I'm gonna kick off Thirties month with Whitfield's GREEN ICE.
Since I'm not much of a short story reader, there wasn't much
for me to read for the Twenties, so I started in on the
Thirties a couple months ago. I planned on reading a couple
and moving on to the Forties, but the Thirties were a
spectacular time for hardboiled, and I've found it hard to
get away from them.
Raoul Whitfield's GREEN ICE came out in 1930, early enough to
rank it among the earliest hardboiled novels written.
Although this is the earliest hardboiled novel I have read
that doesn't have a private investigator as a protagonist, it
still follows the formula closely. According to guidelines
outlined in Somerset Maugham's "The Decline and Fall of the
Detective Story," this is not a good story. Maugham allows a
maximum of two murders, preferrably with the second one
covering up the first, with any number exceeding this both
excessive and in poor taste. In GREEN ICE the body count
exceeds the Maugham limit by page 10.
The style is lean and mean, with Dashiell Hammett describing
it as, "Naked action pounded into tough compactness by
staccato, hammerlike writing." Hammett's opinion is quite
possibly prejudiced though. Not only is Whitfield's style so
similar to Hammett's that the critics complained about it,
but the two were also drinking buddies.
The fast-paced story begins with Mal Ourney being released
after a two-year prison sentence. While in prison Ourney
apparently develops sympathy for the small-time criminals
that the big criminals use and abuse, and hatches a plan to
get the big guys when he gets out. Rumors of this spread
outside the prison walls and he is a target for a frame-up
within hours of his release.
Compared to the brutal and purposely harsh attitudes of
Carroll John Daly's Race Williams and Hammett's Con Op, Mal
is markedly more reserved and thoughtful. He doesn't carry a
gun, he doesn't kill anybody, and he gets knocked out by a
smaller guy when he gets in a fight. These surprisingly
conservative traits, anticipating Whitfield's Jo Gar char-
acter in later stories, are a significant contribution to the
evolution of the genre. Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko
seems like a possible descendent, a guy who's toughness lies
more in his attitude than in acts of physical
aggression.
One small complaint I would make about the novel is that Mal
and most of the other characters are continuously rehashing
the events and speculating on motive and guilt. By the second
half of the novel this continous process becomes a bit worn
and tedious.
miker
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