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Nov. 2nd, 2014 09:32 amMore Elisabeth Sanxay Holding! After I read The Blank Wall, my library turned up a two-in-one Holding suspense package of The Unfinished Crime and The Girl Who Had To Die and they're both so good? THEY'RE BOTH SO GOOD.
The central figure of The Unfinished Crime is a pompous, priggish stick-in-the-mud named Branscombe with a well-organized life, a younger sister who's trapped within the bounds of that well-organized life, and a crush on a classy lady whom he would like to bring into that well-organized life. It turns out the classy lady has a separated husband who has just come back into the picture. When the protagonist bumps into the husband, they get into a fight and he accidentally murders the heck out of him!
At first Branscome's reaction is the generalized ineffectual panic that one would expect, but as he gets a day or two into the cover-up, he starts to get increasingly cocky.
BRANSCOMBE: Man, before this murder thing happened, I never REALIZED what a competent, talented, powerful individual I was! I'm, like, a Renaissance man! A MEDICI. I'm gonna wrap this whole thing up -- maybe with some more murder, idk -- then, like, maybe marry a Lucrezia Borgia or something and settle down to being a patron of the arts. YEAH. IT'S GONNA BE GREAT. Sure there's a body and a witness and about five loose ends, but still, EVERYTHING'S UNDER CONTROL, BECAUSE I'M GREAT.
Spoiler: everything is not under control.
Branscombe is a dick; we are meant to understand that Branscombe is a dick, and as the book goes on, that all the mildly irritating but relatively harmless behaviors that he exhibits at the beginning have been symptomatic of all along of a much larger attitude about the value of other people relative to Branscombe -- an attitude that goes along with privilege and power, and is extremely dangerous in combination with those things.
There's a great line about Branscombe's behavior towards his sister from a fellow in a subplot, a suitor of the sister's who's a little too ethnic (but mostly, also just too existent) to suit Branscombe: "Naturally you don't want to lose her. You'll never find anyone else on earth who'd be so patient and so unexacting. But you're going to lose her. Her life's being wasted. And that's about the worst thing that can be done to anyone." Sanxay Holding gets it.
(The book is actually quite full of women. Branscombe's crush object spends the first half of the book as a perfect cipher, and then you get a chance to see inside her head and what she's made of, and she's WONDERFUL.)
OK, but aside from that, The Unfinished Crime is just a very solid, well-done noir. The Girl Who Had To Die is ... something else again, man. It's plotted almost more like a reverse Gothic, or maybe the lovechild of a Gothic and a noir: a dude in the role of Gothic heroine, and a femme fatale in the role of sinister Gothic hero.
Killian and Jocelyn meet on a cruise ship. Jocelyn is extremely into Killian; Killian is ambivalent. Then Jocelyn falls off in the middle of the night.
JOCELYN: Killian baby I don't mind that you murdered me by pushing me overboard off the cruise ship!
KILLIAN: ...but...well, OK, first of all, you're not murdered, because you're not dead, and second of all, I did what the what now?
JOCELYN: It's OK there are like five men who want to kill me. And you're the only one who fed me soup afterwards! I LOVE YOU.
KILLIAN: a.) I did not try to murder you, b.) I am fairly disturbed by the fact that you think I tried to murder you and still want to date me. FAIRLY DISTURBED.
But despite his extremely ambivalent feelings about this situation, Killian ends up going along with Jocelyn off the cruise ship and over to the house of some sort-of-kind-of-maybe-friends of hers. They are very rich. Killian is not very rich, and also sort of worried that Jocelyn is going to start telling all her friends that he tried to murder her. At this point a bunch of sinister events happen with great rapidity, including a reasonable amount of attempted murder.
KILLIAN: I continue to be disturbed by ALL YOU people and the fact that you don't seem to care about ANY OF THIS MURDER.
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: Would you like a lot of money?
KILLIAN: ...
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: We would especially like to give you money if you take Jocelyn away somewhere where she will never be seen again.
KILLIAN: @___@
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: We're just saying. She ruins people, man. She's a ruiner. She'll probably ruin you, too!
So Killian is the hapless, sensible protagonist drawn into a sinister plot; Jocelyn is the mysterious hero/ine, the femme fatale, the life-ruiner. But it's also a deconstruction of the femme fatale: Jocelyn is certainly troubled, has certainly lied, is probably lying to Killian throughout the book, may be responsible for everything horrible that's happening; she's also nineteen. The various people who accuse her of entangling them and destroying their lives are all older men -- and this all started years ago. So how responsible is she? How responsible are they? Who's really been ruining whom? In between all the mysterious and sinister events, that's the central question that the book's interested in. Which is ... a profoundly less misogynistic take than in your standard noir.
(I'm very sad neither of these were apparently filmed in the 1940s.)
The central figure of The Unfinished Crime is a pompous, priggish stick-in-the-mud named Branscombe with a well-organized life, a younger sister who's trapped within the bounds of that well-organized life, and a crush on a classy lady whom he would like to bring into that well-organized life. It turns out the classy lady has a separated husband who has just come back into the picture. When the protagonist bumps into the husband, they get into a fight and he accidentally murders the heck out of him!
At first Branscome's reaction is the generalized ineffectual panic that one would expect, but as he gets a day or two into the cover-up, he starts to get increasingly cocky.
BRANSCOMBE: Man, before this murder thing happened, I never REALIZED what a competent, talented, powerful individual I was! I'm, like, a Renaissance man! A MEDICI. I'm gonna wrap this whole thing up -- maybe with some more murder, idk -- then, like, maybe marry a Lucrezia Borgia or something and settle down to being a patron of the arts. YEAH. IT'S GONNA BE GREAT. Sure there's a body and a witness and about five loose ends, but still, EVERYTHING'S UNDER CONTROL, BECAUSE I'M GREAT.
Spoiler: everything is not under control.
Branscombe is a dick; we are meant to understand that Branscombe is a dick, and as the book goes on, that all the mildly irritating but relatively harmless behaviors that he exhibits at the beginning have been symptomatic of all along of a much larger attitude about the value of other people relative to Branscombe -- an attitude that goes along with privilege and power, and is extremely dangerous in combination with those things.
There's a great line about Branscombe's behavior towards his sister from a fellow in a subplot, a suitor of the sister's who's a little too ethnic (but mostly, also just too existent) to suit Branscombe: "Naturally you don't want to lose her. You'll never find anyone else on earth who'd be so patient and so unexacting. But you're going to lose her. Her life's being wasted. And that's about the worst thing that can be done to anyone." Sanxay Holding gets it.
(The book is actually quite full of women. Branscombe's crush object spends the first half of the book as a perfect cipher, and then you get a chance to see inside her head and what she's made of, and she's WONDERFUL.)
OK, but aside from that, The Unfinished Crime is just a very solid, well-done noir. The Girl Who Had To Die is ... something else again, man. It's plotted almost more like a reverse Gothic, or maybe the lovechild of a Gothic and a noir: a dude in the role of Gothic heroine, and a femme fatale in the role of sinister Gothic hero.
Killian and Jocelyn meet on a cruise ship. Jocelyn is extremely into Killian; Killian is ambivalent. Then Jocelyn falls off in the middle of the night.
JOCELYN: Killian baby I don't mind that you murdered me by pushing me overboard off the cruise ship!
KILLIAN: ...but...well, OK, first of all, you're not murdered, because you're not dead, and second of all, I did what the what now?
JOCELYN: It's OK there are like five men who want to kill me. And you're the only one who fed me soup afterwards! I LOVE YOU.
KILLIAN: a.) I did not try to murder you, b.) I am fairly disturbed by the fact that you think I tried to murder you and still want to date me. FAIRLY DISTURBED.
But despite his extremely ambivalent feelings about this situation, Killian ends up going along with Jocelyn off the cruise ship and over to the house of some sort-of-kind-of-maybe-friends of hers. They are very rich. Killian is not very rich, and also sort of worried that Jocelyn is going to start telling all her friends that he tried to murder her. At this point a bunch of sinister events happen with great rapidity, including a reasonable amount of attempted murder.
KILLIAN: I continue to be disturbed by ALL YOU people and the fact that you don't seem to care about ANY OF THIS MURDER.
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: Would you like a lot of money?
KILLIAN: ...
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: We would especially like to give you money if you take Jocelyn away somewhere where she will never be seen again.
KILLIAN: @___@
JOCELYN'S FRIENDS: We're just saying. She ruins people, man. She's a ruiner. She'll probably ruin you, too!
So Killian is the hapless, sensible protagonist drawn into a sinister plot; Jocelyn is the mysterious hero/ine, the femme fatale, the life-ruiner. But it's also a deconstruction of the femme fatale: Jocelyn is certainly troubled, has certainly lied, is probably lying to Killian throughout the book, may be responsible for everything horrible that's happening; she's also nineteen. The various people who accuse her of entangling them and destroying their lives are all older men -- and this all started years ago. So how responsible is she? How responsible are they? Who's really been ruining whom? In between all the mysterious and sinister events, that's the central question that the book's interested in. Which is ... a profoundly less misogynistic take than in your standard noir.
(I'm very sad neither of these were apparently filmed in the 1940s.)
