Pulp Poem of the Week

everything
looks like a noose
if you stare at it
long enough

          Sherman Alexie
          “Indian Education”
          1993

Donald E. Westlake, Good Behavior (1985)

Dortmunder + nuns = not my idea of a good premise. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

A smart lawyer knows
when to tell the truth.

     Donald E. Westlake
     The Hot Rock
     1970

Pulp Poem of the Week

The cross-eyed gods of
the universal cash register had
punched the No Sale key, and
the drawer was wide open—
waiting.

          Gil Brewer
          Nude on Thin Ice
          1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

Always living in the garbage cans
of somebody else’s life.
I scavenge old souls.

     Steve Fisher
     I Wake Up Screaming
     1941   

Reviews: Gil Brewer, Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories (2012)

Here are links to all the various reviews, blog posts, etc., that have popped up around the web for Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories.  Newest at the top, oldest at the bottom:

Los Angeles Review of Books

Seattle Times

Palm Beach Post

Woody Haut's Blog

Gainesville Sun

Read @ MPL

The Florida Bookshelf

Jeff Vorzimmer's Dig It, Daddy-O

James Reasoner's Rough Edges

Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine

George Kelley

Pulp Poem of the Week

I’m an alcoholic,
will somebody
buy me a beer?

          Gil Brewer
          A Killer Is Loose
          1954

Pulp Poem of the Week

Not a kick was wasted.
Each of the two men received
two kicks in the guts,
by way of obtaining
temporary silence.
Each received
a kick in the temple,
by way of making the silence
more or less permanent.
Each received
three kicks in the face
as a lasting memento
of the kicking.

     Jim Thompson
     The Golden Gizmo
     1954

Pulp Poem of the Week

I awoke during the night
and she was gone.
Switching on the light,
I looked at my watch.
It was shortly after 3 P.M.

          Charles Williams
          Man on the Run
          1958

Pulp Poem of the Week

the bright light,

the soft sap,

the kick to the kidneys,

the knee to the groin,

the fist to the solar plexus,

the night stick to the base of the spine

          Raymond Chandler
          The Long Goodbye
          1953 

Book Review: Charles Williams, Man on the Run (1958)

Man on the Run begins with a man on the run for a crime that he didn’t commit. Russell Foley is his name, and he has the more-than-good fortune to break into the home of Suzy Patton, a stranger who is willing to help him. This is absurd even for a novel of this type, and the book’s ham-handed plotting as Russell and Suzy try to clear his name only heightens the absurdity. If I had not known that Charles Williams wrote this book, I would never have guessed it. I expect much, much better from him. Grade: D

Pulp Poem of the Week

I never knew a man
with a conscience
made a good con man.
And I never knew a conscience
to quit, either.
If anything, it grows on you
like some kind of
Mesopotamian wart.

          Gil Brewer
          A Devil for O’Shaugnessy
          1973

Dortmunder Footnote

In my review of Dortmunder #2, before I was sold on the series, I wrote that I would continue with Dortmunder until Westlake stooped to his first fart joke. Dortmunder #5 plays farts for laughs three times, but, mericfully, none decends to Blazing Saddles territory. Threat retracted.

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Why Me? (1983)

Upon finishing the Parker series, I began Dortmunder with a sense of desperate skepticism, and I have been pleasantly surprised. I was underwhelmed by Dortmunder #1 (The Hot Rock), but Dortmunder #2 (Bank Shot) was good enough to keep me going. Dortmunder #3 (Jimmy the Kid) was genius, which made mediocre Dortmunder #4 (Nobody’s Perfect) even more disappointing. Fortunately, Dortmunder #5 (Why Me?) is pretty great. The relationship between Dortmunder and his sidekick Andy Kelp deepens, which points to the remarkable strength of the series: Dortmunder’s sad-sack character develops a surprising gravitas, despite his status as a perpetual punch line. At first I was uncertain whether the Dortmunder novels should be read at all. Now I think they should be read in order. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

sometimes
you wind up paying
for things
you didn’t even know
had a price

          Warren Moore
          Broken Glass Waltzes
          2013

Book Review: Gil Brewer, A Devil for O'Shaugnessy (1973)

(The following review does not contain spoilers; the plot element described below does not appear in the published version of A Devil for O'Shaugnessy.) In 1973, with his career in decline for more than a decade, Gil Brewer completed a new noir thriller, A Devil for O’Shaugnessy. A throwback, the novel would have fit as one of his lesser Gold Medal paperbacks of the late 1950s, memorable primarily for the appearance of a deranged pet monkey as a major character. Brewer’s agent submitted the manuscript to Coward, McCann, and the publisher sent detailed suggestions for revision, including the possibility that “there might be a neater ending in which Fisk and Miriam are killed together (in a chase scene, for example).” Brewer dutifully responded to the publisher’s criticisms, only to have his revision rejected outright. In their kiss-off letter, Coward, McCann made substantial (and legitimate) objections to aspects of the plot that they had implicitly endorsed previously. As well, they panned Brewer’s new ending, complaining that “the car chase, another cliché, seems an awfully familiar device. Haven’t we seen this already too many times before?” Feel Gil Brewer’s pain. Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

Footsteps
on the stairs
and
muffled voices.

          Seymour Shubin
          Anyone’s My Name
          1953

Pulp Poem of the Week

Nobody gets
everything in this life.
You decide
your priorities and
make your choices.
I’d decided
long ago that
any cake I had
would be eaten.

          Donald E. Westlake
          Two Much!
          1975

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Nobody's Perfect (1977)

I liked the first 89% of Nobody’s Perfect well enough (statistic courtesy of my Kindle’s progress bar) but with 11% to go, Donald E. Westlake lost me. Too much, too silly, too busy, trying too hard. In Nobody’s Perfect, Dortmunder (a.k.a. Sad Sack Parker) has a robbery go unluckily wrong (surprise!) and as a result gets blackmailed into performing another robbery, which, of course, seems unlikely to go well. If you enjoy the Dortmunder formula, you will certainly enjoy Nobody’s Perfect, despite the fact that the book goes to hell at the end—which, given that this is Dortmunder, might actually be the most appropriate possible way for the book to go. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

He was dead.
Even with practice
he would never be
any deader.

          Howard Browne
          Halo in Blood
          1946

Pulp Poem of the Week

She said,
“I didn’t ask you
to wait for me.”

“I wasn’t waiting,”
he said.
“I just had
no place to go,
that’s all.”

     David Goodis
     Down There
     1956

Book Review: Seymour Shubin, Anyone's My Name (1953)

Seymour Shubin began his writing career as an associate editor for a true-crime magazine, a background that he exploited in his debut novel, Anyone’s My Name. The novel’s narrator, Paul Weiler, is true-crime writer whose vocation greases his slippery slope into crime. Just as the novel’s title promises, Shubin milks the Everyman theme for every last drop of pathos, but with enough aplomb and cleverness to earn a spot in the canon of 1950s Noir Well Worth Seeking Out. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

Never listen
to a stock tip from
a terminal case.

     Donald E. Westlake
     Bank Shot
     1972

Pulp Poem of the Week

He liked every part of it:
the black look of it,
the short snout of it,
the front sight that could
cut a man’s face like
the tip of a beer-can opener,
the heavy trigger guard,
the curving and rigid grip
of the butt.

     James McKimmey
     Cornered
     1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

The guilt that separates
man from insects
is not wider than that which severs
the polluted from the chase
among women.

     Charles Brockden Brown
     Wieland; or The Transformation
     1798

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Jimmy the Kid (1974)

As brilliant as it is self-indulgent, the third Dortmunder novel will delight Westlake fans in general and Parker fans in particular. If you already know anything about Jimmy the Kid, then you already know too much. Read it before you learn more. Grade: A

Pulp Poem of the Week

it was one thing
to fill four pages
of stupid questions
with on-the-spot lies,
and another thing
to remember
all those lies
ten minutes later

          Richard Stark
          Butcher’s Moon
          1974

Pulp Poem of the Week

We weren’t—

and then we were.

     Elliott Chaze

     Black Wings Has My Angel

     1953

Book Review: Donald E. Westlake, Bank Shot (1972)

In the second Dortmunder novel, Dortmunder steals a bank, and the results are consistently entertaining. The only real flaw in the developing Dortmunder formula is that Westlake has difficulty resisting broad comedy, as when Dortmunder and his crew are closed in the back of a truck with an insidiously bad smell, and will they vomit or won’t they? I imagine that I will keep reading the Dortmunder series until I reach the first fart joke. After that, I may have to stop. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

She climbed to her feet,
watching me warily and
trying to back away.
I said nothing, and
merely slapped at her again,
feeling a little sick at my stomach.
She was about eighteen.
But it had to be done.
This was the method
they’d left us.

     Charles Williams
     Talk of the Town
     1958

Book Review: James McKimmey, Cornered! (1960)

James McKimmey was in almost the right place at almost the right time to be counted as one the great writers of noir’s greatest decade, the 1950s. Had he published his first book with Gold Medal in 1951 (as opposed to first appearing with Dell in 1958), McKimmey would be mentioned along with the likes of Charles Williams and Gil Brewer as one of the era’s best, and more than one of his novels (1962’s Squeeze Play) would have come back into print by now. The upside to this, however, is that McKimmey’s OOP books are not exorbitantly expensive, given that they still fly below most readers’ radar. Cornered!, from 1960, is well worth seeking out. The plot centers around Ann Burley, an attractive young woman who provided eye-witness testimony in a California murder trial and since then has improvised her own less-than-ideal witness protection program in small-town middle America. The novel gets off to a fast start when a pair of hoods, who are getting close to finding her, believe that they have been spotted by law enforcement at a local gas station. Grade: B