WITH THE PROPER SELECTION, THERE'S NO NEED TO FEAR THE DARK

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, November 9, 1997

Page: L4

Section: Books

I am reminded of this dull chapter in my history as I make my merry way through the Library of America's wonderful cornucopia of alienation: the recently published two-volume collection ``Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s'' and ``Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s.'' The 11 novels chosen by editor Robert Polito (and presented unabridged) range from James M. Cain's seminal ``The Postman Always Rings Twice'' to Jim Thompson's almost unendurably creepy ``The Killer Inside Me.'' Also included are such disquieting tales as Cornell Woolrich's ``I Married a Dead Man,'' Patricia Highsmith's ``The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' and Chester Himes's ``The Real Cool Killers.'' (The others are Horace McCoy's ``They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'', Edward Anderson's ``Thieves Like Us,'' Kenneth Fearing's ``The Big Clock,'' William Lindsay Gresham's ``Nightmare Alley,'' Charles Willeford's ``Pick-up,'' and David Goodis's ``Down There.'')

To me, these novels are remarkable in that most are not, quite frankly, very good novels at all. With a couple of exceptions, they fail more often than they succeed in diverse or credible characterization; their plots don't touch all the bases; and even in style, they can be as lumpen as mud. Still they are terrific, providing queasy views of the white underbelly of the American dream. They evoke a psychological miasma and moods of both anomie and claustrophobia, of delusion and failure. Their plots, treacherously off-kilter, are entanglements. Circumstances mutate insidiously. Situations decay, betrayal is in the air, and underestimated creatures of feral intelligence suddenly display winning hands. It's all like life baffled by booze -- as well it might be: Even the most abstemious characters in these pages would be strongly encouraged to seek help were they to walk among us today.

The alcohol situation is noteworthy in these novels. No one except Rasputin could knock it back like this squad without ending up dead in one day. On the other hand, what these characters are really swigging, I soon came to see, is 100 proof metaphor. Whiskey -- and it usually is whiskey -- is the means of fortifying the soul in a world that threatens either to steal it in some underhand, rotten deal or suffocate it with gentility, domesticity, and niceness.

Thompson's novels are exemplary in this regard. The terrible tale of his alcoholism and tortured personality, all the strange facts of his life, can be found in Polito's extraordinary, award-winning biography, ``Savage Art'' (Random House paperback, $16). By Thompson's own account, as found in his rollicking autobiographical tale, ``Bad Boy'' (Vintage paperback, $10), his grandmother, with whom he lived for a time, drew her ideas of cooking from farm magazines, those tireless proselytizers of scientific domesticity, and served such execrable food that, he claims, ``I think we certainly should have died except for Pa's constant dosing of us with whiskey.'' Thompson often wrote about drink as if it possessed a purifying nature -- although, to be sure, the exponents of this view are characters with whom we are not meant to feel a great deal of sympathy. For them liquor burns out regret, confusion, and indecision and is also the antidote to oppressive domesticity, the cloying, smothering dimension of life that horrifies them.

I have just finished Thompson's ``The Nothing Man'' (Vintage paperback, $10), a novel about Clinton Brown, a boozer nonpareil, whose penis was blown off by a land mine and who is now invested with a lethally bad attitude. As a story the book is a mess, but it does include one brilliantly gruesome scene of coercive domesticity. At its center is Kay, whom Brown fantasizes drowning in mayonnaise: ``Kay cooked with mayonnaise: it was her rod and her staff, kitchen-wise. . . . I felt reasonably sure she had whole hogsheads of the stuff concealed in the cellar. If one could surprise her at just the right moment -- catch her while she was dipping out a couple of ten-gallon pails for the evening meal -- well. . . .'' The novel is an exercise in outsidership and in visceral repugnance for hominess. Indeed, I would say that fascination with the dead hand of hominess -- as much as big-city deracination -- generates the American brand of alienation that is represented in noir.

I was thinking about this as I read Robert B. Parker's excellent introduction to ``The Best American Mystery Stories, 1997'' (Houghton Mifflin, $25), the first volume in what the publisher says will be an annual series. Briefly put, Parker argues that our enduring romanticism, which itself is tied up with an idealized frontier, a place that is natural, brutal, and free, makes a hero of the man who walks away from civilization. He's the man with a gun, ``alone, outside society, compelled by his own rules. Neither against the law or of it, keeping his moral integrity hard and intact.'' He's the kind of tough customer, I think, who washes the mayo out of his mouth with a long pull of hooch.

In Parker's own fiction, this fellow is a good guy, but Parker is broad-minded and generous enough to include a sampling of contemporary noir in the stories he has selected here. Elizabeth George's ``The Surprise of His Life,'' for instance, completely fulfills the promise of delusion and inexorable ruination of its first sentence: ``When Douglas Armstrong had his first consultation with Thistle McCloud, he had no intention of murdering his wife.'' And there are at least three other stories that will leave you feeling the void.

In the course of this recent orgy of desolation and sleaze, I also read Barry Gifford's ``The Phantom Father: A Memoir'' (Harcourt Brace, $23) for the simple reason that he is responsible for having resuscitated Jim Thompson in the early 1980s, in his capacity as editor of the series of crime novels republished under the Black Lizard imprint (which now belongs to Vintage). Gifford's father, Rudy Winston, was a criminal who ran his operation out of his all-night liquor store in Chicago. He divorced Gifford's mother when the boy was 8, and died four years later. Gifford's memories of his father are understandably patchy, and his sense of what the man was really up to is hazy. Still, for all that, his account is stark and spare, and captures perfectly the cheesy urban reality that gave -- and still gives -- rise to a potent strain of American noir.