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Gumshoe in Dreamland
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17120 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
1,591 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
THE NIGHT MAYOR
Kim Newman
New York: Carol and Graf, 1990
202 pp., $17.95
Richie Quick's got a problem. A cynical, though-talking private eye in the Bogart/Marlowe mold, he's been recruited to an unnamed city to find an ornery lowlife whose world-class crimes make Al Capone and Jack the Ripper look like small boys. Seems Truro Daine, archfiend extraordinaire, has pulled off a nifty prison break and has sequestered himself in the bowels of this strange metropolis, where it's always two in the morning and raining.
Pretty standard gumshoe fare, you say - the old hard-boiled dick in the city tracking the crime boss bit. Not quite. Writer Kim Newman has taken the Raymond Chandler rule book, refracted it through the current fantasy/cyberpunk filter, added a few outlandish tricks of his own, and come up with a whoppingly imaginative tale of future crime.
Newman has created a loving tribute to the very special world of film noir, the brooding, moody genre of the forties and early fifties. An outgrowth of German Expressonist film of the early thirties, film noir used the aesthetic devices of German and French cinema - the sharp, skewed camera angles of Fritz Lang, the claustrophobic night scenes of G.W. Pabst and Marcel Carne, the moral torpor of Weimar - and melded it with the crime and private eye tradition of American pulp fiction to produce a powerful artistic universe that echoed the shifting erotic and ethical terrain of the early twentieth century.
European expatriate filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and Edward Dmytryk, and Americans like Delbert Mann, found the stylistic vocabulary of German film perfect for rendering the shadowy modern city of tough-guy fiction writers. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was a textbook use of what would soon become the film noir's visual currency, and urban crime novels and stories became the source of countless films in the genre. Morally ambiguous good guys battled suave, tuxedoed crime lords in nocturnal tests of wits and wisecracks, or were duped into sin by drop-dead blondes. Some of these films - Wilder's version of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, Siodmak's Cry of the City, Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet - are among the best work Hollywood ever produced, as fresh today as when they were shot.
The last twenty years have seen an
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