I Wake Up Screaming by Steve Fisher

Steve Fisher’s I Wake Up Screaming (1940 and revised in 1960) is a novel that has been on my shelf for a while. I’ve always looked at it with a curiosity, but never felt compelled to peel it open and digest it. It contains all of my favorite elements in a good crime novel: lust, murder, mystery, and Hollywood. Therefore, the reasons for my disinterest in reading it sooner are a mystery to me! I finally solved that problem when I broke down and read it this year.

The Hollywood scene for a writer was quite different from that of an actor and Fisher’s story opens up the production offices of a Hollywood studio. Our young fresh writer attempts to engage with the lovely secretary, Vicky Lynn, who no one in the office seems able to crack open beyond the cordial work environment. He succeeds by proposing an opportunity to brainstorm on story ideas. In a reasonably short amount of time, he’s able to do the “impossible” when a romantic relationship is established; and gradually, a decision is made to convince his associates at the studio to back Vicky Lynn into becoming a silver-screen starlet. She’s then promptly run through the publicity machine and given a completely new identity including a “public” relationship with a leading man. Everyone seems obsessed with the manufactured Vicky Lynn. Jealously spirals out of control; and soon, she winds up dead in her apartment.

Suddenly, motives for her death start to turn up in the form of investments, insurance policies, rivals, and contemptuousness. Our protagonist avoids suspicion for the murder at first, but it isn’t long before a homicide detective, Ed Cornell, starts twisting the screws in his coffin. Ed Cornell’s obsession with pinning the murder on our narrator, regardless of the evidence, centers on revenge. Cornell demonstrates a very high level of fixation on, not only, solving the case, but on the avengement of Vicky Lynn. His reputation is on the line.

Cornell’s character is engaging enough despite the fact the detective angle plays out in the background. Most importantly, he’s never been wrong on a case. I can feel threads of James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet universe. For example, The Black Dahlia’s character Bucky Bleichert and his obsession for Elizabeth Short after her death (Black Dahlia is also set in and around Hollywood in the 1940’s) and Captain Dudley Smith’s corrupt law enforcement style that is both wicked and immoral; and yet, manages to maintain a high-ranking position in a public office.

Considered one of the earliest examples of film noir the film version of I Wake Up Screaming (1941) starred Victor Mature. In the novel, written in the first person singular, I was unable to site a reference to the protagonist’s name; but in the movie, Mature plays the lead as Frankie Christopher. The novel’s bleak, downward spiraling plot does offer a point of redemption at the end. I’m not sure that I like the redemption angle, because it feels that a happy-ending tacked on, although, I was completely satisfied as a reader with the resolution of the mystery.