Roy Earle is thirty-seven and he’s just out of prison. And he’s already involved in another planned job, a hotel heist. Roy had been a big shot. He’d been one of Dillinger’s gang. Six years behind bars hasn’t done him much good. He’s still tough and dangerous, but now he’s fatalistic and obsessed with death. He’s tired.
The job should be easy. This hotel has never been robbed before and supposedly the local police force is practically non-existent.
Roy has to meet up with the other guys in on the job, in an isolated cabin in the Sierras. Red and Babe are young punks and Roy despises them. And they figure he’s old and he’s probably gone soft. What worries Earle is the girl with them, Marie. She’s Babe’s girl. Roy doesn’t ant women involved. Dames always cause trouble and what usually happens is that the men end up at each other’s throats.
The easiness of the job is the problem. It will be easy if nothing unexpected happens. But something unexpected always happens. There’s an overwhelming sense of impending disaster to this book. Roy is the smartest guy involved in this caper, and he’s as dumb as a rock. The other guys ere even dumber. These are guys with no ability whatsoever to look ahead. They want the robbery to go smoothly so they assume it will go smoothly. When things go wrong they have no idea what to do. And they have no idea why things went wrong. Roy puts it down to dumb luck, or fate. He has never considered that his criminal career has been a failure because he just isn’t smart enough. On one level he knows that guys like him always get caught, but he doesn’t have the imagination or the drive to try anything else.
Roy suffers from an extraordinary lack of self-awareness. He thinks a lot about his childhood. He remembers it as an idyllic time. The fact that even when he was a kid people were scared of him because of his violence is something he has edited out of his memories. He believes that he tried getting regular job and making an honest living, but in fact he got fired from every job for being a bad-tempered trouble-maker. He’s also edited that out of his memories.
If there was no more to Roy than this then he’d be a very uninteresting character. But there is more to him. He genuinely likes women. In his own clumsy way he’s kind and considerate towards them. He genuinely comes to love Marie. He even makes a start on understanding her.
He has his own weird moral compass. Some of the bad mistakes he makes are due to this. There are times when he just can’t bring himself to be sufficiently ruthless. He doesn’t really like killing.
The heist comes a long way into the book. The main focus is on what makes Roy Earle tick. This is noir fiction but it’s very much psychological noir. And we do get to know Roy Earle very well. We almost feel sorry for him as we see his characters flaws leading him to disaster, and we feel that maybe he doesn’t entirely deserve what seems like being his inevitable fate. There’s just enough good in Roy to make us feel that maybe, if he could make just one smart decision, his life might be salvageable.
There’s not a huge amount of action in this novel. There is plenty of suspense however. The reader can see all the mistakes Roy makes and can anticipate the consequences. Roy either cannot foresee those consequences, or in some cases (more interestingly) he does know he’s bungling things but he goes ahead anyway because he just doesn’t know what else to do.
The obvious question is whether Roy has a death wish. At times it seems that he does, but that changes slightly as his relationship with Marie develops. For the first time in his life he has something to live for. But he knows it’s probably come too late.
High Sierra is a fine novel that manages to pack an emotional punch despite characters who are not obviously all that sympathetic. Perhaps end up caring about Roy and Marie because they are so very flawed. Highly recommended.
Interesting review of a book I just read. I mainly agree, but to be clear, W.R. Burnett based Roy on John Dillinger--he'd done research for a movie script he was going to write, but the studio ended up ditching the project because Dillinger had just recently been killed, and there was a lot of protest that the movies shouldn't be glorifying a criminal. So make the story about a fictional criminal, give him a dog and a girl and a relatable past. No problem. Hit novel, hit film, made Bogart's career.
ReplyDeleteIt is not noir, strictly speaking. Noir is Post WWII, and it's much less moralistic. It's hard-boiled crime fiction, a prescursor to noir, but not quite the same thing. Burnett wasn't writing noir with The Asphalt Jungle ten years later, either. There's always a moral underpinning, even as he questions society's rush to judgment with regards to such people.
I really love the romance between Roy and Marie--as you probably saw, the ending of the novel is different. Ida Lupino was the star the studio was really pushing here, and therefore she had to feature prominently in the final scenes. Interesting question is, why didn't Burnett do that in the novel, since he clearly loved the character. Maybe that's why.
It's not that Roy is stupid. If we were supposed to believe that, we wouldn't be told that Dillinger thought Roy was hot stuff. Dillinger wasn't dumb at all--he was too smart for the world he grew up in, couldn't figure out a way to move up in the world, so he went sideways. So did Willie Sutton, and honestly, I never hope to meet anyone smart as him. Roy's not the brightest about emotions, no--but he does come to understand some of the mistakes he made, and he is good at his job. Why does he fail? Because the morals of the society the story is being told to demands he fail. So he has a lot of bad luck. But mingled with that is that he does find somebody who truly cares for him. He was never irredeemable, and in a certain sense, he is redeemed.