Pulp Poem of the Week

Sometimes

it is good

for a man

to be drunk.

Dorothy B. Hughes

Ride the Pink Horse

1946

Book Review: John Farris, Baby Moll (1958)

Pete Mallory has cut his ties with the mob. He has a woman he loves, and they are engaged to be married. Pete is ready to live a normal life . . . that is, until his old boss blackmails him into doing one last job, etc., etc., etc. Competent but forgettable. As with quite a few Hard Case Crime reprints, it is difficult to figure why this one was deemed worthy of rescue from oblivion. Grade: C

Book Reivew: Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse (1946)

Sailor, a Chicago hood, finds the Sen, an ex-senator and his ex-employer, enjoying fiesta in a southwestern town. The Sen owes Sailor $1000 for a job, and Sailor is intent on collecting. Rich in atmosphere, glacial in pacing. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

She started a low

continuous moaning,

as though she had

just been branded.

James McKimmey

The Long Ride

1961

Book Review: Jim Thompson, Recoil (1953)

Doc Luther, a sleazy political horse-trader, pulls every available string to get Pat Cosgrove paroled into his custody. The strange thing is that Doc and Pat do not know one another--so why does Doc want Pat out of prison? Why does he get him a job, buy him clothes and a car, and throw women in his path? In a genre that often strains credulity, I found the answers to these and other questions to be remarkably inane and unsatisfying. And more remarkably, perhaps, Jim Thompson managed to bore me fairly steadily. A disappointment to be sure. Grade: D

Book Review: James McKimmey, The Long Ride (1961)

The Long Ride has its share of dark, violent moments and sad, tragic characters, but its overall tone nevertheless manages to be breezy and often even humorous. As with any great book, the less you know about the plot going in, the better, so, in only the most general way, here is what you get: the early chapters contain a bank robbery, and the rest of the novel follows a group of strangers as they carpool from the midwest to San Francisco. And of course the two are connected. A light noir classic. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

Did you ever stop

to figure that

there's all kinds

of ways of dying,

but only one way

of being dead?

Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me

1952

Book Review: Lionel White, Flight into Terror (1955)

I liked the first 30 pages of Flight into Terror well enough; I liked the last couple of pages, too. Unfortunately, I came close to hating the hundred or so pages in between. This bulk of the novel fell prey to one of my major noir peeves: plots that are driven by the completely irrational behavior of their protagonists. In this case, Dal Brandon is an ordinary guy who accidentally ends up with $100,000 that does not belong to him, and the people who want their money back kill Dal's wife. For no sane reason, Dal then decides to take the money and run. He does not care about the money, he says; rather, he is intent on finding his wife's killers and avenging her death. Lionel White might have made this believable if he had portrayed Dal as a devoted, loving husband, but the opposite is true. Not only does Dal not love his (late) wife, but at the start of the novel he is planning to abandon her, having already purchased a one-way plane ticket to Chicago. White's portrayal of Brandon in this way wrecks the plot of this book. Grade: D+

Book Review: Jim Thompson, Cropper's Cabin (1952)

After his breakthrough fourth novel, The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson's fifth, Cropper's Cabin, feels like a variation on the proverbial sophomore slump. The novel's narrator, nineteen-year-old Tommy Carver, is poised to rise above his origins as a sharecropper's son: He's getting an education, and he's the secret beau of Donna Ontime, daughter of his father's wealthy landlord. Then, of course, things turn noirish, but the narrative never gains much momentum. On the whole, Cropper's Cabin is not a bad book, but there's certainly no harm in skipping it. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

I had to see you,

honey,

or I'd go crazy.

Hurry.

Gil Brewer

The Brat

1957

Book Review: Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (1952)

In The Killer Inside Me, which is perhaps the most important early entry in the genre of noir sociopathique, Jim Thompson figures out how to be Jim Thompson. The novel's narrator, simpleton sociopath sheriff Lou Ford, may be Thompson's most memorable and creepy creation. While Thompson's fourth novel may not be his best--it loses its way for a bit in the final act--The Killer Inside Me is still the logical place to begin reading one of the noir masters. Grade: A-

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Brat (1957)

If ever Gil Brewer were guilty of understatement, it was when he titled his twelfth novel. Calling Evis Helling a brat is something like calling Michelangelo a doodler. Evis is one of Brewer's most memorable femmes fatale. Lee Sullivan, The Brat's narrator, has no idea what he is getting himself into when marries Evis and takes her away from her home in the Florida swamp. His first clue comes when Evis announces that she has a plan for them to rob a bank together. . . . Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

It was an ancient house,

built in the late nineties

and constantly repaired

and restored since then.

There was nothing

but the look of money

wastefully squandered here--

a smell of money

even in the flower beds

where roses smelled like

sweaty fifty-cent pieces

instead of roses, and

the jasmine had the scent of

a disinfectant used in banks.

Harry Whittington

Hell Can Wait

1960

Book Review: Elmore Leonard, Mr. Majestyk (1974)

I picked this one up because it appeared on James Lee Burke's pleasantly idiosyncratic list of the all-time best mysteries, which was published recently in Parade magazine. (Alternate interpretation of idiosyncratic list: James Lee Burke has not read very many mysteries.) Says Burke: "It’s one of the best portrayals of professional criminals I have ever read and a beautiful accomplishment in terms of dialogue and style." Mr. Majestyk is a noirish novel of the Average Guy school: melon farmer Vincent Majestyk cares about nothing other than saving his crop, but then he runs afoul of a local mobster and discovers that harvest time becomes more complicated when somebody wants to kill you. Tight, fast-paced, recommended. Grade: B+

Book Review: Harry Whittington, Hell Can Wait (1960)

At first, Harry Whittington's Hell Can Wait reminded me of The Girl from Hateville, my most recent foray into Gil Brewer. Both novels involve a man on a mission in a small town where he is not welcome. In Brewer, the man wanted to find out the truth about the death of his father, the town banker who robbed the townsfolk blind. In Whittington, the man, Greg Morris, wants revenge on the drunk driver who killed his wife. Unfortunately for Morris, the drunk driver is the richest and most powerful man in the town (which is why he was able to beat the rap in the first place). The most important difference between the two novels is that while the Brewer was executed terribly, the Whittington is very good. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

You can label almost anybody

by finding out what time

they go to work in the morning.

Robert Bloch

The Scarf

1947

Book Review: Robert Bloch, The Scarf (1947)

While The Scarf is not the tour de force I had hoped for, it is nevertheless the best of the four Robert Bloch novels that I have read. The titular scarf belongs to narrator Dan Morley, an aspiring writer whose psychological problems, especially with women, are the result of his unhealthy boyhood relationship with Miss Frazer, his unmarried schoolteacher. The scarf is Morley's keepsake from his memorable last encounter with Miss Frazer, after which he ran away from home. The story follows Dan and his burgeoning writing career from Chicago to New York to Hollywood. My taste runs to the noir side of noir, and The Scarf was plenty dark enough for me, but I found Bloch's execution lacking, especially in the book's regrettably contrived dénouement. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

New York and Hollywood

is full of her, she is

everywhere you turn,

and when you have reached

the ripe age of thirty-six,

you have learned it is

useless to try to warn

her of the pitfalls.

Because nothing can daunt her--

nothing except time,

years of batting her pretty head

against too many disappointments,

and her firm white fanny

against too many mattresses.

Steve Fisher

No House Limit

1958

Book Review: Steve Fisher, No House Limit (1958)

There was one thing about No House Limit that bugged me and bugged me and bugged me such that it really interfered with my ability to enjoy the novel: the portrayal of the gambler Bello and his craps expertise. On the one hand, No House Limit presents itself as an insider's look at Vegas and crapshooting: most of the chapters begin with short tutorials about Vegas and/or craps, and in an afterward he wrote for this Hard Case Crime reprint, one of Steve Fisher's sons mentions the research that his father did for this book. But the portrayal of Bello playing craps is all wrong. Bello, we are told, is a legendary craps player with a betting system so mathematically complicated that onlookers are helpless to understand what he is doing. But this is nonsense. Saying that someone is a great craps player is like saying that someone is a great slot-machine player. In both games, the house always wins over the long haul. That's the point of casino games! So Bello has developed a complicated system of placing bets . . . that all favor the house! Fisher should have done more with the loaded dice angle (which does figure to some degree in Bello's success), and he should have left the idiocy alone. Grade: C

Book Review: James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (1936)

As lean as noir comes with pacing so relentless Cain seems to be daring you to notice that his razor-thin characters disappear when viewed from the side--and when you do notice, you don't care. Grade: A

Book Review: Jim Thompson, Nothing More Than Murder (1949)

With his third novel, Jim Thompson arrives in the world of noir, though he has not yet discovered his distinctively creepy voice. I wasn't sure what to make of Nothing More Than Murder's clumsy plotting as its chronology lurched artlessly around while its backstory came and went. If this were a third-person narrative, I would diagnose an evolving writer feeling his way through a new style of writing, but the narrative is written in the first person, so perhaps this clumsiness is an intentional reflection on its narrator. And perhaps, because this is Jim Thompson, I give him the benefit of the doubt. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

I had seen

so many houses burned down,

so many cars wrecked,

so man corpses

with blue holes in their temples,

so many awful things

that people had pulled

to crook the wheel,

that that stuff didn't seem real

to me any more.

If you don't understand that,

go to Monte Carlo

or some other place

where there's a big casino,

sit at a table,

and watch the face of the man

that spins the little ivory ball.

After you've watched it a while,

ask yourself how much

he would care

if you went out and

plugged yourself in the head.

His eyes might drop

when he heard the shot,

but it wouldn't be from worry

whether you lived or died.

It would be to make sure

you didn't leave

a bet on the table,

that he would have to cash

for your estate.

James M. Cain

Double Indemnity

1936

Book Review: W. R. Burnett, High Sierra (1940)

Part crime novel, part character study of a gangster in winter. The wooden dialogue is predictably quaint. The rambling plot feels surprisingly realistic. The aging gangster is unexpectedly affecting. All this, and a beautiful young blonde with a clubfoot. Grade: A-

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Somebody Owes Me Money (1969)

Lightweight, pleasant for a while, tedious in the end--and the author knows it. Near the conclusion of the novel, one of our heroes asks, "Do you know this is ridiculous?" And then later she complains, "You wouldn't get away with that in a mystery story." This is not cutesy metafictional commentary; this is an author who feels compelled to apologize. But Donald E. Westlake is author enough to know that in his line of writing, you don't revise a failure. If want to keep the money coming in, you type THE END and move on to the next one. Grade: D+

Pulp Poem of the Week

It don't take

much brains

to outsmart

a man who

trusts you.

Jim Thompson

Nothing More Than Murder

1949

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Girl from Hateville [a.k.a. The Angry Dream] (1957)

The Girl from Hateville (originally published in hardback as The Angry Dream) reads like the outline of a Gil Brewer novel--the outline of a bad Gil Brewer novel. The narrative is so thin that it often feels like there are paragraphs missing. In one paragraph, Al Harper, the novel's narrator, will be standing in his house, and in the next paragraph he will suddenly be in his car. Or, in the course of a conversation, a character will "repeat" something that no one has previously said. (It makes me wonder if pieces of text got lost in the move from hardback to paperback--not that the answer is particularly worth finding out.) But the big sin is all those missing paragraphs that are needed to make the behavior of Al Harper even remotely believable. Or to make the novel's ending a little bit less laughable. The premise in a nutshell: Al Harper returns to his hometown. Everyone hates him there because his father, who was the town banker, robbed everyone blind. Al's father (apparently) committed suicide after (supposedly) emptying more than $200,000 from the vault. Al wants to know the truth about his father, and of course there are a couple of good-looking women involved. In sum, conventional noir . . . that crashes and burns. Grade: F

Book Review: Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder (1946)

Jim Thompson's second novel is the oddly plotless chronicle of more than a decade with the Fargo family in the farm town of Verdon, Nebraska. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that this novel has a profusion of small plots, none of which stick around long enough to be deeply engaging. Not bad, but somehow I had expected a bit more thunder. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

What can a man do

when a girl

grabs him like that?

A man has to be

polite.

W. R. Burnett

High Sierra

1940

Book Review: Shepard Rifkin, The Murderer Vine (1970)

Mississippi Burning crossed with a detective novel crossed with a revenge novel crossed with stupidity. North meets South done with a nuance that makes My Cousin Vinny look like Proust. Dumbest of the dumb (spoiler follows!): Our New York private investigator has been hired to infiltrate Mississippi, to get proof that five rednecks have murdered three civil rights workers, and then to execute the rednecks. Our genius p.i. floats on top of an inflatable mattress beneath the swamp-side clubhouse of the rednecks. He has a tape recorder with him. Upon his arrival beneath the clubhouse, the rednecks immediately and spontaneously and unambiguously announce their guilt. They practically get down on their hands and knees and shout their confessions through the chinks in the floor. And then, if that isn't dumb enough, in the novel's final chapter. . . . Sheesh. Grade: D-

Pulp Poem of the Week

"Don't move," he said,

in a voice that was

forty percent gravel and

sixty percent inert materials.

Donald E. Westlake

Somebody Owes Me Money

1969

Book Review: Charlie Huston, The Shotgun Rule (2007)

The second half of Charlie Huston's dedication for The Shotgun Rule points to the subject of his novel: "To the kids who don't know any better. / The ones with the attitude problems. / What the hell are they thinking? / Man, believe me, they aren't. / That's the point. / We never do." In general, subjects who don't think (and idiot teenagers in particular) are a better subject for sociologists than novelists. And if the "point" of Huston's novel were nothing more than the fact that some kids never think, then it would be a waste of time. But even if the four kids at the center of The Shotgun Rule never really do think, they nevertheless achieve enough depth as characters--especially during the novel's extended climax--to make this a richer story than I had expected. Grade: B

Memo to Charlie Huston or his editor or his publisher or anyone in a position to fix a simple problem: Please fix the botched cultural reference on page 128. Face Dances is an album by The Who, not The Rolling Stones.

Book Review: Bill S. Ballinger, The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957)

The Bill S. Ballinger narrative gimmick: first-person chapters alternate with and play off against third-person chapters. This iteration of the gimmick, however, is less than inspired. The third-person chapters tell of the red-haired man and his wife on the run from the police. The first-person chapters are narrated by their police pursuer. Unfortunately (and unlike superior Ballinger novels), these chapters run in near chronological lockstep such that if they had been written as a single third-person narrative, the reader's experience would not be much different. But what really drags down the novel is its clichéd plotting: The police investigation is driven by the cop's unerring hunches, and the red-headed man has a sixth sense that unfailingly alerts him when he is in danger. If you've never read Ballinger before, start with Portrait in Smoke or The Tooth and the Nail instead. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

There was now only

the process of taking away.

He wondered if

it was like that with everyone,

and he decided that

it must be.

And he wondered how

they felt,

and reasoned that

they must feel

about as he.

That was all

there was to life:

a gift that was slowly

taken away from you.

Jim Thompson

Heed the Thunder

1946

Book Review: Jason Starr, Fake I.D. (2000)

I love Jason Starr, but Fake I.D. did not quite work for me. The cover of the Hard Case Crime reprint asks, "How far would you go to get what you want?," but I found it difficult to relate to (or feel sympathy for) the novel's protagonist, Tommy Russo, who is pretty much a pathetic creep right out of the gate. As well, I was not convinced by Tommy's character arc, either as a descent into some kind of psychosis or as the erratic behavior of a man with a metal plate in his head (which Tommy has). In the end, it's easy to see Fake I.D. as a dry run for Starr's far superior Tough Luck (2003). Grade: C+

Book Review: Robert Bloch, Shooting Star (1958) & Spiderweb (1954)

Truly inspired packaging from Hard Case Crime. This two-fer makes me misty-eyed for bygone days that I am too young to remember. Now if only the novels were better. . . . On a micro level, these books are well done. Robert Bloch has writerly chops to spare, and I enjoyed almost every page. But on a macro level, these books are completely forgettable. The protagonist of Shooting Star is Mark Clayburn, a small-time literary agent who, because he works in the true-crime field, also has a private investigator's license. This combination has interesting possibilities, but they go untapped. The literary agent fades mostly from view; the private investigator takes center stage; and Clayburn emerges as a super-low-cal Philip Marlowe wallowing in the muck of Hollywood. Also set in California, Spiderweb traffics at first in the noir-friendly universe of psychic charlatans but then veers into a fairly conventional blackmail story. In this realm, try William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley or Cornell Woolrich's Night Has a Thousand Eyes instead. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

He cursed us in a low,

steady, monotonous voice,

ripping his words

off back-alley fences,

off privy walls.

Robert Bloch

Spiderweb

1954

Book Review: Marvin H. Albert, The Chiselers (1953)

Detective Jerry Stone has taped evidence that will expose government ties to the mob in the anytown of Murbank, but he is gunned down in his driveway before he can deliver that evidence to the governor's special prosecutor. Soon thereafter, Stone's partner, Morgan Diamond, is beaten almost to death. Why is he left alive? The mob has plans for him--but then again, Diamond also has plans for the mob. Solid, fast-paced Gold Medal fare. Grade: B+

Book Review: John Lange [Michael Crichton], Zero Cool (1969)

Michael Crichton, posing as John Lange, novelizes a nonexistent Nicholas Cage movie. Grade: C

Book Review: John D. MacDonald, One Monday We Killed Them All (1961)

For me, a major disappointment. Perhaps my expectations were too high, as I have seen this novel raved about in several notable places, but I really had to work to get through it. I found its first half slow and ponderous, weighed down by lectures on American law enforcement . . . and our judicial system . . . and our penal system . . . and so on . . . lectures of the sort that I would expect to hear in a bland freshman-level sociology class. But the crowning disappointment, once the narrative quickens, is that the novel's title, One Monday We Killed Them All, is not an accurate description of the Monday in question, no matter how you interpret it. Ah, John D. MacDonald. At least we'll always have Soft Touch. Grade: C-

Pulp Poem of the Week

The lights were coming on,

twinkling in Glendale,

flickering over Forest Lawn,

sparkling along San Fernando Road.

Los Angeles, that gaudy old

whore of a city was putting on

her jewels for a big night.

Robert Bloch

Shooting Star

1958