Andrew Cartmel's Blog, page 12

Best Films of 2018

Let's say farewell to 2018 with a summary of my personal favourite movies from the past year. As usual, before moving on to the top ten we'll start with a dozen honourable runners-up, including some really oddball choices...

The Happy Time Murders — which elsewhere has been declared one of the worst films of the year — is LA-noir X-rated Muppet fun and it really tickled me. 

Searching was another of those found footage thrillers which supposedly consists solely of computer screens — they bust a gut trying to maintain the convention here, but the twists are well planted and very satisfying.

Unsane was entirely filmed by Steven Soderbergh on an iPhone (yes, really) and featured Claire Foy wrongly locked up in a mental hospital... or is she? Gaping plot holes reduce the impact of this thriller, but it remains impressively powerful. 

In Alpha a Stone Age boy is separated from his tribe and survives by befriending a wounded wolf and thereby creating the first domesticated dog. It begins rather disagreeably — plenty of animal slaughter — but becomes quite wonderful.

12 Strong is a fact-based military thriller. Its Ted Tally script is an asset as is the Lorne Balfe score. And there’s something inherently thrilling about a cavalry charge. For me the best bit was when Chris Hemsworth’s horse, whom I thought was a goner, gets defiantly to his feet (hooves?) and shakes himself, ready to go on fighting.


Mile 22. Who would have thought this Mark Wahlberg shoot-’em-up would be of such high quality? Molly’s Game. As good as this was, I didn’t feel it lived up to Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue at his finest. Love, Simon was an extremely well crafted teen gay romance comedy.

All the Money in the World. Ridley Scott’s best movie in decades. Maybe his best ever. Hostiles is a powerful Western. After harrowing and terrible sequences, it has a marvellous ending.

Black Panther. A great movie, but Andy Serkis was such an outstanding villain, as Ulysses Klaue, that Michael Jordan as his replacement had a hard time matching up — although Jordan has the most extraordinary and telling dialogue… breathtaking, really.

Solo: A Star Wars Adventure. Excellent. A double-Kasdan ampersand of a script and a top notch cast. Thandie Newton gets to say lines like, “Viper droids headed your way.” And there’s convincing chemistry when she and Woody Harrelson kiss.

Okay, now for the top ten itself:

Thoroughbreds is a terrific little movie straight out of left field. Echoes of everything from Heathers to Equus to Stoker. Lily seems to be the perfect teen, Amanda her troubled friend. But is it really that way around? A diabolical and wild music score by Erik Friedlander is one of the finest I’ve heard in recent times. 

You Were Never Here has echoes of Point Blank, but much more emphatically of Taxi Driver. It’s an art movie, but scarily bleak with profound violence. Also moments of great beauty and strangeness. 

Red Sparrow is a really splendid spy thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence which just keeps getting better and better and finally concludes with a knockout ending. 

The Shape of Water is a rare fantasy movie fit to sit beside the likes of The Wizard of Oz. And I think it will be an enduring classic.

I completely love The Girl in the Spider's Web, a surprising high-quality addition to the Lisbeth Salander saga, with director Fede Alvarez channelling David Fincher.

The Predator was another huge surprise with Shane Black not only reviving this franchise but surpassing the original.

Right... now we're down to the best four. And, as usual, it's very hard to chose between these absolute gems.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is utterly wonderful. A sharp, comic and tragic tale of teenager Cameron (Chlöe Grace Moritz) who likes girls — so she's sent for gay conversion therapy (read brainwashing). It also stars Sasha Lane from American Honey (one of my best films of 2016).

Every Day. Under this banal title lurks one of the truly notable films of the year. A body-hopping romance which, in its gender fluidity, makes an interesting companion piece to Love, Simon and provides an amusing corrective to Robert Silverberg’s short story ‘Passengers’.

I was just knocked out by Entebbe. I expected a  gripping account of real life events. But this is a genuine work of art. The screenwriter Gregory Burke and director José Padilha bringing great creative energy to create something profound

But — and this will come as no surprise to regular readers — for the fourth year running, my pick for the best film of the year is one written by Taylor Sheridan: Sicario 2: Soldado, a sequel  which does a superb job of enlisting the audience's sympathies and keeping us on the edge of our seat. Spellbinding. A masterpiece. I loved every moment of it.  

(Sheridan's previous films — all winners of top honours in my annual lists — are Wind River, Hell or High Water, and the original Sicario.)

Happy viewing, thanks for reading, and happy New Year.

(Image credits; All the posters are from the admirable and invaluable Imp Awards.)

The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

For this year's Christmas blog post I've chosen a classic crime novel, a cosy locked room murder mystery, set in a beautifully evoked winter London where "The snow was whirling outside, and it was not a night to venture far..."

The first thing that has to be said about The Hollow Man is that this is not anything to do with the Paul Veerhoven movie featuring an invisible Kevin Bacon.

The second thing is that it is also widely known under the title The Three Coffins.

Whatever you call it, it's an outstanding example of the aforementioned "locked room" sub genre. 

In case you're not familiar with these, and at the risk of explaining the thunderingly obvious, these are murder mysteries where the crime appears to have taken place under impossible circumstances — for instance in a locked room where the killer couldn't have got in, or out.

The Hollow Man was published in 1935 and it's the work of John Dickson Carr, who wrote prolifically under his own name and also under a series of pseudonyms, including Carter Dickson.

Carr was an American, which comes as a surprise, since he writes so convincingly about British locations. But that's because he moved to England at the beginning of his long writing career.

The Hollow Man is a purely rational and realistic story (albeit rather sensational) but it begins by conjuring an air of supernatural menace, which it renews from time to time — fairly deftly. So it isn't surprising that elsewhere Carr did write some memorable fantasy novels, including Fire, Burn! in which a 20th century London cop is transported back to 1829.

But, as I say, The Hollow Man is firmly rooted in the rational and the hero of the book is one Dr Gideon Fell, who is not merely a rationalist, but an amateur detective who has a brain to rival that of Sherlock Holmes, although his corpulent body is a bit of a mess — on a single page he is evoked with the words "lumbering", "wheezed" and "waddled." Not exactly a picture of health and fitness. (Fell is said to be based on the crime writer G.K. Chesterton, creator of Father Brown.)

The Hollow Man was a big surprise to me. In this kind of story I expect the prose to be serviceable at best. But Carr is an excellent writer. His descriptions and dialogue are of a high standard, but it's his characterisation which really scores outstanding marks for him.

Particularly his women. He has some strong and memorable female characters here, which is very unusual at this time, especially from a male writer. 

Take for instance the "restless, sleek and puzzling" Rosette Grimaud, a self described feminist (I didn't even know the term existed in 1935) who announces that she's in favour of "less talk and more copulation."

This sort of characterisation, besides being vivid and original, is way ahead of its time. 

Carr is also often very funny. Superintendent Hadley of the CID — the Inspector Lestrade to Fell's Holmes — says at one point, "We can get ideas even from a clever man."

And Dr Fell describes the benefits of "Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for forty years."  And then goes on to provide a lucid analysis of the whole field of locked room murder mysteries, citing names of writers and detectives in a way that's reminiscent of Stieg Larsson (whose hero Blomkvist devours crime novels while he is busy pursuing his own investigation).

This is very modern and witty — not to mention almost disturbingly meta... as when Fell declares "we're in a detective story and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not."

Naturally the crucial thing in a detective story, especially a complex puzzle mystery like this one, is whether the payoff is satisfying or not. And here the author delivers the goods. The solution is diabolically ingenious, holds water, and I'm willing to wager you'll never guess it.

But for me the real revelation was the quality of Carr's writing. I'm seriously impressed  and I'll be looking for more of his books to read.

Meanwhile, if you want to curl up with a classic mystery this Christmas, I recommend that you let John Dickson Carr cast his spell on you, and accompany him into this moody, menacing tale where "London, on the morning of a grey winter Sunday, was deserted to the point of ghostliness along miles of streets..."

(Image credits: A delightfully huge selection of covers, including a couple of striking Chinese editions, at good old Good Reads.)

You Live Once by John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald is one of my all time heroes. He wrote nearly 80 books, primarily crime thrillers and suspense fiction, and almost every one of them is excellent. 

Most of these novels began life as disposable American paperbacks and many were never published in a more permanent format — i.e. hardcover editions. In the UK, though, a publisher called Robert Hale reissued a lot of MacDonald's work between hard covers.

I pick up these Hale editions whenever I can. I like their durability, even though sometimes the cover art leaves something to be desired — as in the case of You Live Once, which I just got hold of this week. (It features this silly and quite irrelevant photo of a glamour model with a fishing rod and a gun.)

You Live Once dates from 1956 and I'm posting about it now because I just happened to glance at the first page yesterday, before putting it on my MacDonald shelf, and I promptly found myself falling under its spell...

And 24 hours later I've finished it and I'm writing this. 

It's the story of Clint Sewell, who has been dating a troubled rich girl called Mary Olan. As the book begins he wakes up with a very strange, intense headache and discovers that Mary has spent the night at his place — dead in his closet.

Clint isn't the type given to morbid self doubt, so never for an instant does he question whether he might have actually killed Mary, perhaps during a blackout. That might well be the basis for a memorable noir tale by Cornell Woolrich...

But MacDonald is a very different sort of writer. (And, it has to be said, a superior one.) So, instead, Clint correctly infers that someone wanted Mary dead and is trying to frame him for the crime.

Therefore he decides to get rid of the body...

What could possibly go wrong?
 
This plot neatly combines a classic murder mystery — who really killed Mary? — with a powerful suspense element: will Clint end up going to the electric chair as the fall guy, after all?

And indeed, at times, the suspense is almost unbearable.

But what really distinguishes MacDonald, as I've said before, is the quality of his writing. He can even make the description of a parked car memorable — "My black Merc sat dozing in the sun." 

Or here he is talking about "the cruel slant of the bishops" on a chess board. (He also reflects on the intellectual purity of the game "... a special, clean geometric world... Perhaps it was a good world to hide in.")
 
And here he describes a man receiving bad news: "staring at his large clenched fist as though he held something small there, captive."

MacDonald shows that, even at this relatively early stage in his career, he was capable of great psychological acuteness. After dumping Mary's body in the woods, Clint reflects, "If no one found her, I knew I would live with nightmares for a long, long time." 
(As it turns out, he doesn't have to worry about that.)

The characterisation in You Live Once is excellent and often darkly funny, but I would say this is not absolutely top notch John D. MacDonald. It's perhaps a bit too cursory —as if the author never entirely fell in love with the story. And there's a slightly drippy romantic sub plot.

But the absorbing murder mystery is skilfully constructed. You're highly unlikely to guess who the culprit is, but when all is revealed, the answer is entirely satisfying. 

Which is the highest accolade for plotting in this genre.

Well done again, Mr MacDonald.

(I have also previously written posts on these other John D. MacDonald novels: The Brass Cupcake, The Last One Left, The Crossroads, All These Condemned, Border Town Girl — actually two novellas, but let's not split hairs —  The Drowner, Murder in the Wind and One Monday We Killed Them All.)

(Image credits: The crazy Hale hard cover with the gun-toting fisher-girl is from Flickr. The 25c Popular Library edition — the first incarnation of this book — is from the admirable John D. MacDonald Covers site. The more recent version of the McGinnis cover, with the Green Ripper citation is from Good Reads. You Kill Me is from Pinterest. The Magnum edition with the green cover of photo and gun is from the bookseller GD Price. The other covers, including the Cosmopolitan magazine (where an early version of the novel appeared), are from the truly excellent John D. MacDonald blog The Trap of Solid Gold.)

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin (Part 2)

I've previously discussed the background for Rosemary's Baby — its context and predecessors — now onto the novel itself.

(Spoiler alert. If you have no idea of the secret of Rosemary's Baby, stop reading this post immediately and go and read the book instead.)

Ira Levin's novel is quite wonderful. I've read it a number of times before, but I welcomed another chance to immerse myself in it as part of this complete survey of Levin's work. And a couple of things struck me anew on this reading.

Firstly, just how damned funny the book  is. Secondly, how utterly villainous and what a bastard Guy is. Guy Woodhouse is Rosemary's husband, and he's an actor. And this is the key to his being a villain — and a bastard.

He is entirely ready to sell Rosemary down the river (in this case, the River Styx) to further his career. Knowing what he's up to really hammers this home, as in the sequence where he's forcing her to eat the doped chocolate mousse. (Don't eat it, Rosemary! But she does...)

Guy's actorly self absorption and narcissism and gift for duplicity are all signalled from the beginning, like at the dinner party where Rosemary's friend Hutch is warning them not to move into the sinister Bramford building, and lists the inexplicable frequency of bad things  happening there: " 'What's the answer, Hutch?' Guy said, playing serious-and-concerned."

Later, after Rosemary has been drugged and knocked out (the aforementioned chocolate mousse) by Guy, and pimped out by him to be raped and impregnated by Satan, her hubby is a little spooked by the situation.

At this point Rosemary (and the first time reader) has no idea what's happened, but she knows something is wrong between her and Guy. He won't touch her... he'll hardly look at her. 

So she calls him on it. He immediately apologises profusely and pleads the pressure of work —

"It was awkward and charming and sincere, like his playing of the cowboy in Bus Stop."

With adroit and acute little hints like this, Ira Levin is telling us that Guy is not to be trusted and not only is he capable of doing something terrible to Rosemary, he's already done it.

I mentioned how funny the book is. This is not just in its incidentals but also, so brilliantly, in its climax. 

When Rosemary frees herself from captivity, arms herself with a kitchen knife, and goes to rescue her baby, whom she believes to have been kidnapped by Satanists, she discovers instead that her child is the spawn of the devil himself...

Complete with eyes that are "golden-yellow, with vertical black-slit pupils", little budding horns, clawed hands and misshapen feet (there's a subtle and hilarious warning of this earlier when Rosemary finds her klutzy Satanist neighbour Laura Louise knitting some " shaped-all-wrong bootees" for the baby).

When she sees the baby, Rosemary completely freaks out, of course. But within a few pages she's thinking, "His eyes weren't that bad really, now that she was prepared for them." And rocking his cradle. And calling him "Mr Worry-face" and "Andy-candy."

Yup, she's bonded with the little devil. I'd forgotten how utterly Rosemary buys into all this at the end. It's so priceless, and so perfect, and so unexpected. Levin is such a genius.

Oh, and the other cherishable moment in this final scene is when she spits in Guy's face.

Now that Rosemary is embedded with the Satanist's as the baby's doting mother, and accepted that she's spawned the Anti-Christ, I found myself hoping that will she mete out some appropriate punishment for Guy.

I'll let you know when I report on the sequel, Son of Rosemary.

(Image credits: Rich pickings at Good Reads where, as you can see, various publishers the world over have leaned heavily on the film as a source of images for their cover designs.)

Widows by Flynn & McQueen and LaPlante

Widows is potent material. It was the writing debut of former actress Lynda LaPlante and she did a fantastic job. Its first — and possibly still finest — incarnation was as British TV mini-series in 1983.

The concept is simple, and brilliant. A gang of crooks die during a heist. Their widows band together to pull off one last big score, using a plan left by the dead criminal mastermind...

A considerable success back in '83, Widows also had quite an afterlife. There was a sequel, Widows 2 in 1985, a sequel called She's Out in 1993, and an American mini-series ("They took over the family business and made out like bandits") in 2002.

It's great material and I was delighted to hear it was being made into a new feature film. I was less delighted when I learned the director was Steve McQueen.

McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) comes from a high-art background and I don't think he really understands drama, or perhaps even film. However, there's no denying he made one genius decision early on — to chose Gillian Flynn as his co-writer on the project.

Flynn wrote the novel Gone Girl and also the screenplay for the David Fincher film adaptation, both of which are stupendous. For Widows she brings a lot of richness and depth to the script, but there's a little too much coincidence in the plot for my liking.

The new film is well worth seeing, but it's frustrating. Every time it really starts to burn with excitement, McQueen throws a shovel full of sand on the fire, so to speak. The trouble is, he's trying so hard to be arty...

For example, there's a whirling circular tracking shot which makes the audience feel sea sick. 

And also a fixed camera sequence, shot continuously and in real time, where we are stuck outside a car and unable to see the people speaking inside — a corrupt politician Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) and his decorative fixer Siobhan (Molly Kuntz).

There's some great dialogue here but it just doesn't work because we can't see Mulligan or Siobhan. It's an amazingly frustrating scene, and seems to break basic rules of film making.

Now, this was a careful and deliberate decision by McQueen, who wanted to show what a short drive it is from a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Chicago to Mulligan's posh suburban home.

Fair enough. Keep the camera mounted on the hood of the car. But don't make the vehicle a chauffeur driven limo with opaque smoked glass windows. Make it a car with windows we can see through and stick Farrell and Kuntz in the front — it makes perfect sense that Mulligan would drive himself in a less flashy vehicle, because he's just put on his man-of-the-people act.

As I say, Widows is frustrating. It's good, but it could have been great. Art films and thrillers need not be incompatible — look at John Boorman's Point Blank, a movie which shows just how far short Widows falls short.

(Image credits: Very thin pickings — just three variations of  effectively the same poster — at Imp Awards. The Blu-ray cover of the original British mini series is from Network, who have a great catalogue and frequent sales. The poster for the 2002 US remake of the mini-series — which was directed by Geoffrey Sax, a very nice chap — is from IMDB.)

The Girl in the Spider's Web by Alvarez, Knight, Lagercrantz et al

One of my all time favourite movies is David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Expertly scripted by Steve Zaillian, it was supposed to be the first of three films based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, charting the adventures of Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous tattooed girl.

However, Fincher's film wasn't considered lucrative enough by the bean counters, so the sequels never materialised. Which, considering the quality of the first movie, was heartbreaking.

Well, now we move from broken hearts to dropping jaws as, to my astonishment, a sequel does turn up — seven years later. And, against all the odds, it's a worthy successor.

I say against all the odds because Fincher isn't involved, the cast and crew are entirely different, and it isn't even based on a Stieg Larsson novel. 

After Larsson's appallingly unjust early demise it looked like the Millennium series would be truncated at three volumes. But, modern publishing and eternal human greed being what they are, a dead author was no serious obstacle and another Swedish journalist, David Lagercrantz, was commissioned to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander.

I never bothered reading his 2015 novel, The Girl in the Spider's Web, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the movie version starring Claire Foy to catch an early screening.

And it completely knocked me out. It's a true sequel to the 2011 film, clearly showing the influence of David Fincher's work, right from the nightmarish James Bond style title sequence.

The film is brilliantly directed by Fede Alvarez who smartly channels  Fincher's sensibility. Alvarez previously co-wrote and directed the 2013 remake of The Evil Dead, which was sort of okay, and the  suspense thriller Don't Breathe, which was absolutely terrific (one of my runners-up for the best films of 2016).

The other screenplay credits on The Girl in the Spider's Web are both British scriptwriters: Jay Basu who worked on the fun little sports drama Fast Girls and Steven Knight, who is one of my heroes. Knight wrote the big screen masterpieces Locke and Allied and created the TV show Peaky Blinders.

The music for The Girl in the Spider's Web a is by Alvarez's regular composer Roque Baños and the cinematographer is another regular collaborator Pedro Luque — and the film looks magnificent.

Claire Foy is superb as Lisbeth Salander in the new film. She has the same Goth waif quality as Rooney Mara did in Fincher's movie — both of them quite different from Noomi Rapace in the 2009 Swedish film version.

The Girl in the Spider's Web sets Salander in opposition to her sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks), who is a kind of anti-Lisbeth, with her longer blonde hair, very girlie and all dressed in white. Hoeks is great casting; she was superlative and scary as Luv the replicant in Blade Runner 2049. (She looks so different here that I didn't recognise her.)

The film has has some flaws. Its plot revolves around a cyber MacGuffin which puts the world at risk (yawn). And there's a scene where Salander disables the bad guys' car, leaving them helpless; it's an ideal opportunity to finish them off, but she doesn't.

The Lisbeth Salander I know wouldn't have hesitated. But this seems to be a deliberate decision, with Salander for the most part stalking through the story and applying non-lethal weapons on her adversaries. But the film is none the worse for that.

In fact, it's stupendous. A dark Christmas delight. I urge you to see it.

Now... I have to go and see it again myself. And check out Lagercrantz's novel.

(Image credits: a fine selection of stylish posters at Imp Awards.)

Bless the Beasts and Children by Glendon Swarthout

Glendon Swarthout is an intriguing American novelist whose diverse books have often been filmed — indeed I wrote about Tommy Lee Jones's striking adaptation of The Homesman last year. 

Bless the Beasts and Children was also turned into a movie. I haven't seen it (though I've owned a copy of the soundtrack album since I was a kid).

Bless the Beasts begins at a dude ranch in Arizona where difficult boys are sent by their rich parents. It focuses on the most problematical of the problem kids, a group of misfits and outcasts who share a cabin — and also share the contempt of the others.

It tells a classic quest story, with the kids escaping from the ranch in the middle of the night and going on a mission. We only gradually learn what that mission is. It turns out to be a fairly horrifying one. 

They are headed for a national park where there is an annual slaughter of buffalo. Yes, that's right, the iconic beast of the American West. For dubious reasons their population is deemed in need of regular culls.

And it's not as though the "hunters" have to track the buffalo down or anything like that. The poor animals are just driven into a pen from which there is no escape and the "sportsmen" (and women) shoot at them at such close range they can't miss — although the animals are frequently grievously wounded and a long time dying.

The kids share in the horror felt by the reader (or at least by this reader) and the novel is an animal rights and eco-activist milestone. Indeed there was quite an outcry when the book (and film) appeared, from the vast swathes of people who had no idea such butchery was taking place — and wanted it to stop.

Glendon Swarthout often writes beautifully about the wild, ancient landscape he clearly loves. The Mogollon Rim is described as "inconceivable and paleozic";  the Grand Canyon is all "fossil silence and echo".

He also writes movingly of "the stench and desperation of the beasts" and of how the kids, attempting to rescue the buffalo, are surrounded by the creatures who crowd around: "the breath of innocent animals blessed them." 

I have somewhat less admiration for Swarthout's attempt to conjure up teenage slang: "Cool it, or the shooters'll be down here triggering us" Triggering? But there's no denying how invested I was in these characters, and their mission. And when their leader says, as they set off to save the beasts, "Good luck. To us and them," I was moved.

The edition of the book I read featured an extremely useful introduction in which Glendon Swarthout is quoted making the very perceptive point that his novel is kind of an anti-Lord of the Flies... he isolates a group of young boys and instead of descending into savagery they rise to heroism.

As a bitter footnote, I have to tell you that Swarthout's book didn't put a stop to this practice. The "hunt" continues, in a modified fashion: as first State game rangers accompanied the brave hunters "to deliver a quick-kill shot to any poor animal which a nervous marksman had only wounded." 

More recently the brave shooters were required to hunt on foot, and their prey is no longer penned up in front of an audience. "The buffalo now have the privilege of being blasted to bits in private just like every other American game animal."
 
(Image credits: The book covers are from Good Reads.)

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin (Part 1)

The big question is, how did Ira Levin dare to write Rosemary's Baby? 

Rosemary's Baby was published in 1967. Up to this point in his career,  Levin had already experienced considerable success. His first novel, A Kiss Before Dying, had created a big splash in 1954, and remained in print selling strongly. 

He'd also made his mark writing television scripts and, even more so on Broadway, with two hit comedies.

So, with a classic crime novel under his belt and some hilarious and highly successful shows... Was the natural next move Rosemary's Baby? 

Well, a suspense novel absolutely made sense — A Kiss Before Dying was a masterpiece of suspense. But what about a suspense novel which was also a full-blown story of the supernatural? 

Absolutely not...

Novels of the supernatural had climbed the bestseller lists before, notably the works of Dennis Wheatley. But such books pretty much resided in a genre ghetto. They were horror stories. 

And unlike crime — which has always been respectable, indeed is regarded right up there with real literature — horror was as disreputable as fantasy or science fiction. 
 
And science fiction, with a few very rare exceptions, was the kiss of death in the marketplace, both then and now. (Note how Rosemary's Baby is described as a "suspense thriller" on the Fawcett cover... no hint of horror or "genre".)

The most striking precursor of Rosemary — and a superb novel in its own right — is Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, which like Levin's novel locates its tale of dark magic in a mundane and realistic setting (in this case amidst the academic rivalries of an American university town).

But Conjure Wife was packaged and marketed in paperback as a pulp horror confection (the cover shown here calls it "Science Fantasy"). Not much chance of critical respect or breakthrough bestseller status for poor, much-deserving Mr Leiber.

Rosemary's Baby, on the other hand was aimed squarely at the mainstream. How did Levin and his publisher's make such a shrewd move?

Well, there were precedents. Ray Russell's 1962 novel The Case Against Satan was a tale of demonic possession which anticipated William Peter Blatty by about ten years, and it had received respectful reviews and respectable sales, propelled by a blurb from Ian Fleming.

But when Russell's novel appeared in paperback, it was packaged as a sensational and lurid story.

Unlike Rosemary's Baby, which was given classy and restrained art based on based on the hardcover design.

And then there was Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which was a big success in 1959. Indeed, Barbara Nelson in the Library Journal explicitly compared Rosemary's Baby at the time of its publication to the work of Jackson. 

But as the title indicates, Shirley Jackson's novel was a haunted house story following in the classic tradition.

Nobody was getting knocked up by Satan in Shirley Jackson's book

Interestingly, when it was first published, Rosemary's Baby was nominated for an Edgar Alan Poe award for outstanding crime (in this case presumably suspense) fiction. Levin's debut, A Kiss Before Dying had actually won an Edgar.

But Rosemary's Baby is a tale of the supernatural, and unashamedly so. Ira Levin showed great courage in crossing the line into this genre. And his publishers, Random House, are to be applauded for supporting him so effectively.

Because at this time no one was putting horror stories in tasteful covers (like Burnt Offerings) and targeting a mass audience. 

There was no thriving category of mainstream supernatural fiction. Levin invented it with his novel  — and The Exorcist, Audrey Rose, Burnt Offerings, Carrie and hundreds of others owe him a huge debt.

Oh, and in answer to the question we began with... I think there was only one reason Ira Levin wrote Rosemary's Baby. Because the idea had seized him, and he was passionate about it — and having a hell of a good time writing it. All of which shows in the superlative quality of the book, which I'll discuss in my next post.

Meanwhile, for anyone interested in the specific genesis of this novel and the ideas behind it, there is an outstanding website at Ira Levin Org. That's where I got the handwritten note by Levin showing the first, you'll excuse the expression, seed of Rosemary's Baby.

(Image credits: the lovely, and beautifully designed Fawcett cover, with its Freudian penetration of the 'O' by the 'R', is from the Internet Archive. The Devil Rides Out is from The Dennis Wheatley Project (an excellent site). The American paperback of Case Against Satan is from Flickr. Conjure Wife is from Battered, Tattered, Yellow and Creased.  The Haunting of Hill House is from Too Much Horror Fiction, a useful and insightful blog. As mentioned, the Ira Levin handwritten note is courtesy of the absolutely excellent Ira Levin Org. Burnt Offerings is from Good Reads. The red Dell cover, the first paperback incarnation, is also from Good Reads. Both of these latter covers, incidentally, are designed by the great Paul Bacon.)

The Bad Seed by William March

The Bad Seed is a classic of crime and suspense fiction which has some notable similarities to Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying.

They were published within a year of each other (1953-1954), both enjoyed immediate commercial and critical success — Levin's book won an Edgar award. March's was nominated for the National Book Award.

Both novels have been filmed twice (The Bad Seed also became a successful stage play), both have remained constantly in print, and both books are masterpieces.

Also, both are stories about psychopaths who kill ruthlessly for gain. 

But The Bad Seed is inevitably horrifying and heartbreaking in a way that  A Kiss Before Dying isn't.

I say inevitably because the psychopathic killer in March's novel is an 8 year old girl, and the story is told from the point of view her mother, who gradually discovers the truth about her beloved daughter.

Christine Penmark is the mother and March brings her to life swiftly and economically. Christine is beautiful and a bit otherworldly and her peaceful existence is about to be filled with confusion and torment. 
 
Near the beginning of the story we find her languidly holding her toothbrush "as though she were not quite decided what to do with it." Near the end she is holding a gun "as though she did not understand its purpose."

But the really indelible character is, of course, the homicidal child Rhoda, who is like a "pet that can never be quite domesticated", suffering her mother's kisses and caresses but profoundly unable to understand them. She responds with "a calculated simulation of affection."

Rhoda is a star pupil and avid attender of Sunday school, where she studies the bible and has a "strange affinity for the cruelties of the Old Testament."

On the surface she is a perfect little goody-two-shoes and most grownups adore her. However, at school "the other pupils both feared and detested Rhoda."

Quite right, too.

In many ways the book is a pitiless as its monstrous child. There is no escape for Rhoda's mother. In the very first sentence of the book we are presented with Christine and told this is "the day of her last happiness."  And Marsh tightens the screws on his unfortunate heroine remorselessly.

Even as the truth begins to dawn on her, she tells herself that it's "her duty to protect the child, to make every allowance for her."

March shrewdly equips Christine with friends and neighbours who are amateur experts on psychology and true crime, providing her with the clues she needs to work out the terrible reality of Rhoda's nature.

There is no way this can end well, and it doesn't. But it makes for riveting reading along the way.

(Image credits: all the covers are from Good Reads. Except for the Penguin in its classic green crime fiction livery, which is a scan of my own copy. I particularly like the Chinese edition, with a cover which is very true to the story, and the English hardback, which features an illustration by Robin Jacques including Leroy the janitor who is one of the few adults to see through Rhoda.)

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

What a book! Published in 1953, A Kiss Before Dying is a milestone of suspense and crime fiction, and a remarkable debut.

But what really drives other writers nuts is that Ira Levin was only 24 when the book came out, and therefore even younger when he wrote it.

A Kiss Before Dying is the story of a handsome, hard working, ambitious young man. In some ways he's an all-American boy, dreaming very big dreams. Indeed, with his systematic plan of self improvement and his "completely objective list of his qualities, abilities and talents" he's like the Great Gatsby's psychopathic twin.

Psychopathic because he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants.  

And his shortcut to the good life is his scheme to marry the pretty young daughter of a copper tycoon (the company is called Kingship Copper — what a great name). 

She's the perfect target because of her "passive, orphan hunger" for love, and her emotional vulnerability which, he reflects "had something to do with the coldness she felt towards her father." 

He's profoundly psychologically acute (as is Levin) and is meticulously cunning and manipulative, pumping his victim for information so he can draw up a list of his future father in law's likes and dislikes.

But what really drives this novel is the fact that Leo Kingship has three daughters, which leads to an intricate and nail-biting narrative. I'm being a bit coy here because I don't want to give too much away...
  
Besides strong sales (it's never been out of print), the book received rave reviews. Drexel Drake in the Chicago Sunday Tribune called it a "remarkably constructed story" and Anthony Boucher in the New York Times described its "technical whodunit tricks as dazzling as anything ever brought off."  

What they are talking about is Ira Levin's use of unnamed first person narrative to allow the killer to hide in plain sight. When the story's viewpoint then switches to other characters we have no idea who the bad guy is. Or rather, we have some idea, which begins to ratchet up the suspense...

If you haven't read this book, Levin builds in some stunning surprises. Unless some idiot ruins it for you with spoilers — and I don't intend to be that idiot — you are in for a real treat. 

In fact, even if you have read it, it's likely to prove satisfyingly shocking. This was at least my third reading, but details had grown sufficiently vague for me to still be floored by one of Levin's greatest twists

Since the story is told from three different viewpoints in three sections (one for each sister), the style of the book is allowed to change, smoothly and naturally.

The first part is a chilling internal portrait of the killer — full of slippery self justification. He's a perfectly realised character, narcissistic ("He ran his hand over his hair, wishing there were a mirror"), pitiless and implacable.

The second is a sort of a girl-detective story with a plucky young woman doing some "very cautious Sherlocking." She's smart and appealing and very switched on — she's "seen too many movies where the heroine" foolishly confronts the bad guy and comes to a sticky end. (Interesting that this was already such a cliché in the early 1950s.)

The third section of the book moves to a marvellously evoked New York City (Levin clearly loves his home town) where the killer thinks his goal is at last within reach. He's exultant. "Was there ever such a perfect day?" he asks, foreshadowing the title of a future novel by Levin.

But it's not that simple, chum, and the story becomes a nerve-wracking game of cat and mouse, and also a moving tale of loss as the final thrusts in this chess game are played out, at an immense cost to all concerned.

 A Kiss Before Dying is a great crime novel and a classic of suspense fiction. But it's deeper than that. It's ultimately a human tragedy about a father who unknowingly condemns his daughters to a horrible fate, and three girls who just wanted to find love.

You won't be able to put it down, or forget it once you finish it.

This post is part of a series I'm writing on the complete works of Ira Levin — nine out of ten cats recommend his fine novels! The introduction to this series can be found here. Next up, Rosemary's Baby.

(Image credits: Most of the covers are from Good Reads — the Turkish edition recycles a Tom Adams cover painting for an Agatha Christie book, The Seven Dials Mystery. The Corsair edition with the purple cover is from Hachette Australia. And the Signet with the red cover, the first paperback edition, is from Captain Ahab's Rare Books at ABE. The dustjacket of the original hardcover is from Facsimile Dust Jackets, which is a great resource and a wonderful idea.)