All posts tagged Gabrielle

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (2008)

Alan Furst has written 14 spy novels set in or around Eastern Europe in the late 1930s when the clouds of war were gathering over the continent. The last seven or so have appeared at nice regular two-year intervals, conform to a nice predictable formula and his readers can look forward to the usual predictable pleasures.

The formula

Hero

There’ll be a central male protagonist – as the novels have gone by these have tended to become steadily posher, so this one is Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, 46, whose ancient family long ago lost their noble title and vast lands, and so is now plain Colonel Mercier. Mercier fought and was wounded in the Great War, and then in the 1920 Russian invasion of Poland, alongside the rather better-known de Gaulle. He was given a medal by the Polish government and partly because of that has ended up serving as French military attaché in Warsaw. He is tall, dark and handsome, walks with a slight limp from a war wound, because of which he sometimes uses an elegant silver-topped cane – but he nurses a secret sorrow: his beautiful wife, Annemarie, died suddenly three years earlier of influenza (p.55). Luckily his height, good looks, aristocratic bearing and independent means have kept in a regular supply of young lovelies to console him. His daughter, Gabrielle, thinks he is irresistible (p.190).

Sex

The male protagonist usually has an easygoing way with women and enjoys soft porn sex with at least one round-bottomed young lady during the course of the book. For example, after a tennis match at the country house of Polish aristocrat Prince Kazimierz, Mercier is in the shower when the door to the bathroom opens and the lovely Princess Antoniwa enters, lets her robe slip to the floor, before stepping into the steamy shower to join him. You can almost hear Je t’aime playing on the movie soundtrack as they enjoy literally steamy sex. Later, we are treated to a description of his initiation into the joys of mutual masturbation by an older cousin, Albertine, when he was a teenager (pp.121-124).

High society

Prince Kazimierz. Princess Antoniwa. Country houses. Mercier’s own upbringing at boarding school, the huge family apartment in the snobby 7th arrondissement of Paris. Part of Mercier’s job is to attend cocktail parties given by the various embassies, meeting and remeeting the beau monde of Warsaw. ‘Daaahling, have another one of these simply delicious canapés.’

Espionage

One of Mercier’s jobs is managing ‘agents’. The one who features in this book is a shabby German businessman, Edvard Uhl, who works in the giant Krupps arms manufacturers. He was picked up by one of Mercier’s ‘honey trap’ woman agents, and has now been blackmailed / seduced into travelling once a month to Warsaw where he a) has hot, giggling rumpy-pumpy with the supposed ‘Countess Sczelenska’ (real name Hana Musser, a half-Czech, half-German refugee from the ‘fulminous Nazi politics’ of the Sudetenland), and b) the following day meets Mercier to hand over blueprints and diagrams about German tanks, and receive a packet of collars in return. But Uhl is getting increasingly nervous…

Paris

Furst has acknowledged his debt to Eric Ambler who wrote half a dozen spy thrillers set in Eastern Europe, actually during the last years of the 1930s, with brilliantly atmospheric evocations of Eastern and MittelEuropa. Following the master, his stories are set outside the Anglophone comfort zone of Britain or the USA, instead among the capital cities and fog-shrouded landscapes of Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Romania or, in this case, Warsaw.

However, although the adventures often take place in remote parts of Eastern Europe, the texts’ centre of gravity is nearly always the European city Furst which lived in for years and where his heart obviously belongs – lovers’ Paris, the Paris where French movie producer Jean Casson, Hungarian exile Nicholas Morath, Russian émigré Ilya Serebin, and Italian foreign correspondent Carlo Weisz (the heroes of his previous novels) all have apartments regularly adorned by nubile young ladies, and where they depart from for foreign adventures before gratefully returning in various states of disrepair. Paris is the meta-location of these novels, thus Mercier feels ‘the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air’, as soon as he is back there (p.119).

Datestamps

As usual the novel is divided into a handful of long parts or acts – in this case, four – each made up of numerous much shorter sections, often marked with a date stamp to give a sense of the urgent passage of time, of the ominous forward momentum of events. The earliest is 17 October 1937, the last one 9 May 1938.

1. Hotel Europejski

It is autumn 1937. Herr Uhl, happily married with kids, makes excuses to visit the factory down on the Polish border once a month but in fact pops over to Warsaw, checks into the Hotel Europejski and has championship sex with the plump, big-bottomed ‘Countess Sczelenska’. Colonel Mercia is French military attaché to Warsaw. We meet him playing tennis with the cream of Warsaw’s cosmopolitan high society at the rich country mansion of Prince Kazimierz.

Mercier is the ‘control’ of Herr Uhl, meets him in a seedy café in a working class quarter, pays him money, takes diagrams of German tank technology. Later Mercier packs night wear and a revolver and is driven by Marek, the loyal Polish chauffeur, down to Katowice on the German border where he and Marek crawl at night through the various lines of barbed wire, before a searchlight goes on and they have to shoot their way out and back to the Polish side. The tank traps which used to feature in these defences have been filled in: Why? To make them easier for tanks to cross. Why? When? Puzzling.

Uhl gets panicky on the train back into Germany and becomes convinced ‘they’ ie the Gestapo, are waiting for him at passport control. He dodges out of the queue waiting to hand over their passports, nips back under the train to steps down to the river and walks back to the previous station. But this suspicious activity was noticed and reported, a report which eventually percolates up to Sturmbannführer (Major) August Voss in local Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headquarters at Glogau. It takes them a while but his operatives eventually match the description of a pot-bellied businessman with a big knobby nose who behaved suspiciously with Uhl.

Thus, after Mercier’s next rendezvous with Uhl a month later, Mercier, leaving the rendezvous cafe separately, accidentally sees Uhl being forcefully chatted up by a stunning blonde and tails the pair back to a rent-by-the-hour hotel in the red light district. But when the blonde comes running downstairs ten minutes later, and is followed by a big goon carrying a package wrapped in bedsheets, Mercier intervenes, there’s a fight, the Krauts make off in a getaway car and Mercier unwraps the roped-up bedsheets to discover Uhl inside, almost dead. Not quite. He is spirited away to hospital.

In a different plotline – Mercier is invited to a diplomatic reception given to entertain businessmen from the French company Renault, who are trying to sell the Polish government armaments. His regular consort drops out and at suggests a replacement, the girlfriend of a Russian émigré writer (Maxim Mostov), the young and lovely Anna Szarbek, who works for the League of Nations as a lawyer. Guess what happens, go on, guess. Yes, they fall in love and thus begins a passionate love affair set against the looming threat of war!

Among Mercier’s routine chores are regular meetings with his opposite number, Colonel Anton Vyborg, who we’ve already met in Furst’s novels Dark Star and The Polish Officer, both set a few years later, after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. In one meeting Mercier admires a map which Vyborg casually mentions was drawn up by Captain de Milja of the Geographical Section (p.222). Alert readers will remember that this same de Milja is the Polish Officer in the novel of the same name. If the reader had read either of those novels he would have a strong sense of the doom which all these characters are heading towards…

Mercier is reprimanded by the Ambassador for the diplomatic embarrassment of ‘the Uhl Affair’, and is recalled to Paris to explain.

2. On Raven Hill

Paris, where almost all Furst’s novels start and end. Mercier returns to the huge apartment in the 7th arrondissement and bumps into cousin Albertine, the one who initiated him into the joys of sex when he was an innocent 14-year-old. Now she is formal, polite, friendly – but with a teasing hint of flirtation…

Mercier has a formal interview with Colonel Bruner who reprimands him for causing a scene and losing an agent. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Sturmbannführer August Voss has his ear bitten off by his boss about the cack-handed fiasco with Uhl. Infuriated Voss had had one of his thugs identify who it was who interfered in the street, i.e. he has got Mercier in his sights.

In every single one of Furst’s novels he mentions the fictional Brasserie Heininger, the supposedly upmarket, must-be-seen-at Paris nightclub and restaurant. In Night Soldiers it was the scene of an exciting and thrilling shootout, when the Bulgarian head waiter was assassinated for interfering in politics by assassins who then shot the place up and the owners left one mirror, cracked by a bullet hole, in place as a memento, the table beneath it, table 14, quickly becoming the most fashionable one to dine at.

But whereas in Night Soldiers the actual event was part of a genuinely gripping narrative about the criminal and espionage underworld of Paris, repetition of this story has made it boring and banal, and it is now getting irritating (p.137). Mercier is taken to the Brasserie for lunch by Aristide de Beauvilliers, the intellectual on the French High Council for War who, of course, insists on sitting at the famous table and telling him the story of the bullet hole – yawn.

Mercier reports that Uhl was due to go watch German tank manoeuvres at a place called Schramberg. He’s been reading the German General Guderian’s book about tank tactics, Achtung – Panzer! He’s come to the conclusion that the Germans will attack through Belgium, north of France’s supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line. De Beauvilliers agrees but explains that the French Army is in the grip of old men who think they’re infallible. Pétain, hero of Verdun, has ridiculed the Ardennes theory, so it is squashed. Meanwhile, French politicians are so polarised that no decisions, no funding for the Army, is forthcoming. We readers know all this means France will be conquered in a matter of weeks by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in June 1940.

Mercier returns to Warsaw. He attends another reception where he is anxious to see whether Anna Szarbek will attend. She does. His heart soars. Walking her back to her apartment they are caught in a sudden snowstorm and duck into a cinema where they end up snogging. He sees her to her door where she is charmingly shy and conflicted about whether they should see each other again. Women, huh?

In action mode, Mercier slips into civilian clothes, flies to Switzerland, is briefed by a useful fellow official at the French consulate there, given a pistol, maps, compass and then driven by a reliable local, Stefan, across the border to Schramberg. He makes his own way out to the test zone, hides and then observes the German tank manoeuvres for himself.

3. The Black Front

Mercier celebrates Christmas and New Year at his estate back in southern France. The loyal family retainers. The loyal hunting dogs. Mass at the local church with the surviving relations, including an irritating right-wing uncle. Then, gratefully, back to Warsaw. Mercier sends his report of the German tank manoeuvres to Paris. De Beauvilliers hints that it will be ignored by the foolish high command.

Mercier receives a clandestine plea from the two Russian diplomats who he’s always meeting at receptions, a Jewish couple, Viktor and Malka Rozen. They have been ordered back to Moscow. They know they will be interrogated and shot. They wish to defect. He checks with his superiors, then makes an appointment to meet them, but they don’t show.

In Paris Madame Dupin had told him about a League of Nations conference to do with laws surrounding national minorities and refugees. He immediately wonders whether Anna will be going and, if so, she will be free from the clutches of the Russian boyfriend. He arranges with his bosses to go, impatiently and excitedly boards the train and – lo and behold! – she is on it and – quelle surprise! – they are soon in her overnight compartment where he quickly finds out she has ‘small breasts in a lacy black bra’ (p.216) among other discoveries.

Back in Warsaw, Mercier returns to routine work: a letter from Uhl, now recovered, saying he is being sent to safety in Quebec, with a new identity and job. Meetings. Colonel Vyborg invites him to a private meeting and tells him he is under surveillance by people attached to the German embassy. Neither of them know they are thugs hired by Sturmbannführer Voss, the angry man humiliated in the Uhl fiasco.

One night there is a frantic beating at the door and it is Madame Rozen. This sparks the most exciting passage in the novel as she has fled the embassy, but her husband twisted an ankle and is in a park up the road. It is midnight. Mercier packs his Browning pistol and makes his way through the deserted streets, making the reader as tense as he is. He finds Rozen, becoming incoherent with the freezing cold, and supports him all the way back to his apartment, with one interruption. An angry man steps out to confront them but Mercier waves his gun and the man strolls away. From the description, the reader suspects it is Voss not anybody from the NKVD who might be tailing the Rozens.

Mercier calls the embassy and his people put in place a successful operation to exfiltrate the two Russians, his boss Jourdain, the embassy chauffeur Marek, a motorcycle guard, they drive out to a remote airfield where a plane arrives bearing Colonel Bruner, Mercier’s boss, all the way from Paris. The Rozens climb into it and it departs. Panic over. Mercier returns to his apartment for a well-earned kip.

Next night he entertains Anna to dinner and Furstian sex. She has moved out of the apartment she shared with the Russian writer. They are now definitely an item.

At a diplomatic dinner given by the Portuguese embassy, Mercier is surprised to find himself in conversation with the courtly old Dr Lapp, a German businessman assumed to have some part in the Abwehr or German intelligence. Very slyly he indicates that he is a true German patriot and not so keen on the present regime. Shall we meet again, somewhere more private? Mercier repeats the conversation to his boss who points out that he’s becoming quite the spymaster. It was the incident of saving Uhl from being abducted by the Germans; everybody heard about it and everybody deduced his role.

4. A Shadow of War

March 1938. Mercier, in his capacity as military attaché, goes on a typically boring trip to a Polish arms, armoured car and light tank factory, the Ursus Tractor Company in the suburb of Wola. Mercier leaves the factory after a long, exhaustive tour but his faithful driver Marek is not waiting as they’d arranged. Instead, out of the shadows emerge three menacing figures who, before, he can react, surround Mercier and start beating him up, whipping him with a horsewhip, punching and kicking to the ground. It’s looking bad for our hero when a shot rings out and the bad guys desist the beating and run off. The gun was fired by Marek the driver who comes running up to his boss and helps him to his feet. He describes how he’d parked a few streets away and had himself been approached by a thug who drew a gun. Being the sturdy dependable type he is, Marek simply shot this figure.

The reader knows the three assailants are Major Voss and two of his SD thug pals. Voss is very angry at Mercier for interfering in the abduction of Uhl, and blames him for his recent transfer to a small provincial town, Schweinfurt. This demotion was the last straw had determined him to travel to Warsaw with two drinking buddies and ugly bullies from the SD – Meino and Willi – fired up by fantasies of kidnapping Mercier and torturing him, maybe in front of his pretty girlfriend. They were met off the train and driven around by local German thug, Winckelmann, and this is the man who approached Marke threateningly and who Marek shot dead.

Safely back in the centre of town, Mercier is tended by Anna. A few days later he has the planned meeting with Dr Lapp. Mercier passes on the message he has been given by his bosses that Dr Lapp should travel to Paris and phone the number he hands him. He’ll be met by the sophisticated de Beauvilliers and discussion about recruiting him will proceed from there. But Mercier has his own agenda. Running like an unobtrusive thread has been gossip and speculation about a shadowy organisation that opposes the Nazis from within, in fact which originated within the Nazi party itself. Initially, there was a genuinely socialist wing of the party, which wanted to do away with big industrialists, redistribute wealth to the workers and so on. But Hitler needed rich backers and so, in the Night of The Long Knives in July 1934, he had most of the leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA) murdered.

But some survived and went underground in what is rumoured to call itself the Black Front. Now Mercier asks Lapp about a name he has heard, a Halbach. Lapp is reluctant to speak, but eventually says, yes it still exists, in feeble shape. Halbach lives under a pseudonym in a Czech border town, writing anti-Nazi pamphlets.

Mercier plans what will be the final sequence in the novel. He gets funds from de Beauvilliers, and maps, and takes local trains to the little town where he confronts Halbach, saying he knows his real identity but – relax! don’t panic! – is offering him the chance for a new, faked Swiss identity, to escape before the Gestapo find him. He just needs his help tracking down another Black Front colleague, known as Hans Köhler. Halbach tells him that Köhler’s real name is Johannes Elter.

Mercier takes Halbach to Prague to get a new passport and identity, buys a decent second-hand car and drives the pair of them across the border, on a tense car journey all the way to Berlin, where Elter lives. They stay overnight in a rough brothel, visited by drunk SS men. Next day Mercier drives Halbach to the converted church where he knows he is part of a model railway club (!). Elter is shocked to see his old comrade. In private, Halbach explains that the Gestapo are moving in but that he, Halbach, has found a sponsor who can guarantee safety. All he must do is bring all the secret documents he can get his hands on from office I.N.6, the section of Military Intelligence dedicated to making plans against France, to a certain hotel the next day.

It’s a lot for Elter to take in but he handles Halbach’s passport, is shown the money, and promises to be at the bar the next evening. Halbach returns to Merciers car and they drive north for three hours to the port of Rostock where Halbach catches the ferry to Denmark, to be a free man, his job done. Mercier returns and checks into the grand hotel where, the next evening, exactly on time, Elter appears with a heavy briefcase. Mercier takes him up to his bedroom, hands him passport and cash. The pair stand in the darkened room. For a moment I thought the door was about to burst open and the Gestapo rush in but in fact Elter hesitantly says that, if there’s more money, he’s prepared to do this some more. Mercier, momentarily wrong-footed, quickly agrees. They part.

Mercier examines his haul. 73 documents ranging from the trivial to maps of the Ardennes with attack routes sketched. Next day he flies from Tempelhof airport to Le Bourget with the docs in a fake bottomed briefcase, and by taxi to the French High Command. Waits several days. When he is called in for an interview, his colleague de Beauvilliers offers him a job with his small intelligence unit in Paris. But his boss, Colonel Bruner, genial and pleased, congratulates him, confirms his promotion to colonel and then floats the theory that maybe the whole thing was a set-up: Halbach an imposter, Elter a fake, the documents a deliberate decoy, part of a canny plan to deceive the French.

Disgusted Mercier catches a cab back to the family apartment where cousin Albertine is getting drunk with Anna who he’s brought along for the trip.

The novel ends with a short paragraph explaining how, 24 months later, General Guderian did invade France through the ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes, to the north of the supposedly ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line, leading France to capitulate within weeks and establish the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

Cast

Listing them makes you realise just how many interesting and credible characters Furst creates in each of his novels. The sheer number, and the complex ways they overlap and interact, feed into the larger webs and networks of characters which recur across the novels, themselves symbolic or embodying the complex web of diplomatic, espionage and intelligence manoeuvring across pre-war Europe.

  • Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, French military attaché to Warsaw.
  • Annemarie, his fragrant wife, who died three years earlier.
  • Gabrielle, lovely daughter number one.
  • Béatrice, daughter number two, living in Cairo.
  • Albertine, cousin who initiated him into the joy of sex.
  • Prince Kazimierz, member of Polish aristocracy.
  • the lovely Princess Antoniwa, ditto.
  • Edvard Uhl, businessman and industrial spy for Mercier.
  • ‘Countess Sczelenska’, real name Hana Musser, refugee from the Sudetenland, honey trap mistress of Uhl.
  • Sturmbannführer (Major) August Voss, permanently angry head of the SD in Glogau, who is handed the report about the suspicious behaviour of Uhl on the train back into Germany, whose agents track him down and are about to abduct him from a Warsaw hotel when Mercier intervenes to rescue Uhl – leading to Voss being reprimanded – which leads to his vendetta against with Mercier.
  • Winckelmann, one of his thugs in Warsaw.
  • Meino and Willi, thuggish SD friends Voss travels to Warsaw with to beat up Mercier.
  • Marek, Mercier’s loyal embassy driver.
  • Wlada, Mercier’s skinny nervous housekeeper at his Warsaw apartment.
  • Anna Szarbek, lawyer for the League of Nations, who Mercier falls in love with.
  • Maxim Mostov, Russian émigré writer and journalist, who is upset when Anna leaves him for Mercier, and then is exposed, along with many others, by the intelligence handed over by the Rozens (see below) as a spy, and so deported from Poland back to the USSR.
  • Colonel Anton Vyborg, Mercier’s opposite number in the Polish military, with whom he has regular meetings, Vyborg featured in Furst’s earlier novels, Dark Star and The Polish Officer.
  • Captain de Milja of the Geographical Section of Polish Intelligence, mentioned in an off-hand reference by Vyborg, he was the lead figure in Furst’s earlier novel, The Polish Officer.
  • Jourdain, Mercier’s colleague at the French embassy in Poland.
  • The French ambassador to Poland.
  • Colonel Bruner, Mercier’s superior at the Quai d’Orsay back in Paris.
  • Madame Dupin, assistant director of Protocol.
  • de Beauvilliers, the 60-year-old intellectual on the French High Council for War, politely dismissive of the current French Army leadership under the hero of the Great War, old General Pétain.
  • Viktor and Malka Rozen, two Jewish Russian agents in Warsaw who Mercier helps to escape when their own government turns against them.
  • Colonel de Gaulle, Mercier’s contemporary at the St Cyr military college, and with whom he shared adventures as French representative to the army of General Pilsudski during the Russo-Polish war of 1920.
  • General Guderian, theorist of tank-led Blitzkrieg.
  • Stefan, drives Mercier from the French embassy in Switzerland across the German border to Schramberg, where Mercier observes Wehrmacht tank manoeuvres in the snow.
  • Dr Lapp, a German businessman who looks like Buster Keaton, is assumed to have some part in the Abwehr or German intelligence, who approaches Mercier at a diplomatic dinner, apparently offering to hand over intelligence.
  • Halbach, member of the underground anti-Nazi movement, the Black Front.
  • Elter, fellow member of the Black Front who Halbach persuades to smuggle documents out of the French section of German High Command headquarters in Berlin.

BBC mini-series

The Spies of Warsaw was adapted by the BBC into a two-part mini-series for TV, snappily retitled Spies of Warsaw and starring a post-Dr Who David Tennant as the dashing Colonel Mercier.

Credit

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst was published in 2008 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Page references are to the 2009 Phoenix paperback edition.

Related links

Alan Furst reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2016  •  Permalink
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The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

‘You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business. You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.’
(The Dain Curse, page 320)

In retrospect, Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, seems like a delirious fantasy: an entire town populated only by rival gangs of gangsters and their molls and armies, set at loggerheads and wiping each other out in a mounting frenzy of violence. More parable than fiction. The red in the harvest is a harvest of blood; almost everyone dies, maybe it should have been titled The Slaughterhouse.

The Dain Curse starts out much more restrained and sober, more like a traditional crime story: research scientist Leggett has borrowed some diamonds from a merchant because he thinks he might be able to improve the look and appearance of sub-standard stones. One night they are stolen. The Continental Detective Agency is asked to investigate by the insurance company and our friend, the Continental Op, is assigned the case. We find him rooting through grass outside the burgled house, then interviewing various witnesses and suspects. Routine detective work. Only slowly does The Dain Curse, also, like Red Harvest, unravel into a murder fest…

A back story

Early on we discover that Leggett the scientist is not at all who he pretends to be. He appears to commit suicide and leaves a long suicide note, an improbably detailed account of his improbably colourful life of crime in remote foreign lands. This is reminiscent of the way the Sherlock Holmes novels rely on long backstories in India (The Sign of Four, 1890) or among the Mormons (Study In Scarlet, 1887) or as John Buchan will rely on a long-past vow to drive the plot of the final Richard Hannay adventure, The Island of Sheep (1936).

Then again, as the Continental Op probes it, he discovers that maybe the suicide note is not all it seems…

A partner

It’s just so convenient in stories like this to give the protagonist a partner – someone to deploy on missions when the hero can’t do everything himself, to act as dummy or decoy in dangerous situations – but above all, someone to discuss the case with while it’s in mid-stream, to bandy theories around with. And then, finally, someone to mull over the loose ends with when it’s all over, and who can – at a pinch – make sense of it all for the reader.

Dr Watson is the archetype of the partner because he fulfils all these roles so well. Hammett’s detective, the Continental Op, was able to confide in Dinah Brand in Red Harvest, until, that is, he woke up holding the domestic ice pick which was embedded in her dead chest. Oops.

In this novel, the Op conveniently runs into his old mucker, the novelist Owen Fitzstephen, who helps out with a few minor errands but whose real purpose is the epilogue chapter at the end of each of the three parts which the book is divided into – chapters where the two guys sit and piece together what happened and why, for the reader’s edification. Until Fitzstephen himself becomes part of the story…

Three parts

The text is divided into three parts, each one dealing with a cluster of deaths and the rather far-fetched explanations which are concocted to account for them:

The Dains

A few bodies turn up even before Leggett is found dead with a note. In an extended revelation scene the Op moves through several theories of who did what to arrive at a sort of truth, that the current Mrs Leggett is one of two Dain sisters who, back in Paris, before the War, were in love with Maurice Pierre de Mayenne. He married the other sister, already pregnant with the daughter Gabrielle. The current Mrs elaborately arranges for the little girl to shoot dead her mother; Leggett takes the rap and goes to Devil’s Island until he manages to escape and works his way to California and a new identity; the current Mrs brings up Gabrielle, tracks Mr L down, surprises him by arriving on his doorstep then, when Mrs L kills not one but 2 private dicks she’s hired to track him down but were now blackmailing her, she a) kills them both b) persuades Mr L to shoot himself (!). At which point she makes a break for the stairs, is tackled by the Op and Gabrielle’s thick hunky boyfriend Collinson, and in the scuffle, guess what, the gun goes off and she is dead. Among the many facts and fictions thrown around during this mayhem, Mrs Leggatt née Lucy Dain, says there is a Curse on all the Dain family; which now amounts to young Gabrielle.

The Temple

Ten days later the Op is called off another job by the family lawyer who is uneasy that Gabrielle has insisted on going to stay at the San Fran headquarters of a religious sect. The Op is installed there, with the sect owners’ agreement, but that night all hell breaks loose. The Op is drugged by dope fed into his room by secret pipes, encounters a weird physical illusion, bumps into Gabrielle almost naked holding a blood-stained ornamental knife (see illustration, below) saying ‘I killed him’, finds the family doctor stabbed to death by said knife on the religion’s ‘altar’, returns to find Collinson and Gabrielle gone, goes into the servant girl’s room and is overcome with fumes again, then attacked, then nearly knifed, then clubbed, then rushes back down to the altar to find the doctor gone and the lady of the house & cult (Mrs Haldorn) tied up on the altar and her husband, Joseph, having chosen that night of all nights to go beyond the cult they’d cooked up with theatrical robes, hypnotism and dope fed into the followers’ rooms, purely to make money, but on this night he’s finally flipped, thinks he genuinely is God, and is about to sacrifice her on the altar; the Op has to shoot him six times and then stab him through the throat to kill him. Then the Op and Owen the novelist have another session piecing it all together.

Quesada

The Op is called off another case (again) by an urgent cable from Eric Collinson who has hurriedly married Gabrielle and spirited her off to a secluded cottage in Quesada, rural California. He finds Eric’s body fallen off a clifftop path. A lot then happens. there are car chases and car smashes. The sheriff’s wife is discovered to be unfaithful to him with another police official, tells our guys her husband did it, but is then discovered murdered, we go out in a small boat round hidden coves round the coast where a bad guy is discovered who has kidnapped Gabrielle but is shot down before he can reveal who put him up to it…

A small bomb goes off in the Op’s apartment, injuring him, the crim who brought it, and mangling to a pulp his friend the novelist. The main thrust of this section is the Op helps Gabrielle go cold turkey to get over her morphine addiction, and manages to protect her from potential killers, including Mrs Haldorn from the cult, the Mexican maid with the knife, the crooked lawyer who tried it on with her once, and Fink, the helpmeet at the cult who made and placed the bomb. Quite a few more people get killed before the Op/narrator explains it in a detailed 7 or 8 page finale, packed with detailed explanations of everyone’s outlandish motivations and wildly improbable schemes, which caused so much death and, in the end, changed so little. Gabrielle walks clean and free – there is a Happy Ending.

Four short stories

In fact, as with Red Harvest, this ‘novel’ started life as four connected stories in the ‘pulp’ magazine, Black Mask.

  • Black Lives’ (November 1928)
  • ‘The Hollow Temple’ (December 1928)
  • Black Honeymoon’ (January 1929)
  • ‘Black Riddle’ (February 1929)

Separate short stories, or a conscious novel published in the serial method which dates back to Dickens and beyond?

The Continental Op

Usually our heroes are tall, dark and handsome. It is notable that the protagonist of these stories is described as short and stocky:

  • ‘He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad – somewhat of your build…’ (p.197)
  • five foot six (p.223)
  • ‘a middle-aged fat man’ (p.284)

Compare and contrast with the tall, dark, handsome Sam Spade ‘quite six feet tall’, Philip Marlowe ‘slightly over six feet’, Sherlock Holmes ‘rather over six feet’ etc etc.

Fast

As I noticed in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), almost as soon as the motor car had been invented it was getting stolen, hijacked, and used in high-speed pursuits. In other words, right from the start of its existence the car has helped us act out our unconscious desires for speed and flight and brainless excitement.

He had a Chrysler roadster parked around the corner. We got into it and began bucking traffic and traffic signals towards Pacific Avenue. (p.222)

This ride ends, as any traffic policeman might have predicted, in a bad crash where all the car’s occupants are injured. In this respect, The Dain Curse is a bit more realistic than Red Harvest in which there are innumerable car chases and high-speed shootouts.

Underworld slang

Similarly, now I come to look for it, there is less underworld slang and thieves’ argot in Hammett than you might expect.

  • dinge = black person
  • dark meat = black person
  • rats and mice = rhyming slang for dice
  • the nut = earnings, income
  • a gallon of the white = alcohol
  • chive = knife
  • heap = car

Style

In this novel the prose is less crunched and abbreviated than in Harvest, maybe because that one was set in a rather comic-book way among hard-talking gangsters, and this one is set among the more civilised professional classes starting with Dr Leggett the scientist, then taking in the upper-class devotees of the Temple and including the Op’s pal, the novelist: all very literate and civilised types. Less slang, less street patois.

Hammett takes a while to do detailed, rather laborious descriptions of characters. Chandler, Greene or Deighton would have nailed the following character in a few lines. Hammett is surprisingly verbose.

[Edgar Leggett] was a dark-skinned erect man in his middle forties, muscularly slender and of medium height. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn’t been so deeply marked with sharp, hard lines across the forehead and from nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around the broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes were abnormally bright behind horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp, nimble, over a small, bony chin. His black and white clothes were well made and cared for. (p.196)

There are occasional outbursts of jazzy prose, some smart-alec sentences, but not many. There are only a dozen or 15 sentences like that out of a 200-page novel. Nowhere near the stylistic jazz and sparkle of Raymond Chandler.

We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. (p.327)

I piled up what facts I had, put some guesses on them, and took a jump from the top of the heap into space. (p.353)

Go-getter

The Op is sardonic about the pushy District Attorney in Querada, describing him as ‘very conscious of being a go-getter’ (p.306). I was interested to see the Online Dictionary dating this term to 1920-25, making it very new when Hammett used it; though the Etymological Dictionary dates it further back, to 1910.

Author’s message

‘Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wrangle yourself out another to take its place’ (p.331)

Credit

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929. Page references are to the Picador Four Great Novels 1982 paperback edition.

Hammett’s five novels

  • Red Harvest (February 1, 1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus individual murders. Strangely, the CO himself says the violent atmosphere of Personville has made him go ‘blood-simple’, becoming infatuated with murders and killing.
  • The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first, the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
  • The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
  • The Glass Key (April 24, 1931) The adventures of Ned Beaumont, fixer for reformed gangster Paul Madvig, as he copes with a rival gangster, a corrupt DA, a pliant newspaper editor, and various difficult dames in the run-up to an election Paul must win.
  • The Thin Man (January 8, 1934) A lighter, comic departure from Hammett’s earlier hard-boiled fiction, though still centring on a complex murder mystery: the story follows Nick Charles, a retired detective living a wealthy, idle life with his witty wife Nora. Nick is reluctantly pulled back into investigation when Dorothy Wynant, daughter of a former client, seeks help finding her missing father, an eccentric inventor.
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by Simon on October 9, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 9, 2014

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