Guest post written by author Rebecca Barrow
Rebecca Barrow is the critically acclaimed author of Interview with the Vixen, This Is What It Feels Like, You Don’t Know Me But I Know You, and Bad Things Happen Here. She is a lover of sunshine, Old Hollywood icons, and all things high femme. She lives and writes in England. You can find her at Rebecca-Barrow.com, or on Twitter and Instagram at @RebeccaKBarrow.
A dead body, a detective, and a red-lipsticked girl smoking a cigarette: some key ingredients of Bad Things Happen Here, yes, but also what you’re likely to find in the noir classics of the 1940s and 50s. As someone with an interest in Hollywood history and a taste for the black-and-white studio system gems, I often can’t help but slide some references into my work as I write—and in the case of Bad Things Happen Here, I see a lot of similarities between the world of Parris and the worlds found within many noir classics. A glamourous veneer covering a seedy underbelly of lies, betrayal, and murder? Oh yes; Parris has that in spades. So here are five noirs that you should watch after you read the book.
1. The Killers (1946)
Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster star in this adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway story involving a robbery gone terribly wrong. Gardner is often held up as the prime example of a femme fatale, and aesthetically Luca borrows a lot from her—sleek black dresses, bare shoulders, and of course, a love of being barefoot on the beach. As Kitty Collins, Gardner plays the gangster’s moll to perfection, and the film unravels a story of twisted loyalties and naivete that I think Luca is all too familiar with.
2. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
A teenage girl filled with melancholy longs for something exciting to happen in her world—but when excitement arrives in the form of a visit from her uncle, she soon finds herself drawn into a cat-and-mouse game of innocent and killer. This slow-burn Hitchcock thriller deals a lot in family ties, loyalty, and dishonesty; much like Luca, protagonist Charlie (Teresa Wright) is drawn into a world she naively ignored the existence of before.
3. The Big Heat (1953)
A heart-of-gold detective attempts to take down a crime syndicate, yes, but I’m including this one more for Gloria Grahame and her portrayal of mob girlfriend Debby Marsh. Marsh is every bad-girl trope rolled into one, fiery and foul-mouthed, running around town in tight dresses and a fur coat—held up against the protagonist’s wholesome wife, it’s easy to see which one would fit the “good victim” narrative and which one would be dismissed. In Bad Things Happen Here, from the very beginning of the investigation into Luca’s sister’s murder, the police are quick to suggest her own actions led to her death. Victim blaming—she wore the wrong thing, they hung out with the wrong crowd, why didn’t she just say no?—is nothing new, and while I’d love to be hopeful enough to say I think things are changing, I’m not.
4. Detour (1945)
This is a quick, offbeat story about a series of increasingly dark events that unfurl in one man’s life when he makes a simple choice to hitch a ride. It’s a great exploration of self-preservation and the lengths we’ll go to in order to keep ourselves out of trouble. Of course, nothing can be so simple, and the protagonist, played by Tom Neal, who begins his journey as a lovestruck musician on his way cross-country to join his girlfriend, soon spirals into depravity.
5. Laura (1944)
The quintessential beautiful-dead-girl story—with a twist. In Laura, a literal portrait of the title character looms large, watching over the murder investigation and drawing in all those who surround her. The film is a great mystery, but what I find most interesting about it is this watchful character, impossible to ignore, and how the film uses the image of this vanished woman. Bad Things Happen Here focuses on a curse that takes young girls, and as a crime writer, it’s almost impossible to not spend huge amounts of time thinking about the draw society has to beautiful girls, and how the pull only becomes stronger once they disappear or die. What does it say about whose deaths we value, whose lives we value? With a shotgun blast to the face, this girl’s beauty is destroyed—and to me, Laura seems to posit that as the biggest tragedy of all. She’s a corpse, and she’s not even beautiful anymore. Now she’s just any dead girl.
