Ruminating In My Pants #3: The Crime-Centered Art-House-Thriller/Crime-Centered-Literary-Thriller

When perusing the newspaper for movie listings (oh print, you silly antiquated thing, you) for movie times, rare is the instance when you find a noir/crime film to attend. Hell, for that matter you barely even find action movies or straight-up thrillers (and aside from last year's Fracture you almost never see a courtroom thriller anymore - remember when those were HUGE, kids?). But there is one thing you almost always find - and they are usually pretty fucking awesome - and that is what I call the Crime-Centered-Art-House-Thriller or CCAHT.

These are much like the Crime-Centered-Literary-Thrillers you find in the New York Times Book Review every week, only in movie form (wow, that is some redudant shit right there. I apparently think that you, dear reader, are an idiot). Patron authors of these are such critical darlings as Russell Banks, Pete Dexter, Richard Price, James Carlos Blake, James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy,and now noir fan fave Dennis Lehane has recently joined the ranks.

These authors write dark, masculine, violent stories that would make any crime fan get a boner, but they manage not to be lumped in with the critically poo-poo-ed "genre writers" simply because they often center their stories around historical events. Basically, you take a crime novel and sprinkle a J. Edgar Hoover here, a dash of Jesse James there, package it in a classy cover and voila! you have a crime novel fit for yuppie consumption.

I'm a big fan of that stuff too and when I'm not reading stuff for the blog, I've generally got my acne-scarred nose in one of their many books because non-fiction frightens me unless it is about filmmaking (Ebert's new book on Scorsese is awesome, but could use some stills or production photos at the very least, by the way.). But the film equivalent of this literature phenomenon works a bit differently, it seems.

Films that I would qualify as part of the CCAHT genre from recent years would be ones such as Shotgun Stories, No Country For Old Men, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The King, Zodiac, In Bruges, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, In The Bedroom, Snow Angels, Transsiberian, and Eastern Promises.

Most of these films feature big stars and have heavy talent behind the camera, and a large number of them are also adapted from CCLTs as well, but they often find themselves strictly screened at your local Landmark Theatre (and unless you live in a major metropolitan area, you're SO-fucking-L until it's available on Netflix). CCAHTs also pop up frequently at the Academy Awards and on the major critics' top ten lists, much like the CCLTs often garner similar awards and critical notices in the book world.

Unlike the CCLTs, CCAHTs don't have to always be historical to be considered part of the pack. Mainly, they have to not just be violent, but explore the nature of violence and blah-blah-bullshit-blah. This is where I roll my eyes until the retinas detach. With both CCLTs and CCAHTs there seems to be this idea that they have higher-minded goals than crime/noir fiction. While this is sometimes true, it is more often not the case.

Can you honestly claim that a Pelecanos novel explores violence any less probingly than The Darling by Russell Banks? Or that Before The Devil Knows You're Dead has more grandeur and tragedy than the goings-on of The Grifters? The answer is no, in case you're wondering.

You can even do the flipside with this argument too. Is the violence any less exciting and lurid in Dexter's Train than it is in Swierczynski's Severance Package? Is No Country For Old Men not as visceral and gory as the Coens's earlier effort, Blood Simple? For answer, see above paragraph.

We do need labels to some extent because, well, shit needs to be marketed. That is obviously what labels and genres and markets and demographics all come down to: reaching the appropriate audience. But I don't see the point of giving these labels and genres "worth," making one or the other greater than/less than. After all, as far as movies go, unless you see the movies mentioned above which are packaged ever so high-mindedly, you're not really catching any decent crime shit at all. Those are practically all there is for crime nerds anymore!

But for books, I'd lat least ike to see more endcaps at Barnes & Noble where some of the CCLT writers are lumped in with folks like Pelecanos, Guthrie, Bruen, and Huston. Somebody's gotta bridge the gap, and since publisher's aren't about to do it, it's apparently up to booksellers and library employees. Well, those folks and certain brilliant bloggers with too much time on their hands.

RICHARD PRICE'S LUSH LIFE

Richard Price has long been on my TBR (To Be Read) pile. I've been hearing about him forever - former screenwriter, coke addict, staff writer for The Wire, a "literary" Elmore Leonard - but I never got around to giving him a try. I don't know why his latest, entitled Lush Life, was the one that finally brought me to him, but now I'm stuck. I can't read anything else but Price.

Okay, so I actually do know why I finally read Price's latest and it definitely had something to do with his TV work. I am not alone when I say that The Wire the smartest show ever broadcast and this final season had me worried: now that this amazing story is over, where else do I go for this kind of writing? I had read everything available written by both Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos - the other two novelists on the show's writing staff - and found them to be the two of the most consistent writers in popular crime fiction today.

Everybody knows Lehane is the man and for proof you don't even need to read anything by him. You can just check out the two great movies that have been made from his books - Mystic River and Gone, Baby Gone (with a MARTIN SCORSESE adaptation on the way of his book Shutter Island) and there is no question: The guy can tell a noir story like none other.

In regards to Pelecanos, let me just say that two years ago I had the REAL "summer of George" and read nothing but Pelecanos novels for three months straight, wrapping up with his last book, The Night Gardener and found that everything from King Suckerman on was pure gold (the five preceding Suckerman are certainly good, but not The Sweet Forever good, not Soul Circus good).

Because I am The Nerd, I was aware that both Lehane and Pelecanos had books coming out later in the year, but that seemed like decades ahead from where I was sitting.

So I had to venture out and try the "literary" Elmore Leonard. I think that that was the main reason I resisted him, that perception of him as the hoidy-toidy version of the master. Leonard is God and a big reason why he is God is because he is so spare, so stripped down. His books are hardly anything but action and dialogue and yet you still feel full at the end of the book, still feel like you were told a story in the most efficient yet beautiful way possible. A Leonard book is like a Budd Boetticher western: It is short and sweet and definitely has a formula, but handled in such an effortlessly smart and exciting way that you didn't know it was a B-movie/crime novel. Who did this douchebag Price think he was that he could try and improve upon Elmore fucking Leonard?

Well, I had it all wrong. The main resemblance Price has to Leonard is that he tells crime stories and that he kicks ass at dialogue. In fact, Price even occasionally surpasses Leonard at dialogue. It's sacrilege, I know, but he does. And it's not just the dialogue of low-lifes that he has down, but everybody on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The street kids, the street cops, the detectives, the service industry employees, the Asians packed into apartments, the out-of-towners, they all have their own voice and all talk with one another in that heightened way of Price's that is pitched somewhere between the greatest "Movie movie" you've ever seen ("Movie movie" is my term for films like The Departed or Collateral where things are too perfectly cinematic in a way but also just awesome in terms of being an old-fashioned movie) and the recognizable, reality, authenticity.

And it's that authenticity that makes Price who he is. This book is sort of like Price just walked around the neighborhood the book is set in following all kinds of different people and then tossing them all into a book, giving everybody their day. Yes, it has a police procedural structure but that is simply a device used to get at hanging out in this neighborhood in a compelling way. And it is compelling.

The action is set off by the murder of a hipster in what appears to be a botched mugging attempt. We know who actually murdred him a third of the way into the book and from there it is simply about waiting on Matty the homicide cop to catch up with us the reader? Sounds kind of terrible, right? But it is ridiculously entertaining. Price makes us give a shit about everyone in this book from the cops to the perpetrators to the people on the sidelines. And that sense of community is what it all comes down to. Price operates in sort of a Dickensian way in that he has a strong central narrative, the police procedural being his favorite mode, but he constantly branches off from that to show us the society, the people on the periphery. Also like Dickens, he manages not only to make this not boring, but actually really exciting to read.

So while he may have a lot more pages in his book than Leonard would and a lot more attention to little details and things other than the direct story, Price really doesn't waste your time at any point, keeps things moving all the time. It is simply in a different way. And though this may not be a strict "noir" book like something the other writers mentioned might have written, it is certainly just as good as any of them and just as exciting.

Now I sort of have blinders on. I'm blocking out all the other writing coming my way and only reading Price. I've gone through Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan already and they are all great. Clockers was turned into a decent enough movie by Spike Lee with Harvey Keitel a decade or so back, but seeing how it was a major influence on The Wire, I can't help but imagine what it would be like as an HBO miniseries by the same producers of The Wire. I'd also like to see a re-do of Freedomland, too but that's never going to happen. Though it only took a few years for the studios to give The Incredible Hulk another shot so who knows anymore....