Richard Neely

• Born: April 18, 1920
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

TYPES OF PLOT: Thriller; psychological

Contribution

Richard Neely’s writing career is a success story: He worked steadily at his craft and saw his novels rise from paperback obscurity to the best-seller lists. He was not a groundbreaker in the field, nor did lines of influence radiate from his work, yet that work was consistent, never failing to show the touch of the professional. In fourteen years, he produced fifteen novels, including The Obligation (1978), RidgwayWomen (1976), and one of his final works, Judicial Jeopardy: When Business Collides With the Courts (1986), among others.

Biography

Richard Neely was born on April 18, 1920, in New York City and attended high school in Montclair, New Jersey. Before turning to writing as a full-time career, Neely was first a newspaperman and then an advertising executive in New York. He settled in Marin County, California, north of San Francisco. He had an extensive legal career and authored over ten works. He died in California in October 1999.

Analysis

Although Richard Neely has more than a dozen novels to his credit, all reliant on “thriller” or suspense elements, his work cannot fit comfortably into any generic pigeonhole. Neely writes about crimes and criminals, yet his novels seem only peripherally concerned with the psychology of crime. He places his characters in dire jeopardy, yet he does not insist that his readers earnestly desire their rescue. He often locates his characters among the new gentry of modern society, yet no genuine social criticism can be found in any of his novels.

Thus, two questions naturally present themselves: What is Neely after in his work, and what are the most productive ways to get into it? The answer to the first question is problematic and speculative; the second can be gotten at more easily by considering the fictional world that Neely’s thrillers (for lack of a more precise term) create.

In the typical Neely thriller world, the everyday codes of moral behavior have been suspended and replaced by a curiously ad hoc morality. In Neely’s world, morality is situational in application and Darwinian in function. Significant human action is almost always governed by pragmatic rather than ethical exigencies. Value finally resides in survival and success, if it exists at all, in this mechanistic system. The abstract principles of innocence and guilt may have legal but seldom moral meaning; ideas of “good” and “evil,” per se, have virtually no meaning at all.

As a result, Neely’s men and women play out their dramas against a moral backdrop that is relativistic and frequently even neutral. The reader is invited to observe the goings-on from a distance which renders empathic or sympathetic involvement difficult. Even the most basic of reader responses—desiring success for some characters and failure for others—is only conditionally evoked. Consequently, just as other binary oppositions fail to yield much meaning, the categories of “hero” and “villain” seem moot. Yet there is a catch. Though legitimate heroes may be in short supply in Neely’s world, most of the villains are small, relatively petty, and so paper-thin as to cast no appreciable shadows. (Compared with even a minor villain in a novel, they seem particularly bloodless.) From his distance, with no characters to applaud, the reader looks on dispassionately, engaged in the cool, primarily intellectual pleasures of anticipating the next plot twist and, ultimately, of determining “whodunit.”

In most ways, Neely is a traditionalist. His characters, for example, are motivated exactly as though they were stock creations: That is, their crimes proceed from motives of lust (though seldom love), revenge, and—most importantly—money and the social and personal power that goes along with it.

An Accidental Woman

Neely is unusually hard on his women, who are usually portrayed as Circean seductresses who employ sex as a kind of emotional currency with a murderous rate of exchange. This view of women seems to be a hallmark of the Neely thriller. With few exceptions, women in significant roles are portrayed as cunning (though not always intelligent), ruthless, and sexually opportunistic. This is true in one of Neely’s first novels, The Plastic Nightmare (1969), and in one written almost ten years later, Lies (1978). In perhaps his most popularly successful work, An Accidental Woman (1981), the title character undergoes a slightly bungled brain operation that “accidentally” transforms her from a timid, sexually repressed being into a virtual nymphomaniac who uses and discards men at a speed even Harold Robbins might admire. That this woman’s sexual “liberation” coincides with her meteoric rise up the corporate ladder in a Madison Avenue advertising agency suggests that Neely may be, if not quite a misogynist, at least a cynic.

Neely’s male protagonists are scarcely more attractive. They range from a victimized amnesiac (The Plastic Nightmare) to a modern-day Jack the Ripper (The Walter Syndrome, 1970) to a cirrhotic newspaper editor who nearly kills his publisher in a drunken rage (Shadows from the Past, 1983). In The Sexton Women (1972), the putative “hero” is a Vietnam veteran turned would-be filmmaker who returns home long enough to bed his beautiful young stepmother and to get himself involved in other equally unsavory affairs. The two central male characters in The Japanese Mistress (1972) involve themselves in adultery, murder, extortion, and what seems—for a brief time—to be incest. The unfortunate protagonist of A Madness of the Heart (1976) enjoys a minor extramarital tryst, only to discover that while he was conveniently away, his wife was raped and murdered, leaving him the principal suspect.

What these characters seem to share, in addition to bad luck, is a certain native incompetence. Simply put, they are seldom up to the jobs Neely assigns them. Things may turn out relatively well (though Neely is not exactly generous with happy endings), but rarely as a direct result of their labors. At times it even seems that Neely takes pleasure in frustrating them. Terry Donovan, the ace reporter whose detective work accounts for a major chunk of Shadows from the Past, uncovers and doggedly pursues several intriguing red herrings (among them yet another hint of incest), but not a single item of real use in solving the novel’s core mystery. His function seems to be to divert the reader’s attention, the ironic joke perhaps being that the ace reporter does absolutely no useful reporting. The one apparently competent male in Lies is Frank Reno, a tough ex-cop who claims to be very good at one thing: catching criminals. Yet, the character who finally pieces together the puzzle and dramatically names the culprit is Lee Brewer, a handsome nobody whose sexual misadventures were partly responsible for three murders.

Readers who go knowingly to a Neely thriller are not likely to be in search of the perceptively keen, believable characters that can be found in the work of , nor are they likely to be after the complex, richly nuanced themes that mark ’s work. They go instead for the one pleasure that Neely offers and always delivers a conclusion that will probably surprise even the most experienced veteran of the genre. To this end, Neely does not merely “twist” his plots; he wrings them into Gordian knots. At this aspect of his craft, Neely is something of a master. Particularly deft surprise endings can be found in The Walter Syndrome, A Madness of the Heart, and No Certain Life (1978).

The Walter Syndrome

Such narrative victories, however, have their price. Moreover, one cannot help but wonder how many readers derive unmitigated pleasure from Neely’s manipulations. The Walter Syndrome is a case in point. Here, Neely’s passion for the surprise runs him smack into the difficulties often attending “unreliable” first-person narrators, in this case, the two halves of a split, homicidally deranged personality. By creating a kind of narrative liturgy, with each half of the principal narrator’s personality alternately responding to the other, Neely manages to pull off a genuinely shocking conclusion, yet the reader is given little to hold onto during this roller-coaster ride. With one exception, the characters emerge as shabby, pitiful creatures whose lives lack even the quiet desperation that might make them worth the reader’s time and sympathy. By allowing his mad narrator to tell his own story, Neely forces his reader into the role of father confessor. The result is too much like overhearing a lengthy obscene phone call: The initial titillation soon gives way to an uneasiness just short of embarrassment.

Shadows from the Past

Shadows from the Past, a later but less successful work, is also revealing. Here, Neely presents his readers with a curiously fractured narrative: The first-person narrator, newspaper editor Max Willis, occasionally relinquishes his storytelling responsibilities to an unnamed third-person narrator, the point—presumably—being to heighten the suspense of discovering just who might have wanted to put a bullet in the head of Charles Dain, Willis’s wealthy, handsome, somewhat priapic publisher. The sadly anticlimactic payoff (related by Dain, fresh out of a coma) is the revelation that the assailant was Max Willis himself. The reader must trudge through more than three hundred pages to arrive at this knowledge—too stiff a cost for the sake of another surprise ending.

To determine what Neely is trying to achieve, a proper answer must begin with acknowledging Neely’s skills and limitations. As what Graham Greene might call “entertainments,” most of Neely’s books come off reasonably well. Four of his most readable novels—The Plastic Nightmare, The Walter Syndrome, The Japanese Mistress, and Lies—are honest, skillful attempts to engage the reader’s interest in seriously flawed and unattractive characters. This is no easy task, and Neely should be commended for maintaining the courage of his convictions. If these novels finally lack art, they do not lack craft; readers will not be disappointed. The Smith Conspiracy (1972), a political assassination thriller reminiscent of Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959), also passes muster. Neely’s attempts to transcend his limitations in ambitiously “big” novels are less successful. He seems unable to capture winningly the “feel”—the multilayered texture—of a particularly rich time and place. Shadows from the Past, with its suggestions of Citizen Kane (1941), is largely unsuccessful at re-creating New York in the 1940s. Without that background to brighten them, Neely’s characters skitter one-dimensionally across a dim surface. This is even more the case in An Accidental Woman, whose Madison Avenue setting fails to convince and whose array of stereotyped characters fails to interest the reader.

Bibliography

"An Accidental Woman." Kirkus Reviews, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/richard-neely-6/an-accidental-woman. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2013.

Breen, Jon. “Richard Neely.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. Palgrave, 2001.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Polity, 2005.

Sutton, Judith. Review of An Accidental Woman, by Richard Neely. Library Journal 106, no. 14 (1 Aug. 1981): 1567.