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Gumshoe in Dreamland
| Article
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17120 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
1,591 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
THE NIGHT MAYOR
Kim Newman
New York: Carol and Graf, 1990
202 pp., $17.95
Richie Quick's got a problem. A cynical, though-talking private eye in the Bogart/Marlowe mold, he's been recruited to an unnamed city to find an ornery lowlife whose world-class crimes make Al Capone and Jack the Ripper look like small boys. Seems Truro Daine, archfiend extraordinaire, has pulled off a nifty prison break and has sequestered himself in the bowels of this strange metropolis, where it's always two in the morning and raining.
Pretty standard gumshoe fare, you say - the old hard-boiled dick in the city tracking the crime boss bit. Not quite. Writer Kim Newman has taken the Raymond Chandler rule book, refracted it through the current fantasy/cyberpunk filter, added a few outlandish tricks of his own, and come up with a whoppingly imaginative tale of future crime.
Newman has created a loving tribute to the very special world of film noir, the brooding, moody genre of the forties and early fifties. An outgrowth of German Expressonist film of the early thirties, film noir used the aesthetic devices of German and French cinema - the sharp, skewed camera angles of Fritz Lang, the claustrophobic night scenes of G.W. Pabst and Marcel Carne, the moral torpor of Weimar - and melded it with the crime and private eye tradition of American pulp fiction to produce a powerful artistic universe that echoed the shifting erotic and ethical terrain of the early twentieth
... (1943 of 9544 Characters)
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