Pulp Poem of the Week

there was a surprised look
on his face
and David hit
the surprised look

Ed McBain
“Downpour”
1956

Pulp Poem of the Week

Nobody has to say
nothing about a drunk.
A drunk is a drunk.
You just don't spell it
any other way.

Ed McBain
Big Man
1959

Book Review: Ed McBain, Big Man (1959)

A direct descendant of W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar (1929), Ed McBain's Big Man tells the story of Frankie Taglio, a young man in New York who falls in with the wrong crowd (or right crowd, depending on your point of view) and soon finds himself a career mobster. Frankie's rise through the mob hierarchy is somewhat difficult to explain: There are strangely few gangsters between him and the top, and Frankie doesn't seem to have much going for him other than a bit of intelligence and the willingness to use a gun. (Then again, maybe that's all any gangster really needs.) Big Man has a fair amount of action, but its drama is driven less by the crimes that Frankie commits than by the changes in his character as he ascends the mob ladder. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

He had never liked Summer,

even as a kid,

and now that he

was an adult and a cop,

the only memorable characteristic

Summer seemed to have

was that it made

dead bodies stink quicker.

Ed McBain

Cop Hater

1956

Book Review: Ed McBain, Cop Hater (1956)

The American police procedural begins more or less here, with Ed McBain's first 87th Precinct novel in 1956. The prose is slapdash, but the plotting is impressive in its willful directionlessness. Someone murders a detective from the 87th Precinct, and the other detectives from the precinct, naturally, want to catch the killer, but the novel resists falling into a clichéd gathering of clues that lead inexorably to his identity. Rather, the detectives spend most of the novel frustrated as they follow a series of weak leads that go nowhere. In this way, McBain strives for a new sort of realism in crime fiction while at the same time still trying to provide readers with the page-turning momentum that they expect. Cop Hater does not entirely succeed; nevertheless, it is a valiant attempt at something new. Grade: B-