Pulp Poem of the Week

Guards knew when the blue devils had

seized the inmates of these cages.

They couldn't eat.

And there were times, too, when

even the guards couldn't eat.

Theodore Dreiser

An American Tragedy

1925

Book Review: Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup (1997)

In the Miso Soup reminded me quite a bit of Gil Brewer's classic A Killer Is Loose (1954). Both books are narrated by an Ordinary Guy whose fate becomes entangled with that of a Roaming Homicidal Maniac. Both Brewer and Ryu Murkami invite readers to partcipate in Ordinary Guy's attempts to make sense of Roaming Homicidal Maniac, though in the case of Murakami, there is just as much time spent with Roaming Homicidal Maniac trying to make sense of himself. And this leads to my major complaint about In the Miso Soup: I have no problem in theory with books that become increasingly ponderous as they progress, but in this case that pondorousness comes at the expense of nearly everything else. The climax of the novel, such as it is, consists of Roaming Homicidal Maniac blathering on about his life story for 25 pages or so. And that's not much of a climax. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

She pulled off her brassiere and

held it aloft. There were cheers,

and she turned from one side

to the other triumphantly.

Her breasts looked enormously

distorted in the moonlight,

their hard, clean crowns gleaming

and the shadows they cast hanging down

like ugly sinister forebodings

of the ruin age would bring

to their strength, their thrust.

David Karp

Hardman

1953

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-

Pulp Poem of the Week

If you want to know

the truth that much,

go out and commit

a crime yourself.

That's the only way

you'll ever know.

Asa Nonami

The Hunter

1996

(trans. by Juliet Winters Carpenter)

Book Review: Gardner F. Fox, Consider This Woman (1959)

Today Gardner F. Fox is remembered mostly as a prolific writer for DC Comics, but he was a prolific writer of fiction as well, including a number of titles for Gold Medal, mainly in the realm of historical fiction. Witness This Woman is a weak, though not incompetent, crime novel. The cover reads, "Was she faithless, a cheat? Kirwan didn't care--her testimony would make him the next District Attorney." Unfortunately, whoever wrote this cover copy seems not to have read the book. Assistant D.A. David Kirwin knows that he will have no trouble convicting the accused killer of Joe Farella, but the testimony of a woman has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, Kirwin may very well end up caring about more than just winning the case. The novel's plot centers around Kirwin's crisis of conscience: Is he willing to send a man to the electric chair if there is a 10% that the man is innocent? What if the conviction will put Kirwin on the fast-track to becoming governor? Regrettably, it is not worth reading the book to find out the answers to these questions. Grade: D

Pulp Poem of the Week

I looked down at myself.

It was like seeing

a technicolor rainbow shining

on a bushel basket full

of mangled bread dough.

Gil Brewer

The Squeeze

1955

Book Review: Natsuo Kirino, Real World (2006)

Near the end of Real World, a detective is talking to one of the book's teenaged protagonists. The detective speculates about what the teenagers may have done and why. The teenager replies, "Don't you think that's taking it a little too far?" The detective agrees and says, "I don't think even you all would do something that stupid." But the detective's speculations are absolutely right, and she sums up precisely what I was thinking as I read this book: what a bunch of stupid teenagers. So I felt my reaction was validated by the detective's comment while at the same time I naturally wondered if Kirino were making the point that some of us have gotten too old to recall just how stupid teenagers can be. If that is the case, then consider me reminded. Grade: C-

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: Jason Starr, Cold Caller (1997)

I always knew that telemarketers were sociopaths. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

He shook tooth powder into his mouth.

His grandmother could smell liquor

like a dry sourdough in the Klondike.

Patricia Highsmith

Strangers on a Train

1950

Pulp Poem of the Week

She leaned forward again

so quickly that

four things bobbed--

two of them earrings.

Robert Bloch

The Will to Kill

1954

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Red Scarf (1955)

Nothing revelatory here--just Gil Brewer doing his job and doing it well. The plot of The Red Scarf follows a classic noir template: the temptation of a good, decent, ordinary guy. The novel's backstory is that its narrator, Roy Nichols, is trying to make a go of running a motel with his wife, but forces are conspiring against them. The highway that was supposed to run past their motel may never get built, and their business is drying up. Roy travels to Chicago to ask his brother for a loan to save the motel. The brother refuses. As the novel begins, Roy is on his way home from Chicago to Florida. Soon financial temptation will be thrown in his path . . . and noir will ensue. Grade: B+

Book Review: David Goodis, Cassidy's Girl (1951)

David Goodis continues to disappoint me. Cassidy's Girl is the best of the three Goodis novels I have read this year. Indeed, it could have been the noir masterpiece that it strives to be (as could have The Moon in the Gutter), but in my reading Goodis simply does not have the writerly chops to pull it off.

Of course, one should not expect polished prose from any writer of paperback originals--writers like Goodis cranked out novels and stories as fast as they could roll blank sheets into their typewriters, and readers should accept that their writing will not always be deathless. But Goodis is less deathless than most, and the problems with his sometimes fumbling prose are brought into sharp relief by the modesty of his plots. To his credit, Goodis strives to build his books around nuanced characters, but to do this successfully requires a precision that he cannot muster. In Cassidy's Girl, he is more or less in control of his material until the final chapter, and then the wheels fly off. His halting attempts to describe moments of epiphanic discovery result in such nightmarish sentences as this:

The next thing in his mind was the start of another discovery, but before he could concentrate on it, his attention was drawn to Haney Kenrick.

Egad. And I would argue that the novel's plotting collapses in its final chapter as well, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will keep that rant to myself.

In the end, Goodis' failures might be seen as the result of unusually high ambition in an author of noir PBOs. Few authors of paperback originals attempted to portray their characters with the same emotional depth. By comparison, Jim Thompson is also not much of a prose stylist, but the wild depravity of his plots hardly gives readers a chance to notice. Goodis, however, in attempting more subtle effects, leaves his writing too naked for observation. Grade: C+

Book Review: Robert Bloch, The Will to Kill (1954)

The noir is willing but the plot is weak. This is the story of Tom Kendall, a veteran of the Korean War who is prone to blacking out and waking up next to women who have been killed in the manner of Jack the Ripper. Is Tom a murderer? Is he the new "ripper"? The truth comes out in a series of discoveries/revelations that will have you rolling your eyes until you find yourself looking at your own brain. Any novel that combines amnesia with Saucy Jack has no right to be this bad. Grade: F

Book Review: David Karp, Hardman (1953)

Hardman is more of a character study than a crime story, but there is never that much character to study. The title character, Jack Hardman, is an infamous, best-selling, hard-boiled writer whose demon is sadism. Readers are not meant to like Hardman. Perhaps they are meant to be intrigued or fascinated. But his character is too one-dimensional for that. He enters the book a sadistic punk, he leaves the book a sadistic punk, and there is nothing much interesting about him in between. Oddly, it is the characters who surround Hardman--his agent, his editor, his woman, his hangers-on, his reading public--who give this book its interest. Grade: C-

Pulp Poem of the Week

He tried to hate them because

they were enjoying themselves.

He collected some hate,

aimed it, and tossed it,

then knew right away

it was just a boomerang.

There was no one to hate

but himself.

David Goodis

The Wounded and the Slain

1955

Book Review: Asa Nonami, The Hunter (1996)

Bland Japanese police procedural featuring a wolf-dog trained to hunt human targets. In sum, a cross between Cornell Woolrich's Black Alibi and boredom. Grade: D+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Brandy, he thought.

Actually, it was

carbolic acid.

Thus Philibert Faroux,

of Noroy, Oise,

outlived his spree by

a mere two hours.

Félix Fénéon

Novels in Three Lines

1906

(translated by Luc Sante)

Book Review: Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950)

Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train gives only the barest idea what the original novel is like. While Hitchcock's film is a stylish (read: superficial) tale of good vs. evil, Patricia Highsmith's book is a complex psychological study of the evil that we are all (perhaps) capable of. Though Highsmith's characters and their motivations and behaviors are not always 100% convincing, and though in the end the plot takes a regrettable turn for the hackneyed, on the whole this novel triumphs on its merits. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

I sat up at the counter and

pretended to look the menu over

but I was watching Stella.

I was never so glad

to see anybody in my life.

There was something about her

that got me. She wasn't

all over you. She had

that cool aloofness--

luscious figure, soft skin.

I watched her fill

two bowls of cereal.

Marty Holland

Fallen Angel

1945

Book Review: Ken Bruen, American Skin (2006)

I wanted to like American Skin much more than I did. Its (black) heart is in the right place, but it badly needs a good editor. The plot develops largely in flashbacks prompted by the free associations of its characters, and these sometimes redundant intrusions prevent the plot from ever gaining the momentum that it should. Perhaps more annoying, though, is the way that the book is slavered in pop-culture references for the sake of pop-culture references. For example, one of the book's major characters is so obsessed with Tammy Wynette that he will brutalize anyone who dares to insult her. We are told that he became a fan of "Tammy" (he thinks of her by her first name, just as another character is on a first-name basis with Bruce Springsteen) while in prison, but that is pretty much all we are told to help us understand the significance of his obsession with her. As well, we are given little help in understanding the resonance of the many Tammy Wynette songs whose names are mentioned in passing. Of course, the problem may be that my pop-culture IQ is too low to appreciate what Ken Bruen is up to--but I doubt it. Grade: D+

Pulp Poem of the Week

It was a woman's gun,

a little pearl-handled automatic,

not as big as his hand

as he let it rest in his lap,

but there's no difference between

being killed with one of them

and with a .45 unless

it's prestige you're after.

Charles Williams

Hell Hath No Fury

1953

Book Review: George Axelrod, Blackmailer (1952)

Blackmailer's pleasantly convoluted plot cannot fully compensate for its forgettable cast of characters, particularly its narrator, publisher Dick Sherman. The great noir writers can make you root for criminals, but George Axelrod did not make me care one bit what happened to Dick Sherman--who isn't even a criminal. Part of the problem is that Axelrod has a tendency to lapse into screenwriting when he is writing a novel. If you write pages of dialog for a movie character, that movie character can be likable simply because a likable actor is reading his lines. Novel writers do not have this luxury, a fact which Axelrod seems sometimes to forget. Grade: C+

Book Review: David Goodis, The Wounded and the Slain (1955)

Bad things happen after a Yale graduate marries a hopelessly frigid woman. Thus, depending on your point of view, The Wounded and the Slain is a cautionary tale about either premarital abstinence or Ivy League schools (or maybe both). Grade: C

Book Review: Russell Hill, Robbie's Wife (2007)

This is one of those books that I like more having finished it than I did while I was reading it. The first 150 pages are slow, and I am not sure that they adequately prepare for the book's third act. But the more that I think about the flaws in this book, the less I am certain that they are flaws. For example, the book's narrator, Jack Stone, is an over-the-hill Hollywood screenwriter who takes a working holiday in Britain to revitalize his career. Occasionally in the novel, we see mediocre snippets from his screenplay-in-progress, and we see one long section, which is utterly incompetent. This long section is largely expository in a way that a professional screenwriter would never be. In other words, it looks like a screenplay written by someone who has never seen a screenplay. And readers are supposed to believe that this guy is a professional screenwriter? But Jack Stone is also a character in crisis, and the more that I think about his writing in the book, which he repeatedly proclaims to be "good" despite much evidence to the contrary, the more I think that it is an appropriate reflection of his psychological state. I know several folks whose opinions I respect who think that this is a great one . . . so I'm going to keep thinking about it. . . . Grade: B-

Pulp Poem of the Week

Morning sun stripes cell.

Five fingers feel my hard heart.

It hurts, hurts, like hell.

Charles Willeford

Miami Blues

1984

Book Review: Marty Holland, Blonde Baggage [a.k.a. Fallen Angel] (1945)

The set-up is classic noir: Anti-hero wanders into small California town, hooks up with femme fatale, plots to swindle local old maid (who, of course, is not actually that old) out of her recently inherited $10,000. From there the plot drifts a bit toward whodunit territory, and the resolution is too dues ex machina not to be disappointing. On the whole, your time will be better spent watching the Otto Preminger film of this novel (bearing the novel's original title, Fallen Angel), which is much more tightly plotted and much more satisfying. Grade: C

Book Review: Charles Williams, Hell Hath No Fury [a.k.a. The Hot Spot] (1953)

With his fourth novel, Charles Williams hits his stride. In Hell Hath No Fury, an Average Joe moves to a small town to work at a used car lot, and he happens to notice how easy it would be to rob the local bank. Women and noir ensue. This is a classic novel of its type, in which a sympathetic protagonist does rather unsympathetic things, but we root for him all the same as events spiral out of his control. In order to enjoy books of this sort, readers must grant writers a bit of latitude in the realm of plausibility; nevertheless, I do wish that Williams had done a little bit more to convince me that this particular Average Joe would jump at the chance to rob a bank. But this is a minor quibble with a classic. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

Her hair was falling over

her shoulders in snaky

curls. Her eye was all black,

and her breasts weren't drawn

up and pointing at me,

but soft, and spread out

in two big pink splotches.

She looked like the great

grandmother of every

whore in the world.

The devil got his

money's worth that night.

James M. Cain

The Postman Always Rings Twice

1934

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Squeeze (1955)

After writerly forays to Wyoming and France, with his ninth novel Gil Brewer gets back to his Florida roots. In The Squeeze, narrator Joe Maule is an average guy who racks up a gambling debt that he cannot pay. He owes to money to an underworld type named Victor Jarnigan, who gives him another way to get out of debt . . . or else. Top-tier Brewer, no frills. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Her voice faded off

into a sort of sad whisper,

like a mortician asking

for a down payment.

Raymond Chandler

The Little Sister

1949