----- Original Message ----- From: "Etienne Borgers" <
wbac1203@wanadoo.be>
> James Hadley Chase (Raymond Marshall was his second
pseudonym)
> This British writer has to be remembered as well, in
spite of all the
> negative aspects one may find to his work, going
from plagiarism to
> hyperprolific production, with the use of ghost
writers (more than rumors
> pretend Graham Greene was one of them for a couple
of novels signed by
JHC)
> and the standardization of the last part of his
corpus.
It's hard to believe that the same person wrote "The Dead
Stay Dumb" (1939) and "One Bright Summer Morning" (1963).
Most writers improve throughout their career, a few remain on
the same level, but Chase's decline is so steep that you'd
swear that by 1946 ("Make the Corpse Walk") his grammar and
syntax have reverted to that of a struggling and really quite
remarkably ungifted twelve year old.
>In spite of all
> this, Chase was an important and successful noir
producer with some
> influence on writers that followed, at least with
the novels he wrote at
> the beginning of his career (from the first one in
1939 until - roughly-
> 1950).
> Even if Chase was sometime mimicking American
writers, in his first
novels,
> later he had a real influence of his own- at the
time-, and therefore
> certainly belongs to the roots of Brit
Noir.
Despite what I said above, "No Orchids For Miss Blandish" and
"The Dead Stay Dumb" (both 1939) are excellent. Not everybody
agrees, of course. Some people disagree quite strongly, in
fact. George Grella, writing in "Tough Guy Writers of the
Thirties", has this to say:
"NO ORCHIDS..represents the ultimate in the decadence of the
form. The work of an Englishman who obviously learned all he
knew about the United States from gangster fiction, [not
true: he owned a map and a dictionary of American slang -
Al], the novel's plot is loosely stolen from Faulkner's
SANCTUARY. In dialogue, action, locale, and character the
book is ridiculous; it would be a funny example of American
gangster influence in England if it were not an utterly
obscene book. Like Faulkner, Chase uses the impotent gunman,
another apparently unmotivated killer, and his love for an
unattainable girl whom he has kidnapped, as the center of the
novel. The book shows a relentless obsession with the most
frighteningly sadistic and masochistic cruelty, an
appallingly brutal sexuality, and a voilence so explicit, so
badly presented, and so meaningless as to make Mickey
Spillane seem a very reticent, old-maidish type with his nose
only pressed against the torture room window. Chase
apparently took all the elements he found striking in
gangster fiction and magnified them as far as his imagination
and the censors would allow; the result is one of the rarest
of rare birds
[can a book become an honourary rara-avian? - Al], a truly
horrible book."
If anyone is still tempted to read NO ORCHIDS, watch out.
There are two versions. The second, 1961, "has been rewritten
and revised by the author who feels the original text with
its outmoded dialogue and its 1938 atmosphere would not be
acceptable to the new generation of readers who may be
curious to read the most controversial, the most discussed
and the best known gangster story ever to have been written."
At this point, as you no doubt can infer, the author was
losing it big time. A suspicious mind might even consider the
possibility that JHC wanted to strip Graham Greene's
influence from the book, hence the revision. Anyway,
collaboration or not, get the 1939 version.
Al
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Jul 2002 EDT