The
Wages of Fear by Georges Arnaud, is hard-boiled suspense at it’s best, a
novel loaded with hard-luck characters and dripping with intense atmospheric
suspense.
It
is 1952 and the white riff-raff living in a small Guatemalan port town -- all
ex-patriot Europeans and Americans, lonely and lost after trials endured during
World War II -- find themselves trapped by despair and poverty, just like most
of the locals. Each man has his own sad story and each one is lost in a
dead-end existence. These men are not of the local native Indians -- they are despised foreigners unable
to leave the country without the proper cash stake, unable even to afford a
ticket home. Their story is as dark a tale of noir desperation as has ever been
written, but that background merely sets the stage for an even more haunting
story of tense pulse-pounding suspense that is to come.
Georges
Arnaud was a French writer whose books were originally published in his native
France, but The Wages of Fear was his masterpiece and it has been
translated into English and published in America and the UK. The first
English-language edition was a British hardcover from the Bodley Head in 1952,
translated from the original French edition. Both editions are scarce and
pricey today. The first U.S. edition was the hardcover published by Farrar,
Straus and Young in 1952. The
first U.S. paperback edition was published by Avon Books (# 531) in 1953;
reprinted by Avon in 1958 (#804) under the new title, Flesh And Fire.
The first UK paperback edition was published by Guild Books, (#469) in 1953.
There are many later paperback reprints which can be found on internet book
sites. This book is well worth seeking out.
Many fans will remember the book because it was made
into two fine films. It was the basis of the 1953 film The Wages of Fear with
Yves Montand, made by Henri Georges Clouzot. This is a taut classic noir, a
black & white film masterpiece, sadly not shown these days on TV as much as
it used to. I still remember being riveted by the film when I first watched it
on late night TV in the 1960s. Years later, Wages was the basis of the
1977 film, Sorcerer,
starring Roy Scheider, with a screenplay by Walon Green, produced and directed
by William Friedkin. While the films capture much of the raw intensity and
suspense of the story, reading the book offers so much more depth to the lives
of these desperate men that is missing in the films. The book really fleshes
out these men as men, starkly illustrating their dire situation, and the
intense pressure each one is under.
The
story concerns this motley crew, hopelessly stranded in a foreign land. There’s
Gerard the Frenchman, Liugi the Italian, Johnny the Romanian, and Juan Binba
the Spaniard. These four men form the core group, who along with their fellows
live a hap-hazard existence of whoring, gambling and drinking themselves into
mindless oblivion. They dream of escaping the heat-infested swamps and
claustrophobic jungles of these Central American villages, but are trapped from
ever going home. Some are wanted men. Others are too wasted, too far gone to
even care. There seems to be no way out, no salvation, for any of them. So they
rot away, some slowly dying of syphilis from the wretched whores of the town,
others drinking themselves to death on poison rot-gut rum, some murdered in the
dark of night by the Guatemalan military or secret police whom they fear and
who hate all foreigners with a passion. These are men without money, without
position or power, and they are all fair game. Arnaud’s characters are hopeless
and desperate, existing hand-to-mouth at the lowest level of this dirt-poor,
bloody-violent alien society.
On
the top of this Dantesque world and controlling it all, is the all-powerful
Crude Oil Corporation which owns the oil wells in the country and most of the
people and wealth. And sitting atop the corporation is O’Brien, their man in
Guatemala, who runs it all like some banana republic despot. Gerard and his
fellows exist at the largesse of O’Brien, occasionally doing odd jobs for him.
Some legal, some not so legal.
There’s is a story as dark as anything Jim Thompson or David Goodis ever
wrote.
At
the time of publication in 1952, Time Magazine called this book,
“Brutal, violent and good storytelling. The Wages of Fear makes a lot of
hard-boiled writers look like children writing for their maiden aunts.”
The
Time reviewer hit it pretty close. However, this is no Dashiell Hammett
or Raymond Chandler clone, and certainly not a private eye novel. It’s
hard-boiled, but more in the style of James M. Cain’s brutal, dark, noir. In
fact, while there is a lot of crime committed, this is not a crime novel, per
se. What it is, is a depiction of these men’s lives as they live them on those
mean alien streets, a dark desperate story full of atmospheric doom that hits
its stride when four men attempt to change their fortunes. They do this by
agreeing to drive two trucks full of volatile nitroglycerin over rough mountain
roads to be used to put out a raging oil well fire.
DRIVERS
WANTED. DANGEROUS WORK. HIGH PAY.
The
job is actually a death sentence.
The
corporation offers four men a wad of cash that is a princely sum for any man in
their sorry situation. No man can pass it up. The money would be enough to pay
for passage home, enough to start a new life. It’s escape money and they all
want it.
Every
man seeks the job. Four men are chosen.
O’Brien
and the corporation men have a cynical plan. The nitro is necessary to blow out
the oil well fire and end a serious emergency in the country. However, they
dare not hire local Guatemalans because the natives and Army would come down
hard on them for using local people in such an obvious suicide mission. Instead
they use the riff-raff foreigners who are all expendable. So they make an offer
to these men who have nothing to loose. They offer a thousand dollars per man
for this dangerous job, which seals the deal as well as the fate of all four
men.
Things
get tense even before the trucks leave the town on their mission. Gerard soon
discovers that his partner, Johnny -- the man he relies on most and must trust
with his life -- is an utter, abject coward. Johnny looses his nerve and is a
wreck. Then when the first truck goes up in a ball of fire killing Luigi and
his partner, Gerard realizes that they’re not only hauling explosive nitro but
that the trucks have been sabotaged by one of their own fellows. It seems
someone else wants to take their place on the next run should this one fail --
and get all that cash.
Gerard
drives with desperate care over the broken roads, fearing every pothole, each
crevice and bump which could mean instant death -- catastrophic obliteration in
a huge explosive fireball.
Arnaud’s writing puts the reader in the front seat right beside Gerard; hearing
his toughs, seeing his growing tension, feeling his unbridled terror. Just when
it looks as if things could not get any worse -- they do.
Johnny’s
fragile reasoning, which so far has held together by mere threads from the
intense pressure and fear, is eating him up. He has become a useless wreck.
Gerard knows he needs his partner to hold up his end, in frustration he beats
Johnny mercilessly to force him to pull himself together. This works, for a
while.
When
the two men encounter a field of quicksand, it is Johnny who notices that the
dark mud is actually oil -- oil that is highly volatile, easily ignited --
possibly even ignited by the exhaust of their truck. Johnny, who has been
injured tries to hang on as Gerard bulls his way forward -- lurching the truck
dangerously through the oily quicksand before they finally end up getting stuck.
Now, after all they have been through, the truck gets stuck in the quagmire and
even Gerard finally admits defeat.
At
that point, at their darkest and most desperate moment, Johnny suddenly
remembers that similar situations were dealt with when he worked in the oil
fields back home in Romania. He tells Gerard he knows a way he can get them out
of their mess. However, Johnny is severely injured, he is going into shock,
losing his memory, so Gerard is frantic to get the information out of him
before he dies. Johnny fights to stay conscious and at the last moment tells
Gerard what to do. The suspense and tension never flags in these desperate
scenes.
Using
the information Johnny has given him Gerard gets the truck safely through the
quicksand field. He delivers the nitro and becomes a hero. Johnny doesn’t make
it. Gerard is given a thousand dollars for his part in the nitro delivery as
well as another thousand that was Johnny’s share. So Gerard is now up two grand
and planning to make a new life. Things are looking good.
This
is always the most dangerous point in any noir story.
The
nitro delivered, Gerard is naturally more relaxed on the lonely drive back to
town. He is finally free of the monumental stress experienced driving this very
road a short time ago when making the nitro delivery. Now he is making plans
for a new life. He has some money and is thinking about how to spend it. He’s
going to buy that boat he’s always wanted, then get out of Guatemala leaving
this life behind him forever. He sees himself living in Paris, enjoying the
good life.
The
previous run on these roads had been a nightmare, done at an infuriatingly slow
pace, only five miles per hour -- with the threat of a nitro explosion over his
head every second. Now the winding mountain roads call out to Gerard. It’s a
far different ride going back. It’s even pleasant. He’s relaxed and can drive
faster now. Gerard opens up the engine of the truck, increasing his speed. He’s
in a rush to get back to town with his cash so he can get out of Guatemala
forever.
The
mountain roads loom ahead, steep and winding, narrow and always dangerous. On
the way down Gerard knows he must slow his speed, but becomes frantic when the
brakes do not answer his footfall. The brakes don’t work! In desperation he
quickly tries to downshift the truck, to slow it any way he can. The
transmission moans and groans and then suddenly locks at high speed. The truck
is now speeding downward out of control towards a curve. It hurls through a
fence -- then shoots over a cliff.
“Gerard
is still at the wheel, victim of his own obstinacy, his obstinate resolve to
live”
And
so ends this classic and very dark noir novel. No one wins in this gloomy tale
of dead-ender desperation -- no one, except readers and fans of tough,
unadulterated noir suspense. This one is well-worth a revisit.
© 2011 by Gary
Lovisi. All Rights Reserved.
GARY LOVISI is a Mystery Writer’s of America Edgar Nominated
author for his crime fiction. His latest books are Ultra-Boiled (Ramble
House) a collection of his most intense hard crime and noir fiction; Driving
Hell’s Highway (Wildside), a surreal noir novel about a lone man driving
the back roads of darkest America; and Bad Girls Need Love Too (Krause
Books), a celebration of sexy paperback cover art and wild blurb teaser
text that is great fun. Lovisi is the founder of Gryphon Books, editor of Paperback
Parade and Hardboiled magazines, and sponsors an annual book
collector show in New York City. To find out more about him, his work, or
Gryphon Books, visit his web site at: www.gryphonbooks.com.
