Pulp Poem of the Week

Marvelous.
I’ve just committed
my first venal sin
and it feels
marvelous.

          P. J. Wolfson
          Is My Flesh of Brass?
          1934

Pulp Poem of the Week

Don’t ever get a girl
that’s gotta get in
by ten o’clock.
Eleven, yes,
but not ten.

          P. J. Wolfson
          Is My Flesh of Brass?
          1934

Pulp Poem of the Week

I still don’t know
what this is all about.
Please, will you stop
being a woman?

          P. J. Wolfson
          Is My Flesh of Brass?
          1934

Book Review: P. J. Wolfson, Is My Flesh of Brass? [a.k.a. The Flesh Baron] (1934)

How do you know that, deep down, an abortionist is a good guy? When he charters a plane in bad weather to fly across country to perform a late-term abortion on his fellow abortionist’s desperate underage ex-girlfriend. How do you know that, deep down, a writer is a good guy? When he dedicates his novel about abortionists to his wife. Pioneering noir from 1934. Grade: B

Author Photograph: P. J. Wolfson

P. J. Wolfson, author of Bodies Are Dust (one of the great early noirs), is the one in the yellow shirt with the blue stripe around the collar. Photograph posted here with the kind permission of Jon Wolfson.

Book Review: Erskine Caldwell, The Bastard (1929)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner warned of the writer who "labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands." In The Bastard, Erskine Caldwell writes of the glands. Viewed through the lens of noir history, Caldwell's debut novel seems a precursor to the episodic realism practiced by P. J. Wolfson and Don Tracy in their novels of the early 1930s, but Caldwell's characters are, if anything, even more unrepentantly savage. Perhaps Gene Morgan, The Bastard's title character, is meant to have our sympathy, yet he thinks nothing of raping a young runaway who is being held in the local jail. In this world of the glands, such events are treated as so unremarkable that when we finally get a glimpse of Gene's heart, we cannot help but wonder if it is a gland in disguise. Noir doom is often driven by the glands. Grade: B+

Top Ten Novels Reviewed in 2008

1. Gil Brewer, A Killer Is Loose (1954)
2. Charles Williams, Hell Hath No Fury [a.k.a. The Hot Spot] (1953)
3. Martin M. Goldsmith, Detour (1939)
4. Jason Starr, Tough Luck (2003)
5. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950)
6. Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1941)
7. P. J. Wolfson, Bodies Are Dust (1931)
8. Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, Bust (2006)
9. Charles Williams, Big City Girl (1951)
10. Gil Brewer, Hell’s Our Destination (1953)

Pulp Poem of the Week

She was as beautiful

as only a woman

made for dirt can be.

P. J. Wolfson

Bodies Are Dust

1931

Book Review: P. J. Wolfson, Bodies Are Dust (1931)

Part of the story of police inspector Buck Safiotte. I say part of the story because Bodies Are Dust does not have a neat plot of the beginning-middle-end variety. The novel begins seemingly at random in the middle of Safiotte's sordid life--characters enter the story in a confusing, half-explained way--and most of what follows lacks any kind of moral center. Indeed, reading Bodies Are Dust made me feel unclean, which is no easy trick for a novel published 1931. And while the end of the book may not bring a full sense of closure, it serves as a fitting coda to the world that P. J. Wolfson portrays. Bodies Are Dust is not noir for the weak of spirit. It shines an ugly, messy light on an ugly, messy world. Grade: A-