Prelude to a Certain Midnight (Gerald Kersh 1947): Larry David’s London
January 16th, 2008Outraged by police inactivity during the investigation of the rape and murder of a little girl, an anti-sex activist superego named Asta Thundersly turns amateur detective. A crusading Kramer-figure, living comfortably without explanation, Asta is the centerpiece of a Seinfeldian underworld featuring a bevy of battered booze-hounds, all with peculiar characteristics, who gather at Bar Bacchus. There’s Catchy, a weepy beauty in decline, Cigarette, a principled feminist/poet who finds herself covering for her criminal boyfriend , and Mr. Pink, red-tie wearing “Christian socialist” who carries his papers everywhere and makes a life-long project of converting Bible stories into everyday speak, e.g, Judas’ betrayal as told using gangster lingo, like “rats” and “dames.” While few are spared Asta’s biting tongue, she empathetically embraces these wacky wayfarers, often despite uninspiring introductions. She takes on a belligerent boxer as a butler and tolerates another man who likes to make scenes and plots to overthrow the Salvation Army. As a detective, she classifies people by their unique characteristics, obsessions and situations, which she knows intimately, logically determining who is likely or not likely to violate a child, ultimately deciding that all are quite likely, especially men, from the isolated man who cares for his mother to the shy and sullen Apollo who loves the ladies.
Asta throws a party at Bar Bacchus, inviting all the would-be suspects. While the trick always works for the professional detectives in films, her party is a miserable failure . . . both as an investigation and as a party. Asta is unable to crack the case and grows frustrated; at her lowest moment, she slaps Catchy in the face while reproaching her.
Asta clashes, albeit politely, with her sister Thea Olivia, whose life’s work is quilting yet gets little quilting done. Thea would prefer Asta leave all the nasty business alone, yet it is Thea who, somewhat accidentally, solves the murder. However, she proves incapable of coming forward, fearing she has no tangible evidence to offer the police and that informing her sister will only cause a stir. Ten years later, with her quilt still unfinished, the case remains formally unsolved. The Murderer takes his nieces to the circus. The Bar Bacchus scene slowly withers and dies.
Judith Freeman asserts that the three major male characters in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye are all versions of the author. While Marlowe is his masculine ideal, friend Terry Lennox, a gentlemanly war hero, is the “good” Chandler and Roger Wade the “bad” Chandler, a drunk who despises himself for writing lousy genre fiction. Marlowe spends the bulk of the novel judging Wade, even picking apart his insipient prose with an overwhelming sense of disgust, focusing, in particular, on Wade’s dependence on similes, Chandler’s literary trademark.
In Prelude to a Certain Midnight, the Murderer is an amateur author, composing pulp prose under various pen names. Of all the shady suspects, the writer of crime fiction fits the bill best. When Mr. Pink sermonizes against the folly of such seedy stories, it is pointed out that he spends his days writing stories. His initial defense is that he merely translates the verse, not writes, but once convinced, he is brought to tears, utterly destroyed. If Chandler is guilty of a judgmental split personality, perhaps Kersh’s choice of culprit is equally revealing. Earlier in the work, Kersh’s narrator philosophizes over the connection between artist and criminal. “The edge of the two underworlds overlap,” the voice claims. The otherwise principled Cigarette’s affection for her crooked boyfriend demonstrates the intimate bond, one epitomized by Night and the City’s Harry Fabian, another Kersh creation, a wide-eyed optimist blind to the folly of his deluded ambitions, a born to lose street hustler who dreams of “controlling London wrestling.” The mat game is itself a hybrid of art and the hustle, and while Fabian is oddly talented in a damaged sort of way, he is destined to fail, as is Asta the amateur detective and her fellow denizens of Bar Bacchus.
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