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

MEGAN ABBOTT'S GOT THE FEVER

Deenie Nash is a teen-aged girl in a cold, gray town in the northern USA. Her brother is a star hockey player, her father teaches at their high school, her divorced mom lives a few towns away. Her circle of friends is fraught with imbalance, the imperfect mixings along the chain, the way the emotions of love and sex intensify at different paces. So far so normal for small-town America. And then Deenie's friend Lise collapses in fits, struck, as if possessed by a mystery illness which, as it spreads, threatens to bring the whole town down into chaos.

The brilliance of Megan Abbott's seventh novel is the way it constantly shifts the ground from beneath you, the way it moves between tropes and genres almost effortlessly. What is The Fever? Is it a teen-aged thriller about the fragile psyches of girls on the brink of womanhood, in a society where sex is out front all the time, but still treated as a dirty secret behind the curtain? Certainly the adults of the earlier generation do nothing to ease their children through this ever-earlier ritual of so-called maturity? Is it a novel about the abuse of modern science? Were vaccinations to help prevent sexual infections responsible for these fits? Is it about mass-hysteria, a Crucible-like dissection of the weakness of adult society in the face of the power and threat inherent in young sexuality? Or is there a supernatural force at work, enacting a horror-movie's babysitter retribution against these girls when they hit sexual activity? At times Abbott seems to be writing a sharply literate take on the 'weird menace' stories from pulp magazines like Strange Tales, playing a very-knowing three-card monte trick with the enthralled reader.

This knowing approach should not surprise anyone who's followed Megan Abbott's career. Her first four novels, Die A Little, The Song Is You (see my review here), Queenpin, and Bury Me Deep were noir fictons, but with a difference; not so much told from a woman's perspective but with the classic sexual tropes of noir reversed. Abbott's first book, The Street Was Mine, was study of masculinity in hardboiled fiction and film noir; her early novels were filling in the other side of the story. It was something new to crime writing, something she made her own.

With her fifth novel, The End Of Everything, she switched gears. It's easy to see where the now-common comparisons with Gillian Flynn arose, especially once the book was named a Richard and Judy selection in Britain. But the story of a disappeared 13-year girl, told from the point of view of her best friend, reads like Flynn crossed with Vin Packer, a deft mix of coming-of-age girlhood, the spectres of paedophilia and incest, and the desperate intensity and doom of Fifties pulp. I wrote then (you can read my review here) comparing the novel to Lolita, about her fascinating obsessions, and I stand by that now. What I've written above may seem overly analytical, but the remarkable thing about Abbott's writing is how much it suggests and stands up to such analysis, and how engrossing it is on its pure story-telling basis. There is a dream-like sense in her prose, a fever-dream we follow through to the end. I marvel at the result. Megan Abbott may be the most original crime writer of the past decade, and she should be treasured by readers of all sorts of fiction.

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226321

note; this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimtime.co.uk)

MEGAN ABBOTT'S END OF EVERYTHING

It might become a challenge to discuss Megan Abbott's books without reference to the words 'fever' or 'dream'. Her first four novels approached the world of noir from the inside, or perhaps, in a genre where the protagonists are usually men, often superficially attractive (qualities we're supposed to judge in women) but possessed of one-track minds and/or half track brains, we might better say from the other side. This reclaiming of the world of noir has been, for me, the most interesting and original work done in the crime field in this new millennium.

Although her fifth novel, 2011's, The End Of Everything, is, on the face of it, a novel about adolescence, whose 'crime' sits mostly offstage while Abbott provides a stunning take on the power of sexuality, and the even greater power of repression. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because that is at heart what noir is all about at heart—the feeling a child has, of being caught in the grip of a force he or she cannot control, a primal urge beyond understanding or coping-- isn't that exactly what noir protagonists wind up feeling? That they are adults merely intensifies the predicament, intensifies the temperature of the fever dream in which it takes place.It's why the best noir is filmed in shadow, in fog, in haze, in darkness, where no one can see what is coming.

Lizzie and Evie are best friends, with Evie's older sister Dusty their glamorous role model, and Evie's father, Mr. Verver, as the perfect dad, at least in the mind of Lizzie, who's being raised by her single mother, who herself has just begun an affair. Then, Evie disappears, and it soon appears she has been kidnapped by the Verver's insurance agent, Mr. Shaw. But nothing, it seems, is the way it seems.

Although the setting appears to be the 1980s, but the story has the feel of the 1950s—so much so that it reminded me of Thomas H. Cook at his best, the same sort of emotional undercurrent which reveals itself in its own repression, that same sort of quiet build-up which goes beyond noir, but still stirs the perfect surface in search of the imperfections underneath. Abbott, through Lizzie's teenaged eyes, builds an undercurrent of sexual malice which permeates virtually every scene, boiling just beneath the surface. And Lizzie's perceptions are modern, the only really modern thing in the story—she is the author's stand-in, seeing a Fifties noirish reality beneath that 80s world. The reader feels like a youngster who's stumbled across their parents' cache of steam-covered 50s paperbacks. So Mr. Verver, the seemingly perfect father, more and more takes on the appearance of a predator, an abuser, not so different perhaps from Mr. Shaw.

Except that Mr. Shaw is also not quite what he appears to be, and Evie's kidnapping is not quite that either. Without wanting to spoil the story, Abbott has also written a look back at Lolita, again, as I suggested at the start, told from the other side. After all, what is Nabokov's novel, if not a look at 1950s masculinity, and its fatal attraction to the unspoiled, perfect, uncomplaining, unthreatening femininity of the 50s teen, just starting to be sexualised in the post-war modern world.

It's a brilliant book, whose tone never falters, whose tension is wrenched tighter and tighter with each page, and whose vision is resolutely noirish. Megan Abbott's fiction remains fascinating in its obsessions, and in The End Of Everything, she takes them out of their classic setting, and proves she can make them work on a wider, more surprising canvas.

The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott
Picador, £7.99, ISBN 9780330518314

FLITHY RICH: AZZARELLO AND SANTOS GO NOIR

Filthy Rich comes complete with blurbs from George Pelecanos and Meagan Abbott, and it doesn't get much more noirish than that--impressive enough that my wife actually gave me this copy for my birthday! And she does not do comic books. Brian Azzarello has shown in 100 Bullets that he's absorbed a full menu of late 50s and early 60s noir, and artist Victor Santos' art, which seems heavily influenced by Frank Miller as much as 50s black and white films and maybe Bernie Krigstein, suits the story very well.

There is a fine line between hommage and derivation, and the graphic novel format often winds up drawing heavily on both; in writing terms they are short stories, while in story format they are presented more like novels--the same sort of boundaries you might place on film, but even moreso without the giant screen and dark cinema to encompass the viewer. So although the outlines of the story are familiar, what makes it work so well is Azarello's combining of angles: the failed athlete turned car salesman thrown into the nightlife milieu is not only redolent of noir, it carries the undercurrents of the era, the sort of thing you get in Philip K Dick's mainstream novels, in everything from Death of A Salesman to Glengarry Glen Ross, the sort of thing that kept Gold Medal books in business fo so long. Junk Junkin, the former star football player who was accused of shaving points in college and then saw his pro career disappear to injury before it even started, is a desperate, empty man, with a half-track brain and a one-track mind--the perfect noir hero.

If anything, the story is even more desperate than Junkin himself, and that's where Romero's art cranks up the pace to a frenzied level. It resolves itself the way noir ought to, the way it has to, the only way it possibly can, in its real underbelly of a world. Filthy Rich is filthy, and it's rich noir, and what more can you ask for?

THE BLACK DAHLIA AND THE BIG BAD WOLFE

The Black Dahlia Files
Donald H Wolfe
Time Warner 2006, £9.99 ISBN 0316727261

James Ellroy propelled Los Angeles' 1947 'Black Dahlia' murder back into our consciousnesses, after a long period in which it had lain dormant and forgotten, an artifact of a time and place as dead to the modern world as the huge shoulders and lapels of Jack Webb's suits on Dragnet. So why has the case attracted so much renewed interest? Is it an American Jack the Ripper? Or is it simply that it involves sex and Hollywood, and that Beth Short's story can be told as the girl from the sticks who arrives in Tinseltown hungry for fame and gets eaten alive? Or is it simply the butchery, like a Patricia Cornwell novel come to historical life? Or maybe the fact that the crime went unsolved, and their could be an 85 year old killer in some old age home somewhere, still relishing his big event?

It's probably because we know so little, really, about exactly what Elizabeth Short did in LA that makes the case so intriguing. She came from Boston and speculation has her as a B-girl, a whore, a consort of gangsters, an actress in stag films, a figure flitting around the edge of Hollywood, a hustler working cons on men drawn to her black hair and alabaster skin, her exotic good looks and her bad teeth, which she covered with paraffin before going out for the evening.

Since Ellroy, a number of books have tried to 'solve' the killing, or at least benefit from the publicity. The most interesting, if not convincing, was probably John Gilmore's Severed. I recall Ellroy, for one, pointing out to me that one problem with Gilmore's book, his claim that Beth Short's genitals were not fully developed, was simply false, and thus the idea that rage at her 'cock teasing' resulted in her murder fell apart. Donald Wolfe's book, which likewise appears to have a major contradiction to the heart of its conclusion, neatly weaves Gilmore's story into his own, and thus is able to include Gilmore's killer into his own conspiracy.

As drama it works very well. Wolfe's theory is that Short was murdered, in a frenzy, by Bugsy Siegel, in order to protect Arthur Chandler, the playboy father of her aborted child, presumably because Short was going to sing. Chandler was the son of Otis Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and a major power in the city, who virtually controlled much of city hall, including the police department. In fact, the corruption of the police department, especially its 'gangster squad' is where Wolfe is at his best—the LAPD's position in the pockets of the rich has been an element of any number of great novels and films, particularly from that boom era, and Wolfe draws those connections very well—all the way up to the death of Marilyn Monroe, about which he has also written.

But it is one thing to trace that alternate history, and another to turn those connections into the actual solution of the killing. Wolfe's approach invites skepticism; he opens by saying 'there wasn't much nightlife in Los Angeles in the 1940s', which seemed odd when I read it, and became exceedingly odd as he detailed the extensive night life of Short as a B girl and the mobsters and others he's chronicling. Similarly, he goes to great lengths to establish himself in the milieu about which he writes, describing himself as growing up on the 'wrong side of the tracks' in Beverly Hills, which are good tracks to be on any side of, and were even in the 1940s. These may not seem like big things, but they set off warning bells.

Wolfe's solution has the added benefit of drawing on the disappearance of Jean Spangler, a story which, like the Dahlia killing, has been regenerated through fiction, in this case Megan Abbott's brilliantly atmospheric The Song Is You. The note she left behind, mentioning going to see Dr Scott, has generally been assumed to mean she was seeking an abortion, and that the letter was addressed to Kirk has meant people assumed Kirk Douglas was the father (Spangler had worked on a movie with Douglas, who at first denied having known her.) Wolfe is trying to draw a parallel here: his theory is Mickey Cohen found out about the scrape, and sent one of his, Davy Ogul, to shake down Douglas. Kirk's agent then called on Johnny Roselli for help; exit Spangler and Ogul, who disappeared two days after Spangler's body was found.

This scenario has the beauty of virtually repeating his theory of Short's death, with the addition of the gory mutilations, which he attributes to Ben Siegel going, well, bugsy. In this version, Siegel is then killed by the mob precisely because he has gone out of control. Gilmore's killer turns out to be involved as a Siegel henchman, and the bisection of the body is carried out by one of the mob's abortionist doctors. It has the beauty of fitting together beautifully, although among all the distracting hand-waving of moblife in LA, we might easily pass by the fact that Siegel's life was already in danger, and only personal interventions from Meyer Lansky had stopped the contract from being issued earlier.

But the biggest problem is also the simplest one. Wolfe claims the police withheld information about Short's pregnancy, and the fact that the corpse had been given a hysterectomy, as a 'control', to check those who claimed to be the killer. He notes how the coroner's testimony at the inquest was stopped before he got to the crucial details, and of course how, once the cover-up began, this information, which would provide motive, was buried. The problem is, according to what I recall reading about the original coroner's report, Beth Short showed no signs of pregnancy and had a small uterus, an indication she had never had a baby (and possibly the origin of Sinclair's theory). Wolfe never goes into this anomaly, because if that first finding were correct, all that's left is speculation and innuendo which, although it makes for a slick solution, would not be correct.

After finishing the book, I went to check Wolfe's story elsewhere. Larry Harnisch, the LA Times reporter whose own theory about the Dahlia, which forms part of the documentary about James Ellroy, depended on the characterisation of Beth Short as a hustler, conning men lured by her looks, and perhaps too confident of herself in those circumstances. This is something which Wolfe's book reinforces, though of course the abortion motive would not.W hen the book appeared, Harnisch began a page by page demolition of it, starting with the same nightlife comment which had caught my eye. Some of it picks nits, but much of it shoots huge holes into Wolfe's sourcing and footnoting, and, before he apparently gave up the project, revealed one piece of Wolfe's evidence which seems to have been cut and pasted together from two different documents.

All of which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accept Wolfe's findings. The book is great on atmosphere, it conveys the era well, and its photo section is the best of any of the Dahlia books so far. Interestingly enough, Wolfe devotes an appendix to debunking another of the recent Dahlia books, George Hodel's Black Dahlia Avenger, which also suffered from a very simple basic problem, in that the photos that Hodel claimed showed his father with Short very obviously were of another man, and those of Short he claimed he found in his father's scrapbooks were equally obviously not of Short. It was easy for Wolfe to demolish Hodel's claims, and it appears that it is almost as equally easy to demolish Wolfe's, though Wolfe does tell the better story.

MEGAN ABBOTT wants to DIE A LITTLE

Do you know Jeri Southern’s version of Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’? The next line in the song, of course, is ‘I want to die a little’. Southern recorded it in 1954, the year in which this novel is set. I first heard Southern’s version on Charlie Haden’s wonderful album Haunted Heart, on which his Quartet West played behind Southern’s original vocal. It’s both evocative and knowing in that context, and that is exactly the way I felt about Megan Abbott’s novel.

Lora King is a schoolteacher, living in Pasadena with her brother Bill, an investigator for LA’s district attorney. They are orphans, who have washed upin La La Land, as if without pasts, to live the post-war suburban American dream. Then Bill meets Alice Steele, a dish who’s been a wardrobe assistant in Hollywood, and they are quickly married, and Lora’s world is turned upside down. The suburban parties get a bit livelier, Bill gets a bit busier, and although Alice inserts herself into Lora’s world, there is something otherworldly about her. And as Lora gets drawn more deeply into that other world, the story takes on darker implications.

Abbott has done a brilliant job of building her tale through atmosphere. Film noir and pulp fictions of the 1950s lived in this territory, the world kept hidden from the shiny surface of the Eisenhower era dream. It’s the world on the covers of the paperback novels we collect and cherish now, the world of the feverish films of Sam Fuller or Joseph H Lewis. It’s Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, hosting cops like JD Tippett and losers like Lee Oswald. Lots of writers have visited there.

Where Abbott is different is in delineating the ambiguous nature of the line between the respectable and the not so respectable, as if one were the funhouse mirror image of the other. Her suburban parties start out antiseptic on the surface, but soon the reader is getting suffocated by the smells of perfume, hair tonic, highballs, and cigarette smoke; the sweaty desperation of too much close dancing in too small rooms. So as Lora dates her studio publicity fixer, as she moves closer to the ‘other side’, you realise that yin and 50s yang are not that far apart. The title track on Haunted Heart was a hit for Jo Stafford in 1947, and like Jeri Southern's song, I was taken by her singing it with Haden and group behind. But if you go back and listen to the original, with its syrupy big-band arrangement by Stafford's husband, bandleader Paul Weston, you begin to sense the distance between the torch underneath and the sticky song on the mainstream hit parade.

Die A Little is like Dorothy B Hughes or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding rewritten by David Goodis. But though she mines the era's genre, she also manages to avoid the trap of seeming to deconstruct them; she isn’t clinical about her story, characters, or style, the way the Coen brothers were in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Everything happens within the framework of the tale. There are occasional anachronisms, or knowing bits propelled by hindsight, but it rings true as Lora’s descent into the dark side of the 1950s leaves her trapped, and she can get out only by repressing those impulses even as she acts on them. Repression is at the heart of this book, as it was, perhaps in the Fifties. Calling Dr Wertheim! Megan Abbott has written an atmospheric thriller which works on any number of levels. It’s being made into a movie with Jessica Biel, which hopefully will go a bit deeper than say, Hilary Swank and Scarlett Johanssen enjoying the chance for thick red lipstick and constant smoking in Black Dahlia.

By the way, James Ellroy gave this book a plug, and it’s easy to see why--there’s that same awareness of what America’s underbelly was, and is like. Die A Little was published in the States in 2005, and Abbott has written two more since then. The second, The Song Is You, apparently uses the disappearance of actress Jean Spangler as a springboard, like Ellroy used the Black Dahlia. The third, Queenpin, is apparently set in a corrupt little casino town, more Phenix City than Bugsy Siegel's Las Vegas. Definitely worth looking out for.

Die A Little
Megan Abbott
Pocket Books £6.99 ISBN 9781847393463