Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Harry ‘Preacher’ Powell is a man with two missions, one as a self-appointed man of god rooting out sin in the South during the Depression, and an earthlier one to get his hands on $10,000 that belonged to his deceased cellmate. He insinuates his way into the man’s family and begins a cat and mouse game with his children to discover the secret of where the money has been hidden.
Attracting the attention of Hollywood isn’t always the stroke of good luck it might at first appear to be, particularly if the resulting movie attains anything close to ‘iconic’ status.
That certainly seems to be the case with The Night of the Hunter, people quite rightly talk about the 1955 film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum. It is a hallucinatory masterpiece that sees Mitchum play against his usual so laid back as to be virtually horizontal screen persona to create one of the most chilling screen villains of all time.
What is less spoken about is the brilliance of the original novel written by Davis Grubb, who also co-wrote the script for the film. It is one of the most accomplished novels in any genre during the twentieth century. A large claim that can be justified by the skill Grubb shows in evoking the darkness found in fairytales and the hardscrabble nature of life in America’s badlands. All this in a novel no longer than the average pulp potboiler of the era.
If Mitchum was able to burn up the screen as Harry ‘Preacher’ Powell it was because he had been given a truly terrifying template to work with by Grubb. A character both cruel and charismatic, able to use a slick facility with words to twist people’s perceptions to his own ends. A fifties reader might, if so inclined, see this as a nod towards the manipulations of the MacCarthy era, a modern one might see in it elements of the dark attraction of populism. Either way there is more going on than a chase after a McGuffin.
The prose is elegant and brilliantly evokes the skewed perceptions of the world experienced by children or adults with an understanding of it limited by want of experience. This gives the reader the impression that what is playing out is a sort of lucid dream where anything could happen and there is a good chance of it being neither nice nor safe.
If Davis Grubb has been unjustly forgotten, then this reissue as part of the Penguin Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series should be the start of his being rediscovered. Hopefully we will get to see more of his work reprinted in the distinctive green binding.
