The Darkest Hour by William P. McGivern

William P. McGivern’s 1955 crime novel, The Darkest Hour, is a version of “On The Waterfront,” but with a lot more action and a lot less angst.

The book fits squarely into the noir category as an urban crime novel set mostly at night on the cold, dark streets along New York City’s waterfront, with a damaged and angry main character.

Steve Retnick used to be a good guy and a good cop who was promoted to detective at a young age. But gangsters framed him for the killing of a dock worker and Retnick spent five years in Sing Sing prison.

When the book opens, Retnick is out of the can and back in the city, using his street-smarts and detective skills to find the real killer and administer a little of his own justice on the men who set him up.

Retnick inflicts some physical punishment on thugs who deserve it, but he also puts innocent people in harm’s way. He knows what he wants and he also knows he is doing wrong. He has been warned off by his former police supervisor, but he presses on. This kind of destructive obsession is real noir territory.

A man who can give him the proof he needs to nail the hitman and his boss, is killed just as Retnick returns to the old neighborhood. The boss is a local gangster who is muscling his way into a dock-workers’ union.

McGivern’s story, despite an authenticity in the location, the people and the way things work on the waterfront, has a few weak spots, mostly in the subplot concerning Steve Retnick’s bitterness toward his wife, who did him dirt while he was in the joint.

Overall, The Darkest Hour (also called Waterfront Cop), is another good yarn from an author who was on a hot streak in the 1950s. Some of the other books McGivern published in that decade were: Shield for Murder (1951); Blondes Die Young (1952); The Crooked Frame (1952); Margin for Terror (1953); The Big Heat (1953); Rogue Cop (1954); Night Extra (1957); Odds Against Tomorrow (1957); and Savage Streets (1959).

William P. McGivern worked as a newspaper reporter and also wrote many short stories for the pulps. He served in the Army during World War II. After the war he turned to novel writing. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote for the movies and television, while continuing to turn out books. He died in 1982 at age 63.

(For more posts on books, head over to Todd Mason’s blog.)

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MOVIE: Noirish crime film Shield for Murder

Old Hollywood could not produce a film with a lead character like Barney Nolan, at least not the Barney Nolan of William P. McGivern’s 1951 novel Shield for Murder.

In the book, Philadelphia police detective Barney Nolan is a bad cop who hits rock bottom. In the 1954 movie, “Shield for Murder," Barney Nolan, as played by star and co-director Edmond O’Brien, is a complex man, not particularly good or bad, just human, who makes a series of bad – really bad – decisions and goes down the moral drain.

Both book and movie start with Nolan killing a bookie in order to rob the man and then claiming it was an accident, a warning shot gone wild. Nolan, in both versions wants the money to win a girl.

In the book, Nolan needs the money to lavish expensive jewelry on a nightclub singer who has no romantic feelings for him. In the movie, he wants the money to marry a nightclub cigaret girl, buy a small house in the suburbs, move there and live his own vision of the American dream.

Characters like Nolan who make criminal choices for women are a staple of film noir. In the hands of a director like Fritz Lang or Anthony Mann, this movie could have been a great addition to that genre. But as it is, “Shield for Murder” does not reach that level. Still, it is not a bad little crime picture.

The movie might get a better grade from me if I had not read the McGivern novel right before seeing it. (A post about McGivern’s book is here.)

Aside from Nolan’s motivation to commit murder, there is another interesting difference between the book and the movie. In the book, the man who starts suspecting Nolan is a murderer is Mark Brewster, a young newspaper reporter. In the movie, Mark Brewster is Nolan’s police partner. The change may have been dictated by the old Hollywood production code.

O’Brien, who co-directed with producer Howard W. Koch, may have miscast himself in the movie. Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum could play hard guys on the edge and capable of going over to the dark side. In McGivern’s book, Nolan is a big, violent thug who scares the hell out of everyone. The movie’s Barney Nolan is a softer, almost sympathetic guy, thanks to O’Brien’s personality and skill as an actor. (O’Brien deserves a post about his career.)

As Nolan's partner, actor John Agar is wooden and not nearly as good as he was in his first film - John Ford’s “Fort Apache.” Also in the cast is the great, gruff Emile Meyer as a captain of detectives who also suspects Nolan. The cigaret girl is played by Marla English, who did a handful of films in the 1950s. Carolyn Jones has a nice supporting role as a woman in a bar trying to pick up Barney Nolan. Others in the cast who became regulars on TV are Claude Akins, William Schallert and Richard Deacon.

Overall, “Shield for Murder” is an OK picture, but the book is a lot better.

(For more posts on movies and television, check out Todd Mason’s blog.)

FFB: Shield for Murder by William P. McGivern

The first sentence of Shield for Murder is a grabber:

“The man Nolan planned to kill came out of an all-night taproom about one o’clock in the morning.”

William P. McGivern really knew how to get a crime novel up and running.

In this 1951 book, Barny Nolan is a Philadelphia police detective who got on the force and rose through the ranks by luck and political connections. In his youth, he was the muscle behind a district boss. Now pushing 40, Nolan is still violent with a built-up resentment for anyone with money, anyone with power, and anyone in his way. He kills the man who comes out of the taproom, a bookie, so he can steal his bankroll. Nolan needs money to impress a nightclub singer, but is unaware that she has no interest in him. In the bookie’s pocket is a huge wad of cash belonging to a local racketeer. Taking it does not worry Nolan. He figures that as a cop he can derail any investigation and get away with it.

But nothing ever goes smoothly for Barny Nolan.

Not only does the gangster find out he took the money, but also a young newspaper reporter, Mark Brewster, suspects Nolan of murdering the bookie.

Brewster starts putting a case together against Nolan, but runs into resistance from the cops when he tries to tell them that one of their own is a bad guy. He also makes a target of himself when Nolan learns Brewster is investigating him.

McGivern paints a dark, seedy picture of the City of Brotherly Love. How accurate a picture, I cannot say having only visited Philadelphia a couple of times as a tourist, eating cheesesteak sandwiches, visiting the Liberty Bell, and, yes, running up the steps of the art museum with a couple of my young nephews. (No, I did not raise my hands like Rocky. But they did). McGivern’s Philadelphia felt genuine through his descriptions of the neighborhoods, the police precincts, and the taprooms. (By the way, can anyone from Philly tell me what a taproom is, or was? Was it a small pub? Was it a bar that only served beer?)

For a while, William P. McGivern was a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia and several of his crime novels were set there. Shield for Murder and other McGivern books like Odds Against Tomorrow, The Big Heat, and Rogue Cop were made into Hollywood movies. McGivern died in 1982 at age 63.

(An earlier post on McGivern’s novel The Crooked Frame is here.)

(For more forgotten books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)

Tuesday’s Overlooked TV: “The Crooked Frame”

“The Crooked Frame,” the live television play, is a fascinating example of TV in its infancy.

Freely adapted from William P. McGivern’s novel of the same name, with many changes and compressions to fit the 30-minute time-slot of the CBS series Suspense, this 1952 

 

episode drains almost all the mystery and – OK – suspense, out of the story.

So, what is so interesting about it?

First, the show was directed by 27-year-old Robert Mulligan, who labored for years in live television before directing movies. Ten years after doing “The Crooked Frame,” he directed Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Mulligan, here, seemed to have a cast of stage actors who did not quite grasp the concept of acting for the camera. The only exception was…

The second interesting thing about this show: Actor Richard Kiley. Kiley, who later won a Tony for Broadway's "Man of La Mancha," here, at age 30, had done a fair amount of TV work and a movie or two, and he plays the lead in a style far more suitable to…

The third interesting aspect of the show: The staging and camera work. Mulligan, like other directors of live television dramas in those days, kept his actors close to the camera. Sometimes his blocking is almost comically tight, clustering his players together into a sort of football huddle. Most likely, this was to keep the actors' faces visible on the small screens of early television sets. But Mulligan is also clever in his staging and in the freewheeling way he wheels his camera in and around and through the tiny sets.

All in all, a fascinating look at early television and a fairly harmless presentation. But be warned: If you have not read the book, this ancient video will spoil the plot. So, read McGivern’s novel first.

(A companion piece to this post, about McGivern’s book, is on this blog and at Friday’s Forgotten Books, Patti Abbott’s weekly feature, hosted last week by Todd Mason.)

Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Crooked Frame

The Crooked Frame is a 1952 novel by William P. McGivern about a New York magazine editor who stumbles into his apartment in the wee hours, after a night of drinking and a brief blackout, to find his coat and shirt covered with blood. And it is not his blood.

Webb Wilson, 36, a man plagued by violent memories of combat in World War 2, drinks in hopes of finding some peace. All he wants is to live quietly, do the daily 9 to 5, and escape his haunting guilt. His boss upsets Webb’s quiet routine by uprooting him from his undemanding nook and placing him in charge of a department of quirky, off-beat characters, one of whom is murdered. The killer could be anyone on Webb’s staff, and it could be Webb himself who may have committed the crime during his blackout. As Webb pulls together the strings leading up to the murder, he begins to see that … well, McGivern’s story is too good to spoil with a lot of spoilers.

This story, told in a clean, straight forward style, is populated with well drawn, all too human characters. So well drawn are they that clues arrive almost unnoticed. McGivern also puts the reader in the uncomfortable position of wondering throughout the book whether or not Webb, the man trying to find the truth behind the murder, is the murderer himself.

Many of McGivern’s novels deal with cops and criminals, and while there is a forceful police investigator in The Crooked Frame, the focus is on Webb, his colleagues, the inner workings of the publishing firm, and the 1950s world of the three-martini lunch.

McGivern was on a roll in the 1950s. After years of newspaper reporting, writing for the pulps and a hitch in the Army during World War 2, he hit his stride when he published his first novel, But Death Runs Faster in 1948. He followed that effort with a dozen more crime novels over the next decade, including: Shield for Murder (1951), The Big Heat (1953), Rogue Cop (1954), Night Extra (1957) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1957). Many of his books were produced as films. In the 1960s and 1970s, McGivern wrote for the movies and television, while continuing to turn out novels. He died in 1982 at age 63.

The Crooked Frame is well worth the time to find and read.