Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.

Spiderweb by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch is best-known as the author of Psycho. He stated his career as a disciple of H. P. Lovecraft but quickly established his own style. He wrote science fiction, horror and crime fiction but his trademark was always his interest in what makes people tick - especially people with a weakness of some kind.

His novel Spiderweb, published in 1954, is hardboiled crime fiction although perhaps really closer to being a psychological thriller.

Eddie Haines is a failure. He was a minor radio personality on a minor radio station in a small town in Iowa. On the strength of this he headed for the big city, to LA, with an idea for a TV show - the Television Psychologist. Now all his money is gone, gone to pay an agent who now informs him that he’s a nobody and should head back to Iowa. Drunk and despondent he sees only one way out, courtesy of a razor. It will be a fitting end to a career of failure. Just as he is about to cut his throat someone slips a hundred dollar bill under his door.

That someone is Professor Otto Hermann. Hermann is a crooked psychologist, involved in various psychological and psychic scams. He offers Eddie Haines new hope, of a sort. Sadly Eddie doesn’t realise just how high the price will be. Eddie doesn’t know it yet but the professor’s activities extend to murder and blackmail.

The professor needs someone who can front for him - someone who is young and good-looking and can appear respectable. The sort of man that people will trust. Someone who either has real class, or can at least fake it. He re-invents Eddie as renowned psychological counsellor Dr Judson Roberts. Dr Roberts is soon the author of a best-selling pop psychology book (ghosted for him of course). The professor trains him in all the skills a successful scam artist needs - some basic psychology, hypnosis, the kinds of occult and psychic stuff that appeals to rich but troubled people.

Professor Hermann has his eye on Hollywood. Lots of rich neurotic people there, lots of pigeons ripe for the plucking. Their first victim is a minor starlet, Lorna Lewis. This proves to be Eddie’s undoing, involving him in murder. Now the professor has an ironclad hold over him.

Eddie is soon doing quite well for himself. “Dr Roberts” has a full appointment book, a rich roster of wealthy victims. People like Edgar Caldwell. Caldwell has a very successful business, a luxury home, a wife and a mistress. He also has a full suite of anxieties and neuroses, a fetish for saving string and some colourful sexual kinks. Caldwell has plenty of money and Eddie has no qualms about taking some of it off his hands. When he learns the full extent of Otto Hermann’s plans for Caldwell Eddie suddenly develops a conscience. He’s happy to fleece his clients but destroying them is another matter. And Eddie has started to believe that his psychological counselling can actually help people (which shows just how out of touch with reality he is).

But Eddie has a murder rap hanging over his head. Escape seems impossible. To add to the complication of his life he has fallen in love with Ellen Post. Ellen is basically a nice girl but her idea of a good time is to have a few drinks. And then have a few more drinks. And then to have even more, just for good measure. Eddie now has to find a way to save Ellen from herself whilst saving himself from Otto Hermann.

This is not one of Bloch’s better known books but it’s fine entertainment. It has a nicely glamorous but sleazy atmosphere. It has a memorable villain. It has the world of carnival hucksters, phony pyschics and evil scheming psychiatrists as background. It has suspense and romance. It has a solid hardboiled style.

Most of all it has a tortured hero, a man who is a mixture of ambition, avarice, resentment, idealism and innocence. A true noir hero, desperately struggling to escape from the spiderweb that his own weaknesses have led him into.