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Follow Me

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 2 months ago

Reilly, Helen - Follow Me

 

Follow Me (1960) is a short, vividly written mystery novel, almost a novella. Some aspects of it remind one of the pulp story. It seems to show a version of the "pulp style of plotting", with many disparate characters in the book engaged in criminal schemes. When any one thing bad happens, it is hard to tell which group of characters has done it. This style of plotting was widely used by Black Mask authors of the 1920's and 1930's.

 

At the end of Reilly's book, there turn out to be no less than three groups of villains. And two of the groups have multiple bad guys in them, instead of solitary criminals. Reilly uses such all surrounding villainy to generate a sense of paranoia. This paranoia is also found in the pulps. It is interesting how gender plays a role in how this paranoia is perceived. When a tough detective is up against criminals at every turn, readers sometimes interpret this as a piece of serious social criticism. When Reilly's sleuth, a pleasant, chic young New York house wife, encounters universal villainy, one can treat it as a "woman in danger" story. Actually the feel of paranoia is similar and intense in both Reilly and the hard-boiled's. The paranoia is an entire world view, and similar in both kinds of writers. Reilly's heroine does not carry a gun, or beat people up, but she is remarkably similar in spirit to the tough guy detectives of the pulps.

 

Other aspects of the story recall the hard-boiled pulps of the Black Mask school. The heroine gets roughed up when she explores a dangerous criminal lair toward the beginning of the book. This is very close to what happens to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe or other tough p.i.'s when they explore some dangerous locale. Her serious injuries seem far removed from the genteel threats sometimes inflicted on HIBK heroines. There are also private detective characters who play a major role in the book. Another scene that recalls the hard-boiled school: the canyon in Chapter 8, and what the heroine finds there. This discovery is not the fixed aftermath of a crime scene - no, the heroine-sleuth is plunged into a complex series of events involving a crime in progress. When the dust clears, she is left with a series of ambiguous clues about the events. The whole thing is pure hard-boiled, and could have come right out of 1930's Black Mask. Raymond Chandler loved to include scenes set in mysterious lonely canyons, and so did Forrest Rosaire in "The Devil Suit" (1932).

 

On rereading, one can dip anywhere into Follow Me, and come up with a section that recalls itself vividly to memory.

 

Reilly likes ambiguity. Many of the relationships in Follow Me can be interpreted in more than one way. So can most of the twists of the crime story. This adds to the paranoia of the plot. These different interpretations go off in numerous directions, so that suspicion is cast over everyone in the novel. A key scene in Chapter 11 has the heroine looking at two walls. One looks bluish, the other green, but it is an effect of light on identically colored walls. This is a metaphor for the entire book. The everyday background of events in Follow Me should not disguise the quality of imagination in it. It is very difficult to come up with such relentless sustained ambiguity, one encompassing so many scenes and patterns.

 

Color is often used when the heroine is about to have some revelation. For example, what she sees in the shop window in Chapter 7. These revelations have a visionary quality, as if they were illuminations of concealed truth, almost a mystic revelation. They often suggest hidden connections that were obscure before. This is a paranoiac world view - that everything is concealing some truth that could speak. It is also the sign of a real detective. Reilly's heroine is a genuine detective, always motivated above all by the desire to learn the truth, and always uncovering more and more of it.

 

Mike Grost

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