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Recipe For Homicide

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 11 months ago

Blochman, Lawrence G - Recipe for Homicide (1952)

 

His Dr. Coffee novel, Recipe for Homicide (1952), offers a detailed portrait of a soup canning factory. It covers both the technological and the business sides of the factory, and is pretty interesting. This portrait is a full Background in the Crofts tradition.

 

Recipe does more. Blochman saw India as a dynamic place, seething with intrigue and competing political factions. Recipe offers a similar portrait of modern America. There are communists, capitalists, representatives of labor unions, government agents. Each is presented as is, with an attempt to offer a sophisticated, realistic portrayal, not a stereotype common to a thriller (e.g., the dreadful Mickey Spillane). Blochman's portrait of Communism is complex. He is definitely not a Communist sympathizer. Far from it. He shows US. Communists as a sinister group willing to sabotage the US military, a point of view that is perhaps extremely anti-Communist, but which gains reasonable credence in 1996 from all we know about the systematic willingness of Communist Party members in real life to engage in anti-US. espionage and anti-Trotskyist terrorism. Blochman also shows Communists as willing to murder their own members, also a realistic portrayal. But Blochman also shows how idealistic Americans got caught up in Communism because of a desire to treat areas of US society in genuine need of reform, such as the treatment of the poor and racial discrimination. The fate of these idealists is portrayed as genuinely tragic, as their ideals are eventually betrayed by Communist realities.

 

Blochman's portrayal of capitalism is equally complex. He shows how many factory owners are genuinely concerned about the safety and welfare of their employees. He also shows that the ranks of capitalists include crooks and schemers willing to go to any lengths to achieve their swindles. It is a balanced portrayal, which is probably unsatisfactory to ideological extremists of either left or right, but which certainly can be defended as "realistic" and non-superficial.

 

Blochman's greatest deviations from realism come from the demands and conventions of the mystery genre. In a mystery novel, you must have a murder, and a large cast of suspects who can reasonably suspected of the murder. Probably this is not realistic, in the strictest sense. Neither US Communists or capitalists have typically engaged in Agatha Christie style murder schemes to further their goals. Nor have most other people, of course. The types of murders portrayed in mystery stories are largely a literary convention, designed to create entertaining, ingenious plots. Political ideologues of all stripes can reasonably claim that Blochman has exaggerated the willingness of their side to engage in murderous activities. Of course he has - otherwise he wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel about them.

 

The conventions of the mystery story aside, Blochman has created one of the most realistic portraits of American society in this novel. It is also a portrayal that is quite different from that of many modern mystery writers. Mysteries often portray daily life in the US as humdrum, routine, and commonplace. Blochman shows US daily life as the operating ground of many powerful forces, technological, scientific, economic, political. It comes across as a very interesting, dynamic place.

 

Mike Grost

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