Thu 14 Oct 2010
Mike Nevins on CLAUDE CHABROL, THE LOCKRIDGES, DASHIELL HAMMETT and More.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , Movie stars & directors[14] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
On Sunday, September 12, at age 80, Claude Chabrol died. He was one of the most creative French film directors, and one of the most deeply committed to the crime-suspense genre, and the only one I ever met.
It was in the summer of 1986, at an international festival on Italy’s Adriatic coast where he and I and countless others were guests. We were introduced by another mystery writer, the late Stuart Kaminsky, and over the next several days we were on some tours together — including one to the castle of Cagliostro — and had a number of conversations.
I can’t claim to have seen all or even most of the dozens of films Chabrol directed in his career of more than half a century behind the cameras, not even all the crime-suspense-noir pictures with which his filmography is studded.
But among those I knew well were 1969’s Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die) and, from 1971, La décade prodigieuse (Ten Days’ Wonder), the former very freely based on a classic Nicholas Blake novel and the latter on a classic by Ellery Queen.
His then most recent film, which was premiered at the festival, was Inspecteur Lavardin. After seeing Lavardin, and connecting what I took to be dots between it and the other two, I saw all three as sharing a common theme: the meaning of being a father.
Remembering that Ten Days’ Wonder in both novel and film form climaxed with a death-of-God sequence, I ventured to suggest to him that all three films tell us: “There is no God the father, therefore we must be good fathers.†His reply: “Yes, yes, yes!â€
We talked about Cornell Woolrich, a few of whose stories he had adapted and directed for French TV, and after returning to the States I sent him, at his request, a few Woolrich tales that might be adapted into Chabrol features.
Nothing came of this, but among the many films he made in the quarter century after our meeting was Merci pour le chocolat (2000), based on Charlotte Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb, which is also centrally about fatherhood. Among the other world-class crime novelists whose work he translated to film are Stanley Ellin, Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon. Adieu, cher maître.
In my student years I read just about every one of Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. & Mrs. North mysteries, but I hadn’t revisited any of them in decades. Recently I reread The Norths Meet Murder (1940), first in the long-running series, and found it as charming and enjoyable as I had long ago.
It’s also a lovely piece of evidence in support of Anthony Boucher’s contention that one of the valuable functions of mysteries is that they show later generations what life was like “back then.â€
The Norths Meet Murder takes place in late October and early November 1939. On September 1 Hitler had launched World War II, and in New York there’s an organized boycott against buying “Nazi goods,†which impacts at least one of the murder suspects.
The latest consumer novelty is the electric razor. Walking New York’s night streets, you see men working on the new subway line under floodlights. Those who read this novel back in 1940 probably took these verbal snapshots for granted, just as those of us who as kids watched the early TV private-eye series Man Against Crime took for granted the chases all over the New York landmarks of the early 1950s.
Now in the 21st century they strike me as treasures, and perhaps help explain why, given the choice between a vintage whodunit or a new one, or an episode of a vintage TV series or a new one, I tend to go for the gold in the old.
I recently attended a convention in suburban Baltimore but arrived before my hotel room was ready. Luckily there was a bookstore with comfortable chairs in the mall across the street, and I killed some time in the mystery section with “Arson Plus,†the first of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, originally published in Black Mask for October 1, 1923 and recently reprinted in Otto Penzler’s mammoth Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.
For decades this was one of the rarest of Hammett tales, revived only by Fred Dannay (in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1951, and in the Queen-edited paperback collection Woman in the Dark, 1951).
Today it’s in the Penzler anthology and a major hardcover Hammett collection (Crime Stories and Other Writings, Library of America 2001) and can also be downloaded from the Web in a few seconds.
The other day I felt an urge to compare the e-text with the EQMM and Library of America versions, and made a discovery that startled but didn’t really surprise me. The Web version I downloaded is identical with Fred’s except for a few changes in punctuation and italicization, but both are quite different from the Library of America text, which uses the version originally published in Black Mask.
Fred believed that every story ever written was too long and therefore tended to trim the tales he reprinted, even those by masters like Hammett. Some of the bits and pieces he cut were perhaps redundant, but he also axed part of the Continental Op’s explanation at the end of the story.
Reprinting “Arson Plus†in 1951, he must have felt a need to update some of the price references to reflect post-World War II inflation. At the very beginning of the original version, the Op offers a cigar to the Sacramento County sheriff, who estimates that it cost “fifteen cents straight.†The Op corrects him, giving the price as two for a quarter. Fred raised these figures to “three for a buck†and â€two bits each†respectively.
He also added a cool ten thousand dollars to the purchase price of a house that in the 1923 version sold for $4,500. Where a Hammett character disposes of $4,000 in Liberty bonds (sold by the government to finance World War I), Fred has him sell $15,000 worth of common or garden variety bonds.
Whenever Hammett refers to an automobile as a “machine,†Fred changes it to “car.†Where three men in a general store are “talking Hiram Johnson,†Fred has them merely “talking.†(Hiram Johnson, as we learn from a note in the Library of America volume, was governor of California between 1911 and 1917 and later served four terms as senator.)
He also unaccountably changes the name of a major character from Handerson to Henderson. A quick check of Fred’s versions of a few other Continental Op stories with the original texts yielded similar results and a clear conclusion: to read Hammett’s tales as they were meant to be read, you have to read them in the Library of America collection. This doesn’t help, of course, with the eight Op stories not collected in that volume, but it’s a start.
In every version of “Arson Plus†the plot is of course the same: a man insures his life for big bucks, assumes another identity, sets fire to the house he bought, and the woman named as beneficiary demands payment.
Did these people really think any insurance company would be fooled for a minute when there were no human remains in the ashes of the destroyed house? Didn’t Hammett with his experience as a PI realize that this plot was ridiculous? Was Fred ever bothered by its silliness?
My nonfiction collection Cornucopia of Crime, which I subtly plugged a few columns ago, is now officially available (Ramble House, 2010).
So too is Night Forms (Perfect Crime Books), a collection of 28 of the short stories I’ve written over the last four decades including my earliest (“Open Letter to Survivorsâ€), my latest (“The Skull of the Stuttering Gunfighterâ€), and a huge pile of tales that fall between that unmatched pair.
I’ve completely forgotten where the picture of me on the back cover came from, but whoever took it deserves some kind of award for improving on reality more than any other photographer in history.
October 14th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
I’ve never warmed much to the North tales for some reason. Maybe it’s the cats!
I bought the Hammett Library of American precisely because I wanted to read the original texts. I noticed cars always are referred to as “machines.”
I thought “Arson Plus” read rather like a Freeman Wills Crofts story. Crofts makes sure to have human remains in a burned house in Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927)!
October 14th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Ignoring the cats, who were always present but seldom had anything to do with solving their cases, I can’t say that the North books were great works of detective fiction.
I never found them terribly challenging plotwise, but on the whole, very very pleasant to read. Perhaps among the first real cozies? It was Pam North who was the detective, not Jerry, but she often had to be saved from the killer when her instincts got her too far involved in the murders they solved.
And as Mike says, it’s the atmosphere that kept readers coming back (me), the time, the place, the apartment in Manhattan, the social hours (but way too many martinis, as I recall).
I’ve always subscribed to the theory that you can learn more from mysteries about how real people lived in times past than you can from history books, just as Mike points out.
That’s why I’m disappointed to learn that Fred Dannay made so many changes in the Hammett stories he reprinted. To lack so much confidence in his readers that he felt he had to update the very same details that helped make Hammett’s stories so real, that’s a shame.
October 14th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
The Hammett-Dannay point reminds of something I read about Margery Allingham’s The White Cottage Mystery–that her sister significantly edited the manuscript when it was republished in 1974 and removed contemporary (and possibly politically incorrect) references. I was horrified to learn that, especially because I think all modern editions have been based on that 1974 one.
October 14th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Re the bit about the insurance investigators not noticing there are no human remains in the burned house it reminded me of one of Conan Doyle’s gaffe’s — having Watson identify the burned remains of a rabbit as human in “The Norwood Builder.” If I recall they ‘corrected’ that for the Jeremey Brett adaptation on the BBC series.
Truth be told I don’t think writer’s like Hammett and Doyle always bothered to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s when it came to plot. That’s more a product of the Golden Age detective writers than those that went before them or the pulps.
Many writers just allowed plot and sensation to carry the story along, and in Hammett’s case it would not be entirely unlikely he was dealing with an actual crime he had run across in his agency days. The sheer stupidity of some real criminals can be as daunting to investigate as the most brilliant mastermind in fiction.
I concur with Steve re the North’s. Granted it is far from fair play, Pam’s more intutitive, persistent, and lucky (or unlucky)than brilliant, but the books were great fun and as Mike says, portraits in amber of their time and place.
Critics were as hard on the cats as Curt is though. I don’t think I ever read a contemporary review of the North’s that didn’t complain about the cats (or of John Creasey’s Roger West that didn’t complain about his sons). Having cats myself I wasn’t bothered since at least they didn’t do any of the sleuthing, which is more than I can say of some current series.
Chabrol is an interesting director and I envy your meeting him. I’ve been toying with reviewing his THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS for a while, an off beat Hitchcockian film that was done in French and English, and recently purchased a copy of his spy spoof MARIE-CHANTAL VS DOCTOR KHA (THE BLUE PANTHER).
His adaptation of THE BEAST MUST DIE is an exceptional film, and while critics were not kind to it TEN DAYS WONDER was well worth seeing, though he managed to leave Nigel Strangeways out of the one and Ellery Queen out of the other.
October 14th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
I’ve always been against the updating or changing of the words of an author’s work, especially after they are dead and cannot defend their fiction. But even such changes while they are alive are seldom a good idea. We have talked about John D. MacDonald going back and updating some of his pulp work and I remember when some SPIDER pulp novels were updated. Not a good idea.
October 15th, 2010 at 12:13 am
Apparently Edgar Wallace’s daughter allowed that to be done with his books in the 1960s. Didn’t save them. I think now most people recognize the period charm is a great part of the appeal. As a historian, I have to agree as well that the social detail is fascinating.
October 15th, 2010 at 3:13 am
Nostalgia didn’t used to be a multi billion dollar business and editors, writers, and publishers did what they thought they had to do. Like most of you I hate it, but I do understand their actions. They didn’t know this was art, to them it was commerce, and anything that dated it wasn’t charm or history, but simply old and out of date.
They saw themselves in competion with newer material and felt the need to update and revise in order to better compete. I seriously doubt any of them saw a day when their work would be sought after or even if they did, saw the harm in updating it.
The abridgements, censorship, and updating we abhore was just business to them. Many of them would be in shock to hear us complaining about what they thought was needed in order for the material to compete in the modern market.
October 15th, 2010 at 6:21 am
Mike, I’ve always thought of Chabrol’s films as more interesting than exciting, so I was surprised on re-watching THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS how much wit and action I found there. And I noted that in 10 DAYS WONDER he turned he detective into a philosopher… typical for him!
October 15th, 2010 at 9:48 am
I keep meaning to compare the Library of America texts with those in the three Random House collections, THE BIG KNOCKOVER, THE CONTINENTAL OP, and NIGHTMARE TOWN. The most obvious difference, not even needing a close cross-check, is that the magazine texts include chapter numbers and in some cases, chapter titles. The chapter titles do not appear in the Random House texts, and at least in the stories in THE BIG KNOCKOVER (I don’t have the volumes handy right now), neither do numbered chapters. I don’t know if the various editors simply relied on the Mercury and Dell texts, or made their own changes.
Sadly, not all of the Op stories were included in the Library of America collection. One notable and inexplicable omission was “Corkscrew,” one of the very best Op stories.
October 17th, 2010 at 4:47 am
I abhor the re-editing of texts years after publication. But what about rewriting living authors? I have seen an early American paperback copy of THE JUDAS PAIR by Jonathan Gash, where big cuts were made in order to make Lovejoy a more palatable character for the readership (he doesn’t slug his girlfriend in the eye or beat up an informer). I presume that the book wouldn’t have been published without these changes, so were the publishers right to demand it? In effect it is no different to the removal of racial slurs from Christie. I’m against editing, but when it allows books to appear on the shelves of major bookstores is it justified? Is it the same as the Dannay type of editing, where the changes are for pace and understandability?
October 17th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
As I said in Comment #2, I was “disappointed” and called it a “shame” when I learned about the editing that Dannay did of Hammett’s stories, but as David also pointed out in his Comment #7, speaking in a way for Dannay’s defense, it’s easy to understand why he did what he did.
Dannay was a great champion of Hammett’s work in the 1940s and 50s, helping to keep him in print when few other publishers would touch his stuff, so his intent was certainly not one of malice.
I’ll stick to being disappointed and thinking it a shame, but as a crime, I’ll certainly go no further than that.
October 17th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Bradstreet
The editorial hand can be heavy, but in fairness editor’s have improved my work too often for me to complain much about them — but then I’m no Hammett. There are a few cases I would still argue, but overall I lean towards tolerance based on personal experience.
I always keep in mind that the only thing that spared us a scene of Robert Jordan masturbating before battle in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS was the good sense of Maxwell Perkins. We can regret when the editorial blue pencil is too heavy on the page, but I’m not sure where we’d be without it.
Frankly, reading today I often wish the editor had been a little more hand’s on with that blue pencil — too many books — even by major writers — get published reading as it they were edited by a harried high school English teacher grading on the curve and not a professional editor (and that isn’t a knock of English teachers — I wouldn’t want most editors to teach a class).
Editors have been too cautious at times, then again who is to say Lovejoy would have built the American audience he did without a little toning down for the Colonials? At the time I’m not sure those scenes would have been accepted in what was considered to be a largely humorous series — not by the size readership Gash eventually found.
And if you read some of Jonathan Latimer’s paperback reprints from the sixties the amount of rewriting is close to shocking, as is the difference in text between some of Gardner’s Donald Lam novels and the DBC editions. I’m not talking about a few racial slurs changed or some updating, but the entire point and impact of scenes in the books.
It isn’t sacred text, and everyone wants to leave their mark, and in all fairness some editing is a blessing the reader never realises. I would prefer to have the original text as published in Hammett’s case, but I’m not sure the pure writer without benefit of editing would be to our best advantage as readers in every case.
I wonder what the ratio is of works ruined by editors to those saved by them?
October 17th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
My main problem with removing ethnic slurs in Christie (I think it’s almost entirely comments about Jews) is from a historical standpoint. These books are cultural history now and if we remove those references, we make it more difficult to learn about the times when they were written.
But I understand the concern from publishers. They are trying to make money, and these comments are off-putting to many.
Though another problem can be when references are removed that are effective and well thought-out, not silly, supposedly humorous bits. If I were editing, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to blue pencil the lisping Jews in so many English mysteries. But what about Philip Lombard’s anti-Semitic rant in Christie’s And Then There Were None? That’s entirely within character (Lombard is not meant to be a fundamentally attractive character). I think the artistic integrity of the book is damaged when that is taken out.
Let’s not even get into the matter of the original title!
Another interesting example of this “politically correct” editing I found in a fifties American edition of Tey’s The Man in the Queue, with an introduction by Anthony Boucher (called Killer in the Crowd, I think). Inspector Grant’s profound meditations on “dagos” have been changed to thoughts about “Levantines.” I’m not sure that really fooled anyone!
November 6th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
[…] recent experience with the first Continental Op story (related here )took me on a sort of Hammett binge which brought me to the collection of his Lost Stories (Vince […]