Where Evil Lives

by Libby Hellmann



It’s hard to believe Hitchcock’s PSYCHO was released 50 years ago, but it was, and there’s a terrific article in this week’s Newsweek about it. The author, Malcolm Jones, does an excellent job explaining why PSYCHO still feels so contemporary half a century later.

The articles notes that PSYCHO delivered several cinematic “firsts.” It was the first film to show a toilet flushing, to murder the star early on in the film, and, of course, there’s the shower scene, which many say ushered in the era of explicit violence on screen.

But the real power of the film, according to the author, is the randomness
of Norman Bates’ act. Evil is random, Hitchcock believes. It can strike anyone, anytime. Janet Leigh in PSYCHO; Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST; Tippi Hedren in THE BIRDS; you; or me. (Coincidentally, I just saw THE BIRDS for about the 4th time a couple of days ago, and this time I couldn’t watch the scenes where Tippi Hedren and the others get attacked. Is there something about getting older and having less stomach for horror? Or am I just becoming a chicken?)

At any rate, this notion of the randomness of evil resonates with me. Jamie, in her inaugural post last week, talked about how evil can be camouflaged in civility. For me, the fact that evil is random is terrifying. And irresistible. In fact, I suspect that’s the case for many of us.

In fact, it makes me wonder if all of us have recurring tropes that come to mind when we’re exploring the random nature of evil. I do -- it’s World War Two. It was a time of profound conflict; a time fraught with danger, mistrust, and hopelessness. Most of all, it was a time that elicited both heroism and cowardice. I’m not talking about the Evil that was Nazism, which wasn’t random at all, but its effect on ordinary people, particularly those in the Occupied countries.

Like Sean, I am in a reading rut, so I joined Netflix and watched 4 films (and counting) on my new Mac this weekend. Three of them: BLACK BOOK (which I highly recommend despite a couple of “coincidences”), DIVIDED WE FALL, and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, all take place during the War. And while there were Evil Nazis in all three films, the most fascinating parts were the way ordinary people behaved and reacted to them. Some became wicked themselves; some didn’t. The point was (at least to me) it is impossible to predict how people will react when faced with evil.

Which means that the fact that others suffer or lose their lives because of that unpredictability is totally random. The people who are terrified they might be reported to the Gestapo; the people whose homes might be razed by bombing raids; the soldiers who are gunned down or executed for some infraction of the rules…. There are infinite possibilities where the randomness of evil affects life and death. Of course, many authors – Alan Furst, John Le Carre, Philip Kerr, Jack Higgins, Ken Follet, Alistair Maclean – have already tapped into this area more eloquently than I. Still, I never seem to tire of it.

What about you? Is there a time, place, or situation that calls to you in your reading or writing or film-making? A place you keep returning to? A place where evil lives?

Memory

by Barbara D'Amato


Alzina Stone Dale is a long-time member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, familiar to most people in the crime-writing world. She is the author of biographies of Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton, as well as walking guides to mystery fiction sites in Chicago, London, the U.K., and much more.

She has written a memoir called WHEN THE POSTWAR WORLD WAS NEW, about her experiences in Europe just after the war. The book is coming out from Tate Publishing Company, with a pub date probably in 2009. I recently read several sections of it.

1952. World War Two is recently over and much of Europe is in ruins. Dale, newly graduated from college, hearing about acquaintances “stacking bricks in West Berlin” and “clearing Finnish forests” goes to Europe to a work camp under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee. Later she backpacks through Germany, Italy, the U.K. and France. She describes Hamburg, “bombed to pieces, cold, wet, and hungry.” In Cologne, the Cathedral stood untouched, “while every other building seemed to be gone. In London, “a line of churches—just shells.”

Dale’s observations of postwar Europe provide insight into the roots of conflict in our present time. Many Europeans, far from being endlessly grateful, saw the Americans as future world leaders and resented it. I was especially surprised that in the U.S. election that year, Dwight Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson, the Brits strongly favored Stevenson. Eisenhower had been Allied Commander and I would have thought he’d have been viewed as a sort of savior. And if not, at least he was the devil they knew, as opposed to the devil they didn’t know. Dale’s perception then was that the Brits very much resented the fact that U.S. troops had good food and housing in Britain, which the local people, many with homes bombed, did not. “Not reasonable,” as she says, but it makes sense.

It was a time different from today. She had, for instance, to sign three papers to declare she was not now and had not ever been a Communist” to get a passport.

Her adventures are not just sober, they are fun reading, too. Watching her young self as she sees Queen Elizabeth II drive to her coronation is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Among the many charms of this book is her willingness to rely on her own diaries and her letters home, as well as letters from her friends. There is a freshness that would not be there if she had only summarized, as a 2008 person, what one might think about the postwar times.

Which brings me to my question. How many of us would use our young words in anything? My mother threw out all my letters home from college and later, so that is over and done, but not too long ago I threw out all my early writing. It was ghastly.

Would you use any of your juvenilia? Where? How?