You've Got to Know When to Fold 'Em...
A Review of "Everything on Black" by F.T. Grant
The “noir” in film noir literally means “black,” but that is not the point. The point of the black, of the darkness, is that the story being told is one where few flowers bloom and little sun shines. If you’ve ever stayed up too late and caught something like Out of the Past or The Big Heat on TCM’s Noir Alley, then you already know. Film noir is the genre that experienced its heyday after World War II and before the dawn of the 1960s. It became the quintessential American genre, with gun molls, femme fatales, and detectives and gunmen in fedoras doing society’s dirty work on the mean streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and all points in between.
Sure, most people know about film noir. Some are even hip on neo-noir. However, outside of hardcore bookworms, a shockingly low percentage of the American public is aware that film noir began in the pulps and the paperbacks. It was a literary genre before it made its way to Hollywood. The first—the OGs, as it were—got their start in Black Mask magazine. They had names like Carroll John Daly, Paul Cain, and Dashiell Hammett, and they created the hard-boiled detective story. Then came James M. Cain, whose short, sharp novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity became movie classics while simultaneously inspiring what would become French Existentialism. Raymond Chandler, the greatest prose stylist of the whole bunch, came a little later in the 1930s, debuting first in Dime Detective Magazine before graduating to the Philip Marlowe novels like The Big Sleep.
Concurrent with the Black Mask boys, and often working alongside them in the same magazines, were the men who created the American noir novel [1]. Writers like Cornell Woolrich, Steve Fisher, and Jim Thompson ditched the detectives and told stories from the perspective of crooks, criminals, innocent men framed for murders, and other stumblebums living on society’s fringes. Then came the paperback originals of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, greats like Fredric Brown, Charles Willeford, and Dan J. Marlowe upped the violence and insanity in potboilers about skirt-chasing deviants, serial killers, and psychopathic bank robbers who sneeze at the thought of good decisions. This, my friends, is all-American noir: quasi-horror novels about liminal types trying to find the bottom of the depths of depravity.
F.T. Grant’s Everything on Black fits firmly within the literary noir tradition. Published this year by our good friends at Vigilante Crime & Pulp, Everything on Black features a cop as its lead (a sheriff’s deputy, to be precise), but this is no detective novel. Instead, Grant’s taut and tawdry romp through the trailer park sees a female deputy go from one horrendous decision to another, ultimately leading her to murder multiple times over.
The novel opens with Deputy Kat Burgess responding to a domestic violence call at the home of Will Cousins, a handsome thirtysomething who plays in a local rock band. The setting is Patterson County, Illinois, a fictional, mostly suburban county somewhere on the edges of Chicagoland. It’s the kind of place where the biggest dream is either moving to the city or making enough money to own a McMansion in some tony neighborhood with gates and cameras. Wilson Roderick Cousins lives in such a McMansion thanks to the wealth of his wife, Dianna Bartello. However, despite being a lazy musician with no job skills or ambition, Will is not happy being married to a mogul in the cement business worth eight million dollars. He’s downright miserable. Not only does Dianna hit him (hence his first meeting with Deputy Burgess), but she is also a drug addict with a fixation on Oxycodone and injectable vitamins. Her being the daughter of a Mafia-connected family is also something Will worries about.
It does not take Will long to worm his way into Kat’s heart. After a few chance meetings at a gym called FitZone, which in turn become coffee and dinner dates, Will and Kat become an illicit item who do the sideways tango after killing bottles of wine [2]. Will breaks the ice after one of these bedroom sessions by suggesting something incredible: Why don’t we kill my wife?
Ahh, it is the gold standard noir plotline first used by Cain in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, and Everything on Black does not update it all that much. Well, besides making the patsy the woman this time around and the femme fatale a man mentally stuck in high school.
Will says that he has a foolproof plan. While his band, Blood Meridian, is away at a bar gig in the big city, Kat will sneak into his house and plug his sleeping wife with a hotshot of narcotics. Dianna is already a junkie, he figures; her death will look like a run-of-the-mill overdose.
You may be asking yourself: Why is a Patterson County deputy considering a murder plot? What would possess a sworn peace officer to kill the wife of her fling?
Well, Kat Burgess is not totally kosher. Despite being the daughter of a local law enforcement legend and the sister of an Indiana patrolman with a wife and a large family, Kat is a little bit of a fuck up. Not all of it is her fault. Her husband, an Iraq War veteran and former deputy, shot himself, leaving his young wife a widow. However, the biggest problem in Kat’s life was created by Kat herself. She is addicted to online gambling. So addicted that her bank account is fully in the red, and in order to recoup her constant losses, Kat sells information and other under-the-table items to a shady lawyer with ties to a local crime syndicate. Kat is no angel, yet not long after Will ropes her into his murder plot, she begins having some second thoughts. A lot of Will’s backstory doesn’t make sense, and there’s also this nagging YouTube comment accusing Will and his mother of being grifters.
Lust does funny things, however. Envy does even funnier things. Kat experiences both emotions as she breaks into Dianna’s bedroom and finds that the woman is nothing like Will said. Dianna is not older than him, is only worth about two million dollars, and is not a drug addict. Dianna also proves to be the victim rather than the abuser in the relationship, and she tells Kat that she intends to leave Will soon.
This should be the end of the novel, right? Kat, realizing that she has been hoodwinked by her boytoy, goes home and confesses to her peers. That would be the good ending.
But this is noir, and there’s never a good ending. Kat becomes overwhelmed by Dianna’s beauty, her buxom chest, and just how put together she is. She grows to hate her target, so she tells the woman to roll onto her stomach so that Kat can jab the needle in. Once this is done, the real action of Everything on Black begins.
Grant’s novel is a masterclass in psychology [3]. Kat is a tortured individual with multiple complexes. For starters, besides being a gambling addict, Kat is addicted to worshipping her dying father. She is also a bad Catholic who finds the Church again after committing her first mortal sins. The further down the line Kat goes, the more she starts seeing priests and confessional booths everywhere, from convenience stores to the back of a police cruiser.
The one good thing about Kat is she is determined. She’s got a bit of bulldog in her, and after carrying out Dianna’s murder, Kat transitions to becoming a hunter after Will. She discovers that Will is an even bigger bastard than previously imagined. Not only is he a dedicated malingerer, but he is also a suspect in the disappearance of one former girlfriend and the death of another. Then, of course, there’s his mother Elaine. More than both Kat and Will, Elaine is the most interesting character in Everything on Black. She is a trailer park whore and clairvoyant who believes fully in the truth of Tarot cards. She is also a serious fan of The Simpsons and of her own son, the latter of whom may have been her lover at some point (ew!). Most important of all, Kat learns straight from the witch’s mouth that Elaine is the brains behind Will’s many maneuvers.
Everything on Black packs a wallop in less than two hundred pages. This obsidian noir reeks of desperation—Kat’s desperation to get the better of Will and get away from God’s wrath; Will’s desperation to avoid work at all costs; Elaine’s desperation to make others believe in the supernatural. Grant writes with serious speed. I polished this book off in one day. There are no wasted motions or unnecessary discursions here, and even though an argument could be made that Kat’s religious hallucinations come a little out of left field and help to put a nice bow on the ending, they make sense given the high tension of her situation. Also, and this is a praiseworthy decision, so much of the truly abhorrent behavior in this novel is hinted at or suggested rather than confirmed outright (Will may or may not be a serial killer, for example).
Everything on Black is the beating dark heart of the desolate Midwest, and every soul in this moving thunderstorm can stand shoulder to shoulder with the great characters of the aforementioned masters from Black Mask and Gold Medal. Grant and the boyos at Vigilante have brought back an old chestnut, injected it with a new, snarling attitude, and dropped it into our contemporary landscape, which is certainly bleaker and lonelier than any sidewalk stepped on by Spade or Marlowe.
[1] To keep things brief, I will mention here as a footnote that Georges Simenon and his roman durs often get left out of this story. This is a shame, for Simenon’s non-Maigret novels have an unrelenting, sardonic quality to them that puts them on par with the best of Thompson and Woolrich.
[2] White or red? It’s never said.
[3] Makes sense given that the brief biography in the back of the book states that Grant has an undergraduate degree in psychology.