Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly

Devil Take the Blue Tail Fly (1948) is an odd, accomplished noir, almost as effective as Bardin’s earlier The Deadly Percheron (1946), but this time Bardin draws his inspiration not from the detective thriller but instead from the brooding “women’s pictures” of the post WW II period.

It begins its journey in the land of The Snake Pit, where our heroine, the gifted harpsichordist Ellen, waits for her husband Basil the conductor to bring her home from the mental hospital, but it soon takes a detour to the neighborhood of Gaslight as Ellen begins a feverish search for her harpsichord key, convinced Basil is hiding it from her. But soon Ellen encounters her old lover, the professional folksinger Jimmy Shad (his signature song is “The Blue Tail Fly”) and Bardin’s novel takes a darker, crazier turn into a funhouse featuring hallucinatory variations on a few feverish Joan Crawford and Bette Davis themes.

The book is not without flaws. For example, like many of the movies and books of the period, its psychologizing seems naive, its Freudianism outmoded. But in spite of all the twists and turns, all the craziness and flaws, the book is held together by two things: Bardin’s honest, deeply sympathetic portrayal of mental illness and his vivid writing about music as a craft and an inspiration.

One of the great sorrows of John Franklin Bardin’s life was that his mother, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was confined to a mental hospital and remained there until her death. He never forgot her, though, or her continual obsession with “going home,” which he used as an inspiration for both Percheron and Blue Tail Fly. His obvious sympathy with the character of Ellen makes this book more than a mere thriller.

The most important factor that unifies Devil Take the Blue Tail Fly, however, are the continual passages about the challenges and joys of music, for it is music that gives Ellen’s life its shape and meaning:

This was now, here and undeniable, an eternal instant. Irrevocable, irrefutable, it had a strength and a reality that defied oblivion. With it she was unique, just as it was unique; without it she ceased to exist, just as it was nothing. Rthis power to evoke music depended upon her reading of black marks on a ruled page, upon the dexterity of her fingers and her body’s sense of rhythm, upon her knowledge of the way it was, the quality of its sound. But she depended upon it too, for without it she did not know herself. Outside its orbit she was a bundle of sensations, a walking fear, an appetite, a lawless creature. But when this sound esited, she undertood, her life had meaning, order, morality. This was her end, she was its means.