Thu 8 Jan 2015
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: BILL S. BALLINGER – Portrait in Smoke.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
BILL S. BALLINGER – Portrait in Smoke. Harper, hardcover, 1950. Signet #897, paperback reprint, September 1951. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1956, as Wicked As They Come (with Arlene Dahl, Phil Carey & Herbert Marshall).
Ballinger pioneered a new novelistic approach in the mystery field, one that he utilized in several novels: first-person narration told from the point of view of a professional or amateur detective, alternating with third-person narration involving one or more of the other characters in the story. This enabled him to tell two different yet parallel stories that intersect at or near the end, thereby heightening suspense throughout.
Portrait in Smoke is the first of his split-narration novels, and the book that firmly established his name in the mystery field. The first-person narrator is Danny April, the new owner of a small-time collection agency in Chicago, who finds in the agency files an old photograph of one Krassy Almauniski, a local beauty queen, and falls so in love with her image that he is compelled to track her down.
Interwoven with the details of his increasingly puzzling and sinister search, which leads him from the stockyard slums to a modeling school and the Chicago opera, is the third-person chronicle of Krassy’s life after winning the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest — an account that is anything but a Cinderella story.
The dust jacket blurb says that Portrait in Smoke has “depth and power, unusual suspense, brilliant irony, hard-boiled wit, one of the most fascinating heroines in current fiction, and a whiplash ending.” It isn’t that good, but it is a first-rate crime novel that deserves attention from the contemporary reader.
Whether it is Ballinger’s best split-narration novel is debatable; some aficionados of his work prefer The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957), which has a more complex plot and a more dazzling surprise at the end. Also good are The Tooth and the Nail (1955) and The Longest Second (1957); the latter title has one of the most frightening first chapters in all of suspense fiction.
In addition to the many novels under his own name, Ballinger also wrote two under pseudonyms: The Black, Black Hearse (1955), as by Frederic Freyer; and The Doom-Maker (1959), as by B. X. Sanborn.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
January 8th, 2015 at 3:22 pm
The film takes the story international and adds some elements, but Arlene Dahl does well as the earlier tough broad which surprised me. It’s a bit hard to take Sid James and Patrick Allen as American hoods though.
I would agree that WIFE OF THE RED HAIRED MAN is better, but PORTRAIT is the better known and has that classic LAURA/CHICAGO DEADLINE set up.
It remains one suspense novel of the era more than worth finding and reading for more than nostalgia.
January 8th, 2015 at 3:37 pm
Surprisingly, I didn’t know anything about the movie until I started to get this review ready to post. Glad to know it exists, even though it was basically a British production. It still ought to be worth watching. I’ll check my usual sources for it.
January 8th, 2015 at 7:46 pm
I always find Ballinger’s concepts interesting, but his execution weak. PORTRAIT IN SMOKE, THE LONGEST SECOND and 49 DAYS OF DEATH seem to cry out for a better writer.
January 8th, 2015 at 9:47 pm
WICKED AS THEY COME is on YouTube in a decent print if you want to watch before buying. It has many differences from the book and yet it’s pretty close in some ways.
It ends a bit weird, but it sort of has to.
Carey’s character is more sophisticated than a skip tracer and as I said the setting moves from the US to London to Paris as he romances and trails Dahl.