The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as 'A.A. Fair': The great Hard Case Crime book line published this 'lost' hard-boiled detective novel from the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner. It was meant to be the second in Gardner's [Bertha] Cool & [Donald] Lam series but was rejected by Gardner's publisher in 1939 for being too racy and for having Bertha Cool be a little too criminal.
Cool, a Rabelaisian giant of a woman, runs a detective agency in Los Angeles. Donald Lam is one of her newish detectives. A woman and her mother hire Cool's agency to discover what that woman's husband is up to at night. The answer is... plenty! And not all Hanky Panky!
Gardner was certainly no Hammett or Chandler. His prose is workmanlike for the most part, while some of the characters and situations are stereotypical. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, pulpy time-waster. Bertha Cool is a memorable comic grotesque. And some of the perils and pitfalls of private detecting are highlighted as Lam makes some (near) rookie mistakes.
And the novel is surprisingly racy. And surprisingly cynical about pretty much everything, with most of that cynicism expressed by Bertha Cool, about as knee-jerk a pragmatist as one could ask for. Gardner's PI's aren't all that interested in the larger ramifications of the case, leading to a conclusion that's pretty much a dramatic fizzle. I won't read another of the Cool & Lam mysteries published between 1938 and 1970, but I am glad I read this one. It's a hoot. Lightly recommended.
The Big Sleep (1939: Philip Marlowe#1) by Raymond Chandler: Worried that in seeing the great Howard Hawks adaptation of The Big Sleep you've ruined yourself for the novel? Worry not! The novel diverges enough by page 50 or so that it's pretty much a different story than the movie.
Of course, it's also a lot more explicitly bigoted and homophobic than the movie, so there's that too. Get through that stuff and you've got a superior hard-boiled detective novel, one which had a psychological and stylistic depth that would influence hard-boiled fiction ever after.
This is the first novel-length adventure of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles PI with a heart of gold. Well, gold alloyed with cynicism and pithy, pungent comments on The Way Things Are. Chandler's Marlowe arrives here pretty much entirely formed. He'll stay on a case if he thinks justice needs to be done, regardless of what a client wants. He likes chess, whiskey, and pondering the dusty nature of his office.
The written word in America 1939 had a bit more freedom than Hollywood movies in 1946, so certain portions of the plot are simply a bit more explicit when it comes to the pornography ring that drives part of the action. This also leads to the bigotry and homophobia becoming more explicit -- Bogart couldn't utter the opinion that "a pansy has no iron in his bones" in a movie, but Marlowe sure can, and does, in the novel. Hoo ha!
Nonetheless, the novel still reads with a surprising amount of stylistic freshness. Chandler was not better than all those who would follow him into the hardboiled world he remade, but he certainly was better than most -- and better than Dashiell Hammett, who was the epitome of the hardboiled writer before Chandler. Highly recommended.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: written and directed by Kerry Conran; starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Polly Perkins), Jude Law (Sky Captain), Giovanni Ribisi (Dex), Michael Gambon (Paley), Bai Ling (Assassin), Omid Djalili (Kaji), Angelina Jolie (Franky), and the digital ghost of Laurence Olivier (Dr. Totenkopf) (2004): Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow creates a coherent world based on the comics and movie serials and science-fiction covers and cartoons of the 1930's, along with the New York World's Fair of 1939, itself dubbed The World of Tomorrow. It's gradually becoming a cult favourite, possibly because it uses CGI and digital compositing and virtual sets in the service of something retro and weird and wholly authentic in its own way.
Unfortunately, Paramount's decision to dump it in September 2004 with a baffling marketing campaign pretty much sealed its box-office doom. This is really too bad because writer-director Kerry Conran is much better at creating a digital movie-world than most famous directors have proven to be. The whole thing makes Georges Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy look visually dim-witted by comparison.
There's real character and charm in the designs, and in the performances by Gwyneth Paltrow as crusading reporter Polly Perkins and Jude Law as private air-hero Sky Captain, with a nice, relatively straightforward supporting performance from Giovanni Ribisi as gadgeteer Dex.
Along the way, the film drops into a number of locales that allude to forebears such as the 1930's film version of Lost Horizon, any number of Lost Worlds and Skull Islands, the Krell world-machine from Forbidden Planet, Thunderbirds, and brief visual homages to the 1930's King Kong and to the original Godzilla. All in all, it's swell. Highly recommended.
