The Magician’s Wife – James M. Cain

James M. Cain’s three seminal works of crime: The PostmanAlways Rings Twice (1934), Mildred Pierce (1941), and Double Indemnity (1943) seem to over shadow the majority of his bibliography. One can argue after producing these works that all his other works are superfluous, and that the genre requires no other work. However, like any great crafts-man who continues to shape his or her art their output continues with a body of work that has its own set of highs and lows. Nineteen sixty-five’s The Magician’s Wife doesn’t necessarily have the same punch as Cain’s earlier work, but it does display a master genre writer using his talents to produce an entertaining piece of work.

Clay Lockwood sells meat. He’s a lonely man traveling up the corporate ladder while making the rounds of the major hotel food and beverage restaurants. His life is a bit like his work: cold, organized, and in need of possessions to fill his empty locker of a heart. On a whim, Lockwood flirts with a waitress at one of his stops only to find, embarrassingly, that she is a married woman. That’s where things should have stopped; however, Sally Alexis has an ulterior motive. Sally’s married to the local attraction, the Great Alec Alexis, who performs his magic show in residency at the local hotel’s theater. Once her husband’s on-stage assistant, her boss has now demoted Sally to mom, caregiver, and waitress.

Getting in touch with Clay a few days later, Sally sets up a date and they meet in secret. Instantly a connection is made and a romance blossoms. Sally reveals that her marriage is cold and lifeless and that she is merely biding her time so that her son can inherit her father-in-law’s fortune. Admittedly, her father-in-law’s death of natural causes could take a long time in addition to the fact that any inheritance her son would receive would be set up in a trust fund and unavailable until he’s of legal age.

Clay requests Sally to leave her husband and come marry him and she rejects his numerous proposals. She feels it would not be sensible to remove her child away from his wealthy heritage. Although shocked at the news of her child Clay remains sincere, his new job promotion will provide for them all. However, Sally suggests a work around involving accidents and life insurance with her husband. Clay immediately gets the insinuation and backs off, and by no means does he want to get involved with Sally’s implied workaround. He sends Sally on her way.

True to the melodrama aspect of Cain’s writing, additional wrinkles form in the structure. Sally’s mother, Grace, comes to Clay to encourage him to take her daughter away from her lifeless marriage. Reluctantly, Clay agrees to help Sally, but without the implied work around and will attempt to persuade her again to leave her husband and marry him. Unfortunately, Clay’s repeated attempts to persuade Sally to divorce without violence fail. Sally becomes childish and unpredictable pushing Clay towards a relationship with Grace. As with most good noir, there’s a love triangle.

Things start to cook up when Clay finally steps over the edge to commit murder for Sally. After meeting her husband by a chance at his own office, Clay gets a sense of The Great Alex’s personality: brash, egotistical, and demeaning towards woman. It is enough to make the invisible wires snap for Clay. The plot takes a left turn and becomes sinister. Clay’s torn between the two women and their moral stances on human life. Not only does Sally participate fully in the plans of her husband’s accidental death, her mother is also able to turn the check and ignore the act of murder with her silence.

The murder plan is the most exciting aspect and helps levitate this novel firmly into the crime genre and high above a melodrama love triangle. The meticulous planning of the accidental death involves stalking the Great Alexis’s habits before and after the show, tailing him home sans headlights down a deserted road, and eventually trial runs of the forced car crash that’s about to ensue. Cain’s suspense is terrific and reminiscent of the best filmic sequences of Hitchcock, Jules Dassin, or Jean-Pierre Melville. Admittedly, the set up takes time to formulate using ingredients from each of his greater works in a stew. Once that pot is simmering, the pace doesn’t slow down for the rest of the book.

The real magician of the story is not The Great Alec Alexis, although he performs and takes credit as one. Sally works her magic well manipulating Clay to murder, but never succeeds at pulling off the final act or the Prestige. If the reader wants to know the true magician of the story then he or she need look no further than the author, James M. Cain.  

Freezer Burn – Joe R. Lansdale

Bill Roberts is a redneck. He’s as white trash as they come and lives with his dead mother whom he’s wrapped in garbage bags and doused in perfume to mask the putrid smell of decomposed flesh. Life is good. However, Bill runs out of money when he’s unable to forge his mother’s signature for her disability checks. What could possibly be the best plan of action for Bill? Rob a fireworks stand. A brilliant idea that anyone who lives or visits rural, county areas around the Forth of July can imagine would be great premise for a crime story.

Joe R. Lansdale’s 1999 novel takes a rural crime premise and infuses it with a touch of Tod Browning’s Freaks(1939). Lansdale’s works are a fine example of mashing several genres together forging a new genre that’s both refreshing and unpredictable. The scenario described in the opening paragraph is only the first chapter. The heist goes horribly wrong and Bill winds up chased through the swamps by the police. His cohorts have either both been shot and/or bitten by deadly viper snakes in the marsh. Exhausted, Bill passes out on a dry bank only to find his face supper for an infestation of mosquitoes. Rescued by a travelling entourage of carnival freaks, Bill meets the inhabitants that include the bearded lady, Conrad the Wonder dog-boy, the Siamese twins, and a strange white haired commander of the troupe, named Frost, that has an extra hand growing out of his chest. The motley ensemble of freaks chants “one of us, one of us” in a literary tip of the hat to Browning’s Freaks.

Lansdale uses the familiar tropes of the crime genre to build his narrative and then deliberately steers in another direction. With Bill’s face a swollen mess, the freaks are able to relate with him and a bond forms. Bill agrees to work with the troupe until he recovers, but soon finds his place and continues after his recovery, working and driving the trailers for the carnival on its summer tour of the small Texas towns. Frost lets him stay in the refrigerated camper that houses the main attraction of the carnival: the frozen, mummified corpse of a possible Neanderthal man nicknamed “The Ice Man”. Frost later explains that the frozen corpse was a purchase that included a story explaining its reputed biblical origins of the missing body of Christ while hinting at a supernatural curse that comes with the package.

If that doesn’t have your attention, Lansdale introduces the femme fatale of the piece: Frost’s wife. Gidget’s constantly described in various states of revealing daisy dukes, bra-less midriffs, nighties, and nakedness. She’s captured Bill’s attention from the start, by not only her figure, but also her apparent normalcy. She’s the only member of the carnival troupe that’s not disfigured or deformed. She’s been seduced by Frost’s kindness and accepted his hand in marriage even though she’s revolted by his other hand growing out of his chest. She forces him to wear a glove on it during their frequent lovemaking. Gidget has plans to take over the carnival and knows that the Ice Man attraction is her ticket out.

Here comes the powerhouse James M. Cain noir connection and the pivot point for the novel. Now it is ThePostman Always Rings Twice (1934) meets Freaks. Gidget coerces Bill to do her bidding and murder Frost so that she can take over the carnival. Using her body to control Bill’s thoughts, she’s able to lay out a fiendish plot to mask Frost’s murder as an accident while painting on the carnival’s Ferris wheel. Suspense builds by the planning and the execution of this deed; however, it should be no surprise, and without giving anything away, that something will go wrong.

While no pun intended, these brief plot descriptions are just the tip of the iceberg. Lansdale grabs the reader, shakes them up, and spits them out. What really grabs me is the inability to pinpoint the direction the story is supposed to move. This provides an exciting narrative that constantly offers surprise twists with quite familiar story elements that mixes different genres such as horror and crime. I’m not overly familiar with Lansdale’s work. The film adaptation of his novella Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) being the first that comes to mind and proves that Lansdale’s work defies categorization. Also, the recently filmed Cold in July (2014) adaptation is what attracted me to pull Freezer Burn off my shelf and read it for this blog. I was not disappointed.