Pulp Poem of the Week

The guilt that separates
man from insects
is not wider than that which severs
the polluted from the chase
among women.

     Charles Brockden Brown
     Wieland; or The Transformation
     1798

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Jimmy the Kid (1974)

As brilliant as it is self-indulgent, the third Dortmunder novel will delight Westlake fans in general and Parker fans in particular. If you already know anything about Jimmy the Kid, then you already know too much. Read it before you learn more. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

it was one thing
to fill four pages
of stupid questions
with on-the-spot lies,
and another thing
to remember
all those lies
ten minutes later

          Richard Stark
          Butcher’s Moon
          1974

Pulp Poem of the Week

We weren’t—

and then we were.

     Elliott Chaze

     Black Wings Has My Angel

     1953

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Bank Shot (1972)

In the second Dortmunder novel, Dortmunder steals a bank, and the results are consistently entertaining. The only real flaw in the developing Dortmunder formula is that Westlake has difficulty resisting broad comedy, as when Dortmunder and his crew are closed in the back of a truck with an insidiously bad smell, and will they vomit or won’t they? I imagine that I will keep reading the Dortmunder series until I reach the first fart joke. After that, I may have to stop. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

She climbed to her feet,
watching me warily and
trying to back away.
I said nothing, and
merely slapped at her again,
feeling a little sick at my stomach.
She was about eighteen.
But it had to be done.
This was the method
they’d left us.

     Charles Williams
     Talk of the Town
     1958

Book Review: James McKimmey, Cornered! (1960)

James McKimmey was in almost the right place at almost the right time to be counted as one the great writers of noir’s greatest decade, the 1950s. Had he published his first book with Gold Medal in 1951 (as opposed to first appearing with Dell in 1958), McKimmey would be mentioned along with the likes of Charles Williams and Gil Brewer as one of the era’s best, and more than one of his novels (1962’s Squeeze Play) would have come back into print by now. The upside to this, however, is that McKimmey’s OOP books are not exorbitantly expensive, given that they still fly below most readers’ radar. Cornered!, from 1960, is well worth seeking out. The plot centers around Ann Burley, an attractive young woman who provided eye-witness testimony in a California murder trial and since then has improvised her own less-than-ideal witness protection program in small-town middle America. The novel gets off to a fast start when a pair of hoods, who are getting close to finding her, believe that they have been spotted by law enforcement at a local gas station. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

Now that bust-line architecture
has become a basic industry,
like steel and heavy construction,
all the old pleasant conjectures
are a waste of time
and you never believe anything
till the lab reports are in.

     Charles Williams
     Girl Out Back
     1958

Book Review: Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or The Transformation (1798)

An historically important mess is still a mess. Sometimes cited as an early antecedent to noir—but then again, so is Sophocles. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

fifteen dollars for a broken jaw,
thirty for a fractured pelvis, and a
hundred for the complete job

     David Goodis
     “Professional Man”
     1953 

Pulp Poem of the Week

Laugh boys laugh
A few years more and we’ll be dead
And new faces will come and cackle in this place
Laugh boys laugh
For a heavy doom is awaiting you

     Leo Lidz
     “A Happy Thought?”
     date unknown

Book Review: Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)

In 2013, Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel reads like a compendium of noir clichés. This is a partial list: our narrator/antihero—a WWII vet with a permanent head injury who has a mutually abusive relationship with a hooker turned femme fatale—is straight out of Jim Thompson; the armored car heist could come from Richard Stark; the sadistic smalltown cops might have wandered in from Cornell Woolrich; and the novel’s intentionally telegraphed sense of doom could be channeled from David Goodis or Gil Brewer or any of a dozen other Gold Medal novelists. But here’s the thing: Black Wings Has My Angel was published in 1953, before these things had become noir clichés (and when Richard Stark was still nine years away from publishing his first book). Thus, Elliott Chaze did something truly remarkable: He surveyed the world of noir, which was just entering its greatest decade; he discerned those things that made it the blackest; and he blended them into his only noir novel. And then he walked away. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

MrS Cob     If you are aS smart
aS you think you are youll
Stop meddling in other peoples
affaires pronto and take a
hint from peopl that Shoot
straight. go back to Europe
and stay there We give you
ONE week to Clear out.After
that the 1st warning is
ACID throw in your face but
next time its DIE.
     
     Norman Klein
     No! No! The Woman!
     1932

Book Review: Charles Williams, Girl Out Back (1958)

Barney Godwin, a typical noir Everyman, discovers that a local swamp rat has lucked into the proceeds of an infamous back robbery, and he schemes to make the money his own. Girl Out Back should have been better, but author Charles Williams makes little effort to explain the motivations of his first-person narrator, especially early in the novel, and he introduces major plot elements in a lazy hey-guess-what-I-just-remembered fashion. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

I could come in early
any afternoon
and drink her liquor
and give her a roll in the hay,
no questions asked,
no obligations and
no recriminations.
Not because it was me, either.
It was there for anyone
who was friendly,
no stranger,
and had clean fingernails.

     Howard Browne
     “Man in the Dark”
     1952 

Pulp Poem of the Week

It is well known
no one listens
in New York.

     Richard Stark
     The Black Ice Score
     1968

Pulp Poem of the Week

I’d trust Andy
alone with my sister
all night long,
if she didn’t have
more than
fifteen cents on her.

     Donald E. Westlake
     The Hot Rock
     1970

Book Note: Ronald E. Starklake, The Hot Black Ice Rock Score (1968-1970)

I decided to reread The Black Ice Score, a relatively crappy Parker novel, in the wake of having read the first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock. According to author Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock came about when a Parker novel went awry: Parker is anything but a comedic character, and Westlake found that he was writing Parker into a comedy. Thus, he rewrote the novel with a new protagonist, Dortmunder, and that novel became The Hot Rock. I repeated this oft-told story in my review of The Hot Rock, prompting a friend to ask what I made of the existence of The Black Ice Score, whose premise is eerily similar to The Hot Rock. So I decided to reread The Black Ice Score and think it over.

The Black Ice Score was first published in 1968; The Hot Rock was first published in 1970. Both novels are set in New York. Both novels center around factions from small African nations who compete for ownership of valuable jewels—an emerald and diamonds, respectively. In both novels, and African faction hires professional American criminals to wrest the jewel(s) from the competing faction. So what led Westlake to publish such similar novels so close together? If Westlake’s story of converting the botched Parker novel into the first Dortmunder novel is true, then this would seem to be the logical sequence of events:

1. Westlake begins writing a Parker novel, but he realizes that the tone is hopelessly wrong, so he stops.

2. Westlake starts the Parker novel over again, maintaining the proper tone this time, and the result is The Black Ice Score, published in 1968.

3. Westlake, a highly efficient professional writer, hates to waste anything. He still has the partially (how much?) completed manuscript from #1, and he wants to do something with it. Therefore, he reworks it into The Hot Rock, published in 1970.

Westlake probably thought it unlikely readers would notice (or care) about the similarities between Richard Stark’s The Black Ice Score and Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock, so why not? It’s hard to imagine, however, that he wasn’t asked about this at some point, so if anyone knows anything more, I would be delighted to hear it.

A footnote: For a Parker fan, the most remarkable moment in The Hot Rock comes in passing, when one of the professional American thieves, Alan Greenwood, mentions that his current assumed name is “Grofield.” Alan Grofield, of course, is one of Parker’s sometime partners, first appearing in The Score in 1964. So maybe when the abandoned Parker novel became The Hot Rock, Alan Grofield was transformed into Alan Greenwood? I didn’t pay attention to the initials of the other thieves in The Hot Rock, but perhaps they correspond to characters in the Parker novels as well?

Pulp Poem of the Week

he hit
the floor
like a sack
of guts

     Dave Zeltserman
     Fast Lane
     2000

Pulp Poem of the Week

I remember that
the fresh earth beside the grave was brown
     and wet,
and that
the black coffin was shiny in the sun.
I remember that
I did not cry, but just stood there,
even when the men with the spades went away,
and then, after that,
I do not remember all the things I did that day.

     Steve Fisher
     I Wake Up Screaming
     1941

Book Review: Richard Stark, Flashfire (2000)

After the Great Parker Hiatus, Ronald Starlake restarted the series with a sequence of linked titles: Comeback, Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, and Breakout. Of these five, only Breakout (one of my favorite Parker novels) is distinct in my mind; the others blur together, much as Starklake’s titles suggest that he intended. Thus, when the movie Parker was announced as an adaptation of Flashfire, I couldn’t exactly remember which novel that was, but I chose not to worry about it. I wanted to see the movie on its own terms, so I decided against a pre-screening Flashfire refresher course. Then I went to see Parker, and, much to my surprise, at no point during the movie could I remember anything about Flashfire. The experience was both perplexing and alarming: Is this really an adaptation of a novel that I have read? And, more urgently, am I slipping into some sort of dementia?

For me, the nicest thing about writing these reviews is that I can use them as crutch for remembering what I have read. Therefore, immediately after Parker I went to read my review of Flashfire, and I discovered, to my complete and utter relief and joy, that I had not read it! I had made this mistake because of those dastardly similar titles in combination with my mistaken belief that I owned all of the Parker novels, when in fact I owned all of them but Flashfire. When Flashfire came to the top of the list, I couldn’t read what I didn’t own, so I mistakenly read Firebreak instead. Never have I been happier to be old and easily confused! Only a few weeks ago, I finished the last Parker novel, Dirty Money, and I mourned. But then! lo! a miracle! A new Parker novel (to me, at least!) all but dropped from the heavens!

But what a strange circumstance for reading my (actual) last Parker novel, with Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez swimming around in my head. Not once while reading Flashfire did I see Jason Statham’s face, but Jennifer Lopez was Leslie Mackenzie. There was nothing I could do about that. Oh, well. The most significant effect that seeing Parker had on my reading of Flashfire is this: Flashfire became a remarkable demonstration that the power of the Parker novels is in the prose, not the plots. The plots, of course, are often brilliant, but while reading Flashfire it was easy to what the movie is missing. You get some of Starklake’s sociopathically stripped language in the dialogue, but where you need it most is in the action, which is precisely where Parker can’t give it to you. So, instead, they give you Parker hanging from a balcony with a knife stabbed completely through his hand—and it’s just not as good. Grade: B-

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock (1970)

This is less a review of the first Dortmunder novel than a first reaction to the existence of the Dortmunder series. When I finished the last of Donald E. Westlake’s twenty-four Parker novels, I turned to Dortmunder as a possible replacement in my reading program. As the well-known story goes, Westlake wrote the first Dortmunder novel when a Parker novel went awry, becoming too humorous to work as a vehicle for the sociopathically humorless Parker (though Parker does drop a few seemingly intentional one-liners in the later books of the series—a remarkable sign of growth in a generally static character). I love humor, but I love the humorless Parker more, so while I was reading The Hot Rock, I was wishing the whole time that it were a Parker novel. That’s just me. Dortmunder came as advertised: He’s a sad-sack Parker who moves through a world of absurdity rather than a world of menace. I often see the Dortmunder novels described as comic, but I would opt to describe The Hot Rock as silly. I enjoyed the silliness (given that silly Parker is better than no Parker), and as I make my way through the rest of the series, I will be interested to see if Westlake can ever manage any of the profundity with silly that he manages with menacing. To be sure, it’s a more difficult task. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

Excitement and
expectation and
her skill
finished him almost at once.
He lay startled and
humiliated and
enraged:
the boy who got to the movie
just as it was ending.

     Richard Stark/Darwyn Cooke
     The Hunter
     1962/2009

Book Review: Steve Fisher, I Wake Up Screaming (1941)

Steve Fisher wastes a truly memorable character, noir cop Ed Cornell, in this name-dropping Hollywood whodunit, which is amateurishly plotted and overrun with italics and exclamation points. When the excitement builds, you will know it for sure! Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

extra-legal careers
seldom attract
the type of men
which their successful
pursuit demands

     Jim Thompson
     The Golden Gizmo
     1954

Pulp Poem of the Week

I tried to give him
the finger,
but I think I was too tired
to lift my hand.

          Dave Zeltserman
          A Killer’s Essence
          2011

Book Review: Darwyn Cooke, The Hunter (2009)

Sometimes I react to a graphic novel by mumbling “I guess it was pretty good,” and this is one of those times. Having come to graphic novels too late in life, I often feel cut off from enjoying the art form, and, as a Parker fan, I have a hard time understanding why someone would work so hard at illustrating a detailed outline of a Parker novel, unless it’s to exploit a market of people who would never read a not-graphic Parker novel. This adaptation is well done (I guess), and I enjoyed seeing how Darwyn Cook chose to illustrate Parker himself. The page where Parker’s face first appears is quite arresting—he’s sort of a cross between Clark Kent and the Manhunt apeman. His face is, I think, too pretty, but this may well change with Parker’s plastic surgery. So, curious to see how the post-surgery Parker looks, I do plan on reading the next adaptation in the series (I guess). Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

I’m rich.
Who the hell wants
to be happy?

          Raymond Chandler
          The Long Goodbye
          1953 

Book Review: Richard Stark, Dirty Money (2008)

The final Parker novel, Dirty Money, is good in the ways that all Parker novels are good, but there is nothing otherwise remarkable about it. It picks up right where the previous Parker novel leaves off: Our antihero wants to retrieve the $2 million dollars that his gang left hidden at the end of Ask the Parrot. He wants this money even though he knows that it is marked and therefore useless in the United States. This is a desperate Parker, running low on cash and working without I.D. Thus, his larger goal in the novel is to become a fully functional Parker again, flush and not fearful of an ordinary traffic stop. When Parker achieves this goal, however, the victory feels unavoidably sad, and I’m not too noir to admit it: I felt choked up at the end, sentimental about the exit of a character whose great charm is that he never feels sentimental. Grade: B-

Top Ten Novels Reviewed in 2012

(list entries are linked to individual reviews)

1. Richard Stark, Breakout (2002)

2. Jim Thompson, The Criminal (1953)

3. Richard Stark, Butcher’s Moon (1974)

4. Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935)

5. Richard Stark, Nobody Runs Forever (2004)

6. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

7. Seicho Matsumoto, Pro Bono (1961)

8. David Goodis, Down There (1956)

9. Charles Williams, All the Way (1958)

10. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Book Review: Dave Zeltserman, A Killer's Essence (2011)

Dave Zeltserman’s A Killer’s Essence put me in mind of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notion of a Romance. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne explained, “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public.” At its core, A Killer’s Essence is a police procedural, which is to say, a Novel. In the Novel’s main plotline, NYC cop Stan Green grasps at threads to catch a serial killer. The evanescent flavor of the Marvelous is provided by Zachary Lynch, a witness to one of the killer’s crimes. Lynch is a semi-recluse with neurological damage that prevents him from seeing faces. Instead, he sees the essence of people’s souls, be they serial killers or cops. As always, Zeltserman gives readers what they expect from a crime novel—and then a little bit more. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

People who think
That yelling and screaming
Are the same thing

Have never screamed.

          David Rachels
          Verse Noir
          2010

Pulp Poem of the Week

Mme Ernestine Gapol,
49,
dwelling in Vanves,
on Avenue Gambetta,
committed suicide:
two bullets in the head.

          Félix Fénéon

          Novels in Three Lines

          1906

          (translated by Luc Sante)

Book Review: Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

In a 1945 letter, Raymond Chandler wrote that “it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words.” In 1947, he wrote that he was “fundamentally rather uninterested in plot” and that “the most durable thing in writing is style.” In 1953, Chandler showed that he meant it when he published The Long Goodbye, which was 47% longer than his previous Philip Marlowe novel, 1949’s The Little Sister. This extra 47% is almost all style—or, if you prefer, padding. If you agree with Chandler that “it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about,” then you will likely think that The Long Goodbye is his masterpiece. If you disagree, then you will likely find the book self-indulgent. I tend toward the latter camp. Marlowe is still Marlowe, but all the extra style gives him the chance for even more self-righteous speechifying than usual, rather as if he is pointing the way for John D. MacDonald to invent Travis McGee. In sum, I can read any page in The Long Goodbye with great pleasure, but there’s just too damn many of them. Grade: B 

Pulp Poem of the Week

When
there’s no place to hide,
stand
where you are.

     Richard Stark
     Ask the Parrot
     2006

Book Review: Kenzo Kitakata, City of Refuge (1982)

Twenty-one-year-old Koji Mizui’s life spins out of control: his girlfriend turns out to be a minor; he (sort of) loses his job after spending time in jail falsely arrested; he kills one man, and then another, in semi-self-defense. As a result, he ends up running from the mob and the police, travelling with an abandoned six-year-old to whom he becomes a surrogate father. In sum, noir crossed with a buddy movie crossed with Sesame Street. City of Refuge tries to be moving but ends up bland. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Well.
The first impression was of
a slender, stylish, well-put-together
woman in her forties,
but almost instantly
the impression changed.
She wasn’t slender;
she was bone thin,
and inside the stylish clothes
she walked with a graceless
jitteriness,
like someone whose medicine
had been cut off too soon.
Beneath the neat cowl of
well-groomed ash-blond hair,
her face was too thin,
too sharp-featured,
too deeply lined.
This could have
made her look haggard;
instead,
it made her look mean.
From the evidence,
what would have
attracted her husband
would have been
her father’s bank.

          Richard Stark
          Nobody Runs Forever
          2004