0 The Cosmic Puppets (1953)

In case I needed any reminders of Philip K. Dick's productivity, this little feller comes along: written in 1953, his fifth novel, and published in 1957, his fourth published. It's raw and fanciful, basically going to the H.P. Lovecraft well for its charge, yet insanely compelling. It reminds me of the kind of exercises produced by another '50s science fiction writer, Fredric Brown, small-town American innocence in confrontation with dark forces. It also foreshadows Rod Serling by several years, and Dick could well have been under the spell of Ray Bradbury too. Guy is on vacation with his harpy wife. Decides he wants to pay a visit to the town where he was born and lived until he was 9, nearly 20 years earlier. But when he gets there everything is different in weird ways. The streets and stores have different names and nobody remembers him. Also kids are molding with clay and the objects come to life. Plus something about the anthropomorphic shape of the horizon. It's all quite mysterious. And as the plot wends its way across its stepping stones of convenience and coincidence it never loses momentum. The potency of the ideas is still strangely strong. There is a fairly steady stream of weird shit going on at any given time, and one of the secrets to this whole thing is the trim size, under 150 pages. It keeps you guessing, whops you upside the head, ropes you and jerks you along, and before you know it it's done. Good and evil weigh in with all the usual markers—rats, spiders, and snakes on the one side, sunshine and golden goodness on the other. There's not a lot to it but it is profoundly Dick all the same, at a practically primitive brainstem level, with cascading masks of reality itself continually tearing away and filling in again with fresh detail. That's how he does it. Who does that? And somehow he burrows inside our heads as well, to the kind of dislocations of novels such as Martian Time-Slip, when it feels like he's actually in there, doing something. Changing reality. There are roots of that here.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Cosmic Puppets (1953)

0 The Criminal (1953)

Although in many ways The Criminal reads like a Jim Thompson typing exercise, filled with typical language and situations, it is also the closest I've seen yet to "Dostoevskian," with its nearly total abstraction of a rape and murder. It is also a fragment, offering virtually no resolution and very little explanation, at least beyond, "Everything is corrupt and what if it wasn't." And it traffics in a popular noir device, apportioning the narrative chores to multiple first-person characters divided by chapter. Several characters get a chapter or two apiece. Kenneth Fearing has a very nice version in The Big Clock, but I suspect it all starts with As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, who could well be an outsize model for many crime writers of the mid-20th century. I get the feeling they were all well aware of him. In many ways The Criminal feels pro forma: the slutty teen tramp, the stammering good boy who behaves suspiciously because he's such an innocent, and endless corruption everywhere else. As always, the seven deadly sins play a vital role, and institutions such as newspapers and the criminal justice system are so rotten they are casual about the venalities that motivate them. As always, Jim Thompson's inner knowing raconteur keeps it compelling and compulsively readable. This may be an early attempt at innovating non-ending endings, but feels less thought through and more as if he reached some predetermined page or word count and stopped. All indications are that there's still plenty of plot to develop. After getting the young boy Bob Talbert, "the criminal" of the title, well and deeply into trouble, with charges of the aforesaid rape and murder via all the corruption extant and no good man to do a thing about it, he throws it into reverse and seems prepared to back out again, but that's where it stops. I don't even come away with a clear idea of who the guilty party actually is, or even probably is, or could be. Thompson may be at pains to portray everyone as guilty, and there's an argument it really doesn't matter. In fact, it could have been Talbert—he's more likely by circumstance than anyone else. And yet that would do little to change our perceptions. He's practically the most innocent person here no matter what.

In case it’s not at the library.

Detail: The Criminal (1953)

0 Savage Night (1953)

Here's another Jim Thompson novel that I like very well, and in spite of the clunky way it moves. Again, these stories seem to just come spinning out of Thompson's head, carried by a certain headlong, heedless momentum. Even a moment's thought can deal lethal blows to narrative credibility. But never mind. Thompson's voice somehow keeps things compelling. Savage Night is about the visit that legendary hit man Carl Bigelow makes to a small college town. He is there to kill a man who is about to testify in a case that could hurt the man who has hired Bigelow. This man is known only as "The Man," and even celebrity assassin Bigelow fears him. Bigelow narrates the tale, and though he doesn't take long to reveal his identity, he withholds it awhile. We are thus ushered into a world where, in Alfred Hitchcock's famous formulation—or was it Thompson himself?—"things are not as they seem." That's something Thompson does very well, if occasionally ham-handedly, obviously making things up as he goes along (which novelists do, but you know what I mean). And so legendary hit man Carl Bigelow, who has earned his celebrated reputation with multiple slayings to his credit, each one ordered and paid for, turns out to be an orphan who owes much of his good fortune to a kindly old couple who took him in as a boy. The pressures of cognitive dissonance produce strange results. Savage Night notably has one of Thompson's great moments, which I give you now, when Carl finds himself in early scenes seducing (or seduced by) Ruthie, the maid who is missing a leg. He goes into detail:

I looked, and closed my eyes quickly. But I couldn't keep them closed.
It was a baby's foot. A tiny little foot and ankle. It started just above the knee joint—where the knee would have been if she had one—a tiny little ankle, not much bigger around than a thumb; a baby ankle and a baby foot.
The toes were curling and uncurling, moving with the rhythms of her body...
"C-Carl... Oh, C-Carl!" she gasped.
After a long time, what seemed like a long time, I heard her saying, "Don't. Please don't, Carl. It's a-all right, so—so, please, Carl... Please don't cry any more—"

End of chapter.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Savage Night (1953)

0 The Alcoholics (1953)

I'm not about to second-guess Jim Thompson on the look and feel of rehab facilities in the '50s, but the treatment center in this one, El Healtho by name, veers toward the unbelievable, not least in the jolly way it seems to be run by Dr. Peter S. Murphy on a belief that alcoholics will just go on drinking no matter what, straying at will over into upbeat "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" territory. Dr. Murphy looks the other way in some cases, even provides patients with drinks, apparently with an idea that giving them drinks of smaller volume now will somehow head off problems of drinking too much later. Meanwhile, the nurse on duty, Lucretia Baker, lisps and is a sadist. This is minor Jim Thompson for a reason, but it is Jim Thompson through and through. There's a plot about the facility and Dr. Murphy being dangerously in arrears financially, then some kind of redemption via the refusal to help cover up a lobotomy performed on a member of a rich family largely because he was a nuisance (or maybe to keep his mouth shut about something, that's not entirely clear). It veers quite wildly between hardboiled depravity Jim Thompson style and the strangely jovial antics of patients and staff alike, reminiscent of Frank Capra, as they pull together and get things done. Under the non-treatment treatment strategy practiced at El Healtho, the patients, one at a time and each for their own reasons, grin big, clap arms across shoulders, and give up drinking forever. The Alcoholics has a big happy ending and also numerous smaller happy endings dotted all over. Nurse Baker, for example (spoiler alert), changes her ways after once having sex with Dr. Murphy and actually becomes quite obedient—"Yeth, thir!" There are multiple convenient careers held down by the patients that prove remarkably adroit—a marketing man, publishers, etc. I said I'm not going to second-guess Jim Thompson on this, and certainly much of the raw behavior of drinking depicted here rings true enough. But boy, these miracles. Left and right. With the happy endings, I think you have to take it as a comedy pure and simple, because otherwise it's hard to believe a word of it, including "and" and "the." On the other hand, yes, everything I love about Jim Thompson is adequately covered in Lucretia Baker, R.N., the lisping sadist—inspired, freaky, and mordant.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Alcoholics (1953)