Hard-boiled crime fiction delivers
Are Snakes Necessary?
Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman Hard Case Crime
Nude photos are used to entrap a U.S. Senate candidate in the first 10 pages of Are Snakes Necessary? and it only gets wilder from there. No surprise, perhaps, given that it’s co-written by Brian De Palma, director of Carrie and Dressed to Kill, and a notorious maestro of violent sexploitation. Written in collaboration with editor-journalist Susan Lehman and first published in France in 2018, this trashy neo-noir thriller riffs on psychosexual obsessions that will be familiar to fans of De Palma’s movies. Pitched in style somewhere between a film treatment and tabloid true crime, this debut novel is silly and uneven, sure, but it’s also fun, a pastiche of hard-boiled crime fiction that doesn’t scrimp on the lurid pleasures of the genre.
Sen. Lee Rogers, the “Hunk of the Hill,” a man gifted with “Columbia Law School dazzle” but compromised by a “zipper problem,” is running for re-election in Pennsylvania. Fanny Cours, an 18-year-old videographer “in the full flush of carnality” and the daughter of an old flame of his, is determined to join the senator’s campaign. Beefing up the supporting cast are ruthless campaign heavy Barton Brock, who’ll do anything it takes to protect his candidate; Nick Sculley, a photographer always on the lookout for a story; and Elizabeth de Carlo (or is it Diamond? or Black?), a jailbird-turned-agony aunt who’ll play anyone for anything. There are also a $5-million Basquiat, a remake of Vertigo and some implausible coincidences.
Jean-Luc Godard maintains, perhaps waggishly, that film tells the truth 24 times a second. De Palma, though, believes the opposite, and Are Snakes Necessary? litigates the competing claims. De Palma has spent a lifetime exploring the metaphysics of recording technology and of scopophilia, showing us how observation can deceive as much as it reveals. He has shown us the gaze, the camera lens, the telescope as mediums not just of looking but of participating. Think of Body Double, De Palma’s Rear Window/Vertigo remix, in which Craig Wasson’s voyeur becomes a stooge in a murder case.
Likewise Fanny, who shoots webisodes for the Rogers campaign aimed at revealing the real candidate, turns out to be “the antithesis of the fly on the wall.” Fanny comes straight from the Godard school: Through her video work, she says, “I want to see, really see, the truth behind things. The naked truth.” And sure enough, Fanny’s soon involved with Rogers and the videos are starting to tell the wrong story: “Every time he looks towards the camera he’s batting his eyelashes,” her friend says.
Many crime writers have found ways of updating the hard-boiled genre while retaining its vim and demotic panache. De Palma and Lehman, while giving their story a conspicuously contemporary setting, have aimed less at modernizing than simply transplanting its styles and tropes to the 21st century. As pastiche, this partly works, but it may have a distancing effect on readers.
Still, the chapters and plot twists zip by to pass the time guiltily enough.
The Washington Post