The subjects of this book share an obsession. They have all been driven
to interpret life in terms of melodrama. Raymond Chandler made perhaps the best definition of melodrama when he called it 'an
exaggeration of violence and fear
beyond what one normally experiences,’ and yet all art exaggerates some kind of
experience. The enigma
of the crime-artist – a generic term
for this group of novelists and a film-maker - is why he chooses to inhabit this particular world, the brutal and menacing and conflicted world of melodrama.
To trace the separate lives of crime-artists, from Wilkie
Collins to Alfred Hitchcock,
is like trying to find the vital but hidden link
between the different travellers who passed each other on the Bridge of San Luis Rey. Relating the biographical
material to the work and looking for figures in both carpets, I found that they not only have projected a continuous universe in which the dominant reality is criminal, but unfolded a continuous secret autobiography. For these men to reach the
dangerous edge is to find a point
of no return. The crime-artist ends where he
began, high on the amphetamine of
fear.
Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge -- An Inquiry Into The Lives of Nine
Masters Of Suspense, New York, Grossman Publishers, 1976
