chapeau!'” hardly relate to Hopper, much less illuminate him. Hopper and the American Imagination?

John Hollander’s poem, suggesting Hopper as abstract painter, throws some light on reality, and the non-fiction is far more telling than the fiction. Gail Levin’s essay on contemporary artists influenced by Hopper makes a similar, well-drawn comparison with Richard Diebenkorn, who has learned framing from the way Hopper uses architecture, both inside and out. Leonard Michaels’ essay on “New York Movie” compares Hopper to Wallace Stevens’ “plain sense of things”. A more interesting match might be Charles Ives. Both men have 20^th century minds trapped in 19^th century souls, and Hopper often seems to play awkwardly with the shapes of the visibly modern world. Though neither Ives nor Stevens was a full time artist.

There's another difference: Ives drew inspiration from his wife, Harmony, while Ed and Jo apparently waged lifelong battle. Yet it is to Jo that we owe the ledgers which are reproduced in Edward Hopper: A Journal Of His Work. Hopper provides a proportional sketch of each painting, and lists, in his sparse handwriting, the materials used. Beneath, in her flowery, expressive hand, Jo describes each painting, and its disposition. Her descriptions belie the melodrama some read into his work. Jo may reserve some bitchy vitriol for Ed’s female figures, or the way they dress, but the paintings ARE the stories. 

One of the things that attracts us to Hopper is the way his paintings leave themselves open to our imaginations. This is inevitable, given how his art insists on each object, including people, establishing its own space. He is a painter of distances: we look into scenes from odd angles, then discover light coming from two directions at once. Light does more than create mood; Hopper manipulates it to establish the relation between all the objects he paints. The two-dimensional sketches in the Journal make this obvious. This is why he has inspired generations of movie art directors and cameramen. But compare the figures in “Nighthawks” with the faces inside the diner in The Killers and you’ll see why the “mean streets” approach to Hopper is a dead end.

 

It is also why Hopper’s people stand alone, each the start of a lonely crowd. The 1981 film Heartbeat used Hopper's vision to give Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady a backdrop for their now-iconic search for America. The essential emptiness of the wide-open highway and the loneliness of the places it leads to is more Hopperesque than anything in Edward Hopper And The American Imagination is able to suggest. Thankfully the Journal is here to remind us of that.

 

 

EDWARD HOPPER AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

edited by Deborah Lyons and Adam Weinberg

Norton/Whitney Museum, 253pp, £18.95 (paper)

EDWARD HOPPER: A JOURNAL OF HIS WORK

edited by Deborah Lyons and Brian O’Doherty

Norton/Whitney Museum 104pp facsimile edition, £17.95

GEORGE BELLOWS: MODERN AMERICAN LIFE

I had meant to write about George Bellows right after I saw the exhibition a few weeks ago—now there's only a week left for you to get to Royal Academy and do the same, because it is a superlative show that reveals Bellows as a pivotal, and major, artist, and raises the question of where he might have gone had he not died at only 42.

The response in the local press was somewhat lukewarm. Most reviews concentrated on the work for which Bellows is best known, his boxing paintings, particularly Stag At Sharkey's (1909), which is a magnificent work, its power intensified in person and close up. Bellows himself was more interested in the atmosphere around the ring than the dynamic scene he paints inside it, and by the time he produced an oil of Dempsey and Firpo (1924) his perspective has changed considerably—Firpo is a figure of heroism in the centre of a more static crowd—and the lights up in the rafters look on like the staring eyes of jealous dieties. To miss the difference between these two approaches, which span virtually the whole of Bellows' serious career, is to miss his growth, and luckily the RA also shows Preliminaries To The Big Bout (1916), White Hope (1921—the Jess Willard/Jack Johnson fight) in which the battlers exude tiredness, and the triumphant Johnson seems seriously out of shape, and an earlier version, Dempsey Through The Ropes which focuses on the power of Firpo's follow-through.

This might make Bellows appear a genre painter, but he is far more than that, though again the British reviews seemed to care more about what he wasn't—namely an Impressionist. Yes you can see the influence of Manet, and Whistler, but to call him a failed Impressionist is to miss the point. Even Richard Dorment, who didn't miss the point and wrote of Bellows' relationship to Robert Henri and the Ash Can school (and linked it perceptively to Sickert and Camden Town) somehow managed to transform Bellows' contemporary John Sloan into John Soane! But seeing Bellows in terms of Impressionism is missing, most crucially, the point of the exhibition's subtitle, 'Modern American Life', and fails to put Bellows into his proper place, which I think of as being a powerful central figure in the early American Twentieth Century, linking the wide spectrum of styles that were growing in the hothouse of New York City throughout the early part of the century, right up to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.

I started by thinking in terms of Bellows as a touchstone between the Ash Can painters, and their commitment to urban reality, and American Impressionism, which was a late-blooming thing which, pace Bellows' reviewers, hasn't always received enough credit for what it is, as opposed to what it is not. But the deeper you consider Bellows' work, the more links to his contemporaries you can make. Some early paintings, like 42 Kids (1907) recall Eakins, but his figures can also seem like children's book illustrations, almost stick figures. You can see Sloan in Election Night Times Square (1906), and there is no denying affinity with the Ash Can artists, which is no surprise as he studied under Robert Henri, alongside Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent

Bellows' second-best known works are probably his studies around the excavation of the Pennsylvania Station, in which New York City sits atop some primordial force, fires coming from within the earth, with the few human figures looking beaten down, and the lights of the city street pale against the workers' floodlights. This is a different sort of look at urban reality, one which is partly mythic and partly impressionist, recalling Whistler in its use of distinct lighting. You can see some of Hopper in the buildings in the background of Excavation At Night (1908), and you can also see Bellows' influence on later artists like Charles Demuth or Charles Sheeler, who celebrated the finished product of such excavation. It's a different dynamic to the Impressionists; yes, you can see the steam from a train while looking down Riverside Park in Rain On The River (1908) and you can sense the intrusion of the machine age, but Bellows is working at a time when rail is commonplace, and in a milieu where escape from New York is not the grail it was in Paris.

While Cliff Dwellers (1913), with its metaphorical title, can be seen in a genre context, it's a big step forward to New York (1911), a city scene which blends a number of New York squares into one, and populates it with a more fashionable sort of Lowry crowd. There are elements on abstract, say on the wagon pulling itself across the foreground. Way off in the distance, between two skyscrapers and almost crowning a third, is a cold-looking cloud, a kind of gateway to Bellows' most brilliant New York studies—painting after painting of the city frozen by winter, held in thrall to mother nature. His winter is brilliant sun-reflecting white and deep ice blue, and the wild spaces always extend right up to and even past the border of civilisation. It is as if he is returning the city to its proper place in the grand scheme of things, even when, as in Love Of Winter (1914--below left) it's only the sight of the pristine hills glowering in the background. There are elements of Rockwell Kent in some of the painting he did outside the city, in Maine (where Robert Henri summered, and which would be important for artists as diverse as Hopper and John Marin), for example (Forth and Back, 1913) which stands in comparison to Blue Snow, The Battery (1910) to remind us of Bellows' vision of a New York that remained part of unfettered nature. This is obvious in North River (1908), with its high point of view looking past the snow, past the boats on the river, to the seeming wilds of the Palisades.

By contrast, Summer Night Riverside Drive (1909 below right) features lurking darkness and two bits of impressionistic light, including reflections off the river, while figures in the park look for privacy—a topic made plainer, but with less striking effects, in Strugglers Solitude (1913). By the start of World War I, I think you can point to Bellows as already reaching elements of synthesis between the forces in modern painting. The sheer scope of the works I've mentioned were produced in the space of eight years, by which time Bellows was one of New York's leading artists.

But he was also part of a group called The Lyrical Left, and by 1911 was on the board of The Masses. His drawings for the paper, along with other lithographs done for more upscale magazines like Harper's Weekly and Collier's are revealing because they show where Bellows channelled the social awareness we saw in his paintings. This becomes particularly evident after the start of the Great War, in his dramatic drawings in the series Disasters Of War, which deliberately recall Goya, in a magazine illustration of the murder of British nurse Edith Cavell, and in his five paintings titled War Scenes, which were inspired by the 1915 Bryce Report on German atrocities. These are pure propaganda, pure emotion, as powerful in their way as his boxing work, but with a broader focus. They reminded me immediately of John Singer Sargent's Gassed, which was completed in 1919 and hangs in the Imperial War Museum. There is a palpable sense of shock in both painters, as if they cannot totally comprehend the full horror of what they are painting.

He was more ironic and cutting but less shocked perhaps in works like Benediction In Georgia, Electrocution, and Dance In A Madhouse, all done in 1916-17, where convicts being preached to or executed don't look saved or blessed, and the mad look anything but. The last looks forward to the work of Jack Levine, in its chaotic beauty. There's an interesting boxing cover Bellows did for the New Masses, and two pages of contrasting illustrations: John Sloan's portrait of the upper crust on an ocean liner on one, Bellows' riverfront scene of meagre food in the other.

His later magazine work, if anything, is more emotionally powerful. His Billy Sunday (1923), a study of the fiery preacher whom he covered with John Reed, shows Sunday with his fist cocked, like a boxer, the press in the front rows like at a boxing match, and the crowd in expressions of fear, shock, and wonder. The Law Is Too Slow (1923) is a lithograph done for Century magazine, a black man being burned beneath a hanging tree by men in masks. In a sense you get the sense of a divide between this work and his painting, because by this time he was concentrating on portraiture, and they are hugely impressive portraits, which again recall Sargent.

Sargent used to paint watercolours for his own experiment and amusement, while concentrating on the portraits which earned him his acclaim and living. Bellows may well have been painting his portraits as much for their sense of safety, in the evident beauty he highlights in his wife and daughters, his main subjects, as for anything else. At the start of the exhibition, you see three of early portraits, done 1907-09. Frankie the Organ Boy stares directly at the viewer with eyes almost bugged out. His Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hare does suggest Manet, but her face, like Frankie's seems to be making a statement, just slightly off a pose, perhaps indicating their background in the streets. But the portrait of the laundry girl Queenie Burnett (Little Girl In White) is magnificent in its efforts to imbue her with an almost fairy-tale royalty.

He can be nearly as perfect as Sargent or Whistler in his portrait of Mr and Mrs Philip Wise (1924) but there is something almost reverential in Emma And Her Children which contrasts movingly with Emma At The Piano (1914). In the latter, she is part of the balance of lovely objects in an almost neo-impressionist way, while in the later work, the figures are more carefully delineated, with more depth, but set against an almost abstract background.

Finally, there is The Picnic (1924) with its Alice in Wonderland dreamlike quality, with his daughter holding a jump rope and looking off into the Wonderland across the Hudson River, while Bellows contemplates his fishing pole while his wife stares into the picnic blanket. It's hard not to see that as some sort of premonition of his departure from them; a burst appendix would lead to his death from blood poisoning in January 1925. 
 

One gets the distinct impression that at the time of his death, Bellows was possibly reassessing his artistic direction, and given the variety of his earlier work, and the contrast between his illustration and painting in his later, I wonder how significant that abstract background in Emma And Her Children is. Because I see another link here, between Bellows and the Abstract Expressionists. Bellows was the most masculine of painters; like Franz Kline he had been a sports star who turned to painting, and like Kline his work conveys physical dynamism. With America, and American art, in flux in the Roaring Twenties, and about to entire the Depression, Bellows' future, looked at retrospectively, almost shimmers with possibility. But what he left behind, as evidenced in this exhibition, is satisfying enough.

George Bellows 1882-1925: Modern American Life

Royal Academy of Art, until 9 June 2013

This essay also appears at Untitled: Perspectives (on art....

BLUE LONESOME: BILL PRONZINI REVISITED

BLUE LONESOME
by Bill Pronzini
Canongate 2001, £9.99

(note: Bill Pronzini was honoured with the MWA 2008 Grand Master Award, but his publication in Britain remains woefully lacking. I wrote this piece in 2001 for the Spectator, but despite Canongate packaging the book to attract 'serious' attention, the review appears here for the first time, perhaps because one does not like foreigners criticising one's publishing institutions does not one?)

Bill Pronzini has written more than 50 novels, and another dozen or so collections of non-fiction or short stories, but this is his first book published in Britain. Most of his output has been crime fiction or westerns, and he could be considered one of the last of the old-fashioned pulp writers.
Given that, it’s not surprising that in America, Pronzini is best known for his “Nameless Detective” series of novels, whose protagonist, a pulp magazine-collecting private eye, owes much to Dashiell Hammett’s similarly nameless ‘Continental Op’ and like him, is based in San Francisco. The ‘Nameless’ novels deserve reprinting in Britain, but BLUE LONESOME is a far better starting point, a multi-faceted work which highlights Pronzini’s strongest points as a crime writer.

The novel moves through three stages. The first is a hommage to the classic 1950s pulp novel of urban alienation, and is bleak enough to live up to Canongate’s thoughtful use of Edward Hopper’s “Sunlight In A Cafeteria” on the cover. Jim Messenger is a San Francisco accountant stuck in a dead-end job and living a dead-end life, who becomes fascinated with a woman he spies eating at his local cafeteria, a woman who appears to be even lonelier than he is. When the woman is found dead, having slit her wrists in the bathtub, Messenger decides to find out who she was, and what drove her to such a desperate act.

Following a clue to her real identity, he winds up in the Nevada desert, and the second stage of the story begins, as the stranger in town starts turning over rocks the locals would rather leave unturned. Pronzini’s working familiar territory, reminiscent of movies like “Bad Day At Black Rock”, but as Messenger’s own resources are tested, the surface friendliness of the small town reveals its own type of loneliness, more dangerous than the cold city from which Messenger fled. He also realises individuals make their own isolation, and it requires a certain courage to break out from it.

The book’s final stage is classic whodunit. Pronzini may have a hard-boiled facade, but underneath he loves literary puzzles, in which clues are left for the reader, crimes are solved by deduction, and the world is put right. Messenger lives up to his name, as far as Beluah, Nevada is concerned, and the suicide of a lonely woman in the city turns out to be a rebirth for him.
In other hands, this might have been a wild neo-noir cauldron of steamy sex and violence. Or it could have just as easily gone down the kind of pretentious existential road we fear is coming whenever we see Hopper’s paintings on book covers. Pronzini has a more basic agenda. If his prose doesn’t stun, neither does it get in the way of a carefully constructed, satisfying story, as spare and honest as Hopper. Much more than a cosy mystery, and justification for finally ending Pronzini’s British publishing isolation.