© 2007 William Ahearn
If you get the hardcover of Vicki Hendricks’ Miami Purity, you will see that the back cover contains glowing blurbs by well-known writers. In the particular edition that I borrowed from the New York Public Library (I have since purchased a paperback copy), most of those blurbs mentioned James M. Cain and the reference to The Postman Always Rings Twice was only too clear.
Frankly, I have a hard time reconciling Hendricks and Cain – and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – and that difficulty might explain where I’m coming from. Truth be told, to me, the film versions of Cain’s work are almost always better than the books.
(The obvious exception is the film “Butterfly,” based on the novel of the same title and featuring Orson Welles’ last screen appearance and starring Pia Zadora who, let’s face it, hit her peak in “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.”)
Cain, for the most part, was a sentimental moralist and that’s a rare quality in the early series or roman noir writers. Cornell Woolrich – who pretty much created the form of series noir – may have been a twisted loner who drank himself to death in a New York City hotel room but his grasp of the macabre absurdities of life was as tight as it is entertaining.
In “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” we have the story of an innocent drifter who gets dropped off at a café by the local district attorney who picked up the drifter hitchhiking. The café is owned by a man with a much younger wife and there the drifter’s troubles begin.
The story writes itself from there and while I don’t want to give up all of Cain’s plot points, what defines the story as noir is the relative unimportance and innocence of the protagonist and the events that lead to his eventual destruction. This sequence is critical to classic or series noir and it appears over and over again in the genre.
So I was baffled when I began Miami Purity to find there is little more than a superficial similarity to The Postman Always Rings Twice or anything else written by James M. Cain. There was an echo I recognized and it took a few pages to nail it down.
The bones of the narrative may be Cain’s but the heart and soul is pure Jim Thompson. Sherise Parlay, the protagonist of Miami Purity seems to be the unclaimed offspring of the sheriff in Jim Thompson’s classic, The Killer Inside Me. That isn’t a criticism. It’s an observation about the roots of the work and while any reader can see what defines a genre or sensibility, it takes a smart writer to see what isn’t there and in Miami Purity it is adding the sexual elements that could only be hinted at in the hay day of pulp and noir that takes this work out of the possibility of being parody in to a work all its own.
Whether it’s a valuable work or something that will outlive us all isn’t something that I’m concerned with. My original attraction to the work of Vicki Hendricks was based on her being touted as noir, neo-noir, noir-ish and other dark claims by marketers and critics who think that any concept can be twisted to sell whatever has been tossed on their desks. The term noir – especially cinema noir – has been so misunderstood, misused, and over-used as to be pointless. The subject drives me into mumbling fits and I’m working on an essay titled “Cornell Woolrich and the Origin of Noir” that will finally let me empty my head and be done with it.
All of the hype, of course, has nothing to do with Hendricks. And while it’s the story of my life to be attracted to a woman for all the wrong reasons, I decided to just take her first book and see what’s going on in the text.
This essay will contain what some people consider spoilers and what some people may consider language that they can’t deal with. If that’s the case, see you around the pool and please order me a colorful rum drink with a little umbrella in it.
Once you blow the smoke away, and pay attention to the text, it becomes apparent that Sherri Parley – the protagonist of Miami Purity – is a sociopath. It could be argued that that fact alone would send the book from noir to some form of pulp but Hendricks isn’t resurrecting a form, she’s playing with various themes and characters and trying to create her own vision of a style. Whether she succeeds or not is question of taste.
The plot of Miami Purity is that Sherri – an exotic dancer and alcoholic – is coming off a hard jag after unintentionally killing her lover in a domestic dispute. Or at least that’s what Sherri would like us to believe. Hank, the lover, had a long police record so the police declined to pursue any charges against her for hitting him in the head with a boom box in a drunken fight.
“My old man was dead. I didn’t feel like I had anything to do with it. I didn’t make that choice,” Sherri observes in the text. Sherri is the narrator and not a very reliable one. Not once in the several times that Hank is remembered in the novel, is Sherri even remotely remorseful of having killed him. She regrets his absence but not how he got that way. If it was the only death in the book, her lack of remorse might be a debatable point. It isn’t. Not if you pay attention.
Right there, we take another hard turn from the world of James M. Cain. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, we have the innocent drifter showing up at the roadside café by coincidence. That is a classic noir scenario. Hendricks plays on the drifter aspect of Sherri looking for a life away from exotic dancing but there is nothing innocent about her and that isn’t a reference to her sexuality. If nothing else that makes drifting through the text interesting since it’s in the early work where influences are closest to the bone.
Much of the buzz about this book has centered on the copious sex acts in the book. What I find humorous about this observation or criticism – depending on where the reader is coming from – is how few explicit sex scenes there are in the text.
There is plenty of:
“He opened his belt and zipper. I bent over the computer keyboard on his desk so he could poke me from behind. Yeah. He really loved me.”
And,
“He smiled and slid those lips over my mouth, and put his hands up under the T-shirt to graze my tits with his palms. He pulled the shirt off over my head and I rubbed my pussy against his hard-on under the pleats of soft cotton. I had this feeling like I wanted to crawl inside his body.”
And,
“He unbuttoned my shirt and got his mouth on my tits and my nipples were stuck out a mile. We pulled down our pants and he slid right in. It was damn hard and wide and I thought that a few strokes couldn’t hurt anybody. Nobody would have believed it from looking at me, but I really didn’t want to do it. It was just too late to stop.”
The most explicit and longest sex scene involves Sherri and The Dirty Harry .44 Magnum:
“I was squatting on my knees next to him, and he tilted the gun up and placed the cool tip of the barrel against my pussy, pointing it towards my backbone. It took the breath right out and I felt a little scared of the hard metal. Then he started to move it real gentle. He rubbed it side to side and it did feel mighty good. I leaned back and propped myself against my arms. He started to work it in and out. I could feel the sight against my clit. The metal felt hard and soft at the same time. I arched my back and lifted and dropped myself, gripping the cold steel. I didn’t worry anymore about moisture. Payne wasn’t worried. He looked like he’d found a new thrill. I let it flow.”
The only aspect of the sex in Miami Purity that threw me out of the text was the introduction of incest. Sherri’s lover Payne is apparently having an incestuous relationship with his mother. Now, I don’t care how many lovers someone has had or weeklong, multi-partner orgies with drugs, oils, lotions, and power tools, when incest is mentioned it tends to be a conversation killer. One doesn’t usually think of a lover’s incestuous partner as “the other person.” It could be the reaction of a sociopath so it was one of those things that I let slide as to stopping me in my tracks.
Hendricks, I think, let some narrative possibilities get away from her in the relation of Payne and his mother, Brenda. For one thing, the reader doesn’t know that there’s an incestuous relationship between Payne and his mother and it could have been a manipulation on Payne’s part to have Sherri kill the mother. Just the suspicion would have raised the suspense level. Sherri does kill the mother but nowhere is there any disgust at the incest. Sherri seems more concerned with the mother as a romantic competitor and that’s such a sick response that it seems reasonable given what we know of Sherri at this point.
The other storyline possibility has to do with Sherri beginning to wear Brenda’s perfume, jewelry and clothes and even saying at one point, “I could probably pass for Brenda in the dark.” One co-worker says, “The others will see your eyes. I think you are taking Brenda’s place.”
That builds some anticipation for a Single White Sociopath scenario but it ends up dissipating before any resolution is at hand.
There are other killings in the book and I’m hesitant to give it all away because it’s such a fun read on its own merits independent of all the noir hype. There is no getting around the problematic ending. It is, however, so perverse in its sense of the redemption of Sherri to be incredibly cynical.
After the last murder, Sherri takes it on the lam with the dog. She failed to kill the dog and then complicates her escape by bringing it with her. It reminded me of a series of posts on a mystery fiction mail list where the majority of the members found killing pets in fiction to be unacceptable. People can be killed by the dozens but pets are off-limits. The dog plays no other part in the story and I found it an odd choice in a book of murder and incest narrated by a sociopath.
There is one other odd change in Sherri that is never explained in the text. Within two pages at the end of Miami Purity, Sherri goes from saying, “I wanted to feel sorry for all the killing, but I couldn’t. I sat there forever, but I couldn’t feel nothing” to “I wonder what Payne had in his mind, and I feel guilty about killing Brenda. But none of it matters. I’ll pay up. That’s the way things go.”
So we seem to be back to the sensibility of James M. Cain, yet we have no idea how we got there. Sherri is back to exotic dancing and waiting for the police to catch up with her and the dog. That is a classic noir ending and yet it seems totally out of character for the Sherri that has narrated the book who always has a reason to do what’s she’s done.
In all honesty, it’s silly to compare recent books with the noir classics. Noir had a time and it’s long gone. Many of the writers of noir are no longer in print and the ones that remain in print are still read because they’re damn good stories and not because they contain stylistic necessities. Most readers – as separate from academicians or theorists – never really even notice the structure of novels or plots.
Whether Miami Purity is read twenty years from now will depend more on how deeply readers respond to it than its noir or pulp roots. For me, it was a fun read and I’m looking forward to reading Hendrick’s other books. At the same time, I can’t wait for this noir fervor to blow over since so few writers actually understand what it was. And, yes, was as it’s been over for almost fifty years. Hendicks at least gets the difference between playing with the form and imitating it.