Reviewed
by Lee Horsley
"And he was
certain, because he could feel it in the pit of his stomach, that they were
going to make it. Not a million bucks. Leave that to the fiction writers.
But a cool one hundred G’s, maybe. That was the kind of money it took the
average guy ten to twenty years of hard labor to earn. They could get it in
hours." (Squeeze Play, 39)
Much
of James McKimmey’s gripping, intricately plotted novel, Squeeze Play (Dell,
1962), is set in a Lake Tahoe casino, the scene of an elaborate, carefully
planned scheme to walk away safely with "a cool one hundred G’s". Squeeze
Play is a novel in which all of the main characters are – or ultimately
become – gamblers of one sort or another. Throughout, there is a dialogue
between "taking a chance" and fatalism, between game-playing and
passivity. The game-player or gambler is a familiar figure in mid-century
American crime writing. In the 1930s and 1940s, characters who rely on the roll
of the dice or the spin of the roulette wheel are generally (like the
protagonist of Richard Hallas’s You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up,
for example) committing themselves to a doomed enterprise. Their gambles signify
desperation; their games are played in the vain hope of breaking free from a
cycle of defeat and degradation.
The world of Squeeze
Play is less grimly deterministic, partly because the powers-that-be are
less corrupt and less indiscriminately destructive than those that lurk behind
the scenes, controlling the course of events in much earlier literary noir.
Nevertheless, these established powers (though "straight") have in
place some very effective methods of surveillance, and the plans of the aspiring
crooks are very much shaped by the nature of this vigilance. The casino, a
"vast amphitheater of entertainment," has seemingly omniscient
observers ensconced behind an array of mirrored panels "on the ceiling
everywhere through the entire building, overlooking cash registers, crap tables,
roulette wheels, any place where money changed hands" (38; 42). McKimmey’s
schemers, however, see themselves as quite distinct from the compulsive gamblers
they intend to prey on, and as clever enough to evade the watchful eyes of both
police and casino owners. Suspense is heightened in the novel by the gradual
revelation of machinations that do actually seem to offer the criminals a chance
of success against this "legitimate house" and that threaten to bring
destruction on the protagonist, who becomes increasingly enmeshed in their trap.
"He awoke in the
strange room and stared at the ceiling, puzzled" (5): McKimmey’s central
character, Jack Wade, is seen in the first chapter literally waking up to the
danger he is in. By the end of the chapter he is running blindly, in the
position of one of the classic types of noir protagonist, the traumatised
"wrong man". With his sense of masculine competence and potency on the
verge of collapse, Jack is the victim of an accusation of double murder that he
finds incomprehensible. As the narrative shifts to the events of the preceding
eight days, and we begin to piece together the explanation of the situation he
is in, we share Jack’s conflicting emotions and our sympathies very much
remain with him. But McKimmey’s use of multiple viewpoints - of shifting close
third-person narration – ensures that readers are also given sharp insights
into the motives, the anxieties and weaknesses both of the conspirators and of
one of their other main victims, Binny, the wife of Jack Wade.
For all of the main
characters in Squeeze Play, the inducement to become gamblers and
game-players is a sense of their own entrapment. The femme fatale (Elaine
Towne) and her chosen ally (Frank Delli, a dealer at the casino) are both
looking for a way out, battling against a humiliating conviction that their
lives have been wholly determined by the misfortunes of their earlier years.
Frank seems always to have had a sense of personal failure hanging over him. He
is a loser with a past he wants to leave behind – "he’d been on the
outside, a fumbler. He hadn’t been much good at anything he’d tried..."
(38). Frank’s feeling of inferiority and his terrible need to assert himself
are glimpsed, for example, in a scene juxtaposing his childish bravado with the
masculine competence of the sheriff. In contrast to the sheriff, who bags
mountain lions, Frank uses eight shots to blast away a tiger-striped domestic
cat that startles him, reflecting, "Somehow there was something about this
that was more complete, more definite, as though he had really done something,
shooting the hell out of that damn cat. . . ." (44-5) The self-confidence
of this chronically weak character increases under the tutelage of the
determinedly competent Elaine, to the point at which he feels equal to acts of
violence more serious than cat murder - even equal, perhaps, to committing his
own act of betrayal.
Elaine, driven by the
overwhelming urge to escape from a background of "cheap, patched-up
dresses" and a "shack-like house on the outskirts of town",
rejects a passive domestic role to pursue success in a game of her own choosing.
Convinced that sufficient will and ruthless intelligence will save her from the
fate of her mother, "an empty shell of a woman" whose main attachment
was to her husband and who was capable of nothing more than "a child’s
ability to meet life", Elaine clings to the belief that careful planning
can guarantee the success of her quest for "enough money for everything,
piles of it, heaped dollar upon dollar" (88-9). Everything depends upon her
meticulous plan, and she sees the game she sets up not as a gamble but as a sure
thing: both she and Frank feel "certain…that they [are] going to make
it." As the novel builds to a climax, though, we increasingly wonder
whether the foolproof plan may actually turn out to be more akin to a desperate
gamble, at the mercy of life’s sheer unpredictability, beset by human
instability, errors of judgement and the erratic behaviour of Elaine’s
co-conspirator.
Jack Wade and his wife
Binny, also struggling to reverse a fate that’s been monstrously unkind to
them, are not buoyed up by a conviction that they can seize control. Both,
following the death of their young son, feel at the mercy of life’s
randomness. Binny, a character of considerable pathos, is addicted to drink and
gambling, and obtains only temporary respite from her feeling of total
helplessness: "…the gambling…gave her more and more freedom, covered
the constant feeling of insufficiency, insecurity, and gave her the momentary
courage she could not live without" (49). Jack, on the other hand, strikes
us as temperamentally unsuited to gambling. Throughout most of the narrative, he
tries stoically to endure his ever more miserable lot – unhappily married,
downtrodden and persecuted at work – until danger makes him less risk averse,
finally driving him to become a player himself in a last-ditch effort to clear
his name. Too decent and acquiescent for his own good, Jack ultimately has to choose
to take a gamble. It is only by refusing to surrender passively to fate that he
stands any chance of avoiding the defeat that awaits most noir protagonists. As
he moves closer to making his own play, he increasingly speaks like a gambler
– "then we’ve got half a chance", "my best bet" –
until finally he is ready to act, "feeling a peculiar calm because he was
at last going to do something…" (168-9). Readers of Squeeze Play,
of course, can understand but not share Jack’s feeling of "peculiar
calm", since his decision carries us into the final scenes of a plot so
tense that we are compelled to read anxiously and rapidly to the end.
Copyright© 2004 Lee
Horsley
***
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After graduating from the University of
Minnesota, LEE HORSLEY
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, supported by a
Research Leave Award (2003-04) from the AHRB; 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. Together with Katharine, Lee is editor
and webmaster of Crimeculture. Lee is
also a co-editor and webmaster of Pulp Originals.
Contact Lee