A Brief Note on the Politics of the 'Serious Thriller' in 30s Britain
Unlike
their American counterparts, British writers like Graham Greene and
Eric Ambler were never inclined to give a sympathetic role to the
armed gangster and were much more likely to class any violent criminal
as a psychopath, the man excluded from the human community . There
was a deep-rooted sense that criminality and violence were inherently
un-British. In comparison to America, with its more visible urban
crime and its Prohibition gangsterism , British criminals were decidedly low profile, providing little material
for a romanticised gangster mythology. Involved mainly in activities
like protection, racecourse racketeering and street-betting, they were not
known for shootings and machine gun battles, tending instead to sort out
their quarrels with chivs, knives and bottles. It was only in the
1940s, after taking advantage of wartime opportunities for organising rationing,
gambling and prostitution, that 'spivs and racketeers entered the
public consciousness and...began to appear in films and novels.' [i]
There are some notable crime-centred British novels written before 1945,
but criminals who are largely sympathetic are also unarmed and undangerous,
and violent psychopaths are distinctly un-British. Most often,
in fact, they are the kind of men who would unhesitatingly 'split with Hitler'.
Passing references to Hitler aside [ii] , the
main political thrust of the American gangster novel during this
period is domestic. In England and often also in continental Europe,
on the other hand, the 'great man' as 'great gangster' analogy was recurrently
related to the rise of fascism . In Germany such comparisons were quickly
suppressed. Banned immediately after the Nazi take-over, Fritz
Lang 's Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) was made, according to Lang, 'as an allegory
to show Hitler's processes of terrorism' by putting Nazi slogans, doctrines
and paranoid ambitions into the mouths of criminals. [iii] Brecht
, in Arturo Ui , cast a comically de-romanticised gangster as a man of power,
but again this was clearly not a work likely to find favour in Nazi Germany.
Written in 1941 but not performed for nearly two decades (1958), Brecht's
'parable play' satirises Hitler's rise to power as the take over of
a Chicago gangster, 'the biggest gangster of all times' following 'the
call of destiny', securing peace with machine guns and rubber truncheons (8;
95). For British writers of this period, living in a country dominated
by the fear of an impending war , violence was not generally admitted
as an understandable response to economic deprivation and powerlessness.
Instead, there was the nightmare image of the 'civilised normality' of England
menaced by the unnatural monstrosity of fascist violence.
As is apparent in Orwell 's response to James Hadley Chase 's No Orchids
for Miss Blandish , in the context of the late thirties, even the non-political
representation of the psychopathic gangster tends to be
read in relation to continental political violence . Chase's novel struck
Orwell as a debased American import that unwittingly expressed the moral atmosphere
of fascism . Immensely popular, selling over a million copies
in the first five years, [iv] No
Orchids was adapted first for the theatre
and then for the cinema (by St John L. Clowes in 1948).
The film raised an outcry both because of its obvious debt to American gangster
films and because of its sex, perversion and sadism . [v] The most obvious influence on Chase's conception
was Popeye in Faulkner 's Sanctuary (1931), with his jerking hat and 'vicious cringing' look, a misbegotten,
impotent embodiment of pathological violence quite unlike the very human criminals
of most American thrillers of the thirties and early forties. In popular
film and fiction, there were (as in the character of Doc in Nobody
Lives Forever ) minor psychopathic characters lurking at the margins, but the 'psychologising
' of the gangster-protagonist is mainly, in the United States, a post-war
phenomenon, evident in such Cagney films as White Heat
(1949) and Kiss Tomorrow
Goodbye . In No Orchids,
the violent gangster, Slim, is a mother-dominated psychopath comparable
to Cagney in White Heat, but without any of the romantic rebel
overtones. He is an 'idiot' who is 'mean and bad right through'.
The explanation of his having a background 'typical' for a 'pathological killer'
(28) bears more than a passing similarity to Popeye's profile. The descriptions
of Slim in the act of killing are used to evoke horror. As his idiot
mask slips to reveal the killer, the reader is told that he feels 'the same
odd ecstasy' he always felt when killing (34). The social critique implicit
in Chase's novel is quite different from that in the American gangster novels
we have examined. Slim is not a product of his society but, like any
threatening external force, he is a test of its resolve. Whereas American
writers of the time use the rise of the gangster and his violent aggression
as an analogue for the ambitious careers of those at the top, Chase presents
Slim a as perverted and monstrous creature who is dangerous because modern
'good time' society lacks the moral fibre to stand against him. As Miss
Blandish says of being held in captivity by Slim, '"I'm a person without
any background, any character or any faith...I haven't believed in anything
except having a good time"' (155-6).
Writers of more 'serious' thrillers than those of Chase used the figure
of the gangster to engage explicitly with the political dangers
and tensions of the late thirties. Graham Greene , in particular, uses
psychotic, dehumanised criminal types to image the extremity of brutally
aggressive behaviour. [vi] In Gun for Sale (1936) and Brighton Rock (1938) Greene associates violence with those who are
on the margins of society, literally and symbolically homeless and untutored
in English decency and 'respectability'. Both Raven and Pinkie are characterised
as immature. They do not possess the kind of redeeming innocence of,
say, Anderson 's young outlaws but are distorted personalities, born to violence
and 'doomed to be juvenile', [vii] and thus beyond all possibility of
growth or change. In Gun for Sale,
Raven's name, his background and his physical appearance all mark him out
as wholly other. He is less than human, with his hare-lip, his ugliness,
his 'bitter screwed-up figure', his inner coldness and his failed sexuality
(5). Greene does include in the novel two caricatured figures (Major Calkin
and Buddy Fergusson) whose behaviour suggests the presence within Britain
of the home -grown masculine aggression traditionally associated with
the sensational thriller and adventure story. But whereas these
men are linked to fantasy violence, Raven is the thing itself.
He is an abomination metaphorically paired with his gun, 'dark and thin and
made for destruction' (13).
An altogether more complex character, Pinkie is explained in both socio-economic
and theological terms. He possesses a viciousness that is a consequence
of social injustice and exploitation but is also a central actor in Greene's
drama of good and evil. Having begun with the intention of producing
a crime story, Greene shifted the novel towards a theological vision that
required a conception of evil going far beyond a socially conditioned corruption
of values, and the fact that he was able to incorporate the young gangster
in such a vision suggests how completely he had detached his violent
criminal from human normality. Pinkie, like Scarface , is scarred,
but in his case the scarring is not simply the mark of initiation into the
world's violent realities but part of a cluster of physical and psychological
traits that conventionally distinguish the dehumanised villain. Again,
what we see is a stunted appearance, sexual abnormality and a diseased pathological
violence manifested in minutely detailed sadism . These are the
signs that ensure Pinkie's 'capacity for damnation' but also, on a more secular
level, make it natural for Greene to relate his gangland aspirations to continental
political threats. The power Pinkie wants for himself is that
wielded by Colleoni, boss of 'the great racket', whose expansive gestures
map 'the World as Mr Colleoni visualised it'. Pinkie, challenging his
power, is imaged as 'a young dictator' of unlimited ambition, his breast aching
'with the effort to enclose the whole world' (132-5).
[ii] There is, for example, in Love's Lovely
Counterfeit , 134-5, a passing comparison of an
ex-gangster boss to Hitler .
[iii] 'Fritz Lang ', New York World Telegram, 11 June 1941, quoted by Siegfried Kracauer,
From Caligari to Hitler : A Psychological History of the German
Film (Princeton University
Press, 1947; 1974), 248-9.
[vi] Borde and Chaumeton credit Greene with playing a role 'in the birth of
film noir (This Gun For Hire), in the acclimatization of noir in England (Brighton
Rock ), and in its international development.'
Quoted by Naremore, 48.