Customer Reviews

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (Hardboiled Fiction Ser)

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An unjustly neglected classic, fast-paced, funny but with considerable pathos--with a well-orchestrated group of characters and plenty of incident in a relative handful of pages. All the more impressive because it was written by a Yorkshireman who set himself the task of mastering American vernacular, both in narrative and dialogue. Imagine a combination of James M. Cain and Nathanael West and you'll have a sense of the overall tone and approach; hard to believe that the author also wrote Lassie, Come Home!

I heard of this work through Edmund Wilson's classic essay, The Boys in the Back Room, in which he treated a number of "California" writers in general and the "noir" genre in particular. Wilson, who was brilliant and a delight to read on almost anything, wasn't a big fan of the California writers, and more particularly didn't especially like hardboiled crime fiction. Still, it was interesting that he mentioned this relatively obscure novel a number of times, especially as it was the only crime novel by "Richard Hallas," real name Eric Knight, and yes, the man who wrote Lassie Come Home, but who died at a relatively young age in an airplane crash in WWII.
The novel is not especially easy to find. I was never able to find it in a store, even my favorite used book store, but did manage to order it on-line. It is interesting, to say the least, and worth the effort if you are a fan of the genre.
The novel has many of the attributes you would expect: a none-too-bright hero lights out to California in search of the wife and child who have abandoned him. He finds them, but to little effect, and seems almost powerlessly drawn into (i) a robbery that goes awry and ends in murder, (ii) a relationship with a controlling woman who clings to him and ultimately threatens to expose his crime if he leaves her, (iii) a relationship with another woman that ends badly, in one of the larger ironic twists of the story, and (iv) a murder trial that only extends the irony and seems to fulfill his mantra that in Hollywood the truth gets all mixed up. Along the way, there is substantially more social commentary than you might expect--some fairly effective scenes about the trek of the homeless and hopeless to the west, and an economic/religious movement reminiscent of Aimee Semple McPherson with a penchant for drama and a fairly incomprehensible economic program. The book also includes a take on California, or Hollywood, where, in the words of the movie producer who "befriends" our hero, people go crazy--they don't know they're crazy, but they are, and life turns into something like a big movie that people don't really live or feel the way they should.
All in all, the plot won't disappoint, and the writing is better than much of the genre. It is neither as simple nor as hard-boiled nor as limited in subject as many less interesting books of the kind.
The oddity of the book, as the introduction to the edition I read points out, is that this book feels like a pastiche, meaning it seems comprised of a lot of bits and set pieces that the author assembled because that's how you write one of these things, and, at times, the job feels more like a satire or send up of the genre rather than a full-fledged participant. (A contemporary reviewer called it a "phony.") The book doesn't have the drive or conviction of some less accomplished works. The hero seems a bit too buffitted by events, always complaining that he meant to do something, but never got around to it. The irony in the resolution of events seems a bit too contrived. the truly lovely passage that closes the book seems a little out of place and not exactly natural to our hero.
As to characters, none will bear intense scrutiny. The hero is a bit too dim, or perhaps he is just an unreliable narrator. But some of the supporting cast is interesting and the movie producer is well done.
All in all, it is worth the effort and does seem to open more of a window on the times (late '30s) than other similar books from the period. I should note that I am surprised the book hasn't received more serious attention from folks interested in "Hollywood" or California novels. For example, The Day of the Locust is a FAR better novel than this; still, this book travels some of the same ground and reading West with an eye to Hallas (or Knight) would not seem a wasted effort.