It’s amazing how relaxed you can get on a cruise ship with nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see. We recommend it. That’s where we’ve been for the past couple of weeks. However, as soon as we returned, it was back to work and full-speed ahead. And here we are, two days later, writing a fresh newsletter.
This month we lead off with Dark Hazard/The Quick Brown Fox by W. R. Burnett, two of his character dramas from 1933 and 1942, both of which rely more on situational tension than criminal events.
Dark Hazard is the story of Jim Turner. He used to play the horses. Hell, he used to own a winner. But since he met and married Marg, he’s a changed man. Now he’s a Chicago hotel night clerk. But the lure of the track never goes away. So when Mr. Bright pulls a trick on him and gets him fired from his job, and then offers him a new position at a California dog track, Jim jumps at the chance. Marg hates gambling and is at first reluctant, but Jim is persuasive. Once there, Jim finds dog racing to be even more exciting than horse racing. And that’s when Jim falls in love all over again… with a sleek, black greyhound named Dark Hazard.
The Quick Brown Fox is a political novel, a warning of the insidious fascist forces that lurked beneath the surface of World War II America. When reporter Ray Benedict first meets Brant and his two friends Nick and Harry, he is impressed. They are large men, filled with a careless ease. And they’re war heroes, too, having supposedly saved a boat full of men at Dunkirk. So Ray uses his newspaper column to give them a good write-up and a bit of fame. But then Brant brazenly shares his personal philosophy, and Ray realizes that these three men aren’t heroes but cold-blooded schemers. Brant looks appealing on the surface, but he has an agenda, using Ray’s influence to build up a political career. And that’s when Ray sees these three men for what they really are.
Cullen Gallagher contributes another one of his fine, insightful introductions, suggesting that “opening a Burnett novel is like peering into the annals of American history and getting a glimpse of the dark, corrupt truth behind the nationalistic myth.” If you enjoyed High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle, you know that that Burnett excels at character-building. Dark Hazard and The Quick Brown Fox may not be as well known, but as Elgin Bleecker wrote about him on The Dark Time blog, “Burnett knew his characters and the worlds in which they lived, and he wrote about them in a clean, hard style.”
