James O. Causey’s Frenzy is a scathing noir novel about a vicious, vulpine grifter with big plans and bigger failures, a feral fox among wolves who wish to tear out his throat if he makes just one false step. He makes several. But he survives each beating, each attack, each checkmate by fast talking, flight, or the disdainful luck of the inveterate gambler. Along the way he manages to almost betray everyone and everything, though his loyalty is only to himself. Causey’s tale of Norman Sands, the amoral protagonist of Frenzy, is a brutal story of a lowlife already living in hell, who descends further and further as he tries to contrive one big score, one perfect deal that will leave him sitting pretty. It is a perfect novel of a man as far away from perfection as slimy creatures under a rock are far away from the clouds.
“Listen.” I took a deep breath and shivered. “I want you to stay away from me. I’m strong poison, do you understand? I slime everything I touch.”
Norm Sands perceives the truth about himself
Frenzy shows us the petty obsessions with women, money, and power which drive the corruption at the heart of some versions of the American Dream. The unrelenting action takes place in Mason Flats, a small town in Southern California where crooked pols and businessmen skim the cream from the vice and graft they connive at. Norm Sands returns to Morgan Flats a beaten and broken man, returns to the town he fled years ago, the town where his brother Matt tries to live down the dreams and aspirations he once had as the former high school quarterback who was going to go to law school. Norm has no big dreams to live down, merely wants a handout, until he sees again the petty crimes of his hometown, and has dark visions of cashing in on the big city sin he wants to import into this sleepy hamlet.
“Listen, darling.” She was fighting for control, enunciating very carefully. “If you stay in Mason Flats, you’re going to die. I don’t care about the damned money.”
“I care about the money.”
“No.” Her voice was lifeless. “You just hate to lose.” The simple truth.
More truth about Norm, when it will do the least good
Causey’s short book (clocking in at only 144 pages) shows a man without morals, though Norm Sands is no psychopath. He has had some bad breaks, made many more bad choices, and his snarling intelligence and criminal experience allow him to construct plots of betrayal and fraud where other men would simply walk away and lick their wounds. Norm cannot walk away, though he does flee when necessary; he is compelled to brazen out the most hopeless bluff, to play the turncoat in order to pay back his oppressors, to stake everything on just one more turn of the cards, though he knows in his hopeless heart that the deck will always be stacked against him.
I sat drinking coffee, listening to her talk about Paris, and trying to analyze the drowning sensation that hit me every time I looked at her.
This wasn’t love. Love is something warm and human, like the feeling I still had for Laurie. This was stark compulsion, chemotropic. For her I had killed two men.
The unexamined life is not worth living
But Norm is not just a con man. He wants power, and everything that goes with that. And that means a woman. Usually the boss’s woman, since the most desirable female is the one furthest from his reach. He is driven by lust rather than love, by an animal longing for rutting with the boss’s beauty. He is self-aware enough to know that such longing is madness, but that knowledge won’t stop him for a moment. Is this passionate desire his primary failing, the hamartia that will bring him down? No. This sexual hunger is merely one of ravenous appetites that drive him, that will leave him starving for any relationship beyond the merely transactional. He may find a kindred spirit, but their time together will always be measured in days, hours, until the next deal, the next gamble, the next betrayal.
No, the fatal flaw of Norm Sands is a simple one, perhaps the simplest. As Michelle Shocked noted, “The secret to a long life / Is knowing when it’s time to go.” Norm will always be a gambler, he will always hold out for just one more hand, will hope that ‘just one more’ will see his luck change. By the time he is ready to run, it is already too late. He may flee his pursuers for a time, may dodge the fatal bullet or blow this time or the next, but he has already lost everything by the time he is flying out the door. He may blame the attenuated threads of decency still lingering in his (a)moral fabric, the small bonds of humanity which foil his outlandish plans and cost him the evil success he craves. But he will sever every tie to decent feeling he has ever had, all for lucre and lust.
“I’ll steal for you,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll kill for you, anything—provided there’s no other woman, ever. You think I’m crazy?”
“No,” I said, holding her close, tenderly. “You’re not crazy.”
We sat like that for a very long time.
Norm and his lover discuss degrees of sanity
James Causey brings the amoral yearnings of his doomed protagonist to life in a brilliant first-person narrative. The cleverness and bravado of Norm shine out in the cesspools he thrives in, and the reader will find little morality to assuage the dark vision presented in this fast-paced thriller. At the same time, however, this is not a bleak tale of fated destruction à la Jim Thompson; Causey’s ‘hero’ always seems to have a choice as he takes each step and misstep towards the savage denouement. The cunning grifter may not be likable or even worthy of redemption, but Causey’s letter-perfect prose depicts a world of corruption and smalltime dreams that is quite enjoyable in some perverted way, and this tale of fraud and venality in Southern California may have relevance today, for all that it was written sixty years ago.