HOW DO YOU GET FROM TIN PAN ALLEY TO THE HACK SAW?    

 

I.

for William Barker

 

A

Track 1.  Life Begins in the Mirror

Track 2.  If Your Eye was Mine

Track 3.  You Left Me Rustling

Track 4.  Lonely Angel, To You

Track 5.  I Wished On Red Lips

Track 6.  Easy To Cut Out

Track 7.  What a Blue Soul Can Do

Track 8.  (This is) The Last Autumn

Track 9.  Lovely Low

Track 10. I Tried To Hold You But The Moon Got Away

 

B

Track 11. This Year’s Red Lips

Track 12. Why Was I Stunned?

Track 13. I Must Have That Eye

Track 14. That’s Silent, I Guess

Track 15. My Darling, Shine

Track 16. Let’s Call a Cut Soul a Shining Mirror

Track 17. Red, Red Lips Sound Like Angels

Track 18. You’ll Never Be, I Tried

Track 19. Lonely Eye Rustling

Track 20. The Moon Got Autumn Lonely

Track 21. You’ll Never Be The Moon

Track 22.  Stunned and Cut

 

II.

 

It’s at the moment when you think you get something good and then you don’t.

 

III.

 

See William Wyler’s The Best Year’s of Our Lives.  Note the following:

 

1.  The frightening scene when Harold Russell shoves his prosthetic hooks through the window and terrifies the mocking children.
 

2.  When you know that Fredric March and his wife will die slowly from alcoholism even if it isn’t in the film.  He’ll start making worse and worse decisions.
 

3.  When you know that Dana Andrews is a loser without marketable skills.  The film hints that he’s not a good lover either, or at least not good enough to compensate for his being a loser who can’t get work.

3. 
4.  That the fictional Boone City is really Kansas City and that, despite the suggestion that it will be a “boom town” ready to have a baby boom, it’s really just a town in the middle of the country and that all middle-size towns have roughly the same opportunities.

 

5.  That there will be more wars even when we know they’ll be stupid and ill-informed.

 

           

IV.

 

Maybe the Better Question Is How We Got From the Hack Saw to Tin Pan Alley.

 

            This seems to be at the crux of what makes good crime writing.  Indeed, if we look at the classics of the genre, several answers emerge.  Perhaps we could make the Clutter family heroic, maybe even make them beautiful in doom.  Make them the family who could have helped Smith and Hickocks in anther story to which Capote can only allude.  Make the novel a furtive step to redemption.  Perhaps we could produce a more romantic conception of the cop, perpetuate the swinging image of the New Centurions, Joe Friday, The Thin Blue Line.  Make the line lyrical and perpetual.  Pretend the Rampart Scandal didn’t happen.  You could make cops like gutsy gangsters with just a hint of heart.   You could make lawyers.  You could make them seem like Perry Mason before the wheelchair, only better, more capable, more probing; Vince Bugliosi tracks Charlie Manson, Tex, Linda, Patty, Leslie, Squeaky and the rest of the gang to ample applause.  We could make it all about the victims, more beautiful in death.  Our own benediction could be their flesh.  We could make them angels who only were destined to spend a few short years among us.  That could be our refrain.  Those sad girls who helped Ted Bundy, smiling girls who would have changed the world if only.  Each and every life is precious, after all.  Even when the world is full of irony and blood.  You could make the victims a good reason to believe we are all essentially good people who care about others, especially when those others die in compelling ways.  We could think about parents, sisters, brothers, interested others like ourselves.  We could make the world seem like an essentially sane place with only a few exceptions who we all would like dead.  We like to think about all the ways those exceptions could die.  We could write them off as second-rate, leave them to lesser writers in lesser venues, though romantic still.  Maybe all endings can be significant.  Maybe ending is what it’s all about. 

Elizabeth Hatmaker

Elizabeth Hatmaker teaches writing and cultural theory at Illinois State University.  Her work has appeared in Mandorla, Mississippi Review, Bird Dog, L’ Bourgeoizine, ACM and Epoch.  She is currently working on a work of “sonic narration”–a meditation on pop orchestration and soundtrack production, melodramatic plot and the Conference of Studio Unions strike of 1946.  “How Do You Get From Tin Pan Alley To The Hacksaw?” is part of a longer work, Girl In Two Pieces, about the unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a “The Black Dahlia.”  Girl in Two Pieces considers Short’s corpse as the site of discursive abjectness, where the language of failed investigation, lurid romance and  post-war deprivation fail to combine.  The collection questions the ability of poetry to redeem and/or re-figure the Black Dahlia.