© William Ahearn 2007
There are a couple of things that I liked about Megan Abbott almost from the jump. The first is that Abbott attributes her fascination with crime fiction, according to an “at home” interview with Mystery Readers International, to an attempt to escape the canon designed for English Lit. As she told interviewer Theresa Schwegel:
“I was in grad school for English Literature and part of me assumed that [Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep] would be simple, throwaway books—fun things to take a break from stuff like Middlemarch. Boy, was I wrong. I found such complexities, so many endless dark corners in both—creaky little windows into the 1930s and '40s. Stories ragged with feeling, tortured desire. Haunted men and broken women. I was hooked.”
The entire interview is here.
The second thing that I liked about Abbott’s work was a scene in her first book, Die A Little, where the protagonist – at the end of the book – sees a story about a unidentified body being found and realizes who it is and that – amid relief and a sense of resolution – her nightmare is over. That is where most mystery books would begin and the character would become a sleuth and round up the convenient friends to unravel the meaning of the murder.
Abbott isn’t interested in writing a conventional mystery. She’s writing about – in Die A Little – 1950’s Los Angeles and in The Song Is You, Hollywood in the 1940s. There are major and minor gods and ghosts that haunt the streets in the glow of Hollywood for crime writers and the most palpable one is Raymond Chandler. Chandler has as many impersonators as Elvis and nobody needs another one. Abbott wisely steers clear of a false and dated hardboiled patois and instead sits down to a raspberry-coconut jellyroll, “piles of old cookbooks, catalogs, magazines from the 1940s and 50s with titles like Frolic and Laff” and after, maybe another quick drive past Nathanael West’s old place.
In Die A Little, instead of a ennui-infused private dick living on scrambled eggs, black coffee and scotch driving the rain-soaked streets with a gat and a dame, the novel is almost suffocating in the particulars of domestic life in the 1950s. In the crack between the chrome and the Formica is the residue of someone’s life coming apart. It’s an interesting and fun read and while I had problems with the blurry character of Bill that the story surrounds, it did send me out to find The Song Is You.
Murder stories in the glory days of Hollywood are twice told at best. The Song Is You is a riff on a real-life unsolved missing person case concerning aspiring actress Jean Spangler. One version of the facts of the real case can be found here.
Abbott is a writer that is always being characterized as being “neo-noir” and seems always to be mentioned in the same breadth as Vicki Hendricks. They always mention each other in interviews and have appeared together at crime fiction conventions. It’s an interesting pairing, a yin and yang of classic crime fiction. Hendricks – at least in Miami Purity – plays with the themes and situations of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson and Abbott is more concerned with what was once known as mise-en-scéne. She’s also a writer that understands that there is a difference between a sentence and a paragraph.
While the 1950’s consumer sensibility rendered through recipes and the details of domesticity in the kitchen worked as counterpoint against the sordid story that was oozing out between the cracks of the linoleum in Die A Little, the background research of The Song Is You became far more interesting than the implausible and unsatisfying story it is meant to support. There may not have been much choice since the story line is almost mythic in the fact and fiction of the lore of The City of Angels. James Ellroy is another ghost haunting the streets of Hollywood and he carries a satchel of his own strange memories that play out as background to his novels. He’s a tough act to follow and an even tougher act not to follow.
No writer in their right mind is going to attempt to out write Ellroy on his own turf, so if the narrative of the missing or murdered naïve Hollywood wannabe is going to be pursued it requires a lot more than just dazzling the reader with particulars of the time period. Abbott makes some gutsy choices – such as having the protagonist be a less than likeable PR agent or the ultimate fate of the missing character at the center of the story – yet each of these ambitious improvisations never take on a life of their own, never grow beyond being the device of narrative.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by a book because it was written on deadline and a different thing altogether to be disappointed because the writer took one too many risks. My money will always go to the writer who sees the conventional formula in the rear-view mirror even if sometimes they underestimate the final turn and spin out in a cloud of gravel.
Abbott’s first two books aren’t noir (and aren’t neo-noir since neo-noir only exists as a tortured and unnecessary definition for those who need to complicate every little thing), they are period pieces and that’s merely an observation and not a criticism since “Chinatown,” a brilliant private detective film about Los Angeles, is also a period piece. Definitions become meaningless when over- or misused and the real question isn't whether you can tell a hawk from a handsaw but whether either are worth reading. Queenpin plays more on impending doom and the difference between it and Abbott’s other novels is clear in how it is told and they are all definitely worth the read however you want to categorize them.
It’s the early 1960s somewhere in the Midwest but where ain’t exactly clear. The only way we know it’s 1961 or so is the reference to the Chevy Impala bubble top, the first American muscle car that hit production that year. In Queenpin, Abbott stops being an art director and gets down to cases and while the writing is at times tentative, the stripped-down style serves the purpose of the bare-bones plot.
Gone are the glossy vintage magazines of home décor and references to B movies and second tier actors. The story unfolds in an unmapped city with a waterfront and a local mob somewhere near Deacon City and Titusville. It’s the tale of a tyro and mentor and the transition of a smart daughter “setting the table for a corned beef and cabbage dinner” for her father to an assistant for a legendary local female hood named Gloria Denton. Going from off-the-rack skirts, living at home and taking the bus to having her own place and a car in a matter of days, the mentor reels in the tyro.
If I have any real criticism of Queenpin, it is that Gloria Denton bears too strong a resemblance to Lilly Dillon, the mother in Jim Thompson’s The Grifters. They have similar cars with false bottoms in the trunk; pretty much the same job of placing bets at the track to offset odds and wash money, and each has a burn gained from a job-related failure. Lilly’s is from a cigar and Gloria’s from a radiator.
Beyond that, it’s a story of greed, ambition, double-crosses and murder. It’s all about the game and who is left to play it. Early on we know that the unnamed protagonist is headed toward the abyss:
“Maybe you think,” she muses in Queenpin, “during all this I must have felt some pangs of guilt, some doubt. It’s true, this wasn’t the way I was brought up. It wasn’t most families’ idea of good girl behavior. Sometimes I even tried to talk myself into feeling bad, into thinking for a second about the regular joes and why should I get away with nice things without working an honest job. But the second always passed and then the seconds stopped coming at all. Truth was, who was getting hurt by my doings, except those who chose to buy cigarettes and booze without sales tax, gamble away their paychecks, skimp their wife by paying back-of-the-truck prices for an anniversary string of pearls? They took their chances and I got the sweet butter skimmed off their bad backs.”
On some level, we know where this story is going as it begins and a nice touch in the telling is the use of the letter opener and its replacement and how it foretells the conclusion of the relationship even though the actual conclusion comes as a surprise. If there is any salvation or redemption in this story, it comes at the end where it all begins again.