Full Dark, No Stars (2010) by Stephen King

Full Dark, No Stars (2010) by Stephen King: King's third four-novella collection (after the great Different Seasons and the indifferent Four Past Midnight) is a bleak affair in which three of the four novellas feature women revenging themselves against monstrous men.

1922: This is the closest thing King has ever written to a noirish novel by James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) or Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me). Out in the bleak Midwest of  the Year of Our Lord 1922, a farmer plots to kill his wife because she wants to sell her land to a hog-butchering firm. Narrated by the farmer in first-person, 1922 is a bleak tale of (possibly) spectral revenge with a hint of Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart." 

King does a great job here of writing a protagonist whom, while well-spoken, is as dumb as a fencepost. He doesn't go Blood Simple -- he's simple long before he sets out on his murderous course. And he takes a lot of people with him. It's a haunting, distressing piece of work with no particularly sympathetic characters.

Big Driver: Things go terribly wrong for a female mid-list mystery novelist on her way home from a speaking engagement. Is revenge in the cards? Yes. Yes it is. The protagonist is sympathetically drawn (and is one of King's few characters with a cat as a pet, for what that's worth). The antagonists sort of slide off the believability plateau about two-thirds through, allowing for gruesome revenge without any need to parse the rightness or wrongness of it all.

Fair Extension: The shortest piece is also the grimmest. Well, maybe. A cancer-stricken man makes a deal with the Devil (or a devil, perhaps), possibly the same one from King's award-winning short story "The Man in the Black Suit." Things go poorly, though perhaps not as one thinks. It's a sort of one-note horror piece, drawn out a bit too long.

A Good Marriage: Revenge will be served again, as a woman married for more than 20 years to a seemingly good-guy accountant discovers that he's a serial killer. The novella's examination of what one would do under these circumstances is nuanced and suitably thrill-filled, backed by a sort of existential dread about just how much anyone knows about even their closest friends and loved ones. The investigator who shows up at the end seems to be a dry run for Bill Hodges in character if not in physical appearance.

Overall: Well worth a read. Nothing here hits the heights of the four bruisers in Different Seasons (Apt Pupil, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Body, and The Breathing Method). Really, what could? And when do we get a goddammed movie of The Breathing Method, btw?

The Cutie (1960) by Donald E. Westlake

The Cutie (a.k.a. The Mercenaries) by Donald E. Westlake (1960): Early novel from beloved crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, handsomely re-released in paperback by Hard Case Crime. It's also been given Westlake's preferred title, though the Cutie of the title is not what you'd think from the cover.

Westlake's strengths include a talent for intricate plots, apt bits of metaphoric description, and precise and concise characterization. Even this early in his career, all those strengths are present in The Cutie: you don't need to read this just to be a Westlake completist. You don't even need to care who Westlake is, though you will by the end.

Standalone novels like this one put Westlake firmly in the line of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. The Cutie's first-person narrator, a troubleshooter (pretty much literally) for a mob boss in New York, impresses the reader with his determination to find a killer even as his own almost split personality when it comes to violence becomes more and more apparent. He's not a dead soul, but he's probably damned.

Nonetheless, the narrator's pursuit of a murderer who's made things hot for his mob boss hums with menace and moral rot. And the narrator grows just enough in his own self-assessment that the ending comes as a grim epiphany: the things that the narrator  assumed worked one way may instead work completely differently, at least when you're the boss. 

Verisimilitude makes this sort of street-level thriller work. I don't know how accurate Westlake's depictions of the working of crime in 1960 really are, but they seem real. One of the best bits is a classification of all cops into one of four categories, with the pros and cons of each type. It seems like the sort of thing a killer who's always been too evolved for his econiche might formulate during his downtime. And it's moments like that, among others, that make Westlake worth reading decades after what were supposed to be disposable novels were published. Recommended.

Fools in Love

The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the novel by James M. Cain, written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, directed by Tay Garnett, starring John Garfield (Frank Chambers), Lana Turner (Cora Smith), Cecil Kellaway (Nick Smith), Hume Cronyn (Arthur Keats), and Leon Ames (DA Sackett) (1946): It took more than a decade for Hollywood to figure out how to adapt James M. Cain's scandalous, banned-in-Boston bestseller about two dumb people who are really, really bad at staging a murder, and even worse at getting away with it.

It's pretty much of a piece with Cain's other two major novels, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, in depicting how the quest for material comfort and success can drive people to do almost anything, and can poison almost any relationship.

Gone are the sadomasochistic elements in the adulterous relationship between drifter Frank Chambers and young trophy wife Cora Smith (Cora Papadakis in the novel -- the Greekness of Cora's husband has been excised along with the sexual kinkiness). And the ending goes for an upliting 'Crime Does Not Pay' message not entirely supported by the novel, wherein law enforcement can be as creepy and tricky as any criminal.

The Postman Always Rings Twice nonetheless represents one of the high points in the development of American film noir, showing that the American West Coast and its highways and byways can be as menacing as any city landscape. Lana Turner is beautiful and a bit flat as Cora, while Garfield is suitably dumb and lovestruck as her lover Frank. Cecil Kellaway plays Nick as vaguely Irish comic relief, which really neither suits the novel nor the tone of the movie, but there it is. Hume Cronyn does a nice, oily turn as a manipulative defense attorney. Remade far more explicitly and far less effectively with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Recommended.