Abstract
When it’s ‘showtime’, millionaire murderer Robbie Daniels lovingly assembles some of his favourite consumer durables, a $4000 video camera and a ‘compact little submachine gun’, a MAC-ten ‘painted with free-form shapes in rose and dark blue on a light blue background’ (27–8); he gives careful thought to what he is going to wear (a dark cash-mere and a light canvas shooting coat), gets into his silver Rolls Royce and sets out tofilm the death of a rich acquaintance whose main offence is that he ‘never remembers Robbie’s name’ (184). In its preoccupation with consumerism and the creation of spectacle Elmore Leonard’s Split Images (1981) is characteristic of many of the noir thrillers written during the last three decades.
‘We walk in,’ Robbie said, ‘I open up with the MAC and you open up with the Hitachi.’
‘The camera? You’re kidding me.’
‘I told you that, didn’t I? I want to see it, I want to study it…’
Elmore Leonard, Split Images (228)
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Notes
Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 169–70.
See Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivity (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 12–13 and 21–2;
Katharine Horsley and Lee Horsley, ‘Mères Fatales: Maternal Guilt in the Noir Crime Novel’, Modern Fiction Studies, 45, No. 2 (1999), pp. 373–4.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), thesis 1, quoted, for example, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), p. 197,
and Jim Collins, Architecture of Excess: Cultural Life in the In formation Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 11–12.
The cinema ‘makes voyeurs and fetishists of us all’. Arthur Asa Berger, Cultural Criticism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 31.
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage Publications, 1991, 1998), p. 101.
Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 219.
L. C. Thomas, Games, Theory and Applications (Chichester: Ellis Horwood, 1984), p. 16.
Robert Dean Pharr, quoted by Graham Clarke, ‘Beyond Realism: Recent Black Fiction and the Language of “The Real Thing”’, in A. Robert Lee (ed.), Back Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945 (Plymouth and London: Vision Press, 1980), p. 212.
See Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Pp. 26–38.
Leonard’s early stories and novels were Westerns which sometimes contained decidedly noir elements. See Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (eds), Hard-Boiled: an Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 257–71, reprinting and commenting on Leonard’s ‘Three-Ten to Yuma’ (a 1953 story for Dime Western). City Primeval was originally subtitled High Noon in Detroit. Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporaty American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p. 246.
See Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston and Jerry R. Green, Micro-economic Theory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 243–9.
Jay McInerney, Model Behaviour (London: Bloomsbury, 1998, 1999), p. 71.
See Sally R. Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York and London, 1994), p. 125, on self-determination, integration and communality.
See Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton et al. (London: Macmillan, 1977, 1983), p. 62.
Lewis also published two ‘Carter prequels’, Jack Carter’s Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon. For an overview of his work, see Paul Duncan, ‘All the Way Home: Ted Lewis’, Crime Time, 9 (Spring 1997), pp. 22–6.
David J. Skal, The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 375–6.
Will Hutton, The State We’re In (London: Vintage, 1995, 1996), pp. xi–xii and 54.
Peter York and Charles Jennings, Peter York’s Eighties (London: BBC Books, 1995), pp. 8 and 73.
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© 2009 Lee Horsley
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Horsley, L. (2009). Players, Voyeurs and Consumers. In: The Noir Thriller. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280755_8
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