Where Noir And Humor Meet

Here is the test of a good book: when it's a much fun to read the second (or third or eighth) time as it is the first. I'm glad to see that Jeffrey Ford popped in to comment on Gwenda's post, discussing the noir element of The Girl In The Glass, because that's exactly what I wanted to talk about.

Also the humor.

Girl is set during the Depression, an understandably dour time in history. You have the Prohibition (when you think about it, forcing a nation to quit drinking while they're losing their savings...not great politics). You have a war just fought and unease in Europe. You have the rich who are somehow still rich and the poor who just can't seem to catch a break. And you have a lot of people willing to believe in something, anything, that will answer their questions.

Thomas Schell, con man, is just the man to answer those questions. His seances contact the dead, offer people some comfort, and lighten more than a few purses. It's a living. But Schell also collects people and builds an extended family, one of whom is the book's narrator, an illegal Mexican named Diego. Diego's status in this country interestingly mirrors the current fights we have about immigration ("In twenty-four, they invited us to come, because they needed us. Now we're vermin."), and forms a backdrop for future horrors: the eugenics movement and the rise of the Nazi party.

Dark stuff indeed, and because this is, at heart, a murder mystery, bad things happen as our heroes try to solve the crime. Add in a lot of terse, tough-guy type dialogue -- which just absolutely makes this novel read like a Jimmy Cagney movie -- and you have the kind of noir that makes Mickey Spillane timeless.

What Mickey never had was humor. Did Mike Hammer ever crack a joke? God, that man was depressed, wasn't he? Schell, Diego, Antony Cleopatra, and the carnival's worth of, and I mean this affectionately, sideshow freaks all exhibit a droll humor that makes you laugh out loud. Diego's narrative is both wide-eyed innocent, though he's telling the story with wisdom of age, and wise-cracking kid. It's the little things, like him thinking that death puts its own disguise on people while his next thought is "Who would have thought that a man and snake could be so close, but they were."

Though the book has no swordfights, it does have a pitched gun battle. Because it wouldn't be as much fun without a pitched gun battle. And an explosion, which as Schell notes, they probably could have done without, but since it worked, what the heck.

Comments

[Gwenda]

Couldn't agree more, Kassia. And it really does hold up to rereading. I bet I've read the book four times now (or somewhere in that neighborhood) and I even get re-wrapped up in the mystery.

I'm also glad you brought up the explosion sequence. I thought that worked so well and fed into the sort of "brotherhood of cons" (well, and sisterhood) that it was just the perfect action sequence. So well choreographed.

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I'm seeking the author's name and the full text of a short piece of
humor entitled, "A (or The) Cliche Expert Testifies on the Atom." I
read this piece in a humor anthology in the early-to-mid 1960s. I
believe there was a whole series of humorous pieces with similar
titles, e.g., "The Cliche Expert Testifies on War," etc. The nearest
I've come to success in my own fairly extensive on-line searching was
in the Library of Congress on-line catalog, where I found a reference
to a humor anthology, dated 1969, containing a piece titled "The
Cliche Expert Testifies on War" attributed to an author "F. Sullivan."
I have not seen the text of this piece, but the author's name, F.
Sullivan, does not strike me as the same as the author of the specific
piece I'm looking for, i.e., "A/The Cliche Expert Testifies on the
Atom," although I cannot rule out the possibility that it is the same
author.

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Just for today I will have a quiet half hour all by myself and relax. During this half hour, sometime, I will try to get a better perspective of my life.