The narrator of “After Dark, My Sweet” is former pro-boxer turned drifter, William “Kid” Collins. He discloses to the reader that he has been institutionalized multiple times for neurosis and recently walked away (read: escaped) from a mental asylum to hit the road. It’s clear from Chapter One that taking this literary ride with an unbalanced and unreliable narrator is going to be an interesting trip.
On the road, Collins hooks up with a screwy lush of a dame named Fay Anderson who brings him home to her dilapidated house. She seems to have a few screws loose herself and introduces Collins to Uncle Bud, an ex-cop who serves as the the criminal “mastermind” of the story. These three dysfunctional - and rather irritating- characters form the core of the plot.
It takes forever to get there, but Fay and Uncle Bud finally bring Collins in on their money-making scheme: kidnap a little boy from a wealthy family and hold him until the ransom is paid. The execution of the plan is riddled with problems and unexpected obstacles - most of which arise from the fact that the threesome attempting this are a dangerous combination of crazy and moronic.
In a better novel, this could have been fun. Instead, the reader is trapped inside the head of a neurotic lunatic for a narrator, and that makes for an exhausting read. There’s way too much examination of Collins’ mental illness and melodrama relating to his condition. The writing in Collins voice is well-done and the book was written with high literary aspirations. Unfortunately, it lacked the pop and the charm of a good crime novel as the clever stuff was just missing.
One can’t deny that Thompson was a great writer, but “After Dark, My Sweet” just isn’t his masterpiece. The great writing was just overshadowed by the author’s commitment to put the reader in the head of a narrator who overstays his welcome early in the book. Take a pass on this one. You deserve better.
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Well, here we go again. This review is so wrong-headed I can’t help but speak up.
ReplyDeleteLet’s start with the paragraph that begins “In a better novel, this could have been fun” then laments that instead of serving up some fun Thompson traps the reader “inside the head of a neurotic lunatic”.
Then the poor book is condemned for lacking “the pop and charm of a good crime novel as the clever stuff was just missing”.
Honestly, I think this review completely refutes itself, but it really truly begs the question as to why the reader picked up a Jim Thompson novel expecting fun, pop and charm. Or why the reviewer seems to believe that “good crime novels” are universally understood to have pop, charm and “clever stuff”.
This is a brutal noir novel with one of the most disturbingly alive narrators in the genre. Collins is messed up but still has some idea of right and wrong. Thompson, and the narrator’s godawful duplicitous comrades, call him ‘Collie’, equating this capacity for loyalty and kindness with that of a dog. In the end Collie realizes there’s only one thing he can do to undo the worst that he and his companions have done— so he does it and utterly destroys himself, giving all that he is in the attempt to do something right. In Thompson’s fucked-up noir nightmare world Collie is the closest we ever get to a hero, and the final few pages of this book are as wrenching as any I’ve ever read.
Go ahead and toss it aside. It could not be more clear that you do not know what you’re missing.