It certainly starts in an interesting way.
Bill is a 39-year-old commercial artist. He’s married to Louise and they have a kid. It’s a reasonably successful marriage but lately things haven’t been quite the same, for reasons that Bill just can’t understand.
Then he gets a phone call. It’s a girl. She sounds about fifteen. She claims to know Bill and she wants him to meet her at the usual place. She says her name is Karen. Bill has no idea what the usual place is and he doesn’t know any women named Karen. It’s crazy and must be a practical joke. Probably some stupid kids. But there’s something that bothers him, an elusive memory of something but he can’t place it at all.
And then he remembers. Karen. It’s impossible. That was twenty-two years ago. It was something special. It has never been that way with any other woman. But it can’t be her. He remembers the usual place now, and he meets her anyway.
It’s Karen all right, but it isn’t her. It’s not the same Karen, but it is the same Karen. And he wants her as much as ever. He has to have her.
You have to admit that’s a pretty good setup.
There’s another man connected to Karen in a totally different way. That creates a whole separate sub-plot, but the two plot strands do of course eventually converge.
Bill knows it would be foolish to get involved with Karen. You can’t relive the past. But the past was so magical. So naturally he does get involved.
Bill also knows that he’s headed for disaster but when disaster does strike it’s not the disaster he expected. It’s a different disaster. And he’s trapped.
As for Karen, we know there’s something strange about her and while we have our suspicions regarding her motivations we can’t be sure. Bill has no idea what her motivations are. He doesn’t understand his own motivations. Like any noir protagonist when a femme fatale comes along he isn’t thinking straight. He’s just thinking about Karen’s body, and how wonderful it was when they were young and they were together. He feels like his whole life has been wasted without her.
That’s assuming that she is a femme fatale. She is, but maybe not in a straightforward way.
The book is, as its title suggests, all about memory and the past. There are three key characters who are in differing ways trapped in the past. And they’re trapped in ways that involve sexual and emotional obsession. It’s also a story about people whose grip on reality starts to slip. We get the points of view of all three key characters. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing in the case of Hogan. I’m not a fan of novels that try to take the reader into the mind of a psycho. It’s a good thing in the case of Bill and Karen because they’re much more interesting, both tragic and pathetic, with intriguingly tangled motivations.
There’s plenty of sleaze here and the sex is moderately graphic by 1963 standards. Erotic obsession is what drives this story.
The major weakness is some half-baked Freudianism. The novel was clearly inspired by a certain very famous movie made a few years earlier but to say more might risk a spoiler. There’s also a lot of beat lingo, if you can dig it. It does give the novel a very early 60s vibe.
If you wanted to make a movie from this novel you could do it as a film noir, an erotic thriller, a slasher movie, a psychological thriller, a giallo or an art film. It contains all those potentialities.
Memory of Passion is slightly oddball noir fiction but it’s frenetic, crazed and fascinating. Highly recommended.
Stark House have paired this one with another Gil Brewer noir novel, Nude on Thin Ice, in a double-header paperback edition.
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