Book Review: Gil Brewer, A Devil for O'Shaugnessy (1973)

(The following review does not contain spoilers; the plot element described below does not appear in the published version of A Devil for O'Shaugnessy.) In 1973, with his career in decline for more than a decade, Gil Brewer completed a new noir thriller, A Devil for O’Shaugnessy. A throwback, the novel would have fit as one of his lesser Gold Medal paperbacks of the late 1950s, memorable primarily for the appearance of a deranged pet monkey as a major character. Brewer’s agent submitted the manuscript to Coward, McCann, and the publisher sent detailed suggestions for revision, including the possibility that “there might be a neater ending in which Fisk and Miriam are killed together (in a chase scene, for example).” Brewer dutifully responded to the publisher’s criticisms, only to have his revision rejected outright. In their kiss-off letter, Coward, McCann made substantial (and legitimate) objections to aspects of the plot that they had implicitly endorsed previously. As well, they panned Brewer’s new ending, complaining that “the car chase, another cliché, seems an awfully familiar device. Haven’t we seen this already too many times before?” Feel Gil Brewer’s pain. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

Footsteps
on the stairs
and
muffled voices.

          Seymour Shubin
          Anyone’s My Name
          1953

Pulp Poem of the Week

Nobody gets
everything in this life.
You decide
your priorities and
make your choices.
I’d decided
long ago that
any cake I had
would be eaten.

          Donald E. Westlake
          Two Much!
          1975

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Nobody's Perfect (1977)

I liked the first 89% of Nobody’s Perfect well enough (statistic courtesy of my Kindle’s progress bar) but with 11% to go, Donald E. Westlake lost me. Too much, too silly, too busy, trying too hard. In Nobody’s Perfect, Dortmunder (a.k.a. Sad Sack Parker) has a robbery go unluckily wrong (surprise!) and as a result gets blackmailed into performing another robbery, which, of course, seems unlikely to go well. If you enjoy the Dortmunder formula, you will certainly enjoy Nobody’s Perfect, despite the fact that the book goes to hell at the end—which, given that this is Dortmunder, might actually be the most appropriate possible way for the book to go. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

He was dead.
Even with practice
he would never be
any deader.

          Howard Browne
          Halo in Blood
          1946

Pulp Poem of the Week

She said,
“I didn’t ask you
to wait for me.”

“I wasn’t waiting,”
he said.
“I just had
no place to go,
that’s all.”

     David Goodis
     Down There
     1956

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-

Pulp Poem of the Week

Never listen
to a stock tip from
a terminal case.

     Donald E. Westlake
     Bank Shot
     1972

Pulp Poem of the Week

He liked every part of it:
the black look of it,
the short snout of it,
the front sight that could
cut a man’s face like
the tip of a beer-can opener,
the heavy trigger guard,
the curving and rigid grip
of the butt.

     James McKimmey
     Cornered
     1960

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-