Reviews of two new books. Naked to Love: Letters from a Young American in Panama (1952-54) by Christopher West Colie (Council Oak Books, 230 pages, $19.95) PANAMA HOWL Like many 22-year-olds, Chris Colie is determined not to let life's responsibilities fuck him up. He is a typically self-absorbed Reed College student, intent on becoming a writer, when the draft interrupts his education. The year is 1952. Colie leaves Carole, his new and pregnant wife, to serve the U.S. Army in Panama. For the next two years, he regales her with letters that often begin with "I love you," then quickly become all about him. He despises the Army but is infatuated with the exotic tropics and the guys with whom he serves. His richly detailed letters reveal a strange and fascinating new world. Or they are pages-long explanations of how much he adores Carole, though he doesn't seem to consider her feelings much. He rarely asks about her pregnancy, and when he does, he is very detached. "It probably wouldn't do much good to send a picture of him after he's born," he writes, "because babies really do look sort of the same." He even waits until she's about to deliver to confess that he takes an occasional turn with a three-dollar whore. "I knew you wouldn't be angry at me because of this, or think that I was being unfaithful to you as most people, I guess, would." Carole, in one of several witty looks back sprinkled throughout the book, admits that she had broached the prostitution subject first and didn't get the answer she hoped for. "But I was most people," she writes. "I asked the inevitable question: How about me and some other guy--what would he think of that? I got the answer I wanted this time: He would kill himself. That was reassuring." In Naked to Love, Colie reveals the pain of youth and separation with a brooding, Beat-generation insensibility. He is obsessed with chronicling each detail of every single thought and feeling. Yet he is so lost in his own quest to write meaningfully that his relationship with the recipient of those lovely letters becomes very one-sided. After he was discharged, Colie returned to Reed, but dropped out after discovering the longshoreman's profession, which he practiced for the next 40 years. He and Carole raised six children who remain devoted; his daughter showed the Panama letters to a publisher without her father's knowledge. In his afterword, Colie wonders why he was so preoccupied with his own feelings in those letters: "Was it simply that, at that age, feelings are what you have most of and you get a false notion of their importance?" In this case, Colie's feelings gain a universal importance because he recorded them honestly in a tribute to the folly of youth. Susan Wickstrom Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, 396 pages, $25) THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE OF Do yourself a favor--crack open this packet of wire-tight stories by the godfather of hard-boiled prose and head down to Portland's Union Station. The old rail station's noir elegance, AmTrak's mod new trains and the mixed bag of wanderers from San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and points in between match the restless energy of these pulp crime masterpieces. This collection gathers stories from Hammett's 1920s glory run with Black Mask magazine, the cheap digest that served as the modern American crime story's primary R&D lab. Now nearly 80 years old, the population of country killers and urban "roughnecks with manicures" described in these tales could be lifted from today's raffish cast of street characters. Although novels like the bitter labor-war epic Red Harvest and the landmark Maltese Falcon contain his finest moments, Nightmare Town's clutch of rock-ribbed action slices testifies to Hammett's contribution to the national tongue. While Hemingway was busy stripping it down for the high-minded literary set, Hammett went to the gutter to invent the terse, switchblade style Raymond Chandler would later grind to a cool, razor-clean edge. Hammett birthed distinctly American heroes, gimlet-eyed veterans of the gritty streets of San Fran, Butte and New York. His primary creations, the Falcon's Sam Spade and the nameless Continental Op, dominate Nightmare Town. Spade, an urbane San Franciscan constantly trying to score with his secretaries, nonetheless carries ice in his veins--in "They Can Only Hang You Once," he sets up a corrupt butler's murder in order to finger the perpetrator of another crime. The Op, on the other hand, has seen too much to carry malice toward anyone. The consummate hired gun, he hangs above the action with the detachment of a streetwise saint. With their contrasting M.O.'s, these detectives pry the lid off a society riven with ceaseless violence, corruption and tainted passion--a milieu that leaves their creator's timeless fiction ready for the 21st century. Zach Dundas - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published October 13, 1999