Nota Bene

In my review of Brick, I commented on the retro glamour that spreads a shimmery finish across a lot of film and fiction in the noir mode, obscuring the bleak vision underneath. Scraping away that finish can be a good thing, and so it is in Brick. But the style and scenery of classic hard-boiled writing are still nice to behold—as in this passage about a “swank big-city nightclub” that I found in Halo in Blood, a 1946 detective romance in the Raymond Chandler tradition. The author is Howard Browne, and the narrator is Paul Pine, Chicago private eye.

We went into the silk-drapery and crystal-mirror elegance of a foyer crowded with people in evening clothes waiting for tables. Beyond red-velvet ropes strung across an arched opening was [a] semicircular swath of tables about the glistening dance floor.

Music, with plenty of brass and a barrel-house piano, blended with the clatter of tableware, the murmur of voices and the slither of dancing feet to form a curtain of sound like the backdrop of a stage. …

A man in a dress suit with tails, his face the color of wet lime, bowed to us and said, “Good evening, Miss Sandmark.” He curled a lip at my tuxedo, and pushed aside a flunky and unhooked the velvet rope for us himself.

We followed him right down an aisle and around to the right to a table for two bordering on the dance floor. He slid Leona’s chair under her with a flourish, removed her wrap with a flourish, whisked a “Reserved” card off the table with a flourish and handed us wine cards—with a flourish. He jerked his chin up and around, like Mussolini on a balcony, and crooked a lifted finger at a passing runt of a waiter and it stopped the little guy as if he’d run into a wall.