A word of warning: the following breathtaking analysis reveals one or two sensitive plot details

TELEMARKETING AND MURDER IN JASON STARR'S COLD CALLER
 BY LEE HORSLEY

I could forget about my dreams of finding another job in advertising, of starting a family and moving to the suburbs. I was going to be a loser again.

Then I stopped thinking. I tackled him from behind and went right for his throat. (Cold Caller, 120)

From its earliest days, one of the strongest themes of the noir thriller has been the corruption of the American success ethic. The critics quoted on the cover of Jason Starr’s Cold Caller (No Exit Press, 1997) note similarities to the work of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, and thematic comparisons can also, of course, be extended to include most of the other writers of American literary noir, from Dashiell Hammett in the 1920s to, say, Bret Easton Ellis (who has high praise for Starr’s novels) in the 1990s. As Ellis’s American Psycho itself suggests, this is, in addition, a key point of intersection with more canonical American plays and novels, which have repeatedly exposed the ‘straight for the jugular’ implications of the American way, the savagery of the vigorous commitment to frontier capitalism expounded, for example, by Teach in David Mamet’s American Buffalo: ‘the freedom…Of the Individual…To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit.’

Jason Starr’s Cold Caller is a tense, darkly humorous and tightly plotted reworking of the theme. Starr’s methods as well as his thematic preoccupations suggest comparisons with Cain, Thompson and other great mid-century crime writers, amongst others Charles Williams, Gil Brewer and Harry Whittington. Like his predecessors, but in a distinctively 90s way, Starr makes insidious use of a taut, edgy first-person narration to take readers inside a mind on the verge of disintegration. He tempts us to listen sympathetically to telemarketer Bill Moss’s self-justifications and evasions, whilst at the same time we see ever more clearly his slide towards insanity - towards the stage at which the ‘beautiful thing’ he fantasizes about changes from a dream of his gloriously rapid progress up the ladder of success to an almost equally satisfying vision of wrapping his hands around the neck of whoever is standing on the rung above him.

Bill Moss, at the beginning of his narrative, is precariously employed in a part-time job that involves phoning people to try to sell them on the idea of meeting a salesman who will try to sell them long-distance phone services - a form of remote and roundabout salesmanship that in itself suggests a deferral of any actual ‘communication’. The salesman, a kind of legitimized conman and liminal trickster figure, has traditionally held a strong fascination for American writers. As a specialist in phony realities, he depends for his success on his skills as a performer, tailoring his performance to whatever audience he’s trying to con. In Starr’s novel, as elsewhere, the salesman’s strengths (his adaptability and his powers of invention) are perverted in the service of a criminally irresponsible capitalist ethos; his adaptability erodes all firm sense of self, and his slick (and often not so slick) deceptions displace all other forms of communication. The brash self-assurance of the ‘cold caller’, able to establish a transient connection with any stranger via the telephone, eventually hardens into the coldness of complete emotional detachment.

Relationships with others are perceived entirely in terms of power and powerlessness, and Cold Caller is particularly effective in the way it charts the protagonist’s dehumanization, his alternating self-abasement and brutality. Turns of fortune carry him from shame and fear of failure to euphoric interludes when he rediscovers the joys of callously exercising power. The firm Bill works for ensures that ritual humiliations are part of the daily routine. The first traumatic event of his narrative is his ordeal of apologizing to the entire office: ‘"No deals," Ed said. "You either apologize to everyone or you walk out that door"...I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more humiliated’ (32-3). Swallowing his pride and moving upwards in the hierarchy, Bill reflects that his desperation to hold on to his job is such that ‘I was prepared to do anything not to let this opportunity slip away. If it meant literally getting down on my hands and knees, stripping off Mr. Simmons’ pants, and kissing his butt cheeks, I was ready to do it’ (85).

In comparison to this method of career advancement, the act of murder seems like a new-found form of forcefulness and self-assertion. And indeed, the office murder he commits at first appears to be a shrewd career move: ‘The way I saw things, it was the difference between the end of my career and a new beginning. Killing Ed was definitely the right thing to do – it was the only thing to do under the circumstances…’ (125). It looks as though everything is going to turn out as he’d hoped it would before he committed the murder,

except that things were going to happen ahead of schedule. After six months of running the department I could start interviewing for ad jobs again, and by next year I’d be back at a high-level marketing job. And this time I’d be careful. I wouldn’t say or do anything that could possibly lead to any misunderstandings, and before long I’d be living my dream life again…’ (146 )

Bill is already tasting the pleasures of wielding control over those eager to kiss his own butt cheeks: ‘The next couple of days my dream life continued. The telemarketers treated me with fear and respect, making it incredibly satisfying to come into work every day’ (167).

As he strives to hold on to his rediscovered capacity for inspiring fear and respect, Bill Moss feels within reach of suburban security; vigorous and manly, he already seems to be transforming himself into the stereotypical American success story. David Mamet’s definition of the American dream is that it is ‘basically raping and pillage,’ and in Glengarry Glen Ross, for example, he depicts a world in which failures to achieve that dream are emasculating. For Bill Moss, too, the spectre of losing his job renders him impotent, except in a brief encounter with a prostitute. His sexual potency, however, returns when he thinks he is on his way to prosperity: ‘I had new fantasies, fantasies that had nothing to do with prostitutes. I dreamed about continuing to do well at my job and then getting another job at an ad agency...’ (112). Regaining his ability to ‘perform’ is, of course, just a side-effect of his workaholic character reasserting itself, rather than a manifestation of warm human interconnectedness: ‘When I was in my office, the world consisted of me and my work and nothing else’ (100).

From his earliest years, Bill Moss has cultivated his work ethic, and Starr underlines the irony of his childhood conviction that if he dedicates himself to earning money he can protect himself from ‘my aloneness in the world’ (13). It’s a goal that proves as illusory as paying back his ten thousand dollars in student loans. The truth of the matter is that his pursuit of upward mobility leads only to his utter isolation. Starr’s protagonist moves inexorably towards a world that really does consist of ‘me and my work and nothing else’, and in which even his sense of ‘me’ is rapidly crumbling. We witness the reduction of his whole sense of himself as a functioning human being:

When I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize the man staring back at me. His face was gaunt and pale, there was a deep two-inch-long gash on his forehead that wasn’t healing. But it was his eyes that frightened me most. They were two dark, dull circles that didn’t seem to be alive. (71)

There is no longer a man to whom others can relate; there is no further point in giving bogus reassurances to Julie, his partner, because ‘The old Bill Moss had died a long time ago and she was just starting to realize it.’(198). Ultimately his whole existence seems to him ‘to be someone else’s life that I could view like scenes in a movie. I could rewind it and repeat certain events and none of it was real’ (211).

The only real feelings that remain for Bill Moss are a sense of self-righteous rage directed against those who stand in his way and an exhausting array of paranoid fears that he will be found out. The lies that come naturally to the lips of a salesman become increasingly frantic and increasingly necessary to his survival. He begins to realize that his invention of false narratives has been a little less skilful than he has imagined, and the struggle to hold his elaborate fictional constructions together grows desperate. From the outset, murder has presented itself as an essential prop for his habitual untruths: it’s to cover up a lie about his past that he kills his boss; it’s to preserve the lie of his innocence that he kills a prostitute. As his stories begin to unravel, his foolhardy measures become a grotesque caricature of the American dream of upward mobility, his ‘progress’ reduced to a surreal journey towards Harlem on the subway, carrying a severed head in a trash bag. As he sits on the train, he muses on how and why it has all happened – questions echoed in a climactic confrontation in which Julie voices her appalled recognition of the disproportion between Bill’s means and his ends: ‘"For a telemarketing job, Bill?" she cried. "That’s what this is all about? Some stupid telemarketing job? That’s why you killed a man? That’s why you ruined our lives?" (208).

Copyright© 2003 Lee Horsley

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Lee Horsley had a hard-boiled but not noir childhood in Minnesota, where she read pulp fiction, hunted, fished and was particularly good at rifle shooting (winning both state and national championships in her late teens). In the mid-60s, after graduating from the University of Minnesota, she came to England as a Fulbright Scholar to do postgraduate work in English Literature and has lived here ever since (with an English husband and three children, now all in their twenties). She has been at the University of Lancaster since 1974 - currently teaching twentieth-century British and American literature and two specialist crime courses. Over the last fifteen years, she has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (Macmillan, 1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (Longman, 1995) – and more recently The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001). Her current projects include a book on twentieth-century British and American crime fiction for OUP and another (jointly with her daughter, Katharine) called Fatal Families: Representations of Domesticity in Twentieth-Century Crime Stories (contracted to Greenwood Press). Both of these should be out sometime in 2005-06. Katharine and Lee also started a website, Crime Culture, in September 2002, aimed particularly at university students and teachers involved in the growing number of crime-related courses - but also, they hope, of interest to anyone who enjoys crime films and crime fiction.
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Read an extract from Jason Starr's Cold Caller

Read an extract from Lee Horsley's The Noir Thriller