I became a little obsessed. Billy Bob’s birthday is 4 August, which is the date the First World War began and a recurring date in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and the publication date of my first novel. I so wanted to know that Billy Bob is left-handed, like me, that the third or fourth time I watched the film I kept a tally of how often he holds his cigarette in his left hand, how often in his right. The left hand wins. But when he kills a man, he’s holding the knife in his right hand.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very good film and it has the same basic plot as James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. (I’ve written about this in The Other Jack.) Ed Crane in the film and Frank Chambers in the novel are very different characters – Ed is a perpetual bystander (‘I didn’t see anyone. No one saw me. I was the barber’), while Frank has a raging sexual appetite – but both get away with one murder and are then convicted of another that they didn’t commit. While they are on death row, both characters write down their versions of what has happened – Ed for a men’s magazine called Gent that’s paying him 5 cents a word, Frank writing the book we are reading (though he’s relying on the prison chaplain to ‘look it over and show me the places where maybe it ought to be fixed up a little, for punctuation and all that’).
The narratives of both Cain’s novel and the Coen Brothers’ film echo the early 18th-century ‘True Confessions’ of prisoners awaiting execution that jump-started the English novel. As with Ed Crane and Frank Chambers, Jack Sheppard’s first-person account (‘as told’ to Daniel Defoe) of his robberies and his several escapes from prison gained authority from being spoken ‘on the brink of eternity’: aged twenty-two, Sheppard was hanged in November 1724; a third of the population of London followed his progress from Newgate in an open cart to the gallows at Tyburn. Writing was not going to save Sheppard, Crane or Chambers from the noose or the electric chair, so why did they do it? Sheppard is telling his tale, he insists, ‘to satisfy the curious, and do justice to the innocent’. I think Crane and Chambers might have said the same; they felt a need for some kind of justice which for better or worse they associated with the written word.
As well as with justice, writers are often obsessed other writers (see, for example, Nicholson Baker’s U and I and Matthew De Abaitua’s Self and I) and sometimes with singers, artists, actors . . . Some obsessions are long-lasting (I had a thing about Stendhal that went on so long I wrote a novel about him in an attempt to put it to bed); some are ‘mild’ or even ‘unhealthy’; others are simple fandom. Last Sunday there was a premiere screening in Leicester Square of the second series of Landman, which streams on Paramount and stars Billy Bob Thornton, and a friend of a friend had spare tickets and I grabbed one. I went with my copy of the screenplay of The Man Who Wasn’t There for Billy Bob to sign. Fond hope, and an odd thing to do: I do not collect autographs and generally have no interest at all in signed copies of books. Billy Bob was there, in a red cowboy hat, but a Leicester Square premiere isn’t exactly a poetry reading in a pub where you can wander up and say hi: he was there on the heavily patrolled red carpet, and then far away on the stage, and then at the after-party in the VIP room behind a curtain. I got some curious looks and a woman asked me if I was Billy Bob’s father and I drank three margaritas and came home.
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