Friday Night Film Noir: Gun Crazy (1950)

It's been awhile since I put up a Friday Night Film Noir. I've still got a good dozen or so that I hope to get to by year's end. I figured I'd ease back into things with one I  screencapped a ways back but never got around to writing: Gun Crazy (1950), written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo under his alias Milard Kaufman and directed by Joe H. Lewis.

On the surface it has all the traditional elements of a noir gangster: an obsessive romantic relationship that defies rational explanation, a crime doesn't pay arc (to say the least - it's more a slow descent to irony and doom), a femme fatale, etc. But Gun Crazy goes further than many a film of its era in literalizing its sexual subtext.

Bart Tare has always had a thing for guns. He's the best shot of any of his friends, but he's unable to pull the trigger on a living thing. When a flashback reveals him in childhood, he can't shoot the mountain lion that he and his friends have spotted. 

When his friend takes the gun from him, Bart clenches his fist with each shot fired in close-up.

Years later when he meets Laurie Starr he's able to bluff his way along for awhile. But when they're fleeing the cops after a bank job, he becomes very self-conscious about his inability to use his gun in the way it's intended, or that she wants him to, I should say.

"Shoot! Why don't you shoot?"

Bart does shoot out one of the front tires of the cop car chasing them and they get away, but the scene is edited in such a way where there's no doubt about what's really going on.  Tragically, he is able to pull the trigger on a person only once:

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The film opens with Bart as a youth, throwing a rock through a window to steal a beautiful pistol before getting caught and sentenced to reform school.  

Young Bart is played by Russ Tamblyn (father of Amber).

When he's called before the judge, his sister (Anabel Shaw, who looks a lot like Susan Saradon in this movie) sticks up for him, but each flashback reveals a deeper level of displacement and fixation on guns.

Such as that one time he brought a gun to school with him.

The judge sends him to reform school and as he's droning on ("It's my job here to think not only of what's good for you but what's good for the community in which you live") the camera zooms in on Bart's ear. Everything else goes out of focus, and the audio begins to resemble the Charlie Brown teacher voice (not quite that, but in that direction.) It's a nice, weird little touch.

We cut to years later - after a stint in the Army teaching sharpshooting - and Bart and his buddies go to the carnival. They buy a ticket to see the sharpshooting act, and that's where and when Bart meets Laurie.

Her highly sexualized act drives the crowd wild, and Bart is eventually called on stage to take part in a sharpshooting contest.

Bart ends up joining the carnival as part of the sharpshooting act and - despite a warning from a clown wise in the ways of love, and suckers - falls under Laurie's spell. They leave the carnival and fall into that staple of so many stories, noir or otherwise: the love/crime spree

John Dall and Peggy Cummins (Bart and Lauire) give great performances here. More on Laurie in a minute. I only know Dall from Rope, and that's not one of my favorites from the Hitchcock catalog. He's perfect in this role, though - nervous when he has to be, always intense, always playing the subtext. Well-directed, well-performed. The two leads have great chemistry.

As was the case in The Asphalt Jungle, some effective use of L.A. locations to simulate the Midwest (and elsewhere) and some fantastic soundstage work in the swamp. I was amused by something I heard on the commentary track by the always-excellent Glenn Erickson about how it would have been unthinkable at the time to ask actors to play the scene in an actual swamp in cold, muddy water, never mind the logistics in lighting it and moving the cameras, etc. 

As always, how times have changed.

Gun Crazy was first released with the title Deadly is the Female. Apparently they felt the original title of MacKinlay Kantor's short story was too much, although The Saturday Evening Post - hardly a bomb-throwing organization - published it with that title ten years before. Laurie is definitely female and definitely deadly, but Gun Crazy is such a better title. Much more immediate and much more descriptive of the work. Thankfully, that's how it's been remembered since.

When Laurie is introduced in the sharpshooting competition, she's sexy and confident and a crackshot. She and Bart establish an instant connection through their shared ability with guns. It isn't until we see Laurie with her boss/lover Packett -

Berry Kroeger, also in Act of Violence as well as lots of other stuff.

that we see the hidden side of her character.

(Laurie) "If you lay your hands on me like that again, I'll kill you."
(Packett) "Like that guy you killed in St. Louis?"
"You're gonna hold that over my head for the rest of my life, aren't ya?"

"Honey, I'll make money like you want me to - big money. But it takes time. You gotta give me time."
"You'll never make money. You're a two-bit guy...

No guts, no nothing. I want action." 

Laurie uses sex to get what she wants, and what she wants is danger and excitement.

Bart's able to prevent her from killing at first.

But not during the Armour heist (the second of the film's two big set pieces).

Later when they hide out at Bart's sister's place, the composition of each scene Laurie shares with her emphasizes her specifically feminine danger to the status quo.

Something of a Trumbo trademark.

Also something of a Trumbo trademark? This risque sequence in the hotel. 

The code at the time had strict rules for any scene featuring a bed, as this one does.

If someone laid down in it, one foot had to be on the floor of all times. Yet here not only does Laurie recline entirely, Bart joins her and suggestively moves into frame.

Their kiss dissolves to their first hold-up; immediately, Bart has entered a life of crime.

Another risque element: Bart and Laurie adopt several disguises which very much puncture cinematic tropes of the time. They make their way through several roadblocks by dressing as straight, wholesome people in one scene, and as a military man and his wife in another. And with each disguise Bart adopts, his discomfort at the life they're leading and his certainty it will lead to his doom grows and grows. 

The crime sequences are stunning. The Hampton heist sequence is not the first unbroken extended sequence in American cinema, but it's certainly among the best. 

The Armour meat packing heist - where Laurie shoots her boss - is also fantastic.

It's easy to see the influence this film had on so many subsequent films, from Bonnie and Clyde to Badlands to Natural Born Killers to The Devil's Rejects. It's about as close to any of those films as anyone could have gotten away with in 1950 in Hollywood.  

Gun Crazy was not a box office hit or a critical darling; it was exclusively due to the French New Wave critics who championed it and the American New Wave critics they inspired that it endures today as a seminal film noir.

 ~

was

Russell Harlan had quite the c.v.

Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver

"It's twenty-first century imperialism. People used to exploit Africa for diamonds and slaves. Now it's exploited for its ability to purge the guilt of wealthy Westerners."

First published May, 2011.

In his review of the book for 007 Magazine, Luke Williams writes: 

"(Carte Blanche) is a relatively entertaining thriller that blends generic elements of Deaver and Fleming into a readable but resolutely unmemorable 432 pages. As such it’s a typical example of modern 'franchise' fiction." 

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, pop critic for Financial Times adds:

"The novel depicts an unconvicing Bond. The problem partly lies in Deaver's writing style, which its bizarrely clunky moments, like the description of a baddie 'who stood still as a Japanese fighting fish.' But (it) also faces two deeper difficulties:
 

One is the diminished stature of modern-day espionage following MI6 and the CIA's disastrous attempts to convince the world of Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, Carte Blanche avoids mentioning Iraq (Bond's back story has him fighting in Afghanistan instead) and it shifts his spy career from MI6 to a shadowy security service called the Overseas Development Group. Fleming's cold war setting is a distant glamorous memory.

The other problem is finding a way to modernize Bond while staying true to the characteristics that animated him so vividly in Fleming's books. The original Bond has a 'brutal and ironical' face; he is a sensualist through whom Fleming expressed a decadent, even kinky worldview, ripe with sadomasochism and sexualized violence (...) Sanitize this side of 007 and you're left with Deaver's Bond, 'a man of serious face and hunter's demeanor,' a killing machine who talks of 'target vectors' and 'shooting scenarios'." 

I concede that both reviewers are essentially (or at least arguably) correct in their points, yet... I enjoyed Carte Blanche. Quite a bit. Am I too forgiving? Not discerning enough?

As Deaver is not "writing as Ian Fleming" (as was the case in Devil May Care and why I objected to that book's un-Fleming-ness) and as this book does not take place in the Fleming-verse, Gardner-verse, Benson-verse, or the Eon-verse, I wasn't bothered by any of that. Does the marked difference between Daniel Craig's Bond - the other hard-reboot of the franchise(s) - and Connery's or Moore's or whomever's Bond make Casino Royale deficient? Sure it's got the Fleming source material, there, so it's not a perfect one-to-one. I think it's wholly worthwhile to determine what is or isn't "Bond" and compare accordingly, but there's enough of the traditional Bond in Carte Blanche, at least in my eyes, to justify itself.

Deaver's Bond is really just a 21st century version of Gardner's Bond, with some tweaks of his own (such as the subplot with Bond's parents, which I quite enjoyed.) There's even improbable (though not Gardner-level improbable) double/triple agents. I have more sympathy for the modern-franchise-fiction criticism, but that to me is more a comment on the publishing industry than the Bond one.

(That "Japanese fighting fish" simile, by the by, really seemed to ruffle feathers - I saw that mentioned in a few different reviews. I don't see the fuss, myself.)

  
Let's get to the book itself.

The Plot: Bond, a thirtysomething Royal Naval Reserve officer currently employed by the Overseas Development Group (an organization under the control of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but with considerable latitude to protect the realm by any means necessary) is tasked to first discover the truth behind "Incident 20," an upcoming terrorist event of some kind, and then stop it. With the help of Q Branch and Ophelia "Philly" Maidenstone, MI6's liaison officer to the ODG, as well as some familiar faces (Felix Leiter) and the South African Police Service (SAPS), he uncovers a link between the planned incident and rag and bone tycoon Severan Hydt and his Northern Irish henchman/master planner Niall Dunne. Following the trail of clues from the Middle East to the Cape of Good Hope, Bond infiltrates Hydt's "Green Way" organization to try and stop the attack before it's too late.

Bond: Okay, so as mentioned above, I have no objection to writing Bond a different way, or depriving him of his more traditional idiosyncrasies, but he is a bit generic here. I saw him referred to as "James Bourne" somewhere, but that doesn't seem right to me either. He didn't remind me of Jason Bourne, or Jack Bauer, or any franchise spy, really - maybe that was the problem. Deaver's Bond is a perfectly reasonable, efficient spy, but I don't know how many books featuring this version of Bond I'd read. I like Deaver's style, which I'll get to in a bit, but not necessarily his Bond. 

Although he did make several attempts to characterize him with a little of the ol' Fleming malaise and snobbery:

"Bond wasn't impressed by the Lodge Club. Perhaps back in the day, when it was the enclave of hunters in jodhpurs and jackets embellished with loops to hold ammunition for their big-five game rifles, it had been more posh, but the atmosphere now was that of a suburban banquet hall hosting simultaneous marriage fetes. Bond wasn't even sure if the Cape buffalo head, staring down at him with a studious glare from near the front door, was real or had been manufactured in China." 

The Villains: Here I thought Deaver did a good job. Niall is a realistic foil for Bond, even if he's somewhat improbably said to be motivated by unrequited feelings for both Severan and Felicity Willing. (More on her in a moment.) Mainly, it was just nice to see an Ulster man who wasn't saying "Boyo" every other minute, as is all too often the unfortunate case with Yank genre writers.

I quite enjoyed Severan, whose love of decay and rubbish is an extension of his necrophilia. He's a traditional Bond villain - wealthy, sexually unconventional, with a physical deformity (his long, yellow nails) - but not given to cartoony speeches. I like my Bond villain cartoony speeches if they're done right, don't get me wrong, but the way both Dunne and Hydt were written fit the tone of Carte Blanche pretty well. The "Death in the Sand" / Liwa Oasis sequence - and the run-up to it, with the mistaken intel - was great.

Felicity Willing, leader of the International Organization Against Hunger, is the novel's surprise-villain. I appreciate that the villains are heads of famine-relief and recycling organizations. I'm of the opinion that greater evil is accomplished via not-for-profit front organizations than anything else. Which isn't to say all nonprofits are evil, only that people's naivety is (ongoingly) manipulated and exploited by evil people. Not just their naivety: please refer to the quote I started this entry off with.

There's also Mahdi al-Fulan, who designs gadgetry and equipment for Hydt. When Bond sees his factory and showroom in Abu Dhabi, he remarks to himself: "If robots had pleasant dreams, they would be set in this room."

The Ladies and The Allies: Combined since the main love interest (unconsummated, shades of Moonraker) is both. The only Bond hook-up happens with Felicity - nice name, incidentally. There are quite a few here:

- M, obviously. Rather traditional take on M. I liked how he waved off Bond's assurance that he didn't screw up in Serbia (the "pre-credits sequence") despite the Serbians' claims that he did. M waves off the suggestion that any of his agents would be wrong, somewhat irritated.
"Explanation is a sign of weakness, 007."

- Felix Leiter. He shows up in Abu Dhabi (along with Yusuf Nasad, the CIA's man in the sands. Kiss of death, that.) He doesn't really need to be here, but hey, it's Felix. I was amused that Bond (of course) had to save him.

- The SAPS crew. Primarily Bheka Jordan, the beautiful police captain with whom Bond flirts but finds no joy. She's written and characterized pretty well. Actually my favorite character of the whole book. Her underlings (Kwalen Nkosi and Sergeant Mbalula) are effectively sketched but more just scenery, at least until the very end.

- Gregory Lamb (MI6 man in South Africa) and Percy Osborne-Smith (Department 3 aka MI5 man foisted upon Bond, based in London). Both are somewhat stock characters, but they move their parts of the plot along well enough.

I thought it was Lamb who was wearing the Breitling (image nicked from here) but I was mistaken. This is Bond's watch in Carte Blanche.

- And Jessica Barnes, a late-innings (but pivotal) ally. Onetime beauty queen, now kept as a prized "decaying object" for Hydt. 

Gadgets: Very subdued - Bond accomplishes most of what he needs to do on his mobile, as modified by Q Branch, leading to its nickname as an I(Q)Phone. Har de har har. Q Branch comes off quite well, able to slip Bond things across the globe without setting up an entire shop in the middle of a pyramid or what not. (Not that I ever minded that in the movies - part of the fun.) Here Major Boothroyd is replaced by Sanu Hirani, an energetic and congenial young man with a fondness for cricket. 

I forget where, but one of the reviews I looked at mentioned how Bond mentions his Oakley sunglasses "every other page." Undoubtedly just an exaggeration for effect - they're mentioned by name only a couple of times - but I thought his using the Oakleys to capture a bloodied fingerprint was quick thinking. I also enjoyed the nod to how improved surveillance and computer tech has made the analog spycraft of "the cobwebbed past" advantageous. (Shades of the Moore/Eick Battlestar Galactica.)

Locations: Quite enjoyed the Abu Dhabi and South Africa sections. 

"The Lincoln eased through the haze and heat, paralleling the massive power lines conducting electricity to the outer regions of the city-state. Nearby was the Persian Gulf, the rich blue muted nearly to beige by the dust in the air and the glare of the low but unrelenting sun." 

The Writing: While I found Bond a little bland, I thought this was a page-turner. The plot, action, characterization, dialogue, all of it. Moved at a better clip than Solo, even though I liked Solo more overall. 

I thought the 007-Magazine's objections to one aspect of the prose - Deaver's "UK-ifying" his writing - silly:

"Although admirably accurate, they come across as a forced and heavy-handed attempt on the author’s part to prove that an American can master the British context and idiom, rather than acting as a seamless part of the narrative; so it is that we are subjected to a wealth of cricket and rugby references along with name-checks for, among others, Kate Winslet, the Harry Potter novels, Top Gear, Radio 2 and Radio 4, The Two Ronnies, Waitrose, The Times, The Guardian, I Claudius, Guy Ritchie and Boots the chemist!"

Could be just my American upbringing and all, but it didn't seem forced to me. And to refer to the rugby/cricket references as "a wealth" is an overstatement. Most of these things aren't even all that provincial to the UK: likening Mary Goodnight to Kate Winslet, for example  - she's known the world over. Ditto for most of these things. 

(Maybe not Boots the chemist. But who cares?)

The Kipling: 

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne / 

He travels the fastest who travels alone."

The Book Launch: As they did for Devil May Care, IFP went all out with an invitation-only affair with Royal Marine commandos, a tricked-out Bentley, and a stunt rider/ supermodel (Chesca Miles):

Nice to see such things. Must have been a trip for the author.

One last thing: the book's dedication reads "To the man who taught us we could still believe in heroes, Ian Fleming." That struck me as a little odd. Fleming certainly didn't teach me anything about heroes. But when I dug more into Deaver's background, I came across this:

"It was when I started to read the James Bond books that I realized that adventure stories could be brought into the present day and have an immediacy. I grew up in a small town in the mid-west of America, but nonetheless, Bond spoke to me. I found the books to be inspiring. They opened up my world."

A nice sentiment. I suppose I could say something similar about the Bond movies and my own childhood, but sorry, Bond, Marvel Comics got to me first.

All in all, a perfectly readable what-if sideroad of the main Bondverse. I'm not sure what the grand plan is over at IFP - more one-offs? An ongoing series set in a reboot-verse like this one? Something new altogether? Time will tell.

~

So ends my sojourn through the Bond books. (At least for now.) What was my favorite? Off the top of my head, probably Trigger Mortis. It's stuck with me, and I even pulled it off the shelf and ended up practically re-reading the whole thing a couple of weekends ago. But the Union Trilogy by Benson is also great stuff, and I loved Solo and Gardner's Nobody Lives Forever - all for different reasons. 

An enjoyable project, all around. To those who read along, my sincere thanks. Your comments definitely helped shape my perspective on these things.  

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

"Strange is the night where black stars rise,

and strange moons circle through the skies 

But stranger still

is Carcosa."

- Cassilda's Song in The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2. 

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a collection of ten short stories, first published in 1895. It has since fallen into the public domain; you can read it here. 

The first four stories are thematically connected by repeated references to (and excerpts from) a fictional play called, logically enough, The King in Yellow. Although it's a play, it's never performed, as all who read it go insane.

We never learn the plot of the play, only that it references a strange and horrifying land called Carcosa. Chambers took the name (as well as a few other words for its geography) from the Ambrose Bierce story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa." (As well as his "Haita the Shepherd.") H.P. Lovecraft later referenced "The Yellow King" in his story "The Whisperer in Darkness," leading many to mistakenly believe he coined the term.

The first I heard of all this came via season 1 of True Detective.

The show appropriates the Yellow King and Carcosa concept, as well as contributing its own dark and unsettling spin.

Chambers was apparently quite a prolific writer, and based on my enjoyment of these ten tales, I'm definitely interested in reading more from him. To kick off my year-long Short Stories project, I thought I'd take a good gander at the first of the four Carcosa-themed ones. 

"The Repairer 

of Reputations"

What a wild story this is, though it's tough to summarize the plot. Its wiki describes it as " a powerful, weird story of egotism and paranoia." It's certainly that, but let me try and do a better job.

It begins with a few pages of sci-fi - or close to it, anyway - set in the then-future world of 1920, (interestingly enough, after a war with Germany has concluded, one that saw the Germans seize the Samoan islands and invade New Jersey). Prosperity and tranquility are  abundant due (we're told) to "the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of self-preservation (and) the settlement of the new independent Negro state of Suanee," (needle scratch!) as well as "the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive branch."

Well then. The past is a different country, of course, and when traveling to it via its literature or arts, I try and approach everything as an anthropologist and not a missionary. Still, sometimes the casual nature of such remarks can be very jarring. It's the same odd mix of overt racism and antisemitism with early 20th century liberalism (state-subsidized arts and opera and "bigotry and intolerance (lain) in their graves and kindness and charity (drawing) warring sects together") that one finds in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson and work of D.W. Griffith. (This isn't an anti-or-pro-liberal remark, you understand. Maybe pro-consistency, anti-confused-juxtapositions, though.)

All of the above is just table-dressing for the appearance of "Lethal Chambers." The Government has acknowledged the right of any man or woman who suffers from physical or mental anguish to end his or her own life and has opened up one of these Lethal Chambers in every town and city across America. The main character (Hildred) is hurrying past an inauguration ceremony of one such Chamber (on the south side of Washington Square between Wooster and South Fifth) on his way to meet Mr. Wilde, occupant of an apartment above an armorer's shop and the "repairer" of the title.

The armorer and his daughter (the betrothed of Hildred's cousin Louis) think Mr. Wilde to be a vicious lunatic, "crippled and almost demented." Let me pause here to relay that Hildred (our first-person-narrator) is recently released from an asylum after a nasty fall from a horse. More importantly, while convalescing, he read the whole of The King in Yellow, something he shares with Mr. Wilde. 

How do you come to read a play that is well-known (as it is in the world of these stories) to cause insanity? Good question. It is apparently only Act II, with its "irresistible revealed truths" that compels the reader to madness: "The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect."

Hildred tried to throw it into the fire after reading the first act, but it struck the barred gate and fell open to Act II:

"With a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it. I wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow."

Mr. Wilde - who lives with a vicious cat whom he provokes so that it launches itself at his face, tearing it frequently to ribbons - and Hildred discuss the coming Imperial Dynasty of America, which (Mr. Wilde assures Hildred) ends with his marriage to the armorer's daughter. The Yellow King, we are assured, needs nothing; we are all his subjects. But his trusted advisors can rule this world with whatever accoutrements they desire.

Mr. Wilde is a curious character, and not just for the relationship he keeps with his cat. Obviously he's as insane as Hildred, and yet he knows things that are seemingly impossible, such as the location of a famous set of armor, long believed to be lost, or the true identity of the armorer and his daughter (a plot point introduced but not followed up on anywhere else, unless I missed it.) "His mind is a wonder chamber from which he can extract treasures that you or I would give years of our life to acquire." And when Hildred meets with Mr. Wilde, the latter angrily dismisses a caller that turns out to be the owner and editor of New York's greatest daily newspaper.

Or is he? One of the delights of the story is trying to work out what is actually happening vs. what Hildred tells us is happening. For example, there are the contents of the steel safe he keeps in his bedroom:

"The three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant. I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors." 

Later, though, he has placed the diadem on his head and is admiring himself (as much as one can while reliving the perpetual horror of Carcosa) in the mirror:

"The alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up; but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it. And all the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, "The day has come! the day has come!" while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamored, and the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. 

I heard a door open but did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror, when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: "Hildred! for God's sake!" then as my hand fell, he said: "It is I, Louis, don't you know me?" I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

"What is all this?" he inquired, in a gentle voice. "Are you ill?"

"No," I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

"Come, come, old fellow," he cried, "take off that brass crown and toddle into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical tinsel anyway?"

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn't like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand, knowing it was best to humor him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

"It's dear at fifty cents," he said. "What's it for?"

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit box." 

Apologies for the lengthy excerpt, but I quite like the writing there, and it effectively demonstrates that what our narrator sees as a diamond-encrusted crown in a time-combination steel safe might instead be a Cracker Jack prize in a biscuit box.

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?
Camilla: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Casilda) No mask? No mask!

The King in Yellow, Act 1, Scene 2.

I won't ruin the ending for you, but suffice it to say, Hildred has some difficulty getting his cousin to understand his part to play in establishing the Hidden Dynasty of Imperial America. (And yes, Lethal Chambers play a role in the resolution, lest you wonder why I even brought them up.)

Each of the Carcosa-themed stories is a minor masterpiece in atmosphere and tension, but "The Repairer of Reputations" is perhaps the most fully-realized of them all. (Either that or "The Mask.") In each of them, artists of some kind or another are the main characters, with a theme of unrequited love running through them all. The whole book is worth reading, not just the Carcosa stories, if your taste runs to this sort of American horror writing post-Poe, Pre-Lovecraft.

Will reading any of them illuminate anything in True Detective? Not really, but of course that's not what they were designed to do.

"We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing the King in Yellow...

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!"