Thu 23 Apr 2009
TMF Review by Bill Crider: RICHARD NEELY – A Madness of the Heart.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[4] Comments
RICHARD NEELY – A Madness of the Heart. Crowell-Collier, hardcover, 1976; Signet, pb, 1977.
Richard Neely specializes in the novel in which nothing is what it seems. This book is no exception. It tells of Harry Falcon, who saves a girl from rape only to return to his home and find his own wife (just released from a sanitarium) raped and beaten.
As a rapist begins to terrorize the city, Harry becomes obsessed with finding him and extracting vengeance. In the course of things he meets his childhood sweetheart, and their romance is rekindled; but as he recalls their past love, we learn some strange things about Harry Falcon.
Everything falls into place in the end, and the reader begins to see how cleverly Neely has planted little hints all along. Events and phrases take on new meanings as the truth is revealed.
This is a suspense story which carries you right along. The shocking ending might not be as great a surprise to readers of certain detective novelists as it will be to others, but it’s a strong one nevertheless.
[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] In my opinion, Richard Neely’s books were like no one else’s. Noirish and dark and nothing in them is ever exactly what it seems to be. I’ve found a short piece about him on one of Ed Gorman’s former blogs. You can go here to read the whole article, but I don’t think he’ll mind if I include a short excerpt here, one in which he’s discussing The Plastic Nightmare, another of Neely’s works:
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Did all of Neely’s novels feature rape prominently? I stumbled across THE WALTER SYNDROME years ago, before I was aware of his reputation among the congnoscenti, and was impressed by this guy I hadn’t heard of previously, but I haven’t found anything since, though I did, as a good Greta Scacchi fan, see SHATTERED when it was released…and was disappointed, which shouldn’t be held against THE PLASTIC NIGHTMARE, but that, along with the commercial failure of SHATTERED, does in part explain why I don’t remember seeing that edition of the Neely novel, much less reading it.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Todd
Somebody who’s more of an expert on Neely am than I will have to answer your question about rape and how often it turned up as a plot point in one of his books. I hope it wasn’t often, but maybe it was. I read quite a few of them when they first came out, and while I don’t recall the story lines, I do remember the endings knocking me out of my socks every time.
Which means that if I were to start reading his books again, the same thing would happen all over again — I remember them well enough to be awfully sure of that.
— Steve
April 24th, 2009 at 12:08 am
The Damned Innocents by Neely was a French film by Claude Chabrol known variously as The Innocents with Dirty Hands and Dirty Hands.
I don’t know much about Neely other than he was in advertising before taking up fiction, but he was a good suspense novelist who unfortunately came along at a time when the suspense novel was moving away from its psychological roots in writers like Woolrich, Hughes, and Holding and breaking along the lines of horror and women’s suspense writers like Mary Higgins Clark.
There are few (if any) writers doing the kind of novel Neely wrote today, or if they are it is in bloated bestsellers that seldom manage to be as tight and controled as Neely’s best work. Some of the Hard Case originals are in the genre, though they tend more to the Gold Medal style paperback originals they were created to honor.
I don’t think the relative failure of Shattered at the box office did much damage to Neely’s writing career. It’s rare for a bad movie to harm the writer though once in a while a good one gives a career a boost. Publishers are quick to cash in on movie success, but usually don’t blame writers when they fail. It’s possible it soured Neely on writing though. For whatever reason he was a good writer who seemed to just fade out of the picture.
I don’t remember rape featuring in all the Neely books, but I haven’t read them for over a decade so it’s possible it’s a feature I didn’t tie together since I read them fairly widely apart. Still, he wrote some top notch suspense novels that still stand out in my memory, and managed more than a few twists and turns with his own spin on them.
July 29th, 2009 at 7:19 am
bonjour
if you can write french language, may be in english, )
please could you let some details about this author, biography or something else…
on http://www.fichesauteurs.canalblog.com, to Krri
we have already the english titles and the french ones by editor Gallimard with summaries but nothing about the “guy”
thanks for your help.
Elleon