“No Orchids for Miss Blandish.” James Hadley chase A once ubiquitous master of the hard-boiled shocker, British author James Hadley Chase ( Real name: Rene Lodge brabazon Raymond) burst into the scene with 1939’s “No Orchids for Miss Blandish.” This is a novel so stark and “noir” it makes most of today’s thrillers look as colorful as a flowering field. The plot couldn’t be more garden-variety, though: “a simple theft goes awry, then snowballs into an avalanche of murders.” But the fast-paced brutality of the events keeps the pages turning into developments that are always shocking, and sometimes unpredictable.
Miss Blandish is a high-society debutante whose sole character trait is the impression she causes on every man: she is “the most beautiful woman they have ever seen.” A gang of sorta-harmless hoodlums tries to steal her valuable diamond necklace during a night on the town. Then, a considerably more harmful gang steps into the picture, one led by fearsome Ma Grissom and her shifty, sadistic son Slim. Slim has never been interested in women; it is well known. But something about Miss Blandish excites his interest, which is how the titular girl goes from being a victim of theft to a victim of a harrowing kidnapping and enslavement. Drugged out of her gourd, subject to Ma’s beatings and Slim’s advances, Miss Blandish is too much of a cipher to count as a damsel in distress. She’s basically a warm, naked, tortured body-bag on a bed, waiting to be rescued by P. I. Dave Fenner, the Philip Marlowe of this tale. Fenner is a decent guy who loves to banter with his brassy secretary, Paula thusly: “Perhaps you didn’t hear what I said,” Paula said ominously. “They’ll take all the furniture away tomorrow unless you pay the third installment. So what will I have to sit on?” Fenner looked startled. “They’re not taking that away as well, are they?” This is, to be honest, what passes for healthy male-female relations in Chase’s bleak world. There, if Fenner spanks his secretary, he’s not harassing her sexually: he’s merely showing his profound professional admiration. “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” is still unpleasantly violent today; in 1939 it must have read like degenerate snuff. Chase achieves most of his effects by understanding that this material only works if the reader is first made complicit in its horrors. He can genuinely protest: “Hey, I merely said gangster A shot Gangster B’s nose off! It was YOU, the reader, who filled in that picture with your own perverse imagination, you sicko!” Consider the (kind of masterful) rape scene below. Notice Chase merely sets the stage, and says very little; the reader provides the horror: They looked at each other. She read the message in his eyes, and clutching the shirt to her, she backed away. “No… please…” Slim shuffled over to her and snatched the shirt from her. His mouth was pursed, his breathing suddenly violent, his eyes blank. Shuddering and unresisting, she let him lead her to the divan. The clock on the mantel ticked busily. The minute hand crawled on across the ornate clock face. A large bluebottle fly buzzed excitedly over the bloodstain on Rocco’s coat. The traffic in the street below halted, moved on with a grinding of gears, then halted again. Miss Blandish gave a sudden sharp cry. As the minutes passed, the shadows in the room lengthened. Someone in the apartment below turned on a television set. An impersonal voice began to give loud instructions on how to bake a cake. The insistent, domineering voice woke Slim who slowly opened his eyes. He turned his head to look at Miss Blandish, lying flat on her back by his side. She was staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. “That punk makes it sound like a cake is the most important thing in the world,” Slim said. the dead stay dumb Clay-faced criminal Dillon and his undergarment-averse moll Myra are the main characters in 1940’s “The Dead Stay Dumb” (the title is not a comment on the IQ of those who have passed away, but on their lack of snitching abilities). Unlike “No Orchids for Miss Blandish,” this thriller doesn’t even bother with anti-hero detectives: all of the characters are villains, some are simply more successful than others at their villainy. Any one who swears by “likable, relatable characters” will have a horrible time in this slum-diving tale. This one is for people who like their eggs boiled into tooth-breaking hardness. Dillon, tough and unemotional, walks into a small-town the way a Jack Reacher might in a Lee Child book- except that Dillon is actively looking for trouble. He suggests to the local gamblers that he can fix a boxing match, and in the process meets Myra Hogan, the hellcat daughter of blind former boxer Butch Hogan, who still rules the ring from behind the scenes. Myra Hogan is no Miss Blandish. She’s the sort of crime novel gal who poses against the sunlight in flimsy summer dresses, expecting men to notice she forgot her underwear at home. In a small aside that says a LOT about American life in 1940, (even if it was written by a British man who gathered what he could about the U.S. from books and movies), we learn that when temptress Myra walks down the street, “even the n****s hesitated in their work, but frightened to look up, keeping their heads lowered.” This was a time, of course, when if you were the wrong color and you looked at the wrong woman the wrong way at the wrong time, you could expect an outcome considerably more violent than her angry #metoo Tweets. The fixed boxing match goes wrong, and Dillon and Myra are forced to escape into the Bonnie and Clyde life. But Bonnie and Clyde were genteel lovers compared to Dillon and Myra. James Hadley Chase’s great virtue is that you KNOW what will happen in his novels, (tons of people will die) but he made it impossible to guess when and how those deaths would happen. “Abruptly” and “surprisingly,” that’s for sure. James Hadley Chase is due for a rediscovery, but it will happen in a less sensitive future. He never achieved the literary acclaim of peers like James M. Cain or Cornell Woolrich- but then again, us fans of “Double Indemnity” or “Rear Window” probably over-estimate how “acclaimed” Cain and Woolrich were in their time. As it is, I suspect your local bookstore doesn’t carry any Cain beyond his three early hits (“Double Indemnity,” “Mildred Pierce,” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) – and I doubt it carries any Woolrich or Chase at all. K R IRS 101124 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoqHeVLnT3gUWFROLrX_M9nJj60V%2Bic_nuspLZZ2Gnsseg%40mail.gmail.com.
