The Noir thriller page -6

Fatal Men

Killer protagonists proliferate in the post-World War Two noir thriller:
revenge-seekers, criminally inclined social climbers and scornfully supe-
rior psychopaths, these ‘fatal men’ derive from earlier noir character
types, all of them being in some measure victims seeking to become
active agents and taking on the qualities of the punitive investigator,
the gangster or the murderer. In these later narratives, however, the
focus is less on the determining force of adverse economic circum-
stances than on society’s demands for conformity. The pressure towards
conformity shapes the behaviour of some protagonists, particularly that
of the upwardly mobile murderer, and is challenged by others - the
revenge figure and the psychopath. In Horace McCoy’s 1948 novel, Kiss
Tomorrow  Goodbye,  the  psychopathic  gangster  protagonist  makes
explicit the difference between the way pre- and post-World War Two
narratives allocate guilt. He argues that his college education and Phi
Beta Kappa key demonstrate that he should not be used, in literature
or the movies, ‘as a preachment’ on the theme of socio-economic
determinism:

...it proves that I came into crime through choice and not through
environment. I didn’t grow up in the slums with a drunk for a
father and a whore for a mother and come into crime that way. I
hate society too, but I don’t hate it because it mistreated me and
warped my soul. Every other criminal I know - who’s engaged in
violent crime - is a two-bit coward who blames his career on society
(235).

Ralph Cotter’s speech is the ranting of a megalomaniac, but it also exem-
plifies a significant shift in the kind of explanatory framework to be

found in the noir thrillers of this period. McCoy’s protagonist is in effect
rejecting one of the central themes of the author’s earlier work, in which
private despairs and acts of violence were viewed as the effects of a bru-
talising socio-economic system. Like many earlier novels, Kiss Tomorrow
Goodbye uses the gangster as a parodic version of the American success
story. But we do not follow Cotter’s ascent from poverty or his efforts
to reach the top of the hierarchy and become a highly visible big shot.
Instead, we observe his ability to disappear into the crowd, to conceal
his superiority and loathing of the multitude from all but a select few.
At the same time, his self-image is built around an obsession with sep-
arateness from the conformist multitude. He is a connoisseur of his
complexes who takes a perverse pride in the individuality and unrea-
sonableness of his psychopathic responses. With his Nietzschean pos-
turings, he is a near relation of the gangster-as-fascist, but he has a
degree of self-awareness that acts both to make him a more sympathetic
figure and to make his function in the novel more complex.

This psychologising of the criminal and the concomitant movement
away from treating crime as the product of socio-economic deprivation
is sometimes judged to weaken the capacity of the gangster narrative to
act as a critique of the capitalist system.¹ There is no doubt that focus-
ing on the psychopathology of a character can become an indulgence
of horrified fascination at the sheer nastiness of the aberrant personal-
ity, combined with a reassuring sense that normative values and con-
ventional lives are free from these evils. It would be overly simple,
however, to see the critical thrust of such novels as operating only in
this comparatively straightforward way. So, for example, in McCoy’s
novel, Cotter’s sense of difference provides a perspective from which to
view ‘normality’, and his disdain has a satiric edge: in the plain-clothes
man’s face, Cotter discerns ‘the flowered viciousness that only many
years of petty police authority can properly mature. . . . Subtlety and

caution now come to you in a brand-new handy-size package - a pot-
belly and twelve triple-A shoe’ (72). Savouring his unspoken sarcasms,
Cotter retains a chameleon-like ability to camouflage himself as ordi-
nary, and in doing so calls into question the authenticity of those he
apes, suggesting their hollowness and superficiality. As he walks along
he copies the ‘easy habitual manner’ of the man in the street. He acts
out painstakingly and ‘perfectly’ the performances that ‘are never mir-
rorized for the average man’ (71). As Mark Seltzer writes, analysing the
serial killer’s cynical conformism and ‘mask-like, ironic imitation’ of the
‘perfect person’: ‘This is the madness of the sheer conformist to social
forms who at the same time merely simulates those forms . . . reducing

the social order to a “pretendsy” signifying game.’²  It is this double-
edged capacity that gives representations of the sociopathic personality
their critical power. On the one hand, the protagonist is the mouth-
piece for scathing criticisms of the society from which he inwardly holds
himself apart; on the other hand, the implication is that conventional
modes of behaviour must be a complete sham if they can be flawlessly
imitated.

In comparison to the psychopathic killer, the revenge-seeker and the
status-seeker are motivated by quite focused objectives. The obsessive
mindset of someone bent on revenge acts as a comment on the ten-
dency of others to sell out to a plausible but corrupt system and to put
the demands of tame conformity above truth and justice. In McGivern’s
Big Heat (1953), for example, unreasoning anger is the starting point for
an individual assault on received opinion and for revelations about the
corrupt  links  between  respectable  life  and  criminality.  The  social
climbers and money-grubbers (more like the legitimate gangster or the
psychopath as ‘perfect person’) try to rise in society by their pretended
normality. In doing so, they reveal the fraudulence of respectability.
Unlike, say, the big-time gangster, they have no wish to be ‘top dog’ but
simply want, like Highsmith’s Ripley or Packer’s Adam Blessing, to be
‘ordinarily’ affluent. The ironies of such narratives are often intensified
by enclosing them within a small-town environment, with its self-
satisfied vocabulary of decency and normalcy. The duplicity of the
whole community is exposed by the representation of a murderer who
is indistinguishable from the average inhabitant.

Protagonist killer narratives in urban settings tend to involve one
form or another of the faceless organisation, conspiring, coercing or
compelling conformity. The huge, impersonal business corporation, the
crime syndicate and the Communist conspiracy can all fill the role of
the system or ‘outfit’ that demands a collective identity. As the pro-
tagonist of Peter Rabe’s Dig My Grave Deep (1956) says of the criminal
organisation he is trying to leave, ‘“. . . there’s a deal, and a deal to
match that one, . . . and you spit at one guy and tip your hat to another,
because one belongs here and the other one over there, and, hell, don’t
upset the organisation whatever you do, because we all got to stick
together . . .”’ (20). The films of the period also provide many examples
of the plot that opposes the small man to the big organisation. With
the resurgence of gangster films in the late forties and early fifties, there
is a new emphasis on syndicated crime and on the crime cartel and ‘cor-
porate gangsterism’ as mirror-images of legitimate capitalist enterprise.
Films like I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1948), Force of Evil (Abraham

Polonsky, 1948) and The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) all repre-
sent individuals up against corporate criminality. As Samuel Fuller’s
Pickup on South Street (1953) suggests, even the Communist conspiracy
turns out to be uncomfortably similar to the economic machine of
monolithic, large-scale industrial capitalism - just another big, imper-
sonal power with hidden iniquities against which the solitary hero must
battle.³

Revenge-seekers

Revenge-seekers can function as the most direct critics of a corrupt
system, though they are not all equally outspoken. Avenging angels
range from the reluctant to the overly zealous, and some are too nearly
angelic to be very good at revenge. The fact that they nevertheless
remain firm in their purpose is, however, a reproach to the ‘silent major-
ity’. Essentially gentle, unaggressive men who have been propelled by
traumatic events into a seach for vengeance, they are kindred spirits of
the ineffectual, civilised British characters of the interwar period who
were unwillingly drawn into conflict by the threat of fascist violence.
Fearing that their involvement will lead to the destruction of their own
humanity, they are all but disqualified from their task. The quiet family
man in Leigh Brackett’s The Tiger Among Us (1957), going after the
members of the juvenile gang who beat him up, reaches the point at
which he comes close to shooting them, but is horrified by the extent
to which he has become like his antagonists: ‘Because I lusted to kill
them . . . I never wanted anything so much. . . . The tiger stripes were

showing on my own hide’ (177). In An Eye for an Eye, another novel of
the same year (1957, the only year in which she published crime
novels),⁴ Brackett portrays a mild-mannered lawyer who becomes ‘pos-
sessed of a fury so sudden and wild’ (95) that he is almost unrecognis-
able as he pursues the man who has kidnapped his wife. It is usual for
the protagonist of such narratives to meet with indifference and inac-
tion on the part of the majority of those in the wider community, people
anxious not to get involved. In other versions of this basic plot pattern,
instead of communal apathy there is hostility on the part of a slavishly
conformist community that unites to obstruct a protagonist’s quest for
justice. The small town, reacting as a body and closing itself entirely
against any intrusion, functions in this way to thwart an inexperienced
revenge-seeker in Harry Whittington’s Hell Can Wait (1960): ‘They all
seemed to be watching me. They were silent, their faces set and rigid,
unblinking eyes like marbles in their sockets’ (13).

Much the same conflict is to be found in urban plots involving either
supposedly legitimate or manifestly criminal organisations that expect
loyalty  and  acquiescence  from  all  who  have  dealings  with  them.
Amongst gentle avenger narratives, the best known of the fifties is
perhaps McGivern’s Big Heat, in which the humane, reasonable Bannion
is driven to become a destructive force, opposing corruption that
involves deep connections between the ‘respectable’ criminal syndicate
and the whole fabric of the community: ‘This was their city, their
private, beautifully-rigged slot machine, and to hell with the few slobs
who just happened to live in the place’ (123). McGivern gives Bannion
an intellectual background that defines a sane, sanguine human norm
which is savagely violated during the course of the narrative. It is not
that he is an innocent (he is in most respects much closer to the tough-
guy image of Spade or Marlowe). But his strong family life, destroyed
when his wife is blown up by those seeking to kill Bannion, gives him
a ‘lost centre’, and he has a set of values defined by his reading of ‘the
gentle philosophers’. The transformation forced on Bannion is symbol-
ised by his leaving behind the books in which man is represented as
naturally good and evil as ‘the aberrant course, abnormal, accidental,
out of line with man’s true needs and nature’ (15).

The opposing type of revenge-seeker is the cold, amoral, violent out-
sider. The stubborn refusal of the lone wolf to buckle to social pressure
and the resistance to conformity and acquiescence are also present in a
character like Bannion, but in contrast to Bannion this is a figure who
has no compunction about killing. He is often given an impersonal or
symbolic name (just ‘Parker’, or Clinch or Hammer). Richard Stark
[Donald E. Westlake], who represents his most disagreeable gangsters as
organisation men, sets against them one of the most memorable exam-
ples of the existential loner pitted against the criminal machine. Stark’s
Parker has had several incarnations on screen, including Lee Marvin’s
powerful creation of the ruthless Walker in John Boorman’s Point Blank
(1967), Robert Duvall’s humanised portrayal of the almost equally
laconic and remorseless Macklin in The Outfit (John Flynn, 1974) and,
more recently, Mel Gibson’s action-hero avenger, Porter, in Payback,
Brian Helgeland’s 1999 remake of Point Blank.⁵ What these diverse char-
acterisations of the Parker figure have in common is their tenacious,
obsessive single-mindedness: when Macklin’s girl friend tries to per-
suade him that it need not be ‘that way’, he simply replies, ‘It does with
me.’ Westlake’s original intention had been to have ‘the bad guy . . . get
caught at the end’, but his publisher (at Pocket Books) saw Parker’s
potential as a series character and persuaded Westlake to let him escape.

What this meant was that Parker was quite different from the usual
series protagonist: ‘I’d made Parker completely remorseless, completely
without redeeming characteristics,’ Westlake says, ‘because he was going
to get caught at the end. So I wound up with a truly cold leading-series
character. . . .’⁶ There is, however, something touching about Parker’s

sense of betrayal and his persistence in the face of terrible odds. In com-
parison to the typical Charles Williams or Jim Thompson criminal pro-
tagonist, he is in many ways a sympathetic figure. Westlake strongly
stresses his uncompromising individualism and his honest acknowl-
edgement of his own motives in pursuing what he sees as an adequate
revenge.

What Parker is up against is a ‘respectable’ and successful criminal
organisation, transformed between Prohibition and the present by their
diversification of interests and the intricacies of their organisation.
When Parker, in the first of the novels, The Hunter (1962) - the basis for
Point Blank - decides to reclaim his money from the Outfit, he is told
that it is impossible for the individual to stand up against something so
pervasive: ‘“Coast to coast, Parker, it’s all the same . . .”’ (117). Except
for the fact that the organisation works outside the law, it ‘conforms as
closely as possible to the corporate concept’ (125-6). In the eyes of the
Outfit, Parker is ‘a heister, a hijacker’. We know that Parker is wrong in
thinking that his wife was betraying him with Mal Resnick, but her
acquiescence out of fear for her life makes her a foil to him. Parker’s
intelligent strength, psychological as well as physical, is a distinguish-
ing trait. The first physical description of him, followed by a female
response (‘They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were
born to slap with . . .’ [7-8]), fixes him in our minds as a male force, the
embodiment of potent determination. His face may be changed for his
own protection, as it is in The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), but he
always retains his force and resolution, manifest in a refusal to submit
that marks him out as ‘a true existential’.⁷ Parker is, before the start of
The Hunter, thought to be dead. In a way Parker is death, a man back
from the dead to revenge his betrayal and to visit death on others. This
sense of a protagonist so far beyond normal life that he is ‘dead to it’
is central to the understanding of Boorman’s Point Blank, in which the
whole narrative can be interpreted as a fantasy of revenge passing
through Walker’s mind in the few moments before he dies, after having
been shot at point-blank range.⁸

W. R. Burnett’s Underdog (1957) is similarly structured around the
conflict between a criminal misfit and an organisation - in this case, a
partnership between gangsters and corrupt politicians that sacrifices the

individual to secure a smoothly operating power structure. The pro-
tagonist, Clinch, another loner with his own kind of integrity, is drawn
on a less mythic scale than Parker. A genuine ‘underdog’ possessing no
qualities of leadership, he is sustained by his contact with a good-
hearted whore and a generous political boss, Big Dan Moford. Moford,
who ‘runs a whole city’, is too individual in his standards to fit in
with the plans of ‘the gang’ of those who want to run things by regu-
larising the corrupt links between crime and politics. Though Clinch
bonds with Moford, he does not ‘know the meaning’ of words like ‘pal’,
‘chum’ or ‘buddy’ (27). The vocabulary of American normalcy - all
words that assert a shared ethos and conventional connection - is
beyond him. His very name ‘hardly seems like a name at all’ (52), and
the integrity born of Clinch’s isolation combines at the end with his
reluctant affection for Moford to spur his revenge on a killer who is
‘always surrounded by crawling yes-men’ (75).

The period’s most famous and forthright scourge of organised rackets
and their ‘crawling yes-men’ is Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer - a
name equally calculated to imply separation from ordinarily warm
human instincts. Hammer first appeared in I, the Jury in 1947. Spillane’s
protagonist, though not a criminal, is in fact a more extreme example
of the brutally aggressive revenge-seeker than either Parker or Clinch.
Hammer emerges from his first-person narrative as a strongly indi-
viduated centre of consciousness. He is connected to others through
love (his secretary, Velda) and friendship (Pat Chambers, his police
contact),  but  shares  more  with  a  symbolic  executioner  like  Satan
Hall than he does with a comparatively humanised and self-doubting
figure like Hammett’s Op, and is clearly allied to such later vigilante
figures as Dirty Harry, Paul Kersey (Death Wish) and Steven Seagal’s
cop (Out for Justice). Hammer’s origins as a comic-book character are sig-
nificant, suggesting the kind of larger-than-life hero represented on
Harry Sahle’s cover for the unpublished ‘Mike Danger’ comic that
formed the basis for I, the Jury - ‘A vibrant personality . . . as ROUGH as
he looks!’⁹

Spillane’s early Hammer novels, published between 1947 and 1952,
were by far the most popular late forties-early fifties reworkings of the
revenge motif. His sales were phenomenal - over 15 million copies of
his books sold by 1953.¹⁰  One of the acknowledged masters of hard-
boiled fiction, Spillane exploits the possibilities of the style in ways that
make his novels very different from those of Chandler and his heirs.
Spillane is described by Ed Gorman as ‘the great American primitive
whose real talents got lost in all the clamour over the violence of his

hero. He brought energy and a street-fighter’s rage to a form grown
moribund with cuteness and imitation Chandler prose.’¹¹  Like the
earlier pulp tough guys, Hammer is primarily used to expose and punish
the kinds of vice associated with the evil metropolis - narcotics (I, the
Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly), the prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick),
blackmail (Vengeance Is Mine!). He assails the corruption that is engen-
dered by wealth and power and that lurks under apparently admirable
surfaces. His adversaries are men like the wealthy, gracious Berin-Grotin
who is actually the head of a prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick) or
Lee Deamer, in One Lonely Night, who turns out to be the evil twin, the
‘head Commie’ rather than ‘the little man whom the public loves and
trusts’ (157).  Confronted  with  such  duplicitous  enemies,  Hammer
shares the noir protagonist’s alienation, his world-weary despair and his
anger at urban corruption.

Hammer’s vigilantism, like the intuitive, independent investigation
of the private eye, implicitly expresses distrust of the ‘faceless’, imper-
sonal mechanism of law enforcement.¹² He knows from first-hand expe-
rience how vicious life is, and when he says to the reader at the
beginning of My Gun Is Quick, ‘I’m not you’, he is declaring a separa-
tion from bourgeois ease and illusion that has always characterised the
hard-boiled investigative figure. He has an ability to understand the law-
lessness of the urban jungle: ‘You have to be quick, and you have to be
able, or you become one of the devoured. . . .’ But in contrast to many

earlier hard-boiled writers, Spillane is led by his sense of life’s vicious-
ness towards right- rather than left-wing views. Mike Hammer acts out
McCarthyite paranoia. It is not capitalism itself but hidden, conspira-
torial organisations subverting American life that are to be feared,
amongst them the Communist Party. Other thriller writers of the time
expressed anxieties generated by McCarthyism. Even where McCarthy-
ism is not directly mentioned, narratives in which an outsider is threat-
ened by the accusing voice of ‘normal society’ are often coded references
to McCarthyite persecution - to demands for conformity and for

absolute loyalty, to the silencing of opposition through fear and to sac-
rificing the interests of the individual in the name of the collective good.
Spillane, on the other hand, expresses the fears that motivated the
McCarthyite witch-hunts. Hammer’s savage one-man crusade is in some
ways that of the existential loner, but he also has the views of the
disgruntled moral majoritarian, directing his violence against a variety
of  demonised  others  suspected  of  subverting  American  life.  What
results is a macho conservatism that has, over the years, led to many
criticisms.¹³

It is easy see why Spillane has alienated many with his vigorous, no-
holds-barred style, his extremity of violent action and his unashamed
commercialism (he is, he maintains, a ‘writer’ rather than an ‘author’,
and writes only what he feels sure will sell).¹⁴  His prose is hyperbolic,
sometimes surreal and hallucinatory in its evocation of sensual or
grotesque physical detail: at the end of Kiss Me, Deadly, for example,
‘beautiful Lily’, at last revealed as an appalling scarred villainess, is set
alight by Hammer, ‘and in the moment of time before the scream blos-
soms into the wild cry of terror she was a mass of flames tumbling on
the floor. . . . The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing, into
the scars of other flames and her voice the shrill sound of death on the
loose’ (158). Probably the most often quoted example of Hammer’s
crudely violent methods is from Spillane’s first novel, I, the Jury, which
rewrites the famous conflict between desire and justice at the close of
Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. Spade’s response to Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s
‘“Sam, you can’t!”’ is a reasoned defence of the code of the private eye
before he hands her over to the police; Hammer gives the treacherous
Charlotte a lecture on the deficiencies of the jury system, declares
himself to be judge and jury, shoots her and then, looking down at ‘the
ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in’, famously
answers her dying cry of ‘“How c-could you?”’ with ‘“It was easy,”’
(187-8). Hammer’s killing of the woman he ‘almost loved’ haunts him
in subsequent novels; it contributes to his isolation, but it is not a dis-
abling guilt, or one which makes him question the rightness of his ethic
of summary justice. Even Daly’s Satan Hall, whose metaphoric qualities
place him outside the bounds of human law, does not execute male-
factors so cold-bloodedly.

The reader never doubts that Hammer will come out on top, and this
to some extent sets him apart from the noir protagonist. Hammer asserts
himself in ways that ally him closely with earlier action heroes like Race
Williams and Bulldog Drummond and with more recent superheroes
like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra (George P. Cosmatos, 1986), or Judge
Dredd (Danny Cannon, 1995) and RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987),
which Spillane names as one of his favourite films (the other is The
Terminator).¹⁵ Like these figures, Hammer possesses such prodigious
endurance it approaches invulnerability and he responds with such
effective violence that he is matched only by the most extreme of his
predecessors. He proves his worth in surviving a series of tests, but the
ferocity of his assaults and the relish with which he recounts them
place him outside normal civilised humanity. His assertion that he
in no way resembles his armchair-bound reader is more than just a

declaration of an unillusioned knowledge of the city. It is a boast that he has the combative skills necessary for survival amidst the ‘blood and terror’, the ‘razor-sharp claws’ of the Colosseum-like city (My Gun Is Quick, 7). His competence is a form of superiority that is remote from the self-doubt and self-reproach of the noir protagonist.

It is in the opening pages of One Lonely Night that Mike Hammer
comes closest to the iconic noir protagonist in reflecting on his outcast
status and on the brutality that renders him indistinguishable from the
criminals he pursues. Alone on the bridge in the cold, fog-like rain, sui-
cidally depressed, he broods on the way he has been denounced by the
‘little judge’ who reluctantly acquitted him. He feels branded as ‘a guy
who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society’, and
goes home to dream that his gun has become ‘part of me and stuck fast’
(5-13). The novel in which Hammer feels most marginalised is also,
however, the one in which his aggression and paranoia are most closely
linked to the collective hatreds and anxieties of the American right wing
in the McCarthyite early 1950s. The decision to make his villains ‘the
Commie bastards’ who are secretly infiltrating the country is a reflec-
tion of Spillane’s sense of what would appeal to the widest possible
audience of the time. In tackling them, Hammer gives vent to violent
impulses that would in the context of the fifties be judged as ‘evil for
the good’.¹⁶ Though ‘lonely’ and intensely personal, his individualism
is an expression of group hatreds and a rejection of the whole liberal
machinery of law, restraint and civil rights. Vengeance is taken against
those who affect conformity but in reality threaten the very fabric of
American society.

Money-grubbers and social climbers

The revenge plot, with its central action of exposing and scourging,
requires a protagonist who strips off the ‘civilised’ part of himself and
accepts a reduction to a primitive or existential state in which he is
capable of the violence required to bring down or ‘reduce’ the trans-
gressor. In Gordon Williams’ The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (1969) - the
basis of the film Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1972), still banned on video

- the protagonist sees himself poised between restraint and savagery,
realising that he has so far witnessed the violent assault on his house
with the eyes of ‘the civilised man who stood on this side of the thresh-
old . . .’ (118). The process of crossing this metaphoric threshold, horri-
fyingly represented in the later chapters of Williams’ book, is a central
event in many thrillers. The impact of such a transition is summed up

at the end of The Executioners, the John D. MacDonald novel on which
the films of Cape Fear are based (J. Lee Thompson, 1961; Martin

Scorsese, 1991). When Sam Bowden finally sees the dead body of Max
Cady, who had even ‘smelled like some kind of animal’ (147), he finds
only ‘a sense of savage satisfaction’ that he has ‘turned this elemental
and merciless force into clay’. In taking his revenge on a revenger, ‘All
the neat and careful layers of civilised instincts and behaviour were
peeled back to reveal an intense exultation over the death of an enemy’
(154).

A quite different kind of killer-protagonist plot is that in which the
protagonist is aiming not to reduce but to augment himself. He wants
to take on the substance and, often even more importantly, the trap-
pings of a higher social status, though this may be accomplished by
primitive means that are wholly at odds with what he craves, that is,
civilised luxury and heightened respectability. This upwardly mobile
protagonist is himself the object of satire. In some of the more inter-
esting narratives, he is exposed by his own first-person narration as the
epitome of an aggressively materialistic society: whereas, for example,
Harry Whittington’s more heroic protagonists would rather die fighting
than ‘surrender to greed, corruption and mean-heartedness’,¹⁷ a Whit-
tington protagonist killer like Charley Brower (Web of Murder) reveals
himself as the very embodiment of these qualities.

The ways in which these contrasting types of narrative work can be
seen clearly in a novel that combines the two plot movements, The
Killer, published in 1951 under the Wade Miller byline.¹⁸  A narrative
that seems throughout to be about a killing motivated by revenge for a
dead son turns out to be as much or more motivated by the need to
conceal a dodgy business deal. The protagonist is an ‘uncomplicated’
professional hunter hired to carry out the revenge, and his hunter’s
ethic has an integrity that’s lacking in the life of Stennis, the man who
hires him. The prosperity of Stennis is sustained, appropriately enough,
by the manufacture of Stennisfab, which offers ‘Standardization down
to the last nail and a new kind of prefabrication’ (14). The tendency for
the hunter to be reduced to the level of his own prey becomes, in The
Killer, a bond between ‘throwbacks’ (18) who are essentially separate
from a hypocritical society upheld by those for whom ‘standardised’
success is the only goal. The morally debilitating effects of upper-
middle-class affluence also produce the main plot turn in Burnett’s The
Asphalt Jungle (1950), in which there is a very similar counterpointing
of the romantic primitive and the display-oriented social climber.
Although Asphalt Jungle is less bound up with the sheer neediness of

characters than are Burnett’s earlier novels, it contains a man closely
related to his thirties cast, Dix Handley. Dix’s rough integrity is set
against the duplicitous smoothness of Emmerich, the man who betrays
the others because of his need to preserve his bourgeois respectability.
The gang is destroyed by the treachery of a man who has lived ‘by a
system of masterly evasions, bewildering about-faces and changes of
front’, and, even though Dix’s sentimental return home dominates John
Huston’s 1950 film more than it does the novel, we are equally moved
by Dix as an opposing emblem of the humanity left behind in a society
that values ‘class’ and show. Although characters like Stennis and
Emmerich remain in the background of the revenge and caper plots of
The Killer and The Asphalt Jungle, their catalytic roles are evident. It is
ironically their aspirations to climb out of the jungle that bring them
into association with a romantic primitive, a straightforward killer who
seems less reprehensible in comparison to their civilised savagery.

A more common setting for the ‘social climber’ novel is not the city
as jungle (the urban wilderness within which the main actors suffer a
reduction to the primitive) but a small town or (as in MacDonald’s Soft
Touch) a ‘medium-sized city’. In such a milieu we see the workings of a
complex socio-economic mechanism, within which the protagonist
who has violated the social codes in overreaching himself provokes an
appropriate nemesis. Even gangster narratives (usually urban) can be set
in small communities, for example, in Peter Rabe’s Kill the Boss Good-by
(1956).¹⁹ Drawing on his experience as a professor of psychology, Rabe
uses a power struggle within the rackets in the backwater of San Pietro
as a fable in which the success drive is presented as a national manic
psychosis. The self-destruction of Fell, a gangland boss who is ‘resting’
after a nervous breakdown, has something in common with the gang-
ster tragedies of the thirties (for example, Little Caesar). What distin-
guishes it from its thirties counterparts is the way in which an identified
mental condition is used to create an image of the sort of world Fell
inhabits - in particular, of the excesses of the drive towards success in
capitalistic enterprises. With San Pietro ‘in the palm of his hand’ (31),
Fell has ‘pressure left and nowhere to put it’ and seems unable to stop
his frenetic activity. The problem for others involved with him is to dis-
tinguish between effective entrepreneurial behaviour and incipient psy-
chosis: Fell ‘“never stops”’, and his behaviour is the capitalist dream
gone mad (94-7).

In Rabe’s third-person narrative we are able to see Fell through the
eyes of those affected by his unbalanced state of mind. In several other
noir thrillers of this period, first-person narratives take us inside the

mind of the scheming money-grubber or social climber, using the inti-
macy of this approach to satirise the self-deception, greed and under-
lying brutality of the American success ethic. Nothing More Than Murder
(1949), the earliest of Jim Thompson’s first-person killer novels, stays
with the point of view of Joe Wilmot, a small-town schemer who
believes there is nothing wrong in killing for profit: it’s ‘just murder,
nothing more than murder’ (80). Thompson was a writer so disturbing
and original that one wonders, with Geoffrey O’Brien, what contem-
porary readers made of the Lion paperback originals they picked up at
news-stands, with their cover promises of ‘a cheap and painless thrill’.²⁰
In Nothing More Than Murder Thompson issues the satirist’s challenge to
his readers to see their own faces in the mirror, inserting himself in the
novel as a visiting speaker, talking to an audience that applauds because
‘they didn’t seem to realize that they were the kind of people this author
was talking about. Well . . .’ (67). When the criminally avaricious Joe
protests that ‘“I don’t want anything I’m not entitled to . . .”’, an insur-
ance investigator replies, ‘“Oh, sure you do. We all do.”’ This is at the
core of the novel. Joe is a ‘small fry’ capitalist with his own ‘ideas on
making money’, trying to profit by underhanded means and not reck-
oning with the ‘big boys’ (117-19). There is considerable ironic justice
in Joe being ‘mopped up’ himself by a big-league rival, a more skilful
and cunning fraudster who says to Joe as he in effect puts him out of
business, ‘“I’m sorry, Joe. . . . It’s nothing personal”’ (153-4). Joe, whose

mind is too slow to enable him to conceal his true character, becomes
the caricatured embodiment of a culture so grasping that the ‘personal’
atrophies. ‘“It’s a disappearance case”’, the insurance inspector says,
and what has disappeared is not just ‘some dame’ sacrificed to Joe’s
scheme but the traits of character that enable a man to ‘identify himself
with the human race’ (142).

The dehumanised narrator handled with satiric detachment makes
frequent appearances in other novels being written during this period
for some of the major publishers of paperback originals: for example,
in 1958-60, Harry Whittington’s Web of Murder (Gold Medal), John D.
MacDonald’s Soft Touch (Dell), and Gil Brewer’s Nude on Thin Ice (Avon).
Whittington, who places Web of Murder in the tradition of James M.
Cain, says of the novel’s structure: ‘We start the protagonist almost casu-
ally down the road to Hades and then follow him on every cruel twist
and turn through increasing terror to the pit beyond hell.’²¹ The descrip-
tion could apply to all three of these narratives, sharing as they do the
characteristic noir irony of the bid for freedom that ends with worse
entrapment. In each case what is involved is the entry of the protago-

nist into a world in which money and social position become snares
that entangle him in a nightmarish parody of the success he aimed for.
The status and objects pursued are transformed in sinister, surreal ways
to become (as in Cain’s novels) a curse and a torment. In Web of Murder,
for example, a narrator who habitually subordinates everything to his
material and professional ambitions richly deserves his fate - to be paral-
ysed, sexually exploited and unable to extricate himself from the
clutches of the woman who has all along best known how to manipu-
late his crass ambitions, a grotesque parody of the situation he began
by trying to escape.

In MacDonald’s Soft Touch²² (filmed in 1961 as Man-Trap), the narra-
tor, Jerry, begins as a man trapped by his own choices in a childless
marriage to a drunken, unfaithful wife and in a ‘meaningless job’ (32).
At the finish, after breaking free from being bound on a bed, he again
traps himself as a result of his own greed and violence. The plot is set
in motion when he succumbs to his old buddy, Vince, who shows up
‘out of the past, a tiger in the night . . . offering the silky temptation of
big violent money’ (5). The suggestion here of boldly instinctive action
is ironised by the phrase ‘big violent money’: the money itself is a strong
physical presence and an agent of transformation, but it is also the
antithesis of the animal energies of tigers in the night. These atavistic
urges are a reduction entirely inappropriate to the socio-economic struc-
ture Jerry inhabits, and his sense of self disintegrates as he tries to rec-
oncile primitive impulse with the establishment of his identity as a
successful and civilised man. He catches glimpses of disorienting images
of himself in the mirror and tries to shut off the deeds (‘Murderer. Thief.
It couldn’t be me’ [110-11]). MacDonald’s final plot twist wipes out in
Jerry’s mind the whole of this experience of being ‘somebody else’. Suf-
fering from traumatic amnesia, he can only sense the events of the past
two months flickering back in a bizarre and hallucinatory way, until he
is drawn by an imperfect memory of the money to disinter the wife he
cannot remember killing: ‘And then they took me away’ (152).

Gil Brewer’s Nude on Thin Ice²³ contains an even more surreal trans-
formation of stolen wealth into a monstrous form of fatality. His nar-
rator, Ken McCall, exposes himself from the outset as a man entirely
suited to a life of minor dishonesties. The greed and general unscrupu-
lousness that are his undoing are failings he is always ready to identify
in those he is about to betray or abandon: ‘This god-damned world was
populated ass over teakettle to the hilt with sparkling parasites’ (57). He
readily seizes any opportunity for possible gain: ‘The cross-eyed gods of
the universal cash register had punched the No Sale key, and the drawer

was wide open - waiting’ (18-19). It is an image ironically echoed by an end in which the money he has stolen (and murdered for) is locked in a steel suitcase and Ken himself is trapped ‘wide open - waiting’ in the doorless adobe room he has been forced to build so that the woman to whom the crime has bound him can keep her eye on him: ‘I want to always be able to see you’ (141).

In their self-created entrapment these murderers are men who are
compelled to ‘fit in’ if they are not to arouse suspicion. Other protago-
nist killers set a higher value on conformity for its own sake, particu-
larly in two female-authored novels of the time, Patricia Highsmith’s
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Vin Packer’s The Damnation of Adam
Blessing (1961), both of which move the crime novel closer to the novel
of manners and in doing so bring the guilt of the community more
sharply into satiric focus. In contrast to protagonists who need to
conform in order not to arouse suspicion, Tom Ripley and Adam Bless-
ing crave approval and integration. In dealing with the social world,
Highsmith’s Ripley is the more successful and the more sophisticated in
his judgements. Adam Blessing, as his name suggests, is more innocent,
more victimised and, because of his innocence, less successful. Both
Highsmith and Packer explore the indeterminacy of guilt, invoking offi-
cial standards of guilt and innocence only to subvert them. There is in
their novels a much greater sense of complicity and sympathy than
there is in the male-authored narratives - with Packer’s Adam Blessing
because of his gauchely unattractive innocence and even more so with
Tom Ripley, whose actions have a disturbing appeal and, in the context
of the novel, make an odd kind of sense.

As Tom Ripley sets out on his mission, supposedly aimed at persuad-
ing Dickie Greenleaf to return from Europe, it is possible to read his
journey as an inversion of the great American voyage of discovery.
Released from the pressures of conformity and from the snare of
poverty, Tom acquires on board ship a ‘versatile’, magical cap, capable
of transforming his character and personality. Having killed ‘good-
natured, naive Dickie’ and having assumed his identity, Tom’s reflec-
tions echo the American myth of a new-found land - the ‘clean state’
and ‘the real annihilation of his past’ (98-9). Although he is travelling
east rather than west, this is his rebirth as a ‘true American’, another
parodic version of the American success ethic. Tom is determined, like
the  immigrants  to  America,  to  make  good,  moving  ‘Upward  and
onward!’ (32). His extraordinary success is dependent on exactly imi-
tating the class (or at least one particular member of the class) to which
he aspires. He is careful, in his impersonation, not to improve on Dickie

too much (for example, not learning the subjunctive). A comic version
of American adaptability, he develops a new sense of self. His other-
directedness, oversensitivity and diffidence all make it easier for him to
transform himself. Murder, too, serves this fantasy of upward mobility,
disposing of the inconvenient facts of a subservient past. Ripley’s ability
to be another self brings into focus the falsity and superficiality of the
social judgements that confer status and respectability, and our ten-
dency as readers is to hope that the rest of society will fail to detect
Ripley’s deception. Asked by a German interviewer whether Ripley
would ever lose out, Highsmith declared, ‘Nein, nein! Nicht bevor
ich sterbe.’²⁴ The suspense of the novel is built on tension between the
exposure he risks and his success in evading detection, with Tom vacil-
lating between confidence in his luck and fear of nemesis. The open-
endedness of his fate both overcomes the ‘fatality’ of noir and signifies
the continuance of his subversive principle in the world.²⁵

Patricia Highsmith, who published her novels as hardbacks with firms
such as Harper and Doubleday, tried to avoid generic categorisations,
observing that a writer was better treated and more seriously reviewed
if he or she was not, say, ‘a suspense novelist’ but ‘just a novelist’.²⁶ Vin
Packer (the pen-name of Marijane Meaker) was, on the other hand, a
regular writer of Gold Medal paperback originals, an exception amongst
the generally male contributors to the fifties paperback boom.²⁷  She
wrote both crime novels and lesbian ‘shockers’ (like the hugely popular
Spring Fire), though she, too, was eventually packaged as ‘a mainstream
writer whose books just happened to include crime’.²⁸  The Damnation
of Adam Blessing shares some of the characteristics of the Ripley novels.
Adam is a less attractive and rather less complex character than Tom
Ripley, but there is a similar use of close third-person narration to create
sympathy for the protagonist and understanding of his feeling of
sensual longing for the good things in life. Both characters can be seen
to function as a means of social satire, and in both cases we forgive their
crimes because of the crassness and cruelty of those who have wealth
and power. Like Highsmith, Packer creates her protagonist as an orphan
seeking a toehold in a treacherous society, using the tensions generated
as a way of exploring the American class structure and the myth of self-
transformation and upward mobility. The crimes of both protagonists
consist in devising ways to alter their identities, adopting methods just
enough beyond the normally acceptable to put them (if the truth were
known) even further beyond the pale than accidents of birth have
placed them. From the very beginning, when the orphaned Adam hero-
worships the wealthy man who extends condescending kindnesses to

him, he works at concealing his origins (or rather, lack of origins) and
pretends to strangers that he is the son of ‘that rich man’. What we see
throughout is Adam’s own impotence, actual and metaphoric, his
failure, his ‘immense loneliness’ (96) and his increasing desperation. He
is a Candide figure, an innocent adrift in an unfriendly world, equipped
with none of the social graces, hypocritical charm or guile of those who
are well adapted to life. He repeatedly thinks far better of people than
they deserve and wants only to confer ‘blessings’ on them so that they
will repay him with kindness and fellow-feeling. Like Candide, he is on
the receiving end of a series of misfortunes so great that a normal person
would be driven to extreme misanthropy, but for the irretrievably inno-
cent Adam there is nothing that can make him stop living in hope. The
final irony is the murder he commits, killing the beastly wife of another
of his father figures in the hope that this will demonstrate his gentle-
manly commitment to settling his debts. As with his present-giving, he
is attempting in his own way to become a benefactor. It is, of course, a
misguided effort, but Adam nevertheless acts as a foil to the rich and
powerful, whose actions and motives are far less generous.

Psychopaths

In creating Ripley, Highsmith leaves open the possibility of interpreting
his behaviour as schizophrenic: for example, he is able, once he has
returned to his identity as Tom Ripley, to free himself from guilt for
a  murder  committed  whilst  impersonating  Dickie.  The  emphasis,
however, is strongly on his typicality, his American versatility and
blankness of character. Viewed in this light, his ability to reinvent
himself as the occasion demands and to feel as ‘free of guilt as his old
suitcase’ (154) is symptomatic of the widespread tendency to evade feel-
ings of guilt and responsibility. He has the optimistic American belief
in fresh starts, the standard delusion of noir protagonists. Our domi-
nant impression of Ripley is not of psychological imbalance but of ratio-
nal self-interest, and in fact part of his insidious appeal lies in his sheer
pragmatism. It lies in the fact that he does not resort to murder except
when it presents itself as the only reasonable means of securing his goal
or preserving his freedom.

A number of other protagonist killer narratives of the time, however,
are so extreme in their behaviour that the label of ‘psychopath’ is more
obviously appropriate. By the fifties, the pop-psychology clichés of
the psychopath were firmly entrenched and frequently deployed in
both the fiction and the films of the period. This is a trend that has

continued; over the last three or four decades audiences have been
agreeably terrified at the cinema by many memorable incarnations of
the psychopath as alien and monstrous, a darkly irrational threat to
normal society whose death brings closure, allaying our fears of other-
ness. In much fiction of the fifties and sixties, even where the psy-
chopath is presented as a superficially affable figure who tricks people
into thinking of him as normal, he is also readily identified and elimi-
nated. The novels of John D. MacDonald, for example, frequently centre
on the opposition between normative and psychopathic (or ‘socio-
pathic’) characters. Travis McGee is given the task of defeating such
opponents as the amoral predator Junior Allen in The Deep Blue Good-
by (1964) and, in The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968), Tom Pike,
a magnetic, shrewd, entrepreneurial type who likes ‘killing folks’ (78,
302). In MacDonald’s non-Travis McGee novels, such characters are
sometimes given their own sections of narrative, bringing them much
more to the fore, as in April Evil and The Neon Jungle (1953), though here
again they are by the end isolated and destroyed. The use of the psy-
chopath as narrator was well enough established by the late fifties for
it to be readily available at the slick and quick end of the paperback
market, for example in British gangster novellas like Hank Janson’s Kill
This Man, the narrator of which is a psychotic hit man whose sadism
has been provoked by female submissiveness (his mother, caricatured
as a grotesque old hag grovelling before him) and who likes ‘to see folk
running around doing what I tell them . . .’ (11).

Less routine, more disturbing representations of the psychopath,
however, use the figure not as an alien evil but in the double role
of parodic representation and embittered satirist, like Travis Bickle in
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), ‘the only character who possesses a moral
vision’.²⁹  As in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, our perspective on events may
be controlled by the psychopath’s own point of view. Such narratives
often blur the contrast between conventional and aberrant behaviour.
This is an effect also familiar, for example, in the films of Hitchcock,
whose psychopaths, though easily subjected to pop-psychological diag-
nosis, are disturbing precisely because of their apparent normality: films
like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951)
and Psycho (1960) implicate the audience by hinting at the criminal
potential in everyone. In Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock’s adaptation of
Highsmith’s first novel, we are led to share the wish of Guy (Farley
Granger) to get rid of his troublesome wife and we feel the insidious
appeal of Bruno (Robert Walker).³⁰ In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie,
a man indistinguishable from respectable people (honoured by the

townsfolk  at  his  funeral),  functions  as  a  scourge  of  small-town hypocrisy, excoriating the ‘swine’ you would see if you ripped the fronts off the houses: ‘He is a killer with a mission, bent on the destruction of what he sees as ugly. . . .’³¹

The idea of killing as social criticism is developed in both Jim
Thompson and Patricia Highsmith novels. In Thompson’s Nothing More
Than Murder (1949), for example, there is a summary of the news of the
time, with random deaths and people being ‘blown up, drowned,
smothered, starved, lynched. Mercy killings, hangings, electrocutions,
suicides. People who didn’t want to live. People who deserved killing.
People who were better off dead’ (27-8). Thompson was one of the most
remarkable of the fifties successors to writers like James M. Cain and
Horace McCoy and, like them, he gained greater recognition in France
than in America.³² He is, however, more self-consciously modernist than
either and, in his best-known novels, far more radically unsettling. The
French proclaimed him to be ‘le plus noir’, the most American and the
most pessimistic of the noir thriller writers.³³ Highsmith, who lived for
most of her adult life in France, was in fact another writer better known
and more highly respected in Europe than America. Thompson is obvi-
ously in many respects a very different writer from Highsmith, who
would, for a start, never be grouped with the hard-boiled school. But in
their representations of psychopathic personalities there are some strik-
ing similarities. Both writers specialise in narratives that play on the
‘abnormally normal’³⁴  appearance and behaviour of the psychopathi-
cally unbalanced killer. Neither is aiming simply for the shock value of
violence emerging where it is least expected. In their novels, the
‘average-looking’, ‘everyone’s next-door neighbour’ identity of the killer
is used as a means of implying that psychosis is in some ways a repre-
sentative condition. Their killers’ minds are split between conformity
and  violation.  They  are  divergent  enough  to  provide  a  cynically
detached commentary on the society through which they move, but
nevertheless simulate normality in an utterly plausible way. The effect
is that, in looking at them, we both feel complicity and see, reflected
in their states of mind, the suppressed violence of the whole commu-
nity, whether the affluent suburbia of Highsmith or Thompson’s typical
American small town.

Highsmith’s Deep Water (1957) is, like the earlier Strangers on a Train,
the portrait of a blandly appealing psychopath, a man who does not see
himself at all in this light, though ‘diagnosed’ within the text as

borderline psychopath. The entirely civilised Vic van Allen, with his
pleasant, ‘ambiguous’ face (9), scrupulously retains a demeanour that

conforms to the rules of society. But he is different enough and intelli-
gent enough to see through the pretences and petty vanities of others,
and on most social occasions we are party to the acerbic running com-
mentary in Vic’s internal reflections - his sarcastic observations, his car-
icatured images and the surreal insights that liberate him from a stifling
environment. When told ‘“He thinks you’re cracked”’, Vic replies
‘“And the cracks shall make you free”’ (163). He also commits three
perfectly understandable murders. Since, in Highsmith’s third-person
narration, we stay very close to Vic’s mind, we are led to see his killings
as his ultimate expression of the contempt he feels for his neighbours.
In his farewell reflections on Wilson, who seems to him to represent
‘perhaps half the people on earth’, he smiles ‘at Wilson’s grim, resent-
ful, the-world-owes-me-a-living face, which was the reflection of the
small, dull mind behind it. . . . Vic cursed it and all it stood for. Silently,

and with a smile . . . he cursed it’ (259-60).

From 1949 on, with Nothing More Than Murder, Jim Thompson created
a succession of offbeat and subversive portraits of psychologically dis-
turbed protagonist-murderers. Nothing More than Murder was followed
by The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), A Hell of a Woman
(1954), The Nothing Man (1954), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) and Pop.
1280 (1964). All but A Swell-Looking Babe are written in the first person,
and all use the form for savage satiric exposure. The most remarkable
and ambitious of these are the first novel Thompson wrote for Lion, The
Killer Inside Me, and a companion piece written a dozen years later, also
for Lion, Pop. 1280.³⁵ In both novels, the alienated position of the psy-
chopath creates a perspective from which he looks down on his small-
town society as a scathing observer, stripping off illusory surfaces and
denouncing what he sees. Robert Elliott, in The Power of Satire, quotes
Ben Jonson’s lines on Archilochus, who according to tradition could
‘Rime ‘hem to death’. This ‘curious legend’, as Elliott observes, captures
something of the ‘malefic power’ of the satirist to wound his enemies:
‘The word could kill; and in popular belief it did kill.’³⁶  For Lou Ford
and Nick Corey, the killer-protagonists of The Killer Inside Me and Pop.
1280, there is also a strong connection between the ‘malefic power’ of
words and the act of murder. The satirist’s curse is a substitute for killing:
‘I wanted . . . [to] do something worse’ (Killer Inside Me, 51). When Lou
and Nick do kill, they represent themselves as simply taking to a logical
conclusion  their  critiques  of  small-town  American  society,  and  as
putting into practice the secret wishes harboured by others. Both are
‘typical’ not just in the sense that they have the chameleon-like ability
to impersonate ‘normality’ but also in that they do ‘what other people

merely think’.³⁷ They are shown as conforming scrupulously to the con-
ventional social forms that, as lawmen, they officially uphold, but as
cynically recognising the hollowness of these forms and of the ‘pre-
tendsy’ (Killer Inside Me, 187) nature of most people’s apparent adher-
ence to them. Lou Ford’s role as denouncer of a corrupt and morally
bankrupt society is most to the fore in his speech to Johnnie Pappas,
whom he is readying himself to kill: ‘“Yeah, Johnnie . . . it’s a screwed
up, bitched up world, and I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way. . .
Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it”’ (118).
Much of the surreal, blackly comic force of The Killer Inside Me comes
from the tension between the two sides of Lou’s personality, a tension
that manifests itself in his straight-faced parodies of cliché and in ironies
that only he can fully understand. Conveying the real anger felt by
those at the bottom of the heap who are terrorised into obedience, Lou
represents his own schizophrenia as an internalisation of society’s
hypocrisy: ‘“I guess I kind of got a foot on both fences. . . . All I can do

is wait until I split”’ (119).

Pop. 1280 has another small-town sheriff who acts as both the expres-
sion and the self-appointed scourge of a sick society. Nick Corey pre-
sents himself as someone who will not ‘think bad’ of people ‘until I
absolutely have to’. But when he does make up his mind he knows what
to do: ‘I always know’ (21). A trickster figure, moving behind a facade
of genial ineffectuality (‘“Me? Me kill someone? Aw, now!”’ [80]), he
satirically exposes and punishes the latent aggressions and iniquities of
small-town life. Like Lou Ford, Nick justifies his actions on the grounds
that he is just honestly admitting and acting out the self-interest that
motivates the entire community: ‘What I loved was myself, and I was
willing to do anything I god-danged had to to go on lying and cheat-
ing and drinking whiskey and screwing women and going to church on
Sunday with all the other respectable people’ (119-20). He delivers dia-
tribes on communal hatred, hypocrisy and self-deception, and the
ironies of his declarations get more savage as the end of the narrative
nears. Nick declares that he is going to start cracking down on anyone
who breaks a law, ‘“Providing, o’ course, that he’s either colored or some
poor white trash that can’t pay his poll tax”’ (155). Much more explic-
itly than Lou, Nick represents himself as a Christ figure, a final aberra-
tion that embodies a pitying and frustrated sense of the awful realities
of human life:

Not homes. . .     . Just pine-board walls locking in emptiness. . .                . And

suddenly the emptiness was filled with . . . all the sad terrible things

that the emptiness had brought the people to . . . the stink and the
terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame
of your deadness. . . . I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our

Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that
something like murder didn’t seem at all bad by comparison (197-8).

Nick’s role, under the circumstances, is just ‘followin’ the holy precepts
laid down in the Bible. . . . To coax [people] into revealin’ theirselves,

an’ then kick the crap out of ‘em’ (206).

In two of the other paperbacks Thompson wrote for Lion in the fifties,
The Criminal (1953) and The Kill-Off (1957), the central murder is not
finally ‘solved’, nor the murderer known for certain: Thompson has
further varied the form of the thriller by providing no answers, no fixing
of guilt on one person. Through the device of multiple narrators, he
captures the scandal-mongering and ill nature that set the tone of small-
town life and establishes the shared guilt of a whole community. As
Nick Corey says - getting to the heart of Thompson’s own satiric
methods - ‘“there can’t be no personal hell because there ain’t no per-
sonal sins. They’re all public, George, we all share in the other fellas’
and the other fellas all share in ours”’ (98).