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Gil Brewer chose a great noir title for his debut novel, but the title perhaps tips his hand too much. Needless to say, readers will not be surprised to discover that the novel's female lead is not a very nice person--just as the novel's first-person narrator should also not have been surprised. As her evil unfolds around him, yet he continues to love her, he protests that you cannot understand his behavior unless you have walked in his shoes, etc., etc., but his protestations are not especially convincing. On the whole, not a bad example of the noir genre, but not an especially memorable one, either. Grade: C
The Lady in the Lake . . . in which we learn that . . . Raymond Chandler has bills to pay. This book features the inept over-plotting of Farewell, My Lovely but without that (superior) novel's weight of hard-bitten gravitas. The weakest of the first four Philip Marlowe novels. Grade: C
There is not much to recommend this book. A partial list of problems: It muddles around extensively in Irish history and politics without saying much of interest. Its plot is first pedestrian and then worse when ***SPOILER ALERT*** it succumbs to the Hollywood cliché of the bad guys kidnapping our hero's daughter. The dialogue is third-rate Raymond Chandler ("If you could major in trouble, you'd have a Ph.D.!"). And, for a novel published in 1983, the female characters are remarkably two-dimensional, even for this genre. Park your Hard Case Crime dollars elsewhere. Grade: F
This highly collectible paperback from 1954 (a decent copy runs $300+) was given a primitive reissue by Gryphon Books in 2004. In the reissue, Gary Lovisi hails Sin Pit as a forgotten noir masterpiece, and he's more or less right. My only gripe is that the novel is so lean that sometimes it reads more like an outline for the book than the actual thing. But one could just as easily count this is a virture: Hardly a word is wasted in Sin Pit, and it hits all the right noir notes along the way--even if it doesn't hold some of them for very long. This was the only novel written by Paul S. Meskil, who wrote a brief afterword for the 2004 reprint. In it, he writes, "My original title was 'Blood Lust' and they changed that title without my knowledge. I also originally wrote the book in the first person." In fact, Blood Lust is a much better title for the book. Hard Case Crime would do well to give this book a proper reissue with its original title restored. As for narrative point of view, Meskil's novel was published in first person, so his comment on this point simply leaves me puzzled. Perhaps he originally wrote the book in third person? Grade: A-
Big City Girl is not a particularly accurate title for this book, and the cover illustration and tag ("Joy didn't belong in the hill country . . . but there she was") are rather misleading, too. Yes, Joy used to live in Houston and now she lives in the Texas sticks, but she does not spend the novel sexually tormenting the yokels, as the book's cover would have you believe. No doubt all of this was an effort to capitalize on the million-selling success of Charles Williams' debut novel, Hill Girl. In any case, Big City Girl, his second novel, is a clear step forward artistically from its predecessor. Though both novels mine the literary landscape of Erskine Caldwell, Hill Girl is concerned primarily with Caldwellian sexual titillation while Big City Girl moves closer to the world of criminal noir. Well executed and well worth seeking out. Grade: B
The underbelly of Los Angeles never comes alive in this novel as it does in Farewell, My Lovely, but the plot is less frenetic and more comprehensible. The real attraction, Philip Marlowe as world-weary, wisecracking knight errant, is in equally fine form in both books. Grade: A-
David Goodis is commonly ranked in the top tier of noir novelists, and The Moon in the Gutter is commonly ranked among his best work. One recent example: in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007), Barry Forshaw cites The Moon in the Gutter as his representative Goodis text in arguing that, of all the noir novelists, "Goodis comes the closest to the existential angst of Camus and Sartre." I wish I could see it, but I can't. The main thing I see in The Moon in the Gutter is bad writing. The lesser problem is that Goodis' prose is often painful to read--he strings together limp, cliché-ridden sentences as if he does not remember what his previous sentence was or have any idea what his next sentence will be. The greater problem is that his characters seem to behave as they do because they are in a noir novel and not for other discernible reasons. To Goodis' credit, he does take a valiant stab at noir profundity in the novel's last chapter, but the rest of the book is not there to back it up. In sum, a major disappointment. Grade: D+
A note to noir enthusiasts: Fans of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? should not miss Pamela Colloff's essay "A Kiss Before Dying," which has everything to do with McCoy's novel even though it has nothing to do with a marathon dance contest.
Farewell, My Lovely reminded me of Cornell Woolrich in that Raymond Chandler's plot is at least as ridiculous as the plot of any (famously ridiculous) Woolrich novel. What is remarkable is how differently Chandler and Woolrich deal with their own absurdities. The Woolrich strategy is to build a novel whose narrative drive is so intense that readers (hopefully) never notice the plot's defects. The Chandler strategy is just the opposite: His characters spend much of the novel sitting around and trying to puzzle out a plot that ultimately makes no sense. As far as plots go, then, Woolrich may be a more satisfying reading experience, but this is not say that Woolrich's novels are necessarily better than Chandler's. For Chandler, plot is secondary to the careful craft of his prose style and the development of Philip Marlowe's character--both of which make for rewarding reading. Grade: B
One problem with contemporary noir is that the freedom to curse openly and describe sex explicitly can make writers lazy. In The Last Quarry, for example, there is nothing even remotely sexy about it when Quarry pauses to describe the nipple measurements of the book's two female characters, and the actual sex scenes read like stale Penthouse Forum. This book is far from the worst that Hard Case Crime has published (see Stephen King for that), but noir writers should at least aspire to be Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson or [insert name of great noir writer of your choice here], even if they can't quite pull it off. The saying, I believe, is that your reach must exceed your grasp, etc., etc. Grade: D+
In Gil Brewer's fifth novel, he moves beyond the dated titillation that dominates much of his earlier work. A noir Everyman, his pregnant wife on the verge of labor, finds his fate accidentally entangled with that of a psychopath. The less you know about the plot, the better--this is a creepy classic. Read it, and the word "pal" will never sound the same to you again. Grade: A
Straight Cut is narrated by Tracy, a freelance film editor with a fondness for Kierkegaard. Intellectualism is not uncommon in noir fiction, and when it is done well, it can enhance a narrative with an added vein of dark poetry. In the case of Straight Cut, however, the narrator's philosophizing serves only to make a tedious narrative even more tedious. Tracy, who is at least not UN-likeable, is invovled in a love triangle (and other things) with his self-absorbed ex-wife Lauren and his creepy sometimes-best friend Kevin. As the narrative progresses--and it progresses SLOWLY--it is difficult to fathom why Tracy would ever have wanted anything to do with either one of them. Most interesting part of the book: the extended descriptions of the techincal aspects of film cutting and editing. Grade: F+
Million-selling debut novel from noir giant Charles Williams. This story of alcoholism and unbridled sexuality, which was scandalous to many in 1951, seems mighty tame today. More so than most Gold Medal paperbacks of the 1950s, this one is a period piece. Grade: C
The only redeeming feature of Stephen King's disastrous The Colorado Kid is its dedication page, which plugs Dan J. Marlowe's The Name of the Game Is Death, a noir classic featuring a sociopathic antihero of the Jim Thompson variety. The novel builds to a feverish ending which, to my mind, strains too much for effect--but this opinion may well find me in the minority. Grade: B+
Highly entertaining neo-noir from Hard Case Crime. Like a vintage Gold Medal PBO, but with curse words. Brisk and bleak with black humor. Grade: B+
A pro football player, forced into retirement by injury, tries blackmail as a new career, and noir ensues. Most of The Big Bite is top-tier Charles Williams, but the narrative is marred by its ending, which comes from a bit too far out in left field. Read A Touch of Death first--a similar Charles Williams novel executed with greater elegance, and easily available from Hard Case Crime. Grade: B
The latest country noir from Daniel Woodrell. Less the story of Ree Dolly than a portrait of her inbred Ozark community. This community is horribly memorable, but the novel's plot is ultimately too thin to sustain narrative tension. Grade: C
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-
Noirboiled by the numbers: A man has been shot by one of five friends, but he doesn't know which one, so he must track them down one at a time to find out whodunit. Throw in a good-looking woman, a plot twist or two, and there you go. The result, in this case, is noirboiled without any real sense of menace. Cornell Woolrich might have written Say It with Bullets if someone had given him a heavy dose of Prozac. Grade: C+
On rare, unpleasant occasions, I read a novel so bad that I feel angry while I am reading it, and this, unfortunately, was one of those occasions. This postmodern crime novel managed to sneak into the Hard Case Crime series because it was written by Stephen King, and anything with Stephen King's name on it will pay your bills. But this is postmodern-lite drivel at its worst--a novel whose point is the fact that it has no point because life sometimes has no discernible point (profound, right?)--and to top it off, the characters are precious and annoying. I certainly do not begrudge HCC paying its bills, but it concerns me that (for a long while, at least) The Colorado Kid had outsold all other HCC titles combined. I wonder, how many readers who might have gone on to read the HCC titles by Charles Williams, Gil Brewer, et al., were scared off by Stephen King? Grade: F-
