Strangers on a Train - Patricia Highsmith

Strangers on a Train was Highsmith's debut in 1950 and, filmed by Hitchcock a year later, made her name and her fortune. I was therefore excited to come across this nicely put-together Vintage edition. I had never read any Highsmith, but surely I should, given my abiding interest in American noir. Well, now I have and I have to say I am very disappointed.

The premise is, of course, brilliant. Complete strangers meet on the titular train and agree to murder one another's victim. What can possibly go wrong? What's not to keep us turning those pages all the way to denouement?

Well, the sheer number of pages, for a start. The novel is at least 30% too long. There isn't enough story to keep us interested, the characters are too simplistic (hard-working genius and hard-shirking rich wastrel), and the writing is too overwrought. Frankly I didn't care how they got their come-uppance, I just wanted it to end.

Surely the beauty of classic noir is brevity, whereas Highsmith gives us page after page of obvious filler, almost as if she is getting paid by the word. There is, to be fair, a stab at psychological insight, however I was not convinced. The women characters, in a novel by a woman, are so poor as to border on misogyny (tart, tart and doormat). There is literary style but it is stilted and occasionally perversely anachronistic. What I suppose is meant to be the final twist - how the detective gets Haines' confession, is too hackneyed even for an old-fashioned stage thriller and wouldn't have stood up as evidence in any court even in 1950. Had I not been bored stiff by that point, I would have laughed.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson, where have you been all my life.  In fairness, you've been dead for 85% of it so it's not really your fault. I blame the publishers.  I blame critics for not dragging your work regularly into the spotlight.  I blame myself.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is only a novella - Jackson made her name with a short story, 'The Lottery', and she is clearly comfortable in the short form. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the best neo-gothic or indeed American Gothic novella I have ever read.  It is a work of the highest art.  It is a work of genius.  Check out the first paragraph and weep with glee:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Every one else in my family is dead.

It's worth reading that again when you have finished the story and all has been revealed. Then you realise the forensic precision of that list, the sort of list we all put together when we are six or seven but which is bad news when created by an eighteen year old. But, as you might guess, Merricat is not an ordinary girl, her childish precocity is not normal because she's not really a child any more.

To discuss the story in any detail would be to give too much away because every sentence here is a polished precision cog in the fictional machine. Every action and incident pays off in the end.  It is, in short, a masterpiece, not only of genre but of all literature.  It is beyond a must-read.  It ought to be compulsory for anyone who dares to venture onto similar turf.  It is an object lesson and an inspiration. I loved every word.

Running Dog - Don DeLillo

Running Dog (1978) is a relatively early DeLillo novel.  It is redolent with post-Watergate paranoia in which mysterious corporations war with alternative entrepreneurs but both, fundamentally, seek the same thing, control of assets.  The nature of the assets matter little.  Everyone and everything is corruptible, which DeLillo demonstrates by anchoring his story on an asset which, in itself, could not be more corrupt or corrupting: a film believed to feature footage of Hitler and his entourage having orgies in the Berlin bunker as the Russians close in.

DeLillo deploys a number of principal characters, all of whom pay a price for their involvement in the quest.  The second rank characters, corruptors all, pay no price whatsoever.  This is their world and in it they flourish.  Albeit Running Dog sounds like a polemic, the characterisation is so accomplished that the message never supplants the medium.

I've had a long but sporadic relationship with the novels of Don DeLillo.  I always enjoy them but never seem to seek them out.  This was the same.  I picked it up by chance and enjoyed it on every level.  I commend it to you.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

I don't know that I've ever read Ray Bradbury before - certainly not a full length work.  So this fascinated me.  Of course the evil carnival coming to town is nowadays a standard, even hackneyed, trope of American fantasy fiction, but I suspect Bradbury was first in the field, albeit with just a nod to Tod Browning's movie Freaks.  The writing itself is startling, so textured, gnarled, yet impactful.  I liked very much the role of Dad, much older than the usual dad, maybe an echo of Clark Kent's foster father.  I liked that he thought it through, based his plan on research in the library where he works - then discovered the true answer by accident.  The boys themselves, Will and Jim, were wholly convincing and well differentiated.  Stephen King tends to distinguish his boys by contrasting types but Will and Jim are cut from the same cloth but subtly different, hence Jim's fascination with what might be called the Magic Roundabout, which Will shuns.  Something Wicked is, quite simply, a masterpiece in its field.