Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.

Comments

[Biblibio]

The question now arises: If you'd read Thompson after reading Zeltserman, would you still leave with the same overall impressions? Would your impression of the book slip retroactively? Or would you still find Zeltserman to be neat and provocative?

[Finn Harvor]

(HTML)(font: Helvetica)(size: normal)MOE'S MURDEROUS MUSINGS(end)
(subheader) Blood, blood, and more blood ... but all in good fun(end)

Interesting post on the work of Jim Thompson, which reminds me in turn of the extended gothic/poetic/PlayStation-friendly project I've been working on for some time now. It's entitled YOUR WORKPLACE IS A KILLER.

In it, the protagonist (also, in a nod to post-post-modernism, named Moe (but with an umlaut)) learns that his boss is -- well, get this! -- a psycho. He's not just pink-slipping employees, he's red-slipping them, if you know what I mean!

I'll be building a Facebook site around the project and launching it soon on Podiobooks, too.... Happy reading and/or listening, murder-fans!

Posted by Moe Sterling
July 2, 2009

COMMENTS (12)

Good heavens, Moe, does the world really need another murder mystery -- especially one as tritely predictable as this? ("Red slipping" -- ye gods!)

If you want to see what *real* literature is about, go to my website, Arthur Carlyle's Canon (http://a.canon.wordpress.com). We're doing a roundtable on John Banville this week ... and no, not his mysteries!

Arthur Carlyle Riddick
July 2, 2009, 9:12 AM

I think all this putting down of the mystery genre is just plain snobby. What's wrong with a good read, even if it involves painstakingly described torture and dismemberment? (But not in a bad way! And I really draw the line at smut!)

Annabelle Daphne Vert
July 2, 2009. 11:14 AM

No, no, you're both barking up the wrong tree. We don't need more pop culture. If Arthur could only disentangle himself from that ball of, oh, *tweed* that he seems to have got all wrapped up in, he might see that there's a little more to the text's potential than the either/or of Infinite Formula or (heaven help us) "the canon". How about a little -- oh, just a smidgeon -- of uncompromisingly contemporary literature?

(Incidentally, for anyone who's curious, I'll be posting the opening pages of my latest, MAN IN A BOX, over at http://semioticianwithakeypad.blogspot.com as soon as I can figure out to cut-and-paste 1,200 pages into a single Blogger post.)

Brad "the Grad" Fassenbach
July 2, 2009. 11:20 AM

Oh, you're just showing off again, Brad! I read that last "work" of yours you put online -- that 2,200 page RECIPE OF THE BODY ... There wasn't a single recipe in it!

Annabelle Daphne Vert
July 2, 2009. 12:24 PM

And you're talking through your hat again, Annabelle. There *was* a recipe. On page 1,679.

Brad "The Grad" Fassenbach
July 2, 2009. 1:18 PM

I *did* get that far. And hot chocolate doesn't count.

Annabelle Daphne Vert
July 2, 2009. 1:22 PM

What does *any* of this have to do with Jim Thompson?

Thor Au
July 2, 2009, 1:31 PM

We're talking murder mystery generally.

Moe Sterling
July 2, 2009. 1:50 PM

And literature.

Arthur Conan Riddick
July 2, 2009. 2:11 PM

*Your* brand of literature, Arthur.

Brad "the Grad" Fassenbach
July 2, 2009. 2:45 PM

Literature's gone numb if these are its Hobson's choices.

Thor Au
July 2, 2009. 3:15 PM

But there's still nothing like a good read!

Annabelle Daphne Vert
July 2, 2009. 3:46 PM

[Josh]

I wonder whether the use of Vermont isn't also a Thompson allusion: Savage Night concludes in Vermont.