MEGAN ABBOTT'S YOU WILL KNOW ME: BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF NOIR

Devon Knox is an immensely promising young gymnast, despite having lost two toes in an accident with a lawn mower when she was just three. She's worked obsessively hard, and her parents, Eric and Katie, have had to work just as hard, and make serious sacrifices, devoting themselves to her career. But when the handsome young assistant coach at her gym is killed in a hit and run, the finely tuned cocoon around her begins to come apart, and the family face difficult choices as blame and suspicion permeate their tightly-wrapped world fraught with competition, pressure, and jealousy.

All parents know that feeling that 'one morning you wake up and there is this alien in your house', but even as she says it Megan Abbott is reinforcing the darkness behind it with the story of cave fish who, when seeing their parents for the first time, still cannot be seen by them. Around this tension flows the classic noirish theme of the man with the one-train mind, but half-track brain; the innocents and the temptresses, tempered by the family and 'the smell of chloraseptic and panic'.

One of the beauties of Abbott's writing is the way she can transform the most mundane narrative into a dream-like state, where the characters are fighting as much with fate as with each other. This would come as no surprise to readers of her first five novels, with titles like Die A Little and Bury Me Deep, which drew on classic film noir themes and settings, in a way which heralded her as an original and unique voice in crime writing. You Will Know Me is her ninth novel; the last four have been set in a suburban world that is indeed more mundane, but every bit as threatening as the world of those earlier books.

I was surprised the marketing people didn't try to retitle this one something like The Girl On The Balance Beam, in an attempt to lure in that 'Girl whatever' audience. But You Will Know Me is a title which points the way to what this story is at heart, a true noir thriller. At a time when everything from Danish political dramas to cozy kitchen mysteries has the label 'noir' slapped on it, rendering the term virtually meaningless, what Abbott has done is to drawn out the essence of noir from these modern settings, and subtly transmuted the basics of noir to serve her purposes. There's a touch of Thomas H Cook in this, a bigger touch of Dorothy Hughes, but each of Abbott's novels has had its own approach to this darkness. Her dilemma is how to make our world and its optimism jibe with the futility that lurks at the heart of the world of noir.

She does it with the help of the kind of classical allusions that Devon's injury recalls, as much Nathaniel Hawthorne as James M Cain, as well as the contemporary (Amanda Knox?). The dreamy images of seeing, of illness, of fever, that run through the tale draw you into its world. They immerse you in its uncertainty. Not in the mystery puzzle sense, but in the sense of how does life continue? how is life measured? how do children grow up and parents help and hinder them? It brings the dilemmas of real noir down to an everyday level, which, if you study it, is the essence of noir, the everyday turned upside down. This tale of everyday obsession may well be Megan Abbott's finest piece of writing to date, which means it is exceptional.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226352

JAMES M CAIN'S COCKTAIL WAITRESS

The reasons why James M. Cain was more successful than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett during their lifetimes, and the reasons why he is the least read of the three today are connected, and they have to do with morality. This was a point reinforced for me by The Cocktail Waitress, Cain's lost last novel, written in 1975 when he was 83, and tracked down and then edited together from various versions by Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime.

Cain's writing sold more to his contemporary audience partly because it escaped the confines of the genre ghetto of 'mystery' –his stories usually have crime within them (though the killing of Monte Beragon in Mildred Pierce, for example, is something added by the movies), but not detective heroes, so they could play to the somewhat higher-brow audience who looked down on the pulp magazines that spawned Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. More important, though, was the world of steamy, obsessive, noirish sex which Cain's characters inhabited. He wrote material that the highbrow critics hated, but which the middle brow audiences ate up, a form of sexual slumming which inspired a slew of followers, of whom Erskine Caldwell may be the most notable. And though today he's remembered for the films his novels inspired, it's worth noting that it took Hollywood 12 years to work up the gumption to produce a diluted version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Of course, what was hot stuff to my parents' generation, and when I was a kid in the Fifties, is pretty tame nowadays. Which is one of the reasons Cain fell somewhat to the wayside. Another was that, as his late-blooming career went on, his work dealt more and more with his obsessions, and his stories became less and less compulsive.

But what made his stories compulsive is also what made them acceptable in the Thirties and Forties, and what makes them less compelling today. They are underpinned by a powerful sense of morality, a morality which insists that sin, inevitably, be punished, while simultaneously portraying the intoxicating delights it offers before the punishment comes due. Cain's stories are about people caught up by forces they cannot control, forces which will inevitably destroy them. It is a world created by an Old Testament God, and if that makes the original Cain, or Job, or David, the first noir protagonist, so be it. It's not like this is a secret, among Cain's later novels are titles like Sinful Woman and The Root Of His Evil. His God may well have departed the scene; not for nothing did Albert Camus call Cain 'America's greatest writer', but that sense of retribution is never far away, and often his characters see it coming.

Hammett's protagonists resonate with modern audiences because they are almost anti-heroes; they know the world has its sins, that people are corrupted, and they function within that world, partaking of it but never succumbing to it, never letting it take control of them, living by their own code of what demands punishment. Chandler's Marlowe also knows the world is corrupt, but he copes with it like an idealist who's become, as idealists do, a cynic. He constructs a facade of not caring, defined by cracking wise, to protect him from the corruption. What makes Elliott Gould's Marlowe so accurate in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, the reason by it's generally either loved or hated by Chander fans, is the understanding of this character, which Leigh Brackett and Altman nail perfectly. Their Marlowe is the most accurate depiction of what's REALLY going on underneath the facade, as opposed to the what the readers (and perhaps author) really thinks is going on, since Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides' deconstruction of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.

In this sense, The Cocktail Waitress is a veritable cocktail of Cain's Old Testament themes, a small masterpiece of self-deconstruction. Joan Medford, the eponymous waitress, narrates the tale, and when it opens her abusive husband has just died in a drunken car crash, which at least one cop still suspects her of somehow having caused. Her son is in the care of her in-laws, and her sister-in-law Ethel, who can't have children of her own, desperately wants to keep him. Joan is simply trying to make ends meet, but needs to prove she can support herself and her son, so she takes a job as a cocktail waitress at the Garden of Roses. She catches the eye of an older millionaire, Earl K. White III, and of a younger man with big plans, Tom Barclay, who says he drove her home from her husband's funeral, and claims she blew him a kiss when he left.

The set-up is brilliant, and you can see where it's going. Joan is obsessive about making a success, and enough money to get back her son. Her need becomes overwhelming. Earl quickly becomes obsessed with Joan, and offers to marry her, but with a catch—he has a heart condition, and has been told by his doctors that he could never stand the strain of sex. His passion could literally kill him. Joan quickly becomes obsessed with Tom—even though on their first 'date' he takes her to a topless bar cum whorehouse. But her passion is just as dangerous to her need as Earl's is to him. It's like a condensed version of Cain's classic characters and themes rolled into one: Postman crossed with Mildred Pierce crossed with Double Indemnity (you wonder if the character is called Joan in reference to Crawford) with a bit of Cain himself thrown in: he was suffering from angina as he wrote the book, and was 83, (I wondered reading the strip club scene if he'd seen The Graduate and been inspired). Tom is Walter Neff crossed with Beragon, Earl is partly Nick, partly Mr Dietrichson. But the real question is who Joan is, and that's where the beauty of this novel lies.

As you might expect, things get complicated, and then go wrong, and eventually one accident is followed by another death, and coincidence begins to mount. There's a trial scene, and then a vicious twist at the end which clever readers will have seen coming, but which, in terms of Old Testament justice, is cruel and unusual, and which makes clear what Cain has been doing all along: setting us, the readers, up for a fall, just as he did so brilliantly in Postman. But here, he's done it with the female first-person narration (remember, Mildred Pierce is told in third person; Postman in the first by Frank Chambers). Cain's sense of Joan's voice, which seems believable at first, now is revealed to be downright compelling: we have watched the story through her eyes, and we are forced to re-evaluate the entire story, and our own preconceptions and sympathies, as a result. Although we have the sense of impending doom, Joan never shares it, and this creates a wonderful tension, because we, as readers, accept her voice. 

The Cocktail Waitress is not a 'great' novel, and  it will carry less impact to a modern audience unfamiliar with Cain; in fact, judging by some of the reviews it appears that is the case. But its publication at this time makes it a perfect coda to Cain's career; he is remembered now mostly for the movies he inspired. I'd love to see it turned into a film; after all even Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslett was a success (Guy Pearce's Beragon stole that show--though the HBO adaptation did return Lucy Gessler, as Mildred's friend, to a larger role, giving Melissa Leo a chance to shine; there is an equivalent character in The Cocktail Waitress too). The question would be whether you use the late Fifties/early Sixties period (the end of the era of morality: pre-Beatles and the rest) or go contemporary, because we are currently mired in an age that combines both licentiousness and prudery in ways that make the Roaring Twenties/Depression Thirties seem balanced. With the popularity of Mad Men, and copies of it like The Hour, and the success of Mildred Pierce, period might work better; this I think could be the breakthrough role for Jessica Chastain.

There has been huge re-evaluation of Cain in recent years. Postman was picked for the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list; Double Indemnity is one of the AFI's 100 best American films. This novel is a moving reminder of what made Cain so compelling in his time, and what makes him so today. It may not be the place to begin reading him, but once you've started to move beyond the classics, to the more obsessive works (The Butterfly, Galatea, Serenade and Past All Dishonor, for example), it's a good place to see clearly what he's up to, and what he's capable of doing with his writing.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain

Hard Case Crime/Titan Books £16.99 ISBN 9781781160329

This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetrime.co.uk)

FLETCHER FLORA'S KILLING COUSINS: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It is rather odd to read Fletcher Flora's Killing Cousins, written in 1961, while almost simultaneously watching Mad Men, a knowing and ironic look back on that era. Because there is a sense of tongue-in-cheek about Flora that seems slightly out of character for the genre we associate with him. His best known book, the lesbian thriller Strange Sisters (one of at least five books to share that lurid title) was published by Lion in 1954. But when Killing Cousins appeared, in 1960, it was a hardback, from Macmillen, which implies that someone in the publishing world could see what Flora was up to. My copy, shown right, is a 1964 British paperback edition, from New English Library's Four Square, but what really fascinated me what that it reprints the original 1961 British hardcover by Jonathan Cape, at a time when Cape was one of the most prestigious of houses. Which means someone in Britain understood what was going on too..

If indeed he was up to anything more than entertaining at a fast pace. The style and tone of Killing Cousins reminded me of something Ed Gorman once said about Day Keene, that he became more flamboyant the more he wrote, and it doesn't get more flamboyant than this. It opens with Flora explaining about Willie Hogan the most famous of all the residents of Ouchita Road, in a town called Quivera (!), more famous than a losing Republican governor or a bit-part actress, because she killed her husband. Having set-it up, he doesn't wait long to deliver: Willie is confronted by her husband Howard, prosperous because his father is the local beer distributor, and cuckolded frequently, which didn't appear to bother him inordinately until Willie took up with his bright but ne'er do well cousin, Quincy. Howard confronts Willie, while she's painting her nails, and dares her to shoot him. So she does. Then she finishes painting her nails and calls Quincy to help her dispose of the body.

It's a pretty classic set-up, femme fatale and hard-boiled hero about to get in over their pretty heads. But while there is much of the classic femme fatale about Willie, there's a seriously flipped element to the story; she's really stupid, with none of the kind of feral intelligence black widows have in classic noir. Flora really seems to have been intent on reversing lots of the stereotypes of the genre. Quincy is far from the usual noirish hero, driven off-track by lust, stolid and being played by a spider-woman more clever than he is. Instead, he's extremely bright, to the point of alcoholic boredom in Quivera (!), and has more than a little feyness about him, far from your average 50s or early 60s noir hero. His dialogue often sounds like a parody of a drawing room mystery, played for laughs, which may be what appealed to Cape in the first place, that tone like Nick Charles talking to Gracie Allen (the George Burns Gracie, not the British one).

Of course getting rid of the body is never as easy as you might think, and something's always bound to go wrong. Especially when Howard's mistress turns up. And then Quincy's smarts are tested, and so are Willie's natural abilities. As Flora writes: 'Willie, advised to do nothing, was surprised to learn that doing nothing was one of the hardest things she had ever done'. I think that the entire novel may be worth it for just that line; but of course Willie can't keep still, and of course she and Howard turn on each other, and Flora gets to work out a few more reversals along the way. It occurred to me that if you set out to rewrite The Postman Always Rings Twice, take the passion out of it, or better, turn passion into boredom as motivation, and see where that took you, you'd get something like Killing Cousins. You get the sense James M Cain was immersed in his characters, repelled and attracted like his heroes, which is why his books are so intense; Flora seems merely amused by his. But if you could that to Cain's best-known book, you'd probably wind up with that same kind of wry, fed-up with the Fifties, quality that Mad Men has, fifty years later.