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 century.
European expatriate filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and Edward Dmytryk, and Americans like Delbert Mann, found the stylistic vocabulary of German film perfect for rendering the shadowy modern city of tough-guy fiction writers. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was a textbook use of what would soon become the film noir's visual currency, and urban crime novels and stories became the source of countless films in the genre. Morally ambiguous good guys battled suave, tuxedoed crime lords in nocturnal tests of wits and wisecracks, or were duped into sin by drop-dead blondes. Some of these films - Wilder's version of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, Siodmak's Cry of the City, Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet - are among the best work Hollywood ever produced, as fresh today as when they were shot.
The last twenty years have seen an avalanche of interest in noir - detailed filmographies and festivals, courses, endless explication and analysis, and ongoing homage. These movies exert a primeval, sometimes inexplicable pull on us, perhaps because they conjure up the ultimate Hollywood dreamworld, more so than straight-ahead fantasy ever could. The men and women in the tight moral cosmos of film noir act out an American version of life and death in stark black and white, bounded on one side by the strictures of law and order and the other by the power of outlaw desire. Kin Newman is among an army of young noir devotees who has tapped into this seductive concrete landscape. If Newman's outrageous conceits require a willing suspension of belief, remember that those old Bogart films conjured up a similar black-and-white fantasy universe, where hard women waited on barstools with unlit cigarettes and snappy comebacks, everybody smoked 'em unfiltered, and it was always raining in the
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