clair081

Just after finishing The Paul Cain Omnibus (edited by keith Alan Deutsch and published by Mysterious Press), I picked up a copy of the original text (before substantial alterations at the galley stage) of Faulkner's Sanctuary. It's interesting to see how two very different writers deal with the conventions of noir, each taking the genre to its limits. Sanctuary is a bit earlier than the Cain stories and his novel Fast One, but these are very much stories of the era of the formation of noir, the '20s and '30s. Faulkner disassembles pulp noir and reassembles the parts into an extravagant and dark novel of interiority, with the plot (of which there is a lot, by Faulknerian standards) mostly in the background. Cain, on the other hand, is all about exteriority and plot. Instead of taking apart the conventions of the genre, he refined them down to their essence and applied his signature method: speed. The novel is a Fast One, indeed, with not even time for a definite or indef...

Magdalen Nabb's The Monster of Florence and Leif GW Persson's Free Falling as if in a Dream are both about real-life, unsolved crimes, and both use the archive of evidence on those crimes, filtered through a fictional lens, to propose solutions. Persson's book even includes a considerable amount of material about Nabb's namesake, Magdalen (pronouced Maudlin) College in Oxford (or at least about a storied herd of deer that lives there). Both novels include one (or more) major character who remains unnamed throughout. And both novels conclude with a certain amount of ambiguity or uncertainty. Nabb's monster is, of course, the notorious Italian serial killer (and Carlo Vennarucci has posted his interview with the author in which she explains how she became involved in that case, at his italian-mysteries.com site: http://italian-mysteries.com/nabb-interview-part08.html). Nabb proposes that her detective, Marshall Guarnaccia, is appointed to a commission that is re-inves...