Pulp Poem of the Week

She was

as dry as

an invoice.

Èmile Zola

The Kill (La Curée)

1872

(translated by Brian Nelson)

Èmile Zola, The Kill [La Curée] (1872)

For those inclined to trace the origins of naturalistic crime fiction—a.k.a. noir—beyond Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), the next logical stop is French naturalist Èmile Zola. The Kill (La Curée), the second in Zola’s twenty-volume cycle Les Rougon-Marcquart, traffics in familiar noir themes of uncontrolled greed and lust. The novel begins in medias res as we are plunged into the tacky decadence of the nouveau riche of the Second Empire, and then rewinds to show how the environment of Paris created Aristide Saccard (greed) and his wife Renée (lust). The novel can be slow at times, as its subject is as much Paris itself as Saccard and Renée, but if your interest in noir is at all academic, The Kill is well worth your time. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

Everything she wore
must have had
strong seams.

Gil Brewer
“The Screamer”
1955

Pulp Poem of the Week

I felt too young.

I felt like a child

being bathed

by an evil nursemaid.

I felt that some

unspeakable thing

was coiling and vomiting

in her mind.

John D. MacDonald

The End of the Night

1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

Yamsaki Asami undid his belt,

then

plucked gently at his zipper

and

slowly pulled it down,

like

a surgeon opening an incision.

Ryu Murakami

Audition

1997

(translated by Ralph McCarthy)

Book Review: Richard Stark, The Sour Lemon Score (1969)

A solid Parker novel of the aftermath variety: A heist goes so sour that it resembles a lemon, and Parker is hellbent on getting his money back. The narrative makes one serious misstep early on: In a ludicrous sequence, a fellow career criminal drugs Parker and injects him with truth serum so that he can interrogate Parker to determine how much of a threat he poses. I mean, seriously? The man has no reason on earth not to kill Parker, plain and simple. Starklake tries too hard with the truth serum, but he is otherwise in fine form. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Whatever else she may lack,

which seems to be plenty,

the woman appears to have nerve.

Or maybe she hasn’t any nerves.

It is about the same thing.

Damon Runyon

“The Eternal Blonde”

1927

Book Review: John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night (1960)

Having recently read Weep for Me (1951), which John D. MacDonald identified as the worst of his early novels, I felt obligated to follow up by reading The End of the Night (1960), which was his favorite of the early books. The End of the Night chronicles the so-called Wolf Pack, three young men and a young woman who go on a cross-country crime spree. Given that JDM thought so highly of The End of the Night, I was expecting a great read. I did not stop to consider that there is a compelling reason for suspecting that JDM may not have been the best judge of his own work. To wit: Many readers, myself among them, find that JDM’s novels are aging poorly because of his habit of interjecting sociological lectures into his narratives, and these are precisely the sections of his books that JDM liked the best. Therefore, I should not have been surprised to find that The End of the Night is dominated by a pair of pretentious first-person narrators, both of whom are more interested in understanding the world than telling a story. Of course, this is not to say that noir fiction cannot be a vehicle for understanding the world—in fact, this is what distinguishes much of the best noir. But when JDM indulges his love of pontification, he fails to recognize that a well-told story can be not just a sufficient but a superior way of deepening readers’ understanding of the world. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

An old man dozed in the elevator,

on a ramshackle stool,

with a burst-out cushion under him.

His mouth was open,

his veined temples glistened in the weak light.

He wore a blue uniform that fitted him

the way a stall fits a horse.

Under that gray trousers with frayed cuffs,

white cotton socks and black kid shoes,

one of which was slit across a bunion.

On the stool he slept miserably,

waiting for a customer.

I went past him softly,

the clandestine air of the building prompting me,

found the fire door and pulled it open.

The stairs hadn’t been swept in a month.

Bums had slept on them, eaten on them,

left crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper,

matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocketbook.

In a shadowy angle against the scribbled wall

a pouched ring of pale rubber had fallen

and had not been disturbed.

A very nice building.

Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep

1939

Pulp Poem of the Week

There was the feeling

she would

spit on you.

There was the feeling

you wouldn't

care if she did.

Gil Brewer

Nude on Thin Ice

1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

Nobody’s

a professional

at people.

Richard Stark

The Black Ice Score

1968

Story Note: Susan Glaspell, "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917)

Spoiler alert! The following comments spoil much of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers.” If you want to read the story, you may do so here.

Though Susan Glaspell’s early noir “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) has been canonized in Tony Hillerman’s The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2001), it is not a mystery story in the conventional sense. Minnie Wright has murdered her husband. No one in the story believes her claim that she slept undisturbed next to him while someone strangled him with a rope, nor is the reader given any reason to doubt her guilt. The only mystery is why Minnie did it. (Significantly, the name “Minnie Wright” never appears in the story. Martha Hale, a neighbor, still thinks of her as Minnie Foster because Martha remembers her as she was before marriage. In all other instances, she is referred to as “Mrs. Wright,” symbolic of the appendage she became.)

The plot of the story proper describes a visit to the Wrights’ empty house as the sheriff (Peters) and the county attorney (Henderson) collect information for the prosecution of Minnie Wright. Peters and Henderson want to interview Martha Hale’s husband, Lewis, at the house, for it was he who discovered the murder. The day before, he had stopped by to see John Wright and was informed by Minnie that her husband was dead. Upstairs, Lewis found the body. The three men are accompanied on their errand by two women. The sheriff’s wife, whose name is given only as Mrs. Peters, is going to gather items that Minnie Wright wants in jail. When Mrs. Peters becomes nervous, she asks Martha Hale to come as well.

Martha feels sympathy for the accused from the outset. When her husband begins talking, she is concerned that he will “say unnecessary things that [will] just make things harder for Minnie Foster.” Thus, she disapproves when Lewis says that he “didn’t know as what [John’s] wife wanted made much difference to John” because this hints at a motive for the murder. Lewis does not follow up on this observation, however, because the attorney asks him to focus on the murder itself.

When the three men go upstairs to look at the murder scene, Martha and Mrs. Peters stay below, and this is when then real action of the story begins. Piecing together evidence that the men are oblivious to (“Nothing here but kitchen things,” says the sheriff), the women come to understand why Minnie Wright killed her husband. First, Martha notices a paper bag of flour only half emptied into a wooden bucket. Then she notices that the kitchen table has been only half cleaned. Then Mrs. Peters notices where Minnie seems to have lost her ability to sew, and she wonders, “What do you suppose she was so—nervous about?” The answer comes, literally and/or symbolically, when they find Minnie’s pet bird, its neck broken, wrapped in a piece of silk in her sewing basket. Earlier, Martha had observed that Minnie Foster was herself like a bird (“Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change”), and now the two women lock eyes “in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror.” Literally, the dead bird, along with a birdcage whose door has been forcibly broken, indicates that John killed his wife’s pet. Symbolically, the dead bird shows what marriage to John Foster did to the vibrant young Minnie Foster; as well, the manner of the bird’s death suggests the possibility of spousal abuse.

Though Martha and Mrs. Peters know little about the Wrights’ marriage, they know enough about the naturalistic weight of patriarchy to intuit the details that the dead bird suggests. From their perspective, if the men knew of the dead bird, it “would make certain the conviction” of Minnie Wright. Their sympathy is with Minnie, however, so they will not tell the men what they know. Commentary on the story tends to end here: As a jury, Martha and Mrs. Peters have united in support of their peer. But to stop here is to overlook what may be the story’s deepest irony: While Martha and Mrs. Peters believe that they have the power to prove Minnie’s guilt, they may well be wrong. Throughout the story, the men have treated Martha and Mrs. Peters with condescension bordering on contempt. Just as John Wright did not care what his wife wanted, it seems likely that the men would not take seriously the amateur detective work of the two women. The women’s confidence in their own power, when they may have no power at all, is classic noir.

Pulp Poem of the Week

I don’t know

why I'm in—

but I'm in it.

It keeps me

in butts and

I see the

country and

I don't have

to slave

over a desk.

I get places.

It's not a

pretty game,

and no guy

every wrote a

poem about it.

But it’s the

only hole

I fit in.

Frederick Nebel

“Rough Justice”

1930

Book Review: John D. MacDonald, Weep for Me (1951)

Weep for Me is one of two novels that Gold Medal let go out of print at John D. MacDonald’s request. (The other was 1963’s I Could Go on Singing.) So part of the exercise of reading it is trying to figure out why MacDonald disliked it so much. The set-up is standard Gold Medal fare: Narrator Kyle Cameron is a bank teller . . . actually, that’s probably all I need to tell you about the set-up . . . you know the rest. But the book takes a strange turn in its final act, and its ending is downright embarrassing—I don’t doubt that JDM hated it. He probably found much of its prose embarrassing too. Sample sentence: “They knew that the loins of this dark girl beside me were a trap that had closed on my soul” (98). But you might want to read it simply because JDM doesn’t want you to. Grade: C-

5 Quick Questions with Gerald So

Gerald So is founding editor of the poetry journal The Lineup: Poems on Crime. A distinguished poet in his own right, So holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Queens College/CUNY.

1. Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem,” which raises this question: Can a poem about crime be beautiful?

Crime repulses me, people assuming they have the right to hurt others. To write the honest reactions to crime The Lineup seeks, poets have to deal with hurt, fear, and other forces that would keep them silent. That act of bravery is what I find beautiful.

2. Can a crime poem achieve something that a crime story (or novel) cannot?

Yes. Fictional crime stories and novels are structurally bound to beginning, middle, and end. Any story must establish expectations and meet them. A poem about crime doesn’t have the limitations of fiction. It can spend more time evoking a moment and show most intimately what it means to the people involved.

3. Are there any crime novelists whose writings you find to be particularly poetic?

I’ll go with Hammett, Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Reed Farrel Coleman, and S. J. Rozan.

4. Do you think that The Lineup has attracted readers who otherwise would never have picked up a poetry journal?

I hope so. Crime fiction hooked me on fiction in general, and I hope poetry about crime hooks a new audience on poetry.

5. In your opinion, what’s the single best poem to have appeared in The Lineup?

It’s difficult for me to think of each poem individually after they’ve been published in an issue. I can tell you I like the flow of poems in each issue.

Pulp Poem of the Week

Yesterday many friends.

Today many enemies.

Yesterday you speak,

many listen.

Today you speak,

many laugh.

Erle Stanley Gardner

“Hell’s Kettle”

1930

Book Review: Gil Brewer, Nude on Thin Ice (1960)

In the opening pages of Nude on Thin Ice, you can hear the plot gears grind before Gil Brewer gets his machine in gear: Our noir anti-hero, Ken McCall, is summoned to console Nanette Schroeder, the widow of a recently deceased acquaintance. The acquaintance, Carl Schroeder, was a lecherous bastard who didn’t live long enough to spend his fortune. Ken heads to the Schroeder residence with dollar signs in his eyes, but he arrives to find that he is not the only one with designs on the dead man’s money. In the trajectory of Brewer’s career, Nude on Thin Ice is remarkable primarily for its heightened sexual content. Dating to his earliest days with Gold Medal, Brewer was forced to reign in the “perverse” sexual content of his writing, but by 1960 he had considerably more freedom. In Nude on Thin Ice, he doesn’t use that freedom tastefully, but in noir this is not necessarily a bad thing. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

You may

question

the ethics,

but the results

are good.

Poor morals

perhaps,

but good, sound,

common sense.

Carroll John Daly

“Three Gun Terry”

1923

5 Quick Questions with Ed Lynskey

Ed Lynskey is an accomplished poet, essayist, and novelist. His novels tend to the noir side. His most recent, Lake Charles, begins with its protagonist waking up one morning to find his girlfriend next to him in bed. Dead, of course.

1. What’s the first crime novel that you remember reading?

The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald or a John Jericho title by Hugh Pentecost.

2. Hammett or Chandler?

Chandler’s early work is my preference.

3. Gun, knife, blackjack, or hands?

Gun. I don’t like up close and personal.

4. Which noir novel have you read the most times?

The only title I can think of reading more than once is Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

5. What’s the best novel by Ed Lynskey?

That’s for the readers and critics to decide. I like Lake Charles, my new Appalachian noir because it took ten years for me to finish writing.

Pulp Poem of the Week

The men

with dirty faces

and calloused hands

said nothing.

David Goodis

The Blonde on the Street Corner

1954

Author Photograph: P. J. Wolfson

P. J. Wolfson, author of Bodies Are Dust (one of the great early noirs), is the one in the yellow shirt with the blue stripe around the collar. Photograph posted here with the kind permission of Jon Wolfson.

Pulp Poem of the Week

the face of a

Vassar undergraduate

smelling a

dead cat

Richard Stark

The Dame

1969

Book Review: Richard Stark, The Black Ice Score (1968)

More support for the International Parker Theorem: The more Parker gets involved in international intrigue, the less interesting he becomes. The best Parker books convince you that they take place in the real world of professional thieves. Those books that fall under the International Parker Theorem convince you that some of the Parker novels should have been left out of print. Grade: C-

Dispatch from the Gil Brewer Collection

I’m spending my spring break in Laramie, Wyoming, at the American Heritage Center working in the Gil Brewer Collection. A couple of tidbits folks might find interesting:

1. On November 26, 1956, Brewer signed a contract with Lion Books to write four novels for them. I have no idea why Brewer never actually wrote anything for them. I have not seen Lion mentioned anywhere in the Brewer papers other than on this contract.

2. On July 17, 1958, Brewer signed a contract with Tower Publications to write a book titled Backwoods Bikini under the pseudonym of Zack Holland. This is more exciting than the Lion business because I suppose it’s just barely possible this book is actually out there somewhere. As with the Lion contract, however, I have not seen this mentioned anywhere else in the Brewer papers, and a quick check of online sources has not turned up the existence of any such book. Nevertheless, I thought I should make everybody aware of it, just in case. (And if you’ve got a copy, shoot me an email, and I’ll tell you where to send it.)

Pulp Poem of the Week

I saw to it that

it happened

fast and clean.

It was something

like working

in a butcher shop,

only my job

pays better,

the hours

are shorter,

and there isn’t

the mess.

Max Allan Collins

Quarry [a.k.a. The Broker]

1976

Pulp Poem of the Week

Kill yourself
into a hole,
and the chances are
a time comes
when you have to
kill yourself out.

Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse
1929

Pulp Poem of the Week

If you could find

a nice circular saw

he'd put his neck

against it

just to make certain

it was sharp.

W. T. Ballard

Dealing Out Death

1948

Pulp Poem of the Week

The good guy

won.

The bad guy

lost.

The girl

didn’t do much of anything at all.

Sara Gran

Dope

2006

Book Review: William F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys: Masters of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (1985)

Stories included: “Three Gun Terry” (1923) by Carroll John Daly; “Bodies Piled Up” (1923) by Dashiell Hammett; “Hell’s Kettle” (1930) by Erle Stanley Gardner; “Sal the Dude” (1929) by Raoul Whitfield; “Rough Justice” (1930) by Frederick Nebel; “Frost Flies Alone” [original title: “Frost Rides Alone”] (1930) by Horace McCoy; “Gundown” [original title: “Murder Done in Blue”] (1933) by Paul Cain; and “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) by Raymond Chandler.

William F. Nolan gathers eight representative stories from Black Mask’s heavy-hitters and seasons the mix with a history of the magazine, biographical overviews of the writers, and bibliographies of their work for Black Mask. Unfortunately, by almost any critical yardstick, Black Mask fiction is pretty bad. Joseph T. Shaw, who edited the magazine during its glory years, was interested in good writing, but he was more interested in series characters who would build and keep a base of loyal readers. (Thus, the many, many appearances of Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, whom even Shaw knew to be terrible.) On the whole, the best story here (no surprise) is Dashiell Hammett’s “Bodies Piled Up,” which manages to be brilliant even if it doesn’t add up to much as a story. And this is the perspective from which Black Mask fiction is best enjoyed: as collections of moments rather than as unified narratives. Approached in this way, even Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry”—the world’s first hard-boiled detective story—can be fun. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

You can’t tell

a wound

from its scab.

Richard Stark

The Damsel

1967