Fatal men

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Fatal Men

Extract from Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001)

Killer protagonists proliferate in the post-World War Two noir thriller: revenge -seekers, criminally inclined social climbers and scornfully superior psychopaths , these 'fatal men' derive from earlier noir character types, all of them being in some measure victims seeking to become active agents and taking on the qualities of the punitive investigator , the gangster or the murderer . In these later narratives, however, the focus is less on the determining force of adverse economic circumstances than on society's demands for conformity . The pressure towards conformity shapes the behaviour of some protagonists, particularly that of the upwardly mobile murderer, and is challenged by others - the revenge figure and the psychopath . In Horace McCoy 's 1948 novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye , the psychopathic gangster protagonist makes explicit the difference between the way pre- and post-World War Two narratives allocate guilt. He argues that his college education and Phi Beta Kappa key demonstrate that he should not be used, in literature or the movies, 'as a preachment' on the theme of socio-economic determinism :

Ralph Cotter's speech is the ranting of a megalomaniac, but it also exemplifies a significant shift in the kind of explanatory framework to be found in the noir thrillers of this period. McCoy 's protagonist is in effect rejecting one of the central themes of the author's earlier work, in which private despairs and acts of violence were viewed as the effects of a brutalising socio-economic system. Like many earlier novels, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye uses the gangster as a parodic version of the American success story. But we do not follow Cotter's ascent from poverty or his efforts to reach the top of the hierarchy and become a highly visible big-shot. Instead, we observe his ability to disappear into the crowd, to conceal his superiority and loathing of the multitude from all but a select few. At the same time, his self-image is built around an obsession with separateness from the conformist multitude. He is a connoisseur of his complexes who takes a perverse pride in the individuality and unreasonableness of his psychopathic responses. With his Nietzschean posturings, he is a near relation of the gangster-as-fascist , but he has a degree of self-awareness that acts both to make him a more sympathetic figure and to make his function in the novel more complex.

This psychologising of the criminal and the concomitant movement away from treating crime as the product of socio-economic deprivation is sometimes judged to weaken the capacity of the gangster narrative to act as a critique of the capitalist system. [1] There is no doubt that focusing on the psychopathology of a character can become an indulgence of horrified fascination at the sheer nastiness of the aberrant personality, combined with a reassuring sense that normative values and conventional lives are free from these evils. It would be overly simple, however, to see the critical thrust of such novels as operating only in this comparatively straightforward way. So, for example, in McCoy 's novel, Cotter's sense of difference provides a perspective from which to view 'normality', and his disdain has a satiric edge: in the plainclothes man's face, Cotter discerns 'the flowered viciousness that only many years of petty police authority can properly mature...Subtlety and caution now come to you in a brand-new handy-size package - a pot-belly and twelve triple-A shoe' (72). Savouring his unspoken sarcasms, Cotter retains a chameleon-like ability to camouflage himself as ordinary, and in doing so calls into question the authenticity of those he apes, suggesting their hollowness and superficiality. As he walks along he copies the 'easy habitual manner' of the man-in-the-street. He acts out painstakingly and 'perfectly' the performances that 'are never mirrorized for the average man' (71). As Mark Seltzer writes, analysing the serial killer's cynical conformism and 'mask-like, ironic imitation' of the 'perfect person': 'This is the madness of the sheer conformist to social forms who at the same time merely simulates those forms...reducing the social order to a "pretendsy" signifying game .' [2] It is this double-edged capacity that gives representations of the sociopathic personality their critical power. On the one hand, the protagonist is the mouthpiece for scathing criticisms of the society from which he inwardly holds himself apart; on the other hand, the implication is that conventional modes of behaviour must be a complete sham if they can be flawlessly imitated.

In comparison to the psychopathic killer, the revenge -seeker and the status-seeker are motivated by quite focused objectives. The obsessive mindset of someone bent on revenge acts as a comment on the tendency of others to sell out to a plausible but corrupt system and to put the demands of tame conformity above truth and justice. In McGivern 's Big Heat (1953), for example, unreasoning anger is the starting point for an individual assault on received opinion and for revelations about the corrupt links between respectable life and criminality. The social-climbers and money-grubbers (more like the legitimate gangster or the psychopath as 'perfect person') try to rise in society by their pretended normality. In doing so, they reveal the fraudulence of respectability. Unlike, say, the big-time gangster, they have no wish to be 'top dog' but simply want, like Highsmith 's Ripley or Packer 's Adam Blessing , to be 'ordinarily' affluent. The ironies of such narratives are often intensified by enclosing them within a small-town environment, with its self-satisfied vocabulary of decency and normalcy. The duplicity of the whole community is exposed by representating a murderer who is indistinguishable from the average inhabitant.

Protagonist killer narratives in urban settings tend to involve one form or another of the faceless organisation, conspiring, coercing or compelling conformity . The huge, impersonal business corporation, the crime syndicate and the communist conspiracy can all fill the role of the system or 'outfit' that demands a collective identity . As the protagonist of Peter Rabe 's Dig My Grave Deep (1956) says of the criminal organisation he is trying to leave, '"...there's a deal, and a deal to match that one, ...and you spit at one guy and tip your hat to another, because one belongs here and the other one over there, and, hell, don't upset the organisation whatever you do, because we all got to stick together ..."' (20). The films of the period also provide many examples of the plot that opposes the small man to the big organisation. With the resurgence of gangster films in the late forties and early fifties, there is a new emphasis on syndicated crime and on the crime cartel and 'corporate gangsterism ' as mirror-images of legitimate capitalist enterprise. Films like I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin , 1948), Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky , 1948) and The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis , 1955) all represent individuals up against corporate criminality. As Samuel Fuller 's Pickup on South Street (1953) suggests, even the communist conspiracy turns out to be uncomfortably similar to the economic machine of monolithic, large-scale industrial capitalism - just another large, impersonal power with hidden iniquities against which the solitary hero must battle. [3]

Revenge -Seekers

Revenge -seekers can function as the most direct critics of a corrupt system, though they are not all equally outspoken. Avenging angels range from the reluctant to the overly zealous, and some are too nearly angelic to be very good at revenge . The fact that they nevertheless remain firm in their purpose is, however, a reproach to the 'silent majority'. Essentially gentle, unaggressive men who have been propelled by traumatic events into a seach for vengeance, they are kindred spirits of the ineffectual, civilised British characters of the interwar period who were unwillingly drawn into conflict by the threat of fascist violence . Fearing that their involvement will lead to the destruction of their own humanity, they are all but disqualified from their task. The quiet family man in Leigh Brackett 's The Tiger Among Us (1957), going after the members of the juvenile gang who beat him up, reaches the point at which he comes close to shooting them, but is horrified by the extent to which he has become like his antagonists: 'Because I lusted to kill them...I never wanted anything so much...The tiger stripes were showing on my own hide' (177). In An Eye for an Eye , another novel of the same year (1957, the only year in which she published crime novels [4] ), Brackett portrays a mild-mannered lawyer who becomes 'possessed of a fury so sudden and wild' (95) that he is almost unrecognisable as he pursues the man who has kidnapped his wife. It is usual for the protagonist of such narratives to meet with indifference and inaction on the part of the majority of those in the wider community , people anxious not to get involved. In other versions of this basic plot pattern, instead of communal apathy there is hostility on the part of a slavishly conformist community that unites to obstruct a protagonist's quest for justice. The small town , reacting as a body and closing itself entirely against any intrusion, functions in this way to thwart an inexperienced revenge-seeker in Harry Whittington 's Hell Can Wait (1960): 'They all seemed to be watching me. They were silent, their faces set and rigid, unblinking eyes like marbles in their sockets' (13).

Much the same conflict is to be found in urban plots involving either supposedly legitimate or manifestly criminal organisations that expect loyalty and acquiescence from all who have dealings with them. Amongst gentle avenger narratives, the best known of the fifties is perhaps McGivern 's Big Heat , in which the humane, reasonable Bannion is driven to become a destructive force, opposing corruption that involves deep connections between the 'respectable' criminal syndicate and the whole fabric of the community : 'This was their city , their private, beautifully-rigged slot machine, and to hell with the few slobs who just happened to live in the place' (123). McGivern gives Bannion an intellectual background that defines a sane, sanguine human norm which is savagely violated during the course of the narrative. It is not that he is an innocent (he is in most respects much closer to the tough guy image of Spade or Marlowe ). But his strong family life, destroyed when his wife is blown up by those seeking to kill Bannion, gives him a 'lost centre', and he has a set of values defined by his reading of 'the gentle philosophers'. The transformation forced on Bannion is symbolised by his leaving behind the books in which man is represented as naturally good and evil as 'the aberrant course, abnormal, accidental, out of line with man's true needs and nature' (15).

The opposing type of revenge -seeker is the cold, amoral, violent outsider . The stubborn refusal of the lone wolf to buckle to social pressure and the resistance to conformity and acquiescence are also present in a character like Bannion, but in contrast to Bannion this is a figure who has no compunction about killing. He is often given an impersonal or symbolic name (just 'Parker ', or Clinch or Hammer). Richard Stark [Donald E. Westlake ], who represents his most disagreeable gangsters as organisation men, sets against them one of the most memorable examples of the existential loner pitted against the criminal machine. Stark's Parker has had several incarnations on screen, including Lee Marvin 's powerful creation of the ruthless Walker in John Boorman 's Point Blank (1967), Robert Duvall 's humanised portrayal of the almost equally laconic and remorseless Macklin in The Outfit (John Flynn , 1974) and, more recently, Mel Gibson 's action-hero avenger , Porter, in Payback , Brian Helgeland 's 1999 remake of Point Blank. [5] What these diverse characterisations of the Parker figure have in common is their tenacious, obsessive single-mindedness: when Macklin's girl friend tries to persuade him that it needn't be 'this way', he simply replies, 'It does with me'. Westlake's original intention had been to have 'the bad guy...get caught at the end', but his publisher (at Pocket Books ) saw Parker's potential as a series character and persuaded Westlake to let him escape. What this meant was that Parker was quite different from the usual series protagonist: 'I'd made Parker completely remorseless, completely without redeeming characteristics,' Westlake says, 'because he was going to get caught at the end. So I wound up with a truly cold leading-series character...' [6] There is, however, something touching about Parker's sense of betrayal and his persistence in the face of terrible odds. In comparison to the typical Charles Williams or Jim Thompson criminal protagonist, he is in many ways a sympathetic figure. Westlake strongly stresses his uncompromising individualism and his honest acknowledgement of his own motives in pursuing what he sees as an adequate revenge.

What Parker is up against is a 'respectable' and successful criminal organisation, transformed between Prohibition and the present by their diversification of interests and the intricacies of their organisation. When Parker, in the first of the novels, The Hunter (1962) - the basis for Point Blank - decides to reclaim his money from the Outfit, he is told that it is impossible for the individual to stand up against something so pervasive: '"Coast to coast, Parker, it's all the same..."' (117). Except for the fact that the organisation works outside the law, it 'conforms as closely as possible to the corporate concept' (125-6). In the eyes of the Outfit, Parker is 'a heister, a hijacker'. We know that Parker is wrong in thinking that his wife was betraying him with Mal Resnick, but her acquiescence out of fear for her life makes her a foil to him. Parker's intelligent strength, psychological as well as physical, is a distinguishing trait. The first physical description of him, followed by a female response ('They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with...' [7-8]), fixes him in our minds as a male force, the embodiment of potent determination. His face may be changed for his own protection, as it is in The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), but he always retains his force and resolution, manifest in a refusal to submit that marks him out as 'a true existential '. [7] Parker is, before the start of The Hunter , thought to be dead. In a way Parker is death, a man back from the dead to revenge his betrayal and to visit death on others. This sense of a protagonist so far beyond normal life that he is 'dead to it' is central to the understanding of Boorman 's Point Blank, in which the whole narrative can be interpreted as a fantasy of revenge passing through Walker 's mind in the few moments before he dies, after having been shot at point-blank range. [8]

W.R. Burnett 's Underdog (1957) is similarly structured around the conflict between a criminal misfit and an organisation - in this case, a partnership between gangsters and corrupt politicians that sacrifices the individual to secure a smoothly operating power structure. The protagonist, Clinch, another loner with his own kind of integrity, is drawn on a less mythic scale than Parker . A genuine 'underdog' possessing no qualities of leadership, he is sustained by his contact with a good-hearted whore and a generous political boss, Big Dan Moford. Moford, who 'runs a whole city ' but is too individual in his standards to fit in with the plans of 'the gang' of those who want to run things by regularising the corrupt links between crime and politics . Though Clinch bonds with Moford, he does not 'know the meaning' of words like 'pal', 'chum' or 'buddy' (27). The vocabulary of American normalcy - all words that assert a shared ethos and conventional connection - is beyond him. His very name 'hardly seems like a name at all' (52), and the integrity born of Clinch's isolation combines at the end with his reluctant affection for Moford to spur his revenge on a killer who is 'always surrounded by crawling yes-men' (75).

The period's most famous and forthright scourge of organised rackets and their 'crawling yes-men' is Mickey Spillane 's Mike Hammer - a name is equally calculated to imply separation from ordinarily warm human instincts. Hammer first appeared in I, the Jury in 1947. Spillane's protagonist, though not a criminal , is in fact a more extreme example of the brutally aggressive revenge -seeker than either Parker or Clinch. Hammer emerges from his first-person narrative as a strongly individuated centre of consciousness. He is connected to others through love (his secretary, Velda) and friendship (Pat Chambers, his police contact), but shares more with a symbolic executioner like Satan Hall than he does with a comparatively humanised and self-doubting figure like Hammett 's Op, and is clearly allied to such later vigilante figures as Dirty Harry , Paul Kersey (Death Wish ) and Steven Seagal (Out for Justice ). Hammer's origins as a comic book character are significant, suggesting the kind of larger-than-life hero represented on Harry Sahle's cover for the unpublished 'Mike Danger' comic that formed the basis for I, the Jury - 'A vibrant personality...as ROUGH as he looks!' (see Fig. 5). [9]

Spillane 's early Hammer novels, published between 1947 and 1952, were by far the most popular late forties-early fifties reworkings of the revenge motif. His sales were phenomenal - over fifteen million copies of his books sold by 1953. [10] One of the acknowledged masters of hard-boiled fiction, Spillane exploits the possibilities of the style in ways that make his novels very different from those of Chandler and his heirs. Spillane is described by Ed Gorman as 'the great American primitive whose real talents got lost in all the clamour over the violence of his hero. He brought energy and a street-fighter's rage to a form grown moribund with cuteness and imitation Chandler prose.' [11] Like the earlier pulp tough guys, Hammer is primarily used to expose and punish the kinds of vice associated with the evil metropolis - narcotics (I, the Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly ), the prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick), blackmail (Vengeance Is Mine!). He assails the corruption that is engendered by wealth and power and that lurks under apparently admirable surfaces. His adversaries are men like the wealthy, gracious Berin-Grotin who is actually the head of a prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick) or Lee Deamer, in One Lonely Night , who turns out to be the evil twin , the 'head Commie' rather than 'the little man whom the public loves and trusts' (157). Confronted with such duplicitous enemies, Hammer shares the noir protagonist's alienation , his world-weary despair and his anger at urban corruption.

Hammer's vigilantism, like the intuitive, independent investigation of the private eye , implicitly expresses distrust of the 'faceless', impersonal mechanism of law enforcement. [12] He knows from first-hand experience how vicious life is, and when he says to the reader at the beginning of My Gun Is Quick, 'I'm not you', he is declaring a separation from bourgeois ease and illusion that has always characterised the hard-boiled investigative figure. He has an ability to understand the lawlessness of the urban jungle: 'You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured...'. But in contrast to many earlier hard-boiled writers, Spillane is led by his sense of life's viciousness towards right- rather than left-wing views. Mike Hammer acts out McCarthyite paranoia . It is not capitalism itself but hidden, conspiratorial organisations subverting American life that are to be feared, among them the communist party. Other thriller writers of the time expressed anxieties generated by McCarthyism . Even where McCarthyism is not directly mentioned, narratives in which an outsider is threatened by the accusing voice of 'normal society' are often coded references to McCarthyite persecution - to demands for conformity and for absolute loyalty, to the silencing of opposition through fear and to sacrificing the interests of the individual in the name of the collective good. Spillane, on the other hand, expresses the fears that motivated the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Hammer's savage one-man crusade is in some ways that of the existential loner, but he also has the views of the disgruntled moral majoritarian, directing his violence against a variety of demonised others suspected of subverting American life. What results is a macho conservatism that has, over the years, led to many criticisms. [13]

It is easy see why Spillane has alienated many with his vigorous, no-holds-barred style, his extremity of violent action and his unashamed commercialism (he is, he maintains, a 'writer' rather than an 'author', and writes only what he feels sure will sell [14] ). His prose is hyperbolic, sometimes surreal and hallucinatory in its evocation of sensual or grotesque physical detail: at the end of Kiss Me, Deadly , for example, 'beautiful Lily', at last revealed as an appalling scarred villainess, is set alight by Hammer, 'and in the moment of time before the scream blossoms into the wild cry of terror she was a mass of flames tumbling on the floor...The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing, into the scars of other flames and her voice the shrill sound of death on the loose' (158). Probably the most often-quoted example of Hammer's crudely violent methods is from Spillane's first novel, I, the Jury , which rewrites the famous conflict between desire and justice at the close of Hammett 's Maltese Falcon . Spade's response to Brigid O'Shaughnessy's '"Sam, you can't!"' is a reasoned defence of the code of the private eye before he hands her over to the police; Hammer gives the treacherous Charlotte a lecture on the deficiencies of the jury system, declares himself to be judge and jury, shoots her and then, looking down at 'the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in', famously answers her dying cry of '"How c-could you?"' with '"It was easy."' (187-8). Hammer's killing of the woman he 'almost loved' haunts him in subsequent novels; it contributes to his isolation , but it is not a disabling guilt, or one which makes him question the rightness of his ethic of summary justice. Even Daly 's Satan Hall , whose metaphoric qualities place him outside the bounds of human law, does not execute malefactors so cold-bloodedly.

The reader never doubts that Hammer will come out on top, and this to some extent sets him apart from the noir protagonist. Hammer asserts himself in ways that ally him closely with earlier action heroes like Race Williams and Bulldog Drummond and with more recent super-heroes like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra (George P. Cosmatos , 1986), or Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon , 1995) and RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven , 1987), which Spillane names as one of his favourite films (the other is The Terminator ). [15] Like these figures, Hammer possesses such prodigious endurance it approaches invulnerability and he responds with such effective violence that he is matched only by the most extreme of his predecessors. He proves his worth in surviving a series of tests, but the ferocity of his assaults and the relish with which he recounts them places him outside normal civilised humanity. His assertion that he in no way resembles his arm-chair-bound reader is more than just a declaration of an unillusioned knowledge of the city . It is a boast that he has the combative skills necessary for survival amidst the 'blood and terror', the 'razor-sharp claws' of the Colosseum-like city (My Gun Is Quick, 7). His competence is a form of superiority that is remote from the self-doubt and self-reproach of the noir protagonist. [16]

It is in the opening pages of One Lonely Night that Mike Hammer comes closest to the iconic noir protagonist in reflecting on his outcast status and on the brutality that renders him indistinguishable from the criminals he pursues. Alone on the bridge in the cold, fog-like rain, suicidally depressed, he broods on the way he has been denounced by the 'little judge' who reluctantly acquitted him. He feels branded as 'a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society', and goes home to dream that his gun has become 'part of me and stuck fast' (5-13). The novel in which Hammer feels most marginalised is also, however, the one in which his aggression and paranoia are most closely linked to the collective hatreds and anxieties of the American right-wing in the McCarthyite early 1950s. The decision to make his villains 'the Commie bastards' who are secretly infiltrating the country is a reflection of Spillane 's sense of what would appeal to the widest possible audience of the time. In tackling them, Hammer gives vent to violent impulses that would in the context of the fifties be judged as 'evil for the good'. [17] Though 'lonely' and intensely personal, his individualism is an expression of group hatreds and a rejection of the whole liberal machinery of law, restraint and civil rights . Vengeance is taken against those who affect conformity but in reality threaten the very fabric of American society.

Money Grubbers and Social Climbers

The revenge plot, with its central action of exposing and scourging, requires a protagonist who strips off the 'civilised' part of himself and accepts a reduction to a primitive or existential state in which he is capable of the violence required to bring down or 'reduce' the transgressor . In Gordon Williams ' The Siege of Trencher's Farm (1969) - the basis of the film Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah , 1972), still banned on video - the protagonist sees himself poised between restraint and savagery, realising that he has so far witnessed the violent assault on his house with the eyes of 'the civilised man who stood on this side of the threshold...' (118). The process of crossing this metaphoric threshold, horrifyingly represented in the later chapters of Williams' book, is a central event in many thrillers. The impact of such a transition is summed up at the end of The Executioners , the John D. MacDonald novel on which the films of Cape Fear are based (J. Lee Thompson , 1961; Martin Scorsese , 1991). When Sam Bowden finally sees the dead body of Max Cady, who had even 'smelled like some kind of animal' (147), he finds only 'a sense of savage satisfaction' that he has 'turned this elemental and merciless force into clay'. In taking his revenge on a revenger, 'All the neat and careful layers of civilised instincts and behaviour were peeled back to reveal an intense exultation over the death of an enemy' (154).

A quite different kind of killer-protagonist plot is that in which the protagonist is aiming not to reduce but to augment himself. He wants to take on the substance and, often even more importantly, the trappings of a higher social status, though this may be accomplished by primitive means that are wholly at odds with what he craves, that is, civilised luxury and heightened respectability. This upwardly mobile protagonist is himself the object of satire . In some of the more interesting narratives, he is exposed by his own first-person narration as the epitome of an aggressively materialistic society: whereas, for example, Harry Whittington 's more heroic protagonists would rather die fighting than 'surrender to greed, corruption and mean-heartedness' [18] , a Whittington protagonist killer like Charley Brower (Web of Murder ) reveals himself as the very embodiment of these qualities.

The ways in which these contrasting types of narrative work can be seen clearly in a novel that combines the two plot movements, The Killer , published in 1951 under the Wade Miller by-line. [19] A narrative that seems throughout to be about a killing motivated by revenge for a dead son turns out to be as much or more motivated by the need to conceal a dodgy business deal. The protagonist is an 'uncomplicated' professional hunter hired to carry out the revenge, and his hunter's ethic has an integrity that's lacking in the life of Stennis, the man who hires him. The prosperity of Stennis is sustained, appropriately enough, by the manufacture of Stennisfab, which offers 'Standardization down to the last nail and a new kind of prefabrication' (14). The tendency for the hunter to be reduced to the level of his own prey becomes, in The Killer , a bond between 'throwbacks' (18) who are essentially separate from a hypocritical society upheld by those for whom 'standardised' success is the only goal. The morally debilitating effects of upper-middle-class affluence also produce the main plot turn in Burnett 's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), in which there is a very similar counterpointing of the romantic primitive and the display-oriented social climber. Although Asphalt Jungle is less bound up with the sheer neediness of characters than are Burnett's earlier novels, it contains a man closely related to his thirties cast, Dix Handley. Dix's rough integrity is set against the duplicitous smoothness of Emmerich, the man who betrays the others because of his need to preserve his bourgeois respectability. The gang is destroyed by the treachery of a man who has lived 'by a system of masterly evasions, bewildering about-faces and changes of front', and, even though Dix's sentimental return home dominates John Huston 's 1950 film more than it does the novel, we are equally moved by Dix as an opposing emblem of the humanity left behind in a society that values 'class' and show. Although characters like Stennis and Emmerich remain in the background of the revenge and caper plots of The Killer and The Asphalt Jungle, their catalytic roles are evident. It is ironically their aspirations to climb out of the jungle that bring them into association with a romantic primitive, a straightforward killer who seems less reprehensible in comparison to their civilised savagery.

A more common setting for the 'social climber' novel is not the city as jungle (the urban wilderness within which the main actors suffer a reduction to the primitive) but a small town or (as in MacDonald 's Soft Touch ) a 'medium-sized city'. In such a milieu we see the workings of a complex socio-economic mechanism, within which the protagonist who has violated the social codes in over-reaching himself provokes an appropriate nemesis. Even gangster narratives (usually urban) can be set in small communities, for example, in Peter Rabe 's Kill the Boss Good-by (1956). [20] Drawing on his experience as a professor of psychology, Rabe uses a power struggle within the rackets in the back-water of San Pietro as a fable in which the success drive is presented as a national manic psychosis. The self-destruction of Fell, a gangland boss who is 'resting' after a nervous breakdown, has something in common with the gangster tragedies of the thirties (for example, Little Caesar ). What distinguishes it from its thirties counterparts is the way in which an identified mental condition is used to create an image of the sort of world Fell inhabits - in particular, of the excesses of the drive towards success in capitalistic enterprises. With San Pietro 'in the palm of his hand' (31), Fell has 'pressure left and nowhere to put it' and seems unable to stop his frenetic activity. The problem for others involved with him is to distinguish between effective entrepreneurial behaviour and incipient psychosis: Fell '"never stops"', and his behaviour is the capitalist dream gone mad (94-7).

In Rabe 's third-person narrative are able to see Fell through the eyes of those affected by his unbalanced state of mind. In several other noir thrillers of this period, first-person narratives take us inside the mind of the scheming money-grubber or social-climber, using the intimacy of this approach to satirise the self-deception, greed and underlying brutality of the American success ethic . Nothing More Than Murder (1949), the earliest of Jim Thompson 's first-person killer novels, stays with the point of view of Joe Wilmot, a small-town schemer who believes there is nothing wrong in killing for profit: it's 'just murder, nothing more than murder' (80). Thompson was a writer so disturbing and original that one wonders, with Geoffrey O'Brien , what contemporary readers made of the Lion paperback originals they picked up at newsstands, with their cover promises of 'a cheap and painless thrill'. [21] In Nothing More Than Murder Thompson issues the satirist 's challenge to his readers to see their own faces in the mirror, inserting himself in the novel as a visiting speaker, talking to an audience that applauds because 'they didn't seem to realize that they were the kind of people this author was talking about. Well...' (67). When the criminally avaricious Joe protests that '"I don't want anything I'm not entitled to..."', an insurance investigator replies, '"Oh, sure you do. We all do."' This is at the core of the novel. Joe is a 'small fry' capitalist with his own 'ideas on making money', trying to profit by underhanded means and not reckoning with the 'big boys' (117-19). There is considerable ironic justice in Joe being 'mopped up' himself by a big-league rival, a more skilful and cunning fraudster who says to Joe as he in effect puts him out of business , '"I'm sorry, Joe...It's nothing personal."' (153-4). Joe, whose mind is too slow to enable him to conceal his true character, becomes the caricatured embodiment of a culture so grasping that the 'personal' atrophies. '"It's a disappearance case,"' the insurance inspector says, and what has disappeared is not just 'some dame' sacrificed to Joe's scheme but the traits of character that enable a man to 'identify himself with the human race ' (142).

The dehumanised narrator handled with satiric detachment makes frequent appearances in other novels being written during this period for some of the major publishers of paperback originals: for example, in 1958-60, Harry Whittington 's Web of Murder (Gold Medal ), John D. MacDonald 's Soft Touch (Dell ), and Gil Brewer 's Nude on Thin Ice (Avon ). Whittington, who places Web of Murder in the tradition of James M. Cain , says of the novel's structure: 'We start the protagonist almost casually down the road to Hades and then follow him on every cruel twist and turn through increasing terror to the pit beyond hell'. [22] The description could apply to all three of these narratives, sharing as they do the characteristic noir irony of the bid for freedom that ends with worse entrapment. In each case what is involved is the entry of the protagonist into a world in which money and social position become snares that entangle him in a nightmarish parody of the success he aimed for. The status and objects pursued are transformed in sinister, surreal ways to become (as in Cain's novels) a curse and a torment. In Web of Murder, for example, a narrator who habitually subordinates everything to his material and professional ambitions richly deserves his fate - to be paralysed, sexually exploited and unable to extricate himself from the clutches of the woman who has all along best known how to manipulate his crass ambitions, a grotesque parody of the situation he began by trying to escape.

In MacDonald 's Soft Touch [23] (filmed in 1961 as Man-Trap ), the narrator, Jerry, begins as a man trapped by his own choices in a childless marriage to a drunken, unfaithful wife and in a 'meaningless job' (32). At the finish, after breaking free from being bound on a bed, he again traps himself as a result of his own greed and violence . The plot is set in motion when he succumbs to his old buddy, Vince, who shows up 'out of the past, a tiger in the night...offering the silky temptation of big violent money' (5). The suggestion here of boldly instinctive action is ironised by the phrase 'big violent money': the money itself is a strong physical presence and an agent of transformation, but it is also the antithesis of the animal energies of tigers in the night. These atavistic urges are a reduction entirely inappropriate to the socio-economic structure Jerry inhabits, and his sense of self disintegrates as he tries to reconcile primitive impulse with the establishment of his identity as a successful and civilised man. He catches glimpses of disorienting images of himself in the mirror and tries to shut off the deeds ('Murderer. Thief. It couldn't be me' [110-11]). MacDonald's final plot twist wipes out in Jerry's mind the whole of this experience of being 'somebody else'. Suffering from traumatic amnesia , he can only sense the events of the past two months flickering back in a bizarre and hallucinatory way, until he is drawn by an imperfect memory of the money to disinter the wife he cannot remember killing: 'And then they took me away' (152).

Gil Brewer 's Nude on Thin Ice [24] contains an even more surreal transformation of stolen wealth into a monstrous form of fatality . His narrator, Ken McCall, exposes himself from the outset as a man entirely suited to a life of minor dishonesties. The greed and general unscrupulousness that are his undoing are failings he is always ready to identify in those he is about to betray or abandon: 'This god-damned world was populated ass over teakettle to the hilt with sparkling parasites' (57). He readily seizes any opportunity for possible gain: 'The cross-eyed gods of the universal cash register had punched the No Sale key, and the drawer was wide open - waiting' (18-19). It is an image ironically echoed by an end in which the money he has stolen (and murdered for) is locked in a steel suitcase and Ken himself is trapped 'wide open - waiting' in the doorless adobe room he has been forced to build so that the woman to whom the crime has bound him can keep her eye on him: 'I want to always be able to see you' (141).

In their self-created entrapment these murderers are men who are compelled to 'fit in' if they are not to arouse suspicion. Other protagonist killers set a higher value on conformity for its own sake, particularly in two female-authored novels of the time, Patricia Highsmith 's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Vin Packer 's The Damnation of Adam Blessing (1961), both of which move the crime novel closer to the novel of manners and in doing so bring the guilt of the community more sharply into satiric focus. In contrast to protagonists who need to conform in order not to arouse suspicion, Tom Ripley and Adam Blessing crave approval and integration. In dealing with the social world, Highsmith's Ripley is the more successful and the more sophisticated in his judgements. Adam Blessing, as his name suggests, is more innocent, more victimised and, because of his innocence, less successful. Both Highsmith and Packer explore the indeterminacy of guilt, invoking official standards of guilt and innocence only to subvert them. There is in their novels a much greater sense of complicity and sympathy than there is in the male-authored narratives - with Packer's Adam Blessing because of his gauchely unattractive innocence and even more so with Tom Ripley, whose actions have a disturbing appeal and, in the context of the novel, make an odd kind of sense.

As Tom Ripley sets out on his mission, supposedly aimed at persuading Dickie Greenleaf to return from Europe, it is possible to read his journey as an inversion of the great American voyage of discovery. Released from the pressures of conformity and from the snare of poverty, Tom acquires on board ship a 'versatile', magical cap, capable of transforming his character and personality. Having killed 'good-natured, naive Dickie' and having assumed his identity , Tom's reflections echo the American myth of a new-found land - the 'clean state' and 'the real annihilation of his past' (98-9). Although he is travelling east rather than west, this is his rebirth as a 'true American', another parodic version of the American success ethic . Tom is determined, like the immigrants to America, to make good, moving 'Upward and onward!' (32). His extraordinary success dependant on exactly imitating the class (or at least one particular member of the class) to which he aspires. He is careful, in his impersonation, not to improve on Dickie too much (for example, not learning the subjunctive). A comic version of American adaptability, he develops a new sense of self. His other-directedness, oversensitivity and diffidence all make it easier for him to transform himself. Murder, too, serves this fantasy of upward mobility , disposing of the inconvenient facts of a subservient past. Ripley's ability to be another self brings into focus the falsity and superficiality of the social judgements that confer status and respectability, and our tendency as readers is to hope that the rest of society will fail to detect Ripley's deception. Asked by a German interviewer whether Ripley would ever lose out, Highsmith declared, 'Nein, nein! Nicht bevor ich sterbe.' [25] The suspense of the novel is built on tension between the exposure he risks and his success in evading detection, with Tom vacillating between confidence in his luck and fear of nemesis. The open-endedness of his fate both overcomes the 'fatality ' of noir and signifies the continuance of his subversive principle in the world. [26]

Patricia Highsmith , who published her novels as hard-backs with firms such as Harper and Doubleday, tried to avoid generic categorisations, observing that a writer was better treated and more seriously reviewed if he or she was not, say, 'a suspense novelist' but 'just a novelist'. [27] Vin Packer (the pen-name of Marijane Meaker) was, on the other hand, a regular writer of Gold Medal paperback originals, an exception amongst the generally male contributors to the fifties paperback boom. [28] She wrote both crime novels and lesbian 'shockers' (like the hugely popular Spring Fire ), though she, too, was eventually packaged as 'a mainstream writer whose books just happened to include crime'. [29] The Damnation of Adam Blessing shares some of the characteristics of the Ripley novels. Adam is a less attractive and rather less complex character than Tom Ripley, but there is a similar use of close third-person narration to create sympathy for the protagonist and understanding of his feeling of sensual longing for the good things in life. Both characters can be seen to function as a means of social satire , and in both cases we forgive their crimes because of the crassness and cruelty of those who have wealth and power. Like Highsmith, Packer creates her protagonist as an orphan seeking a toehold in a treacherous society, using the tensions generated as a way of exploring the American class structure and the myth of self-transformation and upward mobility . The crimes of both protagonists consist in devising ways to alter their identities, adopting methods just enough beyond the normally acceptable to put them (if the truth were known) even further beyond the pale than accidents of birth have placed them. From the very beginning, when the orphaned Adam hero-worships the wealthy man who extends condescending kindnesses to him, he works at concealing his origins (or rather, lack of origins) and pretends to strangers that he is the son of 'that rich man'. What we see throughout is Adam's own impotence, actual and metaphoric, his failure, his 'immense loneliness' (96) and his increasing desperation. He is a Candide figure, an innocent adrift in an unfriendly world, equipped with none of the social graces, hypocritical charm or guile of those who are well-adapted to life. He repeatedly thinks far better of people than they deserve and wants only to confer 'blessings' on them so that they will repay him with kindness and fellow-feeling. Like Candide, he is on the receiving end of a series of misfortunes so great that a normal person would be driven to extreme misanthropy, but for the irretrievably innocent Adam there is nothing that can make him stop living in hope. The final irony is the murder he commits, killing the beastly wife of another of his father figures in the hope that this will demonstrate his gentlemanly commitment to settling his debts. As with his present-giving, he is attempting in his own way to become a benefactor. It is, of course, a misguided effort, but Adam nevertheless acts as a foil to the rich and powerful, whose actions and motives are far less generous.

In creating Ripley , Highsmith leaves open the possibility of interpreting his behaviour as schizophrenic: for example, he is able, once he has returned to his identity as Tom Ripley, to free himself from guilt for a murder committed whilst impersonating Dickie. The emphasis, however, is strongly on his typicality, his American versatility and blankness of character. Viewed in this light, his ability to re-invent himself as the occasion demands and to feel as 'free of guilt as his old suitcase' (154) is symptomatic of the widespread tendency to evade feelings of guilt and responsibility. He has the optimistic American belief in fresh starts, the standard delusion of noir protagonists. Our dominant impression of Ripley is not of psychological imbalance but of rational self-interest, and in fact part of his insidious appeal lies in his sheer pragmatism. It lies in the fact that he resorts to murder only when it presents itself as the only reasonable means of securing his goal or preserving his freedom.

A number of other protagonist killer narratives of the time, however, are so extreme in their behaviour that the label of 'psychopath ' is more obviously appropriate. By the fifties, the pop-psychology clichŽs of the psychopath were firmly entrenched and frequently deployed in both the fiction and the films of the period. This is a trend that has continued, and over the last three or four decades audiences have been agreeably terrified at the cinema by many memorable incarnations of the psychopath as alien and monstrous, a darkly irrational threat to normal society whose death brings closure, allaying our fears of otherness . In much fiction of the fifties and sixties, even where the psychopath is presented as a superficially affable figure who tricks people into thinking of him as normal, he is also readily identified and eliminated. The novels of John D. MacDonald , for example, frequently centre on the opposition between normative and psychopathic (or 'sociopathic ') characters. Travis McGee is given the task of defeating such opponents as the amoral predator Junior Allen in The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) and, in The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968), Tom Pike, a magnetic, shrewd, entrepreneurial type who likes 'killing folks' (78, 302). In MacDonald's non-Travis McGee novels, such characters are sometimes given their own sections of narrative, bringing them much more to the fore, as in April Evil and The Neon Jungle (1953), though here again they are by the end isolated and destroyed. The use of the psychopath as narrator was well enough established by the late fifties for it to be readily available at the slick and quick end of the paperback market, for example in British gangster novellas like Hank Janson 's Kill This Man , the narrator of which is a psychotic hitman whose sadism has been provoked by female submissiveness (his mother, caricatured as a grotesque old hag grovelling before him) and who likes 'to see folk running around doing what I tell them...' (11).

Less routine, more disturbing representations of the psychopath , however, use the figure not as an alien evil but in the double role of parodic representation and embittered satirist , like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Scorsese , 1976), 'the only character who possesses a moral vision'. [30] As in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye , our perspective on events may be controlled by the psychopath's own point of view . Such narratives often blur the contrast between conventional and aberrant behaviour. This is an effect also familiar, for example, in the films of Hitchcock , whose psychopaths , though easily subjected to pop-psychological diagnosis, are disturbing precisely because of their apparent normality: films like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951) and Psycho (1960) implicate the audience by hinting at the criminal potential in everyone. In Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock's adaptation of Highsmith 's first novel, we are led to share the wish of Guy (Farley Granger ) to get rid of his troublesome wife and feel the insidious appeal of Bruno (Robert Walker ). [31] In Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie, a man indistinguishable from respectable people (honoured by the townsfolk at his funeral), functions as a scourge of small town hypocrisy, excoriating the 'swine' you would see if you ripped the fronts off the houses: 'He is a killer with a mission, bent on the destruction of what he sees as ugly...' [32]

The idea of killing as social criticism is developed in both Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith novels. In Thompson's Nothing More Than Murder (1949), for example, there is a summary of the news of the time, with random deaths and people being 'blown up, drowned, smothered, starved, lynched. Mercy killings, hangings, electrocutions, suicides. People who didn't want to live. People who deserved killing. People who were better off dead' (27-8). Thompson was one of the most remarkable of the fifties successors to writers like James M. Cain and Horace McCoy and, like them, he gained greater recognition in France than in America. [33] He is, however, more self-consciously modernist than either and, in his best-known novels, far more radically unsettling. The French proclaimed him to be 'le plus noir', the most American and the most pessimistic of the noir thriller writers. [34] Highsmith, who lived for most of her adult life in France, was in fact another writer better known and more highly respected in Europe than America. Thompson is obviously in many respects a very different writer from Highsmith, who would, for a start, never be grouped with the hard-boiled school. But in their representations of psychopathic personalities there are some striking similarities. Both writers specialise in narratives that play on the 'abnormally normal' [35] appearance and behaviour of the psychopathically unbalanced killer. Neither is aiming simply for the shock value of violence emerging where it is least expected. In their novels, the 'average-looking', 'everyone's next-door neighbour' identity of the killer is used as a means of implying that psychosis is in some ways a representative condition. Their killers' minds are split between conformity and violation. They are divergent enough to provide a cynically detached commentary on the society through which they move, but nevertheless simulate normality in an utterly plausible way. The effect is that, in looking at them, we both feel complicity and see, reflected in their states of mind, the suppressed violence of the whole community , whether affluent suburbia of Highsmith or Thompson's typical American small town .

Highsmith 's Deep Water (1957) is, like the earlier Strangers on a Train , the portrait of a blandly appealing psychopath , a man who does not see himself at all in this light, though 'diagnosed' within the text as borderline psychopath. The entirely civilised Vic van Allen, with his pleasant, 'ambiguous' face(9), scrupulously retains a demeanour that conforms to the rules of society. But he is different enough and intelligent enough to see through the pretences and petty vanities of others, and on most social occasions we are party to the acerbic running commentary in Vic's internal reflections - his sarcastic observations, his caricatured images and the surreal insights that liberate him from a stifling environment. When told '"He thinks you're cracked,"' Vic replies '"And the cracks shall make you free"' (163). He also commits three perfectly understandable murders. Since, in Highsmith's third-person narration, we stay very close to Vic's mind, we are led to see his killings as his ultimate expression of the contempt he feels for his neighbours. In his farewell reflections on Wilson, who seems to him to represent 'perhaps half the people on earth', he smiles 'at Wilson's grim, resentful, the-world-owes-me-a-living face, which was the reflection of the small, dull mind behind it... Vic cursed it and all it stood for. Silently, and with a smile...he cursed it' (259-60).

From 1949 on, with Nothing More Than Murder , Jim Thompson created a succession of off-beat and subversive portraits of psychologically disturbed protagonist-murderers. Nothing More than Murder was followed by The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), A Hell of a Woman (1954), The Nothing Man (1954), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) and Pop. 1280 (1964). All but A Swell-Looking Babe are written in the first person, and all use the form for savage satiric exposure. The most remarkable and ambitious of these are the first novel Thompson wrote for Lion , The Killer Inside Me , and companion piece written a dozen years later, also for Lion, Pop. 1280. [36] In both novels, the alienated position of the psychopath creates a perspective from which he looks down on his small-town society as a scathing observer, stripping off illusory surfaces and denouncing what he sees. Robert Elliott, in The Power of Satire, quotes Ben Jonson 's lines on Archilochus, who according to tradition could 'Rime 'hem to death'. This 'curious legend', as Elliott observes, captures something of the 'malefic power' of the satirist to wound his enemies: 'The word could kill; and in popular belief it did kill.' [37] For Lou Ford and Nick Corey, the killer-protagonists of The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, there is also a strong connection between the 'malefic power' of words and the act of murder. The satirist's curse is a substitute for killing: 'I wanted...[to] do something worse' (Killer Inside Me, 51). When Lou and Nick do kill, they represent themselves as simply taking to a logical conclusion their critiques of small-town American society, and as putting into practice the secret wishes harboured by others. Both are 'typical' not just in the sense that they have the chameleon-like ability to impersonate 'normality' but also in that they do 'what other people merely think'. [38] They are shown as conforming scrupulously to the conventional social forms that, as lawmen, they officially uphold, but as cynically recognising the hollowness of these forms and of the 'pretendsy' (Killer Inside Me, 187) nature of most people's apparent adherence to them. Lou Ford's role as denouncer of a corrupt and morally bankrupt society is most to the fore in his speech to Johnnie Pappas, whom he is readying himself to kill: '"Yeah, Johnnie...it's a screwed up, bitched up world, and I'm afraid it's going to stay that way...Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it"' (118). Much of the surreal , blackly comic force of The Killer Inside Me comes from the tension between the two sides of Lou's personality, a tension that manifests itself in his straight-faced parodies of clichŽ and in ironies that only he can fully understand. Conveying the real anger felt by those at the bottom of the heap who are terrorised into obedience, Lou represents his own schizophrenia as an internalisation of society's hypocrisy: '"I guess I kind of got a foot on both fences...All I can do is wait until I split"' (119).

Pop. 1280 has another small-town sheriff who acts as both the expression and the self-appointed scourge of a sick society. Nick Corey presents himself as someone who will not 'think bad' of people 'until I absolutely have to'. But when he does make up his mind he knows what to do: 'I always know' (21). A trickster figure, moving behind a facade of genial ineffectuality ('"Me? Me kill someone? Aw, now!"' [80]), he satirically exposes and punishes the latent aggressions and iniquities of small-town life. Like Lou Ford, Nick justifies his actions on the grounds that he is just honestly admitting and acting out the self-interest that motivates the entire community : 'What I loved was myself, and I was willing to do anything I god-danged had to to go on lying and cheating and drinking whiskey and screwing women and going to church on Sunday with all the other respectable people' (119-20). He delivers diatribes on communal hatred, hypocrisy and self-deception, and the ironies of his declarations get more savage as the end of the narrative nears. Nick declares that he is going to start cracking down on anyone who breaks a law, '"Providing, o' course, that he's either colored or some poor white trash that can't pay his poll tax"' (155). Much more explicitly than Lou, Nick represents himself as a Christ figure, a final aberration that embodies a pitying and frustrated sense of the awful realities of human life:

Not homes...Just pine-board walls locking in emptiness...And suddenly the emptiness was filled with...all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to...the stink and the terror, the weepin' and wailin', the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness...I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison. (197-8)

Nick's role, under the circumstances, is just 'followin' the holy precepts laid down in the Bible...To coax [people] into revealin' theirselves, an' then kick the crap out of 'em' (206).

In two of the other paperbacks Thompson wrote for Lion in the fifties, The Criminal (1953) and The Kill-Off (1957), the central murder is not finally 'solved', nor the murderer known for certain: Thompson has further varied the form of the thriller by providing no answers, no fixing of guilt on one person. Through the device of multiple narrators, he captures the scandal-mongering and ill-nature that set the tone of small-town life and establishes the shared guilt of a whole community . As Nick Corey says - getting to the heart of Thompson's own satiric methods - '"there can't be no personal hell because there ain't no personal sins. They're all public, George, we all share in the other fellas' and the other fellas all share in ours"' (98).