Pulp Poem of the Week

He had greased black hair

parted in the middle

and a wax mustache;

wasn't tall and wasn't short;

and looked more like

his mother's side of the family,

but he didn't want anyone

to forget his father.

I made a bet with myself that

his parents never made it legal.

Earl Norman

Kill Me in Tokyo

1958

Book Review: Bill S. Ballinger, Portrait in Smoke (1950)

Cleverly and effectively constructed noir. Bill S. Ballinger's method is to juxtapose two narratives, one in first person and one in third, that come together at novel's end. In Portrait in Smoke, Danny April, a small-time bill collector, tells the story of how he becomes obsessed with a young woman named Krassy Almauniski and how he dedicates his life to finding her. His narrative (first person) alternates with Krassy's life story (third person), allowing Ballinger to dramatically contrast Danny's discoveries and theories and fantasies about Krassy with the truth about her life. A memorable read. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

"I am sorry for all men," she said.

"But the others I am sorry for and send away.

You I am sorry for and I let you come.

That's how I know I love you."

Eric Knight

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up

1938

Book Review: Earl Norman, Kill Me in Tokyo (1958)

Avoid Earl Norman's Kill Me in Tokyo unless, for some strange reason, you absolutely must learn about the origins of the first hard-boiled detective whose weapon of choice is karate. The detective in question, ex-GI Burns Bannion, comes to his profession by chance. He is drinking in a club one night when a drunk American businessman decides that he looks like a private detective and thrusts ¥100,000 upon him with instructions to find a woman named Mitsuko. Apparently having nothing better to do, Bannion takes the job, which he continues to pursue ineptly for no discernable reason even after his client turns up dead. Though this novel is without charm, wit, or intelligence, it does have the distinction of being the first place that I have seen the word "herm" (short for "hermaphrodite") used as a verb. Grade: F

Pulp Poem of the Week

He told about all the women

what he had knowed,

and all the saloons he'd been in,

and some of it was a lie,

'cause if all those saloons

was as swell as he said they was

they'd of throwed him out.

James M. Cain

"Pastorale"

1928

Book Review: Mickey Spillane, Dead Street (2007)

There are so many false notes in Dead Street that an explication of them all would be longer than the novel itself. Here is one of my favorites from early on: Our hero, ex-cop Jack Stang, has discovered that his fiancée, who supposedly died twenty years ago in an accident after being kidnapped by the mob, is actually alive. When Stang, a.k.a. "The Shooter," learns this remarkable news, he proclaims, "Somebody has got to pay for twenty lost years." Somebody has got to pay for all that lost time, Captain Stang? That's strange. Why didn't they have to pay back when you thought that all they had done was kill your fiancée? Grade: D-

Pulp Poem of the Week

She may

be a

feminist,

my boy,

but she has

startling

lapses.

John Dickson Carr

The Three Coffins

1935

Book Review: Eric Knight, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938)

Oddly episodic crime novel about a man who hops a freight train to California, chasing after the wife and son who have fled him. We meet numerous flakes in California, including a pair of women who somehow manage to turn a ridiculous Ponzi scheme (Ecanaanomics!) into a successful cross between a religious cult and a political movement. Part social satire, part noir, all from the writer who would later create Lassie. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

The night was like purple ink.

And it was as though the bottle

that held the ink

had been smashed against the sky

by some insurgent celestial accountant.

For heaven was pitted with its tiny,

twinkling particles of broken glass.

And there seemed to be no one

there to sweep them up.

God's office was closed for the night.

Cornell Woolrich

Fright

1950

Book Review: John Dickson Carr, The Three Coffins [a.k.a. The Hollow Man] (1935)

If you like traditional whodunits, you may well love this book. In my case, The Three Coffins served to remind me why I quit reading traditional whodunits.

The best part of the book is its famous twenty-seventh chapter, "The Locked-Room Lecture." This disquisition could be read with enjoyment apart from the rest of the novel. (Indeed, this is what I wish I had done myself.) Here, John Dickson Carr's detective-hero, Dr. Gideon Fell, gives an entertaining history and theory of locked-room mysteries. Dr. Fell, aware that he is participating in one of the more ridiculous examples in the history of an often ridiculous genre, argues, "A great part of our liking for detective fiction," he says, "is based on a liking for improbablity." But Dr. Fell speaks only for fans of certain types of mysteries (not including, obviously, me). In some cases, I do not mind improbable plots, but these stories must compensate with memorable characters. (See, for example, Sherlock Holmes.) In The Three Coffins, however, the characters are thin, and all they ever do is talk, trading their tedious theories back and forth. After the first chapter, all the action takes place off stage, and we are treated to page after page after page of talk, talk, talk. Who cares? Not me. Grade: D+

Top Ten Novels Reviewed in 2008

1. Gil Brewer, A Killer Is Loose (1954)
2. Charles Williams, Hell Hath No Fury [a.k.a. The Hot Spot] (1953)
3. Martin M. Goldsmith, Detour (1939)
4. Jason Starr, Tough Luck (2003)
5. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950)
6. Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1941)
7. P. J. Wolfson, Bodies Are Dust (1931)
8. Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, Bust (2006)
9. Charles Williams, Big City Girl (1951)
10. Gil Brewer, Hell’s Our Destination (1953)

Pulp Poem of the Week

He was disturbed,

still trembling, still vibrating

with the throes of the crisis,

but he was the master;

the animal was downed,

was cowed for this time,

at least.

But for all that, the brute

was there. Long dormant,

it was now at last alive,

awake. From now on he

would feel its presence continually;

would feel it tugging at its chain,

watching its opportunity.

Frank Norris
McTeague
1899

Pulp Poem of the Week

It would be fun
to cut Katsu,
to see what it felt like
to kill with a knife.
He'd already shot
somebody today;
if he strangled Kyle afterward
it would be like hitting
the murder trifecta.

Ken Bruen & Jason Starr
Slide
2007

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.

Pulp Poem of the Week

She spoke broken, halting English,
but since I spoke Thai better
than she spoke my native tongue
we conversed in her language.
Though for the most part
we'd used body Thai,
which is something like body English
but more passionate.

William Knoles
Jade Brothel
1961

Book Review: William Knoles, Jade Brothel (1961)

Background: I became interested in William Knoles (a.k.a. Clyde Allison) as a result of reading Feral House's Sin-a-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties. Earl Kemp, famed editor of sex paperbacks, claims that Knoles "was the best writer I ever worked with" (putting him above Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block) and that Greenleaf house editors took turns with him because "everyone wanted to be Clyde Allison's editor." But total trash is total trash, right? We'll see. I bought a random Clyde Allison novel for a song on eBay to see what it is like.

Review: Jade Brothel is the story of Dave Owens, a thoroughly loathesome American living in Thailand. Owens will do anything, legal or not, to earn a buck, and in his spare time, if he is otherwise unable to find a sex partner, his visits the brothel that he owns. But this book is not about the brothel, its title be damned. Rather, the main plot centers around Owens getting into the movie business with a Hollywood refugee named Jaybee, whom Owens plans eventually to kill in the name of more money. If Knoles had written this novel for Gold Medal, it might have been pretty good, but the requirements of the sleaze paperback formula make that almost impossible. And it's not just that the sex scenes are too many or too long or too forumulaic--it's also the repulsive pride that Dave Owens takes in narrating his conquests, which makes the sex scenes repulsive, too. But at least ***SPOILER ALERT*** it was nice at the end of the book when he got chewed up by crocodiles. Grade: D

Pulp Poem of the Week

I'm not hard to hire.

All you have to do is

offer me money.

Robert Terrall

Kill Now, Pay Later

1960

Book Review: Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, Slide (2007)

Even moreso than its predecessor, Bust, Slide succeeds or fails (depending on your point of view) as noir comedy. The novel's third-person narrative is filtered through the minds of half a dozen characters, all of whom are caricatures and only one of whom (police detective Joe Miscali) is not a blathering moron. The idiocy and the jokes (which are often one and the same) come in an unrelenting stream. Though I found Bust a more satisfying novel, especially in its plotting, I cannot deny that Slide was entertaining. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

I found it amazing

how many men,

when asked to supply

a photo of themselves

by a young woman

over the Internet,

responded by sending

a digital snapshot

of their penis.

Charles Ardai

Songs of Innocence

2007

Book Review: Jason Starr, Tough Luck (2003)

Mickey Prada is a throwback to the noir anti-heroes of old, a Seemingly Good Guy who gets in deeper and deeper after he makes one unfortunate decision, agreeing to place a bet with his bookie for a man who claims to be a member of the mob. As Mickey's life unravels, he makes more bad (and sometimes criminal) decisions, but he keeps reader sympathy because he is, after all, a Seemingly Good Guy. Jason Starr manages the affair with great skill and finishes with a closing line that is almost perfect. Grade: A-

Book Review: Robert Terrall, Kill Now, Pay Later (1960)

Private eye Ben Gates must restore his good name after he botches the simple job of guarding gifts at a wedding. As pleasant and lightweight as a tale of murder and blackmail can be. If you like your crime dark, skip it. Grade: C

Footnote: I must gripe about this hideous cover. Robert McGinnis did the painting for the original 1960 paperback, featuring a deformed blonde who looked to be about nine feet tall with six feet of legs. For this reprint, Robert McGinnis was again hired for the job, and this time he painted a redhead who looks even more deformed than the original blonde. If ever a man thumbed his nose at a second chance, this is it!

Pulp Poem of the Week

Roger knew well enough

what he wanted to do,

but he wasn't certain if

he would know just how

to go about it.

In the end

that didn't matter,

however,

because Grace did.

James McKimmey

The Perfect Victim

1958

Book Review: Gil Brewer, —And the Girl Screamed (1956)

Cliff Reddick. Cliff Reddick. Cliff Reddick. As I was reading this book, I kept having to repeat the narrator's name to myself so that I would not forget it. Though this behavior is generally not the hallmark of a memorable book, —And the Girl Screamed is by no means terrible. On the whole, reading it was rather like watching Gil Brewer cash a check. He's doing his job, going through the motions to earn his pay. Cliff Reddick is an ex-policeman who has been implicated in a murder that he had nothing to do with, other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus, he works to solve the murder while trying to evade the police who want to arrest him for it. To my mind, this is lazy plotting: The book would have been much more interesting if Reddick had actually been connected to the victim in some way, rather than just happening upon the murder scene. As the plot progresses, Brewer mixes in some 1950s hand-wringing about the rise of juvenile delinquency, and then he wraps things up and heads to the bank. For diehards only. Grade: C-

Pulp Poem of the Week

They said the leg was going

to be as good as ever,

but it wasn't.

You could see that by

the end of the first week

of practice.

I couldn't pivot and

swing fast enough to

go with the play even

when I saw it coming,

and they ran through me

like B-girls through

a sailor's bank-roll.

Charles Williams

"The Big Bite"

1956

Books Review: Richard Aleas, Songs of Innocence (2007)

Richard Aleas (or Charles Ardai, if you prefer) is the inverse of Raymond Chandler: whereas Chandler was terrible with plotting while creating unforgettable characters, Aleas crafts his plots with great care while creating easily forgettable characters. As a creation, John Blake, the noir hero of Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence, is little more than the sum of the problems that he encounters (and creates for himself). He's not particularly smart, not particularly witty, has no interesting hobbies, does not smoke a calabash pipe or wear a deerstalker cap. Thus, we are left with the noir-whodunit plots. My experience with both Aleas novels is that if you think much at all while you are reading, then the books' alleged surprises are not very surprising, so I am left with the pleasure of having my suspicions confirmed, which is, of course, a lesser pleasure than being surprised. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

As he took his woman,

the fire was solely his own fire

and there was the sordid and dismal feeling,

and finally the downright horrible feeling,

of being alone in the bed.

David Goodis

Cassidy's Girl

1951

Pulp Poem of the Week

The ghosts

of sad, cheap souls

live on

in sad, cheap furniture.

Ryu Murakami

In the Miso Soup

1997

(translated by Ralph McCarthy)

Pulp Poem of the Week

She was as beautiful

as only a woman

made for dirt can be.

P. J. Wolfson

Bodies Are Dust

1931

Pulp Poem of the Week

Money is no fun

to go to bed with.

Gardner F. Fox

Witness This Woman

1959

Book Review: James McKimmey, The Perfect Victim (1958)

James McKimmey's debut centers around the murder of a young woman in a small town. Townsfolk adored the victim, Grace, as a sort of tramp-with-a-heart-of-gold, and they are predisposed to accept the circumstantial evidence that points to a stranger--traveling salesman Al Jackson--as her killer. Jackson is a two-dimensional character (dimension #1: he's lecherous; dimension #2: he's a drunk), and the residents of Willow Creek are mostly small-town clichés. The novel's most interesting character is Buggie Alstair, who is a fraternity brother of a local boy and also a budding psychopath. On the whole, The Perfect Victim is sort of a tepid cross between Jim Thompson and Our Town. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

She gave me a smile

I could feel

in my hip pocket.

Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely
1940