Pulp Poem of the Week

These chickens of mine are lucky.
They don’t know
what’s coming their way.
They may end up on a table
but they don’t have the newspapers
to worry them to death first.

          Seymour Shubin
          Anyone’s My Name
          1953

Pulp Poem of the Week

Footsteps
on the stairs
and
muffled voices.

          Seymour Shubin
          Anyone’s My Name
          1953

Book Review: Seymour Shubin, Anyone's My Name (1953)

Seymour Shubin began his writing career as an associate editor for a true-crime magazine, a background that he exploited in his debut novel, Anyone’s My Name. The novel’s narrator, Paul Weiler, is true-crime writer whose vocation greases his slippery slope into crime. Just as the novel’s title promises, Shubin milks the Everyman theme for every last drop of pathos, but with enough aplomb and cleverness to earn a spot in the canon of 1950s Noir Well Worth Seeking Out. Grade: A-

Book Review: Cornell Woolrich, Fright (1950)

Cornell Woolrich fans (myself included) are highly skilled at praising his strengths while discounting his weaknesses. Usually, this means reveling in the momentum of his plots while overlooking their inherent absurdities. Though I give Fright passing marks on the whole, its weaknesses are too great to ignore. Yes, the prose is overwrought, but the greater problem is that the book's protagonist, Prescott Marshall, is not a sympathetic character. I found him self-absorbed an unlikeable from the start, and his problems are problems of his own creation. He is not an innocent victim of the fates, as are many Woolrich heroes, and an unsympathetic Woolrich protagonist can make for tough reading. Grade: C+

Footnote: Fright makes an interesting pair with Seymour Shubin's Witness to Myself (Hard Case Crime, 2006), which covers a similar (but different!) noir landscape.

Book Review: Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

Upside: High literary noir. The respectable godfather of such disreputable godchildren as Seymour Shubin's Anyone's My Name and Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. Downside: Reading Dreiser is like watching a world-class sprinter run the wrong way up the world's fastest escalator. You know that, eventually, he's going to get to the top, but you can't stop wondering why he didn't take the stairs--or, even better, the right escalator. Grade: B

Book Review: Seymour Shubin, Witness to Myself (2006)

The first half of Witness to Myself is very good. The protagonist knows that, years ago, he assaulted a girl--but did he kill her? Seymour Shubin does a nice job of ratcheting up the narrative tension as we eventually learn the answer. The second half is substantially weaker, in part because the same sense of drama is never there. But the novel's most serious flaw is its bizarre POV: The story is narrated by the protagonist's cousin and childhood buddy, but he narrates as if he has access to the protagonist's every thought and sensory experience. In other words, it's as if the protagonist is narrating the novel--but he's not. As I was reading, I assumed that this arrangement would eventually have some kind of pay-off, but it never does. It's a weird choice by Shubin that serves only to distract. Grade: C-