Two Books
Aug 12, 04:52 AM Robert O.After a long period of indulging myself in science fiction—a genre that I admit I won’t ever really give up on—I allowed myself to indulge in genre mystery and, specifically, crime fiction.
Crime fiction, for those who might not know, is a specific aspect of mystery fiction. In the popular mindset, most people consider mystery fiction to be synonymous with the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character. This is not entirely untrue, since detective and sleuth fiction by nature includes a crime as an aspect of the storytelling, but crime fiction doesn’t need the sleuth character, nor does it necessarily need the unraveling of a shrouded plot to really drive it forward. Good crime fiction can be about the committing of a crime, or the lifestyle of people whose lives are largely driven by committing criminal acts.
Some might argue with this but for me, it’s the most logical and inclusive approach, and provides an important starting point for the two novels discussed here.
The first book I want to highlight is my first real dive into the Hard Case Crime line of novels. If you haven’t heard of these (and you really should, considering they’ve been out for a while) they’re a revivalist-noir publishing line devoted to reprinting classic works of crime and noir detective fiction, printing compelling new work in the category, and packaging everything in a slick and attractive retro style that is entertaining on a level all its own.
The book, The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer, is a very blue, sex-driven romp through two murders: one thoroughly planned and deliberately passive, one quick and very intense. The relatively brief amount of violence is in contrast to the sexuality that blankets the storyline almost from beginning to end. The main character whose voice forms the first-person narrative is that of a roughly-mid-thirties male TV repairman named Jack, whose background is an implied rough, street life. He begins a wild if improbable sexual relationship with eighteen-year-old Shirley Angela, a posh suburban youth whose boredom and resentment against her invalid stepfather eventually leads, with Jack’s help, to a murderous intent. This drive to murder has not only a sexual promise to it, but a lucrative financial promise as well—Shirley Angela’s stepfather is hardly starving for cash, of course, and though I won’t spill the specific ending, needless to say all does not end well.
The plot is driven by means of storytelling techniques that aren’t entirely true to reality, and at times the book skirts close to, if not over, themes of violence to women that wouldn’t be acceptable to a mainstream audience these days. However, you wouldn’t be reading it if you weren’t at least willing to read through things like that—warts and all, it’s an original example of sex-tinged noir writing.
The second is a novel I read some months ago and is an unlikely choice for crime fiction—though the book blatantly fits the category.
Never Die Alone by Donald Goines is a book that suffers from all the worst results of being stigmatized somewhat by its categorization as an African American interest title. Goines books have generally sold well for years, and have influenced urban, black and hip-hop culture in a number of ways, yet the books to my knowledge enjoy few white readers, and even fewer critical or academic readers.
Goines’s work is attractive not merely because of his reflections in contemporary culture, where he is certainly still influential, but for his vivid understanding of crime. Goines portrays all the aspects of the criminal experience—criminal, victim and innocent bystander, with an enthralling and powerful level of skill because he embodied throughout his life all three perspectives. Goines published an impressive sixteen novels between 1971 and 1975, with one novel being published posthumously after his murder during what is believed to be a botched drug deal.
Goines, like any true crime writer, is naturally obsessed with exploitation as a plot drive and a characterization motive. The previously-mentioned Gil Brewer, like most of his noir and hard-boiled counterparts, tended to use sexuality with brief, punctuating moments of violence to titillate readers. For Goines, sex is always present but never quite relevant. Goines is willing to break the taboos of illustrating scenes of rape, whether or not that might be the taste of his readers. Goines’s violent scenes tend to be drawn out and feature such a level of inventiveness as to be torturous in themselves—a torturous quality that Goines uses to further highlight the distinctions between criminal, victim and bystander.
Goines also has social motivations that few other writers of his type seem to exhibit. Mickey Spillane’s vision of society is somewhat right-wing and libertarian in tone, with an individual set apart from society and drawing upon personal determination to solve problems and achieve greatness. Goines, by contrast, offers a more progressive and unified vision of society, although it’s shrouded by a criminalized social perception. For Goines, to become a well-recognized individual simply means that one will be targeted all the more, and that one’s resources can be limited by how flagrantly one treats his or her supposed friends and allies.
Yet another more fascinating point in Goines’s books is his absolute disallowing of any character to benefit from the results of criminal activity. This isn’t entirely unlike much noir crime fiction where the motif is “crime doesn’t pay,” yet Goines chooses more complicated and subtle reasons to keep his characters from making the big score that they often spend the whole book working toward. For Goines, gaining a benefit from a crime is the result of disrupting a social framework that can have negative almost karmic results. Goines does not frame his fictionalized crimes as a result of perception of property rights or of financial values, but in terms of the physical and social tolls that crime can have on an individual or a community.
Unlike much of what is characterized as “black exploitation,” this book at least attempts to promote a socially responsible message underneath a veneer of hardened crime. Goines’s work is at least distinguishable for that reason.
Yank Our Chains
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