The Architecture of Mystery
by Gary Phillips
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an expressionistic film of forced perspectives and distorted perceptions. This 1919 German silent film is not a mystery per se but considered a horror film. Cabinet was written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, two pacifists. According to Danny Peary in Cult Movies 3, Mayer during World War I was bitter about his sessions with a tight-assed psychiatrist in the military. Must be this officer tried to get him to see the error of his ways being antiwar and whatnot.
The Crimson Kimono
The movie begins as a man in a mental hospital tells a story. In flashback two male friends, Francis (the one telling us this tale) and Alan, visit a traveling circus and enter the tent of the sinister mesmerist, Dr. Caligari. He opens his cabinet to show them Cesare, a somnambulant under his spell for many years, who zombie-like follows his orders and can predict the future. After a series of phantasmagoric incidents it’s revealed that Caligari is also the head of an asylum—and that he may or may not be insane his damn self.
A little over an hour, the film made an impression not only on future horror filmmakers, but those who saw it as a cautionary tale about authoritarianism, and those working in the mystery genre what with its dream sequences, odd backdrops (shadows were painted directly on walls and floors), elasticity of narrative time sequences and uses of darks, lights and smoke. These are the basics tropes of what would be identified in the years to come as the physical manifestation of the noir style. A style that was as much a product of limited budgets as it was of German Expressionism and the influences of technologies that gave us neon, Bakelite and the chrome highlights of Art Deco and Beaux Arts.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights.
So reflects Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s weary but undaunted private eye in The Little Sister. In those novels of his like The Big Sleep, the aforementioned Little Sister and The High Window, ’30s Los Angeles has impersonal downtown office buildings, Spanish-style bungalows where who knows what goes on inside of them, and back rooms off narrow alleys where hopheads jam needles into their arm. The city is an much a character as Orfamay Quest, Sonny Steelgrave or Eddie Mars are in his stories.
Chandler was an American raised in England who wound up in L.A. for work in the oil business. In 1932, at the age of 45 and as the Great Depression raged, he lost his job due to excessive drinking. For him L.A. always remained both a place of fascination and predilection. The types of places his characters found themselves in mirrored something about who they were and what they lost. Arriving at a woman named Jesse Florian’s place in what is now South L.A., Marlowe observed in Farewell, My Lovely:
1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-put brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year’s poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall.
Out of the Past
Significantly, it would be Chandler who would help adapt James M. Cain’s novella, Double Indemnity for the screen. Directed by Billy Wilder (an émigré who left Berlin at the rise of Hitler and who co-wrote the screenplay) the influences of what began in Dr. Caligari are seen in the slatted shadow of Venetian blinds across insurance adjuster Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) face and the film is also told in flashback, by the corrupted Neff. It’s a Los Angeles of sprawl and space accessible by car, yet the two principals—Neff and the adulterous Mrs. Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck)—are claustrophobically closed in on due to their lust and greed.
In Nicholas Christopher’s Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, he writes,
Unlike the ancient or medieval city, the modern American city is one in which the chief architectural forms are based on abstract units of space, like the cubic foot. With few structural rearrangements, the hotel, the department store, apartment house, and office building are fully convertible, one into the other.
He could just as easily have been talking about the interiors of many a noir movie in the classic period of the ’30s-’50s, where chiaroscuro heightened the mood but also allowed incomplete sets the illusion of being the private eye’s office or the living room where the femme fatale pumped a slug into the chump she manipulated. In those buildings are countless archways, corridors, basements, crawlspaces and on and on. A city too of industrial areas, docks, wrought iron gates, dive bars of dark stained wood, strip clubs with flashing lights and nightspots where torch singers enthrall.
The big city is not the only habitat of sharp angles and rough hewn characters. When Dashiell Hammett’s unnamed private eye, the Continental Op, short for operative of the Continental Detective Agency, steps off the train in a western town on a case, he notes:
The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its buildings had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south and yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been al dirtied up by mining.
The film Vertigo opens with Jimmy Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, a plainclothes detective, and a uniformed cop chasing a suspect across the rooftops of San Francisco. Ferguson nearly slips off a roof. As the uniform attempts to help him up, the detective has an onset of acrophobia, a fear of heights. The uniformed cop plunges to his death and a terrified Ferguson retires to become a private eye. But it’s his fear of heights that becomes the crux for the machinations of the plot. For Ferguson, the architecture of the city is his enemy and he is finally driven by his obsession to confront his phobia. But Ferguson is no Marlowe. Indeed he’s rather selfish in his reason for cracking the puzzles of his case.
More consciously heir to Chandler—his dissertation was partially about his works—the late Robert Parker, starting in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript until this year with Sixkill, wrote more than 35 novels about his Boston PI, Spenser, who even his friends and lover called by his last name. Those hallways in hotels and office buildings the detective is forever prowling get a twist in the Spenser novel Looking for Rachel Wallace. Here he’s sitting in one on guard duty for Wallace, a controversial lesbian feminist author, and her lover in a hotel hallway:
The corridor was silent and Ritz-y, with gold-patterned wallpaper. I wondered if they’d make love before they ordered dinner.
Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski is a female Chicago-based private investigator who in the tradition is tough and resourceful but also reflects her creator’s experiences as a Kansas girl who came to Chi-Town as a Vista volunteer during the Civil Rights era. In her non-fiction book Writing in the Age of Silence, her ruminations on social constructs, political discourse, and detective fiction, she wrote regarding her twelfth Warshawski novel, Fire Sale, where Warshawski is coaching an inner city girls basketball team,
The case takes her into the filthy swamp waters of South Chicago, it takes her into the storefront churches where her girls’ families seek consolation for their barren lives, it takes her into the heart of the harsh economic realities these families face, and it leads her almost dying in the mountain of garbage the city dumps in that neighborhood.
The recent cable show The Wire attests to the city’s racial and social divide Paretsky was commenting about. The cops, criminals and the pols in that show were products of and affected by the physicality of Baltimore—a port city where not the recent economic meltdown but the one from the ’80s and its deindustrialization still affects the town. Where Detective William “Bunk” Moreland scolds takedown thief Omar Little, given both men grew up in the same neighborhood and went to the same high school, though years apart.
As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn’t matter. And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckahs like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar, calling you by name, glorifyin’ your ass. Makes me sick, motherfuckah, how far we done fell.
For the modern detective, housing projects, strip malls and the outer ’burbs are as much their territory like the night club and gambler’s swanky suite was for their predecessors. But the city, as Bunk warned, has changed. When Bush the First visited L.A. after the ’92 riots, he essentially said there would be little response from the federal government to rebuild. Unlike post-1965 and the largess of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Bush helped usher in what his predecessor President Ronald Reagan pronounced, that government wasn’t the answer, government was the problem.
Now, even with the foreclosure crisis still being manifest, the cry is cut and cut to balance the books and little demand for the financial sacrifice it will take to rehab and replace crumbling infrastructure. That somehow magically the free market will step in when in fact repairing train tracks, fixing bridges and retro-fitting public buildings is precisely the job of government.
In the recent movie The Adjustment Bureau, a sci-fi love story based on a Philip K. Dick short story, secretly navigating the streets and hallways of New York is integral to the film’s structure. Members of the Bureau have memorized hidden passageways through the concrete and steel labyrinth. When wearing their cool Mad Man-ish snap brim hats, they can go from one locale miles apart from the other by merely stepping through a doorway so as to do their adjusting of one’s fate.
If decay and downsizing is the fate of some parts of our cities and suburbs, this condition will surely be reflected in mysteries being written now and in the near future. The detective in these stories may not be in search of the missing spouse but seeking to unravel what possessed seemingly rational people to let their edifices and roads and transportation systems go to seed.
What was their motive?
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