Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Tease (1967)

Wes McCord is a skirt-chaser with a marriage to match. One night, when his disgusted wife leaves him to stay at her sister’s house, a naked nymphette appears on his doorstep with an incredible tale of murder and money. For reasons that are never explained, Wes believes that money will solve his marital problems, so he agrees to help the nymphette flee her pursuers and secure her hidden loot. If all goes well, she will give him half of her $300,000. Brewer may be going through the motions with this one, but at least he knows the motions to go through. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

Somehow we just don’t see

how it is with other folks until—

something comes up.

Susan Glaspell

“Trifles”

1916

Book Review: Charles Williams, The Diamond Bikini (1956)

Start with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Remove the Duke, the King, and Huck, and transplant them into an Erskine Caldwell novel. Have the Duke and the King be a little bit smarter. Cut Huck's age from fourteen to seven, and make him the Duke’s son. Throw in a striptease dancer on the run from the mob, and throw in some killing, but all in fun. This is what happens when Charles Williams needs a vacation. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

marriage

is

a

lottery

Emily Hawley Gillespie

April 25, 1887

Top Ten Novels Reviewed in 2011

1. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)
2. Gil Brewer, Memory of Passion (1962)
3. Gil Brewer, A Taste for Sin (1961)
4. Dave Zeltserman, Outsourced (2011)
5. Richard Stark, Plunder Squad (1972)
6. Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Death Note (2003-2006)
7. Donald E. Westlake, The Ax (1997)
8. Richard Stark, The Sour Lemon Score (1969)
9. Otsuichi, Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse (2000)
10. Richard Stark, Lemons Never Lie (1971)

Book Note: Dave Dickerson, Japanese Serial Killers: True Tales of 13 Notorious Murderers (2011)

With an interest in Japanese noir, I couldn’t resist a cheap eBook about Japanese serial killers. My instincts said it looked like a piece of self-published crap, but the price was only $2.99. Unsurprising moral of the story: Trust your instincts. Most of the write-ups in Japanese Serial Killers: True Tales of 13 Notorious Murderers read like underdeveloped Wikipedia entries. Favorite moment in the book: the sentence that ends [citation needed]. FOOTNOTE: Just got curious and checked . . . they are Wikipedia entries! Ha!

Book Review: Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Death Note (2003-2006)

Tsugumi Ohba, author of the Death Note story, admits that he is no good at keeping plots going. Therefore, every time he has an idea for a new plot point, he immediately sticks it in. The upside to this strategy is that it gives Death Note a real sense of unpredictability; the raggedly constructed narrative arc will frequently surprise you. The downside is that the plot eventually feels arbitrary, sort of like a season of 24. Heroes and villains come and go, and sometimes it does feel that the author has no purpose other than to keep the damn thing afloat till the end of his projected 108 chapters. Fortunately, most of the time the upside outweighs the downside. Favorite thing about the art: the hilarious reaction shots of the Japanese police force. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Burglary, I thought,

and the more I thought

the more I liked it.

It seemed somehow akin

to writing—

you set your own hours,

you avoided human contact,

and, if you were successful,

you managed to touch the lives

of people you never even met.

Lawrence Block

Introduction to The Burglar Who Quoted Kipling

1999

Pulp Poem of the Week

You couldn’t trust

anything she said,

colored as it was

with her personality.

Gil Brewer

The Hungry One

1966

Pulp Poem of the Week

the safe,

the god,

crouching,

embedded in the wall,

squat and somnolent,

with its triple lock,

its massive flanks,

its air of a brute divinity

Èmile Zola

The Kill (La Curée)

1872

(translated by Brian Nelson)

Pulp Poem of the Week

If I had anything

left to lose,

I couldn’t remember

what it was.

John D. MacDonald

The End of the Night

1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

The cheaper

the crook

the gaudier

the patter.

Dashiell Hammett

The Maltese Falcon

1930

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Hungry One (1966)

Herb Forrest and his wife Wilma are traveling to Tampa, where a new job awaits Herb. They stop for the night in perhaps the world’s sleaziest motel, and, in the novel’s most memorable scene, find their room invaded by Danny and Joy, a couple of speedfreaks. Danny/Joy kidnap Herb/Wilma and force them to participate in the fake kidnapping of Joy, an effort to get a suitcase of loot from Joy’s rich father. On the whole, not bad when one is running out of Brewer novels to read. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

the ponderous machinery of the law

grinds the sausage of circumstance

into links of evidence

Damon Runyon

“The Eternal Blonde”

1927

Pulp Poem of the Week

Dying
in the line of duty
is heroic,
but dying
while unemployed
is just stupid.

Tsugumi Ohba

Death Note

(2003-2006)

(translated by Pookie Rolf)

Pulp Poem of the Week

College is fun

as long as

you don’t die.

Tsugumi Ohba

Death Note

(2003-2006)

(translated by Pookie Rolf)

Book Review: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Maybe it’s sacrilege to be thinking of John D. MacDonald while reading The Maltese Falcon, but that’s what I’ve been doing. In 1981, when asked if he were an admirer of Hammett, JDM answered in part, “The prose style of Hammett is certainly a more solid and a more artful style than that of Chandler. But he was an idiot as far as plots are concerned. If you want to drive some high school or college kid nuts, make him do an outline of the plot of The Maltese Falcon. It’s incredibly mixed up and nothing ever happens the way it’s supposed to. But the flow of the narrative is such that you’re caught up in it and you believe it. But you can’t believe it if you try to dissect it.” What I kept thinking as I was reading was how strange it was for JDM to criticize Hammett’s plotting of The Maltese Falcon in the same breath that he was mentioning Chandler. Worse than being “mixed up,” I find the plot of The Maltese Falcon to be patently uninteresting, but Raymond Chandler sets the standard for incomprehensible hardboiled-detective plots. The thing about it, though, as JDM does seem to know, is that with Hammett and Chandler plots may well be beside the point. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

Apples taste

so much better

indoors.

Tsugumi Ohba

Death Note

(2003-2006)

(translated by Pookie Rolf)

Pulp Poem of the Week

more relieved

than bereaved

Koushun Takami
Battle Royale
1999
(translated by Yuji Oniki)

Book Review: Richard Stark, Plunder Squad (1972)

After taking a kind of vacation in Slayground, Parker gets back to work in Plunder Squad, and it is, as always, the kind of book that Starklake does best: a slice of life from the career thief. Whereas Slayground was a set piece, Plunder Squad is tangle of events from the ongoing story of Parker’s criminal career. And it is, as well, the clearest evidence you could want that Parker is a pure sociopath: Any sane person would work in a McDonald’s rather than deal with Parker’s problems. Grade: A-

Book Review: Koushun Takami, Battle Royale (1999)

Lord of the Flies as formally organized competition: In a Japan-like dictatorship, 42 fifteen-year-old classmates are forced to play a killing game till one of them remains. Each kid is issued a bag of supplies—including one weapon, which could be anything from an Uzi to a fork—and they are turned loose on an island, where they will complete the competition or all be killed. The 2009 English-language edition of Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale features a newly corrected translation, interviews with the author and with the director of the film version, and a foreword by Max Allan Collins in which he makes a fair case for himself as the world’s coolest dad. These bonuses in some measure compensate for the novel’s weak dénouement, which culminates in perhaps the lamest final page in the history of the printed word. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

I sit here writing, not daring to stop,

For fear of seeing what’s outside my head.

Bob Kaufman

“Jail Poems”

1959

Pulp Poem of the Week

I wondered which would be better—

to work as a prostitute to live,

or to die rather than work as one?

I’d say the latter answer would be

the one chosen by the healthy mind,

but then again,

there’s not really anything healthy

about being dead.

Anyway, they do say that women

who are sexually active tend

to have a better complexion.

Not that I cared if

I was healthy or not.

Hitomi Kanehara

Snakes and Earrings

2004

(trans. by David James Karashima)

Book Review: Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes and Earrings (2004)

Woodenly translated Japanese nihilnoir. Sort of like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? with the dancing replaced by tattoos, piercings, and demeaning sex. Grade: C-

Pulp Poem of the Week

I had no idea

How much brains

He had

Until

I saw them.

David Rachels

Verse Noir

2010

Book Review: Richard Stark, Lemons Never Lie (1971)

The best Grofield novel earns its status as the best Grofield novel by being the Grofield novel that is most like a Parker novel: The Sour Grofield Score with minimal opportunities for Actor Alan to play the wiseass. Grade: B+

Book Review: Richard Stark, Slayground (1971)

I prefer to read novels knowing as little as possible about them going in, so Slayground represents a special achievement for me: I began reading the often-discussed, often-praised fourteenth Parker novel knowing absolutely nothing about it—I even managed to tune out the illustrations on the cover of the Chicago reprint (except for the always-present Big Gun). So, in that spirit, I’m not going to tell you anything about it, either. Grade: B+

Book Review: Richard Stark, Deadly Edge (1971)

Deadly Edge perhaps deserves better than the grade I give it, but I’m trying to make distinctions within the Parker canon—or, to put it another way, a C-level Parker novel is still a damn good novel. “Part One” of the book, which runs uninterrupted for nearly 50 pages, details Parker and his partners stealing the all-cash take from a rock concert. No one does this sort of thing better than Starklake, and Deadly Edge would be worth reading just for this set piece. The 150 pages that follow are not nearly so compelling, as Parker plays cat and mouse with two uninteresting villains who want to steal what he has stolen. This, too, is well done, but Parker-the-thief is almost always more interesting than Parker-the-anything-else. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

Lit by her son,

5,

a signal flare burst

under the skirts of

Mme Roger, of Clichy;

damages were

considerable.

Félix Fénéon

Novels in Three Lines

1906

(translated by Luc Sante)

Book Review: Richard Stark, The Blackbird (1969)

One reason that the Parker novels are superior to the Grofield novels is that, over the long haul, it's more pleasant to spend time with a sullen sociopath than a smartass. In The Blackbird, Grofield's schtick begins to wear thin around page 100, but the book has more than enough action and intelligence to keep you going. Grade: B-

Book Review: Gil Brewer, Memory of Passion (1962)

Contrary to what you may have heard, Gil Brewer had his mojo working well beyond the 1950s. Memory of Passion tells of a husband wife who still have “active glands,” though not for each other. Things get complicated when the flame of the husband’s teenaged years reappears in his life—having not aged a day in more than 20 years. Things get more complicated still when we learn that this ageless flame is being stalked by a serial killer. Another excellent Brewer ripe for rediscovery. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

I stood on the top

of the toboggan slide,

thinking how small it was

really,

and how large it had looked

to me when I was a kid.

It had been a world then,

a big one.

You could get lost in it.

Now I knew no world

was big enough

to get lost in.

Gil Brewer

“Final Appearance”

1951

Pulp Poem of the Week

It’s too late

for anything

but

getting away.

Gil Brewer

The Red Scarf

1958

Pulp Poem of the Week

He looked as if

somebody had

machine-gunned

his soul.

Gil Brewer

13 French Street

1951

A New Gil Brewer Story!

Courtesy of yours truly, an unpublished Gil Brewer story will appear in the next issue of Needle. Read all about it here:

Gil Brewer story to debut in NEEDLE