The Book You Have to Read: “Nightmare Alley,” by William Lindsay Gresham

(Editor’s note: This is the 71st installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick has been made by Kelli Stanley, a San Francisco author, film noir fan, and comic book buff. Her debut novel and first Roman Noir, Nox Dormienda [A Long Night for Sleeping], won the Bruce Alexander Memorial Mystery Award. Her second book, City of Dragons, is a private-eye tale set in 1940 San Francisco. It’s due out from Thomas Dunne/Minotaur Books in February 2010. When not penning novels or listening to old-time radio shows, Stanley composes a blog called Writing in the Dark.)

If noir is the stuff of nightmares--you know what I mean, the kind in which (according to the popular conference definition of the genre) you’re fucked from page one--then a one-off, nearly forgotten classic called Nightmare Alley is surely the biggest freak show of them all.

And I mean that literally. Nightmare Alley, written by William Lindsay Gresham, concerns itself with the twilight world of the carnival, the huckster, the super-slick salesman of the three shell con, all grifting a living--and sometimes better than a living--off the hopes, dreams, fears, and delusions of middle-class, corn-fed America.

Now, I’ve got this thing for carnivals. The black magic way they just appear on the edges--parking lots, small towns, aging strip malls--always, it seems, at twilight. The heady mixture of the barked come-on, the pitch, the rigged games, and the smells of hot dogs and popcorn and stale cotton candy. And the thrill rides ... screaming teens, no inhibitions. Secret assignations, stolen moments. Everything gone with the dawn.

My fascination with carnivals and their ephemeral, disturbing, chaotic, and ultimately transfiguring effect on mainstream society was one reason why I wanted to set a novel at San Francisco’s 1939/1940 world’s fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition. World’s fairs sport a midway--the one mounted on manmade Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, was called the Gayway, long before that tag would become an obvious pun. My short story “Children’s Day,” which will be published in the next International Thriller Writers’ anthology, First Thrills (due out in June 2010 from Tor), is a prequel to my forthcoming novel, City of Dragons, and is set on Treasure Island. And while the action in City of Dragons itself takes place during the off-season of that exposition, the Rice Bowl Party at the heart of that story is a three-day-and-night street carnival, complete with games of chance, the odors of sweat and peanuts, and a mind-reader named Madame Pengo--a small homage to Nightmare Alley.

Gresham’s book is sumptuous, rich, redolent, and literary. Fused with a classically tragic structure, the plot and characters roil and roll in your head, guests who will never leave. In some ways, it’s a bitter, cynical take on the Horatio Alger myth, a commentary on the Americans America left behind.

Stan Carlisle is a bright boy. He hooks up with a traveling carnival, and learns the tricks of the trade as a sideshow “mentalist”--how to read faces, how to memorize code, how to exploit his natural bent for theatricality. He uses whomever he has to in order to better his position. Stan possesses intelligence, ambition, good looks, and something more--a true talent for communicating with people, for persuading them. To know what the little lady would like and the ability to give it to her ... the power to charm the marshal into not closing down the fleabag flea circus he’s made his home:

“How’d you know I got a daughter?”

Stan rolled the silks into a ball and they vanished. His face was serious, the blue eyes grave. “I know many things, Marshal. I don’t know exactly how I know them, but there’s nothing supernatural about it, I am sure. My family was Scotch, and the Scotch are often gifted with powers that the old folks used to call ‘second sight.’”

The white head, with its coarse, red face, nodded involuntarily.

But Stan’s not satisfied with playing the sticks. He steps on a few people, causes trouble, exploits a woman named Zeena, and is torn between fascination and disgust at the spectacle of the alcoholic geek, the lowest of the low, the man who--for a bottle of cheap whiskey--will bite the heads off squirming live chickens and degrade himself to a subhuman status.

Eventually, Stan makes the big time, becoming a slick and successful spiritual advisor to the gullible, emotionally vulnerable and--of course--wealthy patrons who can make him the real bucks.

For a while, of course.

It would spoil the book to reveal any more. Gresham’s style sometimes veers from third-person to inner monologue, a feverishly close point of view that propels the drama:

Groping in the dark he found it, lying on its side there was still a drink in it oh Jesus I got to get out of here before they see this room ...

And “cards,” not chapters, divide the novel’s text, each section named for a tarot card and provided with a pertinent quote. Card I, for example, is The Fool: “who walks in motley, with his eyes closed, over a precipice at the end of the world.”

What makes Nightmare Alley even more of a nightmare is the temptation to see the author in these lines. Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, moved to New York, graduated from high school, and volunteered as a medic for the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He came back in ’39 a damaged man and ravaged soul. Yet another personal point of interest for me, as Miranda Corbie--the protagonist of City of Dragons--volunteered as a nurse in that conflict in the same year, and later finds work as an escort.

For Gresham, the world was a downward spiral. He contracted tuberculosis and tried to commit suicide. He eventually married poet, radical communist, and former child prodigy Joy Davidman, and found work writing for the pulps. Gresham became an alcoholic and an abusive husband and father, which led Joy into a relationship to and marriage with English writer C.S. Lewis--a relationship later dramatized in the play and subsequent films, Shadowlands.

Nightmare Alley was published in 1946; Limbo Tower, Gresham’s only other novel--another noir, set in a TB ward--in ’49. He eventually penned a book about magician and escapologist Harry Houdini as well as a non-fiction look at the lives of carnies (Monster Midway, 1954), but years of hard living took their toll. He started to lose his sight, then developed cancer of the tongue. And finally, in 1952, he returned to the Dixie Hotel in Manhattan, where he’d written his first and greatest novel, Nightmare Alley ... and took an overdose of sleeping pills. He was 52.

In 1947, Nightmare Alley was fortunate enough to be made into one of the greatest of all film noirs. Starring a terrific Tyrone Power (if you don’t think he could act, you’re in for a surprise) and a strong supporting cast which included the lovely ingénue Colleen Gray, Joan Blondell, and noir stalwarts Mike Mazurki and Helen Walker, the movie is available on DVD. Rent it soon and often, or better yet buy a copy. With a crackling good script by Jules Furthman (The Shanghai Gesture, The Big Sleep), and atmospherically directed by Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, The Old Maid--we can only wish he’d been given more crime films), Nightmare Alley is a rare example of a movie almost as good as its source material.

Both the film and novel have been dark inspirations for my own work, and I appreciate The Rap Sheet for giving me the opportunity to share them with you! And I promise you this: You’ll never use the word “geek” without William Lindsay Gresham’s novel brushing through your mind ...

So step right up, ladies and gents, for only one thin dime, right this way--don’t crowd the ladies, children, make some room, make some room!--only one thin dime, and Zeena will tell your past--your present--your future ... in Nightmare Alley!

READ MORE: “100 Years Down Nightmare Alley: A Carnival Noir,” by Craig McDonald; “Paperback Writers: Nightmare Noir,” by Richard Rayner (Los Angeles Times); “The Carny Novel Calls. Lucky Thing It Also E-mails,” by Charles Ardai (Criminal Element).