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TO HELL TOGETHER.
A noir classic back in print, unabridged, for the first time in over 65 years. Lee Burke carried the hell of war back to Carmel, California with him...and everyone who touched him felt his torment. Except, perhaps, for Sharon, a wealthy, hard-partying widow, who married him and tried to battle his brutal, insatiable demons with all of her love and money until they became her own, too. Now they're trapped in a passionate struggle that could destroy them both, body and soul. "Although the story is more thoughtful than the average noir novel, its typically simple prose and fast pace are likely to please fans of the genre." Reading California Fiction
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Published January 1, 1951
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December 28, 2024
Set in upscale Carmel Village in the late Fifties, Dixon’s “To Hell Together” is the noir story of two star-crossed mismatched lovers, Lee Burke and Sharon Collison, broken, battered people drowning themselves in alcohol, infidelity, and viciosness. Where David Goodis might set such characters in the slums of Philadelphia, Dixon sets them in Carmel, California, a works of its own separated from the rest of reality in Monterey Peninsula.
Their eventual marriage seems more like a convenient arrangement that works (until the horns become too heavy) because Sharon has so many of the Collison millions she can never spend it all. “He did know that marriage to a psychotic woman could never be part of any possible plan. He would be a part-time companion, a wet nurse, a pimp, a poodle on a leash, even lower in his own estimation than in his present condition.”
Lee was an architect before the Second World War. He says he should have gotten out after that war. Something went wrong with him after Korea when he spent months in Army hospitals waiting for them to amputate his arms. He broke mentally and never recovered. He drifted down to Monterey and Carmel where he lived in a cottage behind Millie’s home. “There were exactly five places to go, the four bars and then the Barn, on the edge of town. It was always the same. Sometimes he wound up in a party in a private home, and lately he had been winding up the night with Sharon, but first there were always the four bars and then the Barn. It was a trap and he knew it, and he wondered how to break it and then decided, wearily, to forget it.”
Millie was another of the seemingly idle, but broken rich set. We are told: “Millie was lying on a couch before the fireplace, reading a mystery serial in a magazine. She was wrapped in a beach robe that emphasized the lush contours of her figure. Millie’s schedule rarely varied on a clear day. She walked the three blocks to the Carmel beach, stripped down to swim halter and panties, which were the minimum the law allowed, and soaked in the sun. Her body was a clear, smooth tan that was in striking contrast to her corn-gold hair and lazy calf-brown eyes.”
As it turns out, both Sharon, whose life on the surface appears to be one endless cocktail party after another, and Millie were broken by the same incident. It was an affair between Sharon and Millie’s husband resulting in a shotgun taking Sharon’s first husband’s life, officially a gun-cleaning accident, but widely viewed by the whispered rumors as murder. Even Lee, upon seeing the shotgun at issue, realizes it couldn’t have happened the way it was reported officially.
And, he’s now Sharon’s new husband and her millions will cover up anything. “There was something tragic in her hectic efforts to drown herself in alcohol and false gaiety. Occasionally he caught glimpses of that tragedy mirrored in her eyes, an animal look of fear and loneliness and desolation. And occasionally, too, she would crawl into bed with him and lie shivering and whimpering at his side and clutch at him as if trying to escape within the shell of his body.”
Dixon offers up a fascinating character study in this novel of people who could never drink enough or have enough affairs to drown out their sorrows. He peeks back the layers of seemingly on the surface happy successful people who seem to have it all and reveals how empty and lost their lives turned out to be.
Their eventual marriage seems more like a convenient arrangement that works (until the horns become too heavy) because Sharon has so many of the Collison millions she can never spend it all. “He did know that marriage to a psychotic woman could never be part of any possible plan. He would be a part-time companion, a wet nurse, a pimp, a poodle on a leash, even lower in his own estimation than in his present condition.”
Lee was an architect before the Second World War. He says he should have gotten out after that war. Something went wrong with him after Korea when he spent months in Army hospitals waiting for them to amputate his arms. He broke mentally and never recovered. He drifted down to Monterey and Carmel where he lived in a cottage behind Millie’s home. “There were exactly five places to go, the four bars and then the Barn, on the edge of town. It was always the same. Sometimes he wound up in a party in a private home, and lately he had been winding up the night with Sharon, but first there were always the four bars and then the Barn. It was a trap and he knew it, and he wondered how to break it and then decided, wearily, to forget it.”
Millie was another of the seemingly idle, but broken rich set. We are told: “Millie was lying on a couch before the fireplace, reading a mystery serial in a magazine. She was wrapped in a beach robe that emphasized the lush contours of her figure. Millie’s schedule rarely varied on a clear day. She walked the three blocks to the Carmel beach, stripped down to swim halter and panties, which were the minimum the law allowed, and soaked in the sun. Her body was a clear, smooth tan that was in striking contrast to her corn-gold hair and lazy calf-brown eyes.”
As it turns out, both Sharon, whose life on the surface appears to be one endless cocktail party after another, and Millie were broken by the same incident. It was an affair between Sharon and Millie’s husband resulting in a shotgun taking Sharon’s first husband’s life, officially a gun-cleaning accident, but widely viewed by the whispered rumors as murder. Even Lee, upon seeing the shotgun at issue, realizes it couldn’t have happened the way it was reported officially.
And, he’s now Sharon’s new husband and her millions will cover up anything. “There was something tragic in her hectic efforts to drown herself in alcohol and false gaiety. Occasionally he caught glimpses of that tragedy mirrored in her eyes, an animal look of fear and loneliness and desolation. And occasionally, too, she would crawl into bed with him and lie shivering and whimpering at his side and clutch at him as if trying to escape within the shell of his body.”
Dixon offers up a fascinating character study in this novel of people who could never drink enough or have enough affairs to drown out their sorrows. He peeks back the layers of seemingly on the surface happy successful people who seem to have it all and reveals how empty and lost their lives turned out to be.
Displaying 1 of 1 review