John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One
John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One
I knew little of John Franklin Bardin when I found this 1976 omnibus at a Mystery bookshop. I had only seen his 1948 novel Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (included here) on several lists of the best mystery novels of the 20th century. The cashier told me that Bardin’s writing was like “Philip K. Dick collaborating with David Goodis.” The comparison sounded like how I would describe the early work of Jonathan Lethem, who, in novels like Gun, With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon played out his obsession with Dick’s paranoid work in neo-noir settings. (Of course when Bardin was writing, Dick had yet to publish a book.) Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Lethem is familiar with Bardin, and in fact wrote the introduction to a recent small press reprint of the earliest book in this omnibus, 1946’s The Deadly Percheron.
That novel has one of more compelling opening set-ups in noir literature: A man named Jacob Blunt visits a psychiatrist, Dr. George Matthews, hoping to be proved insane. He says that leprechauns have been paying him to wear flowers in his hair and give away twenty quarters a day. Matthews agrees to accompany Blunt to a meeting with one of these little men in order to prove to himself that his patient is delusional. A leprechaun, or at least a very short fellow, actually shows up to tell Blunt that he will now be giving away horses, the Percherons of the title. The first will be delivered that night to a famous actress. Later, Dr. Matthews hears that the actress has been murdered and that Blunt is in jail, having been found loitering outside her apartment with a horse. When he goes to visit his patient at the police station, he finds a man he has never met before in the cell, then is knocked out, only to wake up in a hospital a year later. He is told that he cannot be who he claims to be because Dr. George Matthews was found dead months ago.
The book, which as it progresses goes further and further out of control, is gripping, if a bit silly—using more carnival funhouses, midgets, and convenient erasures of amnesia than an episode of the soap opera Passions. The psychological complexity is welcome, even if it means that sometimes character toss psychobabble back and forth at what should be tense moments. One really has no idea what is
going to happen next.
The second book in this set, 1947’s The Last of Philip Banter, is a slightly tamer affair, and a more skillfully executed story. This one is interesting in that, though it is a mystery novel, there is no crime committed until the book is nearly over. The central question is whether the title character, a philandering alcoholic who keeps coming into work and finding on his desk pages of a “Confession” that he has supposedly written himself and that describes future events that for the most part end up coming true, is a schizophrenic personality or is being driven insane by an outside force. Banter, an unlikeable fellow, falls easily in the trap the “Confession” lays for him. He reads that he will cause a schism in his marriage by
sleeping with a woman that his old friend will bring over for dinner that night, and even though he swears he will not let this happen, ends up trying to make love to the woman, Brent, after driving her home. Though, again, the scenario is unlikely, Bardin gives us enough psychological insight into his flawed hero that we can’t even be sure until the end whether Banter is being set-up or not.
The pacing is unusually fast for a book of the era. It reminded me of a present day Harlan Coben thriller, where the plot exertions are paved over by sheer breathtaking action both mental and psychical. This book follows an opposite and darker path, than does “Percheron.” Banter is man self-destructing rather than one trying to piece himself back together, as was Dr. Matthews (who appears in both books.) The novels do remind me of Philip K. Dick in that they view reality as a mental construct open to revision by malevolent forces both outside the self and inside.
Part two of this review will deal with Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly.