moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
A Professional Safecracker Reveals His Craft

One morning toward the end of summer, Santore was called out to the house of a client suffering from what his son described as early-stage dementia. The man’s house stood on a leafy cul-de-sac in Century City. Santore was able to manipulate the safe open with nothing but his bare hands and intense concentration, but it took him nearly thirty minutes. About twenty minutes in, the homeowner’s son stepped outside to take a phone call. The owner, apparently having forgotten that he hired a safecracker, stepped around the corner to see us squatting next to each other in the closet, fiddling with his safe. Startled, the man said an awkward hello; after we reminded him who we were, he reintroduced himself. In another scenario, I realized, that moment could have gone very badly.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (acme)
Looked up this passage, because it was the only bit that stuck with me from an early Raymond Chandler story, before he hit his stride. The story turned out to be "Smart-Aleck Kill" Basically, the detective's search takes him to a louche house party:

He went past the blond man down the hall and turned under an arch into a big old-fashioned room with built-in china closets and a lot of shabby furniture. There were seven or eight people in the room and they were all flushed with liquor.
A girl in shorts and a green polo shirt was shooting craps on the floor with a man in dinner clothes. A fat man with noseglasses was talking sternly into a toy telephone. He was saying: "Long Distance-Sioux City-and put some snap into it, sister!"
The radio blared "Sweet Madness."
Two couples were dancing around carelessly bumping into each other and the furniture. A man who looked like Al Smith was dancing all alone, with a drink in his hand and an absent expression on his face. A tall, white-faced blonde weaved towards Dalmas, slopping liquor out of her glass. She shrieked: "Darling! Fancy meeting you here!"
Dalmas went around her, went towards a saffron-colored woman who had just come into the room with a bottle of gin in each hand. She put the bottles on the piano and leaned against it, looking bored. Dalmas went up to her and asked for Miss Crayle.


That's not even a case of period sleaze coming off as charmingly quaint by modern standards. That is the sort of thing that David Lynch copied years later. Nothing so obvious as nudity or open drug-taking is going on, but everybody's just... off. It's terribly effective. I still can't recall the rest of the story.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
Read some more Cornell Woolrich today, including 'The Night I Died,' which has what must be the most absurdly noir ever, and 'You'll Never See Me Again,' condensed for radio and starring Joseph Cotton, here.

ETA - Wait, what?! Ok, that twist ending wasn't in the original.

ETA2 - Same script, different cast: http://escape-suspense.typepad.com/files/suspense_1946-09-05_youll-never-see-me-again.mp3

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