Crescendo by Robert J Harris review: 'plays nice with pulp fiction tropes'
Set in late 1950s Hollywood, Robert J Harris’s new book sees a fictional novelist hired to do some investigating on behalf of Alfred Hitchcock. Review by David Robinson
“Let’s fade in,” writes Bobby Burgogne, the writer-narrator of Robert J Harris’s latest novel, “on a shot of me, driving my long-serving Studebaker coupe through the sculptured hills of North Hollywood.” Indeed, let’s – because this is a novel that plays out exactly like a Hitchcock film, albeit one that the man himself never got round to making.
It’s 1959, and Burgogne, who writes dime novels, is on his way to meet the Master of Suspense. He has been hired by Hitchcock’s wife Alma and his assistant Peggy Robertson to work on the studio’s new film, Crescendo, which is based on a novel about a millionaire’s daughter who has disappeared for six months. When she is found, she is suicidal and can’t remember a thing.
Filming starts in a fortnight, but already there are signs - a falling Klieg light, a fire on the set - that somebody doesn’t want it to be made. Unless Burgogne can find out who and why, Hitchcock himself might not make it to the final reel.
Such a brutally brief summary does not, however, doesn’t do justice to Harris’s fast-paced metafictional plot, which resolves itself only through a careful reading of the novel-within-the novel. When Burgogne suggests this to Hitchcock, he replies: “Is this what fictional detectives commonly refer to as a hunch?”
It is a pleasant change to have a fictional novelist on the case instead of the usual gumshoes, hacks, detectives and insurance adjusters, but Burgogne is just as hard-boiled and cynical as the rest of them about his main job for Hitchcock - writing the kind of dialogue that enhances dull scenes. As a fellow-writer observes: “Have you ever heard any real people have a conversation that was sparkling?”
On the set of Crescendo, Burgogne’s secondary, secret role - but probably, he thinks, the real reason he was hired - is to find out who has it in for Hitchcock. In this he is helped by his on-off girlfriend, Tess Donovan, wisecracking star reporter on the LA Clarion, and somewhat akin to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. “That fast-talking Howard Hawks shtick is so old it smells like mothballs,” a fellow screenwriter observes while talking about his own past work. Maybe, but it’s how Bobby and Tess talk.
The scenes to which the plot takes them firmly echo ones in Hitchcock’s films: inside the Hoover Dam, for example, (the nearest that concrete comes to Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest) a sanatorium (Spellbound) and in a car chase (various). Even when the settings merely exist in the director’s mind and on planning boards – one involves whitewater rafting down the Grand Canyon and another has a fire engulfing a Las Vegas casino, with the heat making a row of one-armed bandits simultaneously cough up their jackpots – it is easy to imagine them on celluloid.
Ultimately, that’s the case with the whole book. It slips down so easily because it plays nice with all the pulp fiction tropes - by which I mean, it treats them with respect, makes them faintly plausible, filling in background detail and avoiding anachronism. The plot is detailed (“a pretty screwy yarn,” says Burgogne, when he reads the novel-within-a-novel, “Would amnesia really drive someone to suicide?”) but makes sense in the context of why Hitchcock wants to film it. “What he really wants,” says one scriptwriter, “is to have a girl whose memory has been wiped clean... So he can fill her head with any stories you choose. That is his ultimate dream, his most obsessive fantasy.”
Yes, it’s hokum, but it’s well-plotted, and ties in neatly with Hitchcock's working methods, his singularly slow, rounded manner of speaking, and even his career. For in 1959, as Bobby Burgogne was driving up to see him, Hitchcock was riding high on the success of North by Northwest and was working on a film that had to be abandoned. It wasn’t this one, but a low-budget slasher you’ve probably heard of with a rather famous shower scene.
Crescendo, by Robert J Harris, Polygon, £9.99
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