John Franklin Bardin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Work
His most acclaimed works, The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly experienced renewed interest in the seventies when they were discovered by British readers. An introduction by Julian Symons in an omnibus of these works published throughout the United Kingdom and America recounts their emergence:
Denis Healey was the guest of honour at a Crime Writers' Association dinner a few years ago, one of those years when he was no more than a shadow Minister, and so had time for criminal frivolity. In the course of his speech Mr Healey showed a considerable, almost a dazzling, knowledge of crime fiction. It was an impressive performance, one nearly too much for some of the audience. People who write crime stories are often not great readers of them, feeling perhaps that anything they read will be inferior to what they have written. And when, near the end of his peroration, Mr Healey picked out for special praise the crime novels of John Franklin Bardin, they looked at each other in astonishment. Who was John Franklin Bardin? One is safe in saying than no more than a dozen of the hundred and fifty people at dinner than night had ever heard of him.
Symons, who edited the omnibus, had difficulty tracking down any information regarding Bardin. He was unable to find any American critic who had heard of him and even his original publishers did not know how to contact him or even find out whether he was still alive. He was eventually tracked down, willing and eager to see his work republished.
The novels are distinguished by a combination of the hard fiction style of the late forties and a pervasive and morbid sense of psychology, in most cases pathological (psychiatrists and general discussions of insanity pervade the works). The protagonists are subject to extraordinary situations which provoke intense feelings of distress and mental agony, communicated to the reader with a lucidity that makes his storytelling logic surrealistic, fantastic, persuasive and disturbing at once.
The Deadly Percheron tells the story of a psychiatrist who encounters a patient with apparent delusions and a strange story to tell, but who does not otherwise exhibit signs of mental instability. His story turns out to have at least some connection to reality, drawing the psychiatrist into a complicated reality hack that changes his life. The Last of Philip Banter sees a man receiving (or apparently writing) disturbing predictions about his life. The predictions partly become true, the effect of the predictions themselves being destructive and mind-altering.
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, his perhaps most acclaimed work, is a complicated story told almost entirely in terms of the psychology of the protagonist Ellen, a mental patient who experiences mental disintegration caused seemingly by her own mind, the actions of others and mysterious occurrences that go unexplained.
Bardin himself gives his literary influences as Graham Greene, Henry Green and Henry James. Symons writes: "Bardin was ahead of his time. He belongs not to the world of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, but to that of Patricia Highsmith or even that of Poe.
