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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Hard Rain Falling (1966) by Don Carpenter

Hard Rain Falling
Cover art for the New York Review of Books Classics edition of Hard Rain Falling.

 



Book Review
Hard Rain Falling(1957)
by Don Carpenter

  Hard Rain Falling is a "lost classic" of American crime fiction, rescued from out-of-print status by the New York Review of Books Classics edition published in 2009.  If you wanted to trace the roots of American crime fiction, you would want to go back at least until to the 1730's, when English painter William Hogarth did his series of a Rake's Progress, dramatizing the decent of an 18th century dandy into degeneracy and sin.   The major evolution between then and now is the decoupling of crime fiction from some kind of ending which provides moral uplift- this being the major difference between Hard Rain Falling, written in the mid 1960's, and You Can't Win by Jack Black- published in the 1920's, where the uplifting ending or reform is required.

  Jack Levitt is the main protagonist- he shares time with Billy Lancing, a light skinned African American who Levitt befriends, later loves (when they are together in San Quentin) and loses (Lancing is killed in prison.)  Levitt is an orphan- the introduction is a brief description of the circumstances of Levitt's birth, and this experience colors his subsequent experience- since he is basically turned loose on the streets of Portland at 14.   He commits crimes big and small, and is eventually done in by a kidnapping and statutory rape case out of a county resembling Sonoma County, after he's found in a San Francisco hotel room with the under-age daughter of a local dignitary.  It's a classic tale, old as time. His prison story isn't as harrowing as the more naturalistic accounts that would later occur, but it is a realistic depiction of prison life- interesting in the 1960's, when people were just becoming interested.

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