Suspects - by David Thomson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new edition of this landmark metafictional novel brings acclaimed film critic and writer David Thomson to a new generation of readers

Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime - these are a few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the screen.

Then these characters start to meet each other outside the films as if they were real people with real needs and passions. The book is becoming a novel. The names and faces are familiar to us - Jake Gittes from Chinatown, Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura, Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca - but is it true that Noah Cross and Norma Desmond were lovers in the twenties, that she and Joe Gillis had a son who grew up to be Julian Kay in American Gigolo?

For the narrator is not merely the author. Married to the sister of Laura Hunt, he has a mission to carry out, a lost family link to find, a thread to pull so that nearly all these disparate characters come together to form a kind of society.

Suspects is the most inspired of commentaries on film noir and the forms of Hollywood story-telling. It is in its way a biographical dictionary, but it is also a dazzlingly original work of fiction, so full of America, of an old man's dread of loss and failure, and of a simultaneous love and rage for these movies that you may find its impossible world as real and as touching as any you have ever inhabited.

Ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in some ways comes to stand in for them, Suspects can be read as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives, or simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom. Either way, it's fabulous.

Review Quotes

"This is a work whose power is incremental, whose shadow-America is elaborated step by step. The closest comparison I can think of are the fabulations of Steve Erickson--also obsessed with Hollywood and the myths its country makes about itself. .. . If it only tells us about Hollywood and its dreams, that's because they're our dreams too." --Strange Horizons

"A dazzling work of narrative invention." --Village Voice

"If The Biographical Dictionary of Film allows David Thomson to flex his scholarly muscles then Suspects provides the English-born author a vehicle for his passionate admiration of the stories America tells about itself." --Pop Matters

About the Author

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.