Sin for Me marked
the thudding end of Gil Brewer’s seventeen-year career as an author of noir
paperback originals (1951-1967). Conventional wisdom says that the 1950s were
Brewer’s artistic glory years and that his 1960s output was spotty at best.
More accurate is to say that Brewer was more prolific in the 1950s and
therefore wrote more good novels in that decade. (He wrote more stinkers in the
1950s, too.) Sin for Me has all the
elements of a top-tier Brewer novel patched together ineptly. A pair of femmes fatale and $400,000 in stolen
cash upend the life of Jesse Sunderland, an everyman realty agent whose
woodenly introspective first-person narration plays a major part in spoiling
the fun. Brewer justifies each turn in the narrative with a three-part formula:
(1) Jesse has an intuition about a character or an event; (2) Jesse immediately
decides that his intuition must be
true; (3) therefore Jesse’s intuition is true. At times, you can almost hear
Brewer whispering into Jesse’s ear, “Come on, man, we can make that word
count—I know we can!” An unfortunate end to a great run. Grade: D
Thursday, July 19, 2012
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