James Hadley Chase: collected mini-reviews

Over at James Reasoner's blog, there's been some discussion on the British crime writer James Hadley Chase. I've reviewed several of his novels here and I thought I could gather them in one posting, edited, of course.

James Hadley Chase's Shock Treatment from 1959. It was more sane than some other Chases I've read, but still nothing memorable - just another James M. Cain imitation with a surprisingly flat ending.

The Dead Stay Dumb by James Hadley Chase. It's an early Chase, from 1939, and while it's pretty wild, it's also somewhat moronic. There's no real plot, no real characters - all the killings and counterfeits just happen almost out of nowhere. Maybe it's surrealism. (I know that the French are enthusiastic for Chase.)

The Flesh of the Orchid, James Hadley Chase's sequel to his debut, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, is absurd and implausible, but you never know if it's because Chase was a poor writer or because he wanted it to be so. There's a ridiculous thing about having a law according to which if you escape from the mental institute and manage to not get caught in fourteen days, you get to go free. What the fuck? If you manage to forget all this, I guess the book could be enjoyable. There are some genuinely chilling moments and Chase has a knack for outrageous violence, but in the end it's a rather empty book. The French director Patrice Chereau made a film from this in the early eighties (or late seventies?). It emphasized the dream-like quality that I think is involuntary in the book and is a much better work of art.

James Hadley Chase: Eve (1945; no American publication that I know of) - basis for a famous film by Joseph Losey (1962), but of little interest as a thriller, Chase doesn't really know how to make American settings plausible, this has characters Clive, Carol, Rex etc., which doesn't ring true; a Cainish story, but not enough plot.

What's Better Than Money? (1960) is one of the best Chases I've read, even though there were many implausibilities and some of the scenes were just plain stupid, but in this Chase was able to build suspension. The ending was flat, though.

In Knock, Knock, Who's There (1973) Chase has switched to Mafia stories that were a fad in the early seventies due to the Godfather movies. It's a story about Johnny Bianda, the bagman for a small-time mafioso. Bianda decides to get off the boat and robs the money he's gathered on his daily racket round. The book focuses on him trying to stay one step ahead of the Mafia guys. It's a bit weak in the middle, but all in all one of the better Chases. The ending is very cynical and not so flat as in the some other Chase novels I've read so far.

I Hold the Four Aces (1979) is strictly mediocre. It has a nice scam plot, but Chase is not very good at describing a female lead and there's a stupid butler character involved. The climax is also not violent enough.

This must be one of the best James Hadley Chase novels - at least of those I've read. In The Sucker Punch (1954) he spins the story of the man caught in the web of fake love, greed and seven million dollars quite well. There's just that it never feels like it takes place in the US. If someone gave it to me without covers or any other identifications and took out the half dozen references, mainly to California, from the text, I'd say it takes place in England. This makes the novel seem pretty empty, without any real content. I haven't really checked, but I believe the book was first published as by Raymond Marshall, one of Chase's pseudonyms.

More films seen: The Catamount Killing, Rock & Rule, Mars

Last Monday the Finnish Film Archive treated us with two rare films: the Canadian Rock & Rule from 1983 and Mars, a Soviet documentary by Pavel Klushantsev, from 1968. Mars was very beautiful and the scenes on the fictional Mars were breath-taking. It's evident Kubrick learned a lot from Klushantsev. The print was very pretty, with beautifully faded colours, and the Finnish voice-over narration held some poetic descriptions, such as "jos tuhka keväällä vihannoisi".

Rock & Rule, however, was something entirely different. It's an animated film, about 80 minutes long. The tale is set in a distant future after the nuclear war. Rodents seem to have evolved into humanlike creatures and they play rock'n'roll. The soundtrack has some great tracks by Cheap Trick (a band that I've otherwise never really got into) and some not so great by Lou Reed ("My name is Mok") and Debbie Harry. Have these ever been released? I couldn't make out if there's ever been a soundtrack release. The original synthesizer music in the film is horrible.

The animation in the film is actually very good and boasts many different and striking styles. I seem to remember reading that the making of the film took three years to complete. Now it would take three months, with all the computers and shit.

But the storyline in Rock & Rule is not enough - the premise is funny, though: Mok, a super rocker (who's sold "plutonium"), seeks to find a way to bring a demon into one of his concerts. What would Ozzy Osbourne think of this? The story line is a bit thin and there are not enough funny gags. Furthermore, the acoustics in the film are pretty noisy. All the characters are shouting in stupid voices all the time and then there's the synthesizer whining. It's as if the makers didn't believe in their own dialogue. Well, it's evident in many of the recent animated features that there's just gotta be speed and noise all the time.

Lots of people walked out during the film, but I didn't think it was really all that bad. There's a whole web site devoted to the film.

I also managed to see through The Catamount Killing from 1974. It's the most pulp-related film of the three, as it's based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, one of the most important hardboiled writers of Britain. The film is a bastard, to put it nicely: it's situated in America, it's based on a British novel, it's financed by German money and directed by a Polish director, namely Krzysztof Zanussi, who's better known as an art-house director (and one or two of his films that I've seen have been pretty powerful). Also the lead actor is the German Horst Buccholz. He's quite hysterical throughout the movie.

There are some nice touches here and there (especially the climax at the end with Buccholz rushing out of a house with camera following), but overall the film is too slow and you never quite believe how a neurotic jerk like Buchholz could be a bank manager. The music by Wojciech Kilar is very good, eerie and atmospheric.