Drinking wasn't done in gay public places either – but in cellars, vacant lots and back-rooms. My preferred afternoon avenues to oblivion were second- or third-run movie theatres. Not the two-thousand-seater picture palaces on Broadway, with Versailles mirrors and plaster sphinxes, but concrete boxes called the Rex or the Lux – or perhaps the Styx. You were ushered to a row of bolted-together dentists' chairs and charged fifteen times the price of admission for a bottle in a brown paper bag with 'peanuts' written on it.
Smoke ghosts swirled in the projector beam, gold-digger legs dancing and cowboy guns puffing. Auditoria rattled with the tinny sounds movies made when they first started to talk. Characters set off firecrackers, tap-danced, honked car-horns and breathed husky songs. I did not patronise such places as a devotee of the cinematic arts. Or as an admirer of Miss Janet Gaynor or Strongheart the Wonder Dog. I was only here for the peanuts.That afternoon, the picture was Frankenstein.Little of the original remained. My third form at Dulwich College scorned Mrs Shelley's novel as insufficiently terrifying fudge. Her Monster was as given to quoting Milton out of context and at length as our tedious house master. Schoolboy sophisticates with a yen for the horrors preferred the much-confiscated ghost stories of M.R. James. In a rare instance of American literary pride, I argued for Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow. Now, that's a frightening book.
***
In Something More Than Night (Titan, 2021) author Kim Newman catches the music of his narrator Raymond Chandler in many moments, the breaths between actions:
It didn't do in writing a mystery to fix on the culprit before doing the detective work. Only real cops decide on a killer when the call comes in, then beat a confession out of him to tidy up the story. Guilty parties are brought to book by that method – if only coincidentally. Big criminals remain out of reach – too well-connected to arrest, too venomous to kill.
***
At the typewriter, we're all murdering devils.
**
All District Attorneys run on a reform ticket.
***
Never underestimate the bone-bred cheapness of the rich. The session must have been written off against the budget of Pyramid's Unfinished Symphony. Young Schubert (middle-aged Fredric March) can't complete his magnum opus, because his composing arm gets skewered during a duel with Lord Byron (Franchot Tone). If the picture had been any bigger a bomb, the Luftwaffe would have dropped it on Guernica.
***
There comes a point when you don't drink to make the scenery spin, but to make it stop still.
***
The perfect snap-back would occur to me three days later, when it'd be no more use than a girdle on Pitcairn Island.
***
'Can we hurry this along?' I said. 'My grandmother has eggs that need sucking.'
***
Despite his ascent to demi-divinity, Junior was ridiculous. Most tyrants are. People only stop laughing when the pile of corpses reaches the roof. Even then, the temptation of black humour remains.
***
'Are we breaking and entering?'
'Hard to say. No one owns this place. That makes this a grey issue.'
'This is America. Everywhere is owned.'
***
This isn't a case. The bungalow isn't here. The people who died were already ghosts. By moving in, we become ghosts too. When that storm they're predicting hits, it won't rain on this plot.'
***
'The Lone Ranger uses silver bullets because – he says – killing a man should have a high price.'
'He might also be loaded for lycanthrope.'
'That would be a different radio show.'
'Conceded.'
***
Something More Than Night (Titan Books, 2021) is a brilliantly executed headlong Hollywood horror thriller. I wish I could read it again for the first time. Really a gem!
Protagonists Raymond Chandler (our narrator) and Boris Karloff, united since youth in friendship tried in a furnace of strange, recurring incidents, reunite in the 1930s.
Our heroes take on the rich son of the founder of Pyramid Pictures; with help from mad science, Junior has found a way to siphon and assume the gifts and skills of sideshow performers: strength, self-healing, expanded lifespan. Junior has also found a way to zombify employees into unthinking pawns and henchmen. Even Pyramid's four-member comedy team, the Sparx Brothers, get into the act with their shared anarcho-homicidal mania.
In making-strange 1930s Hollywood, Newman creates a fiction redolent of exploitation and alienation. As a Marxist, I certainly felt right at home.
Jay
13 November 2021
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