Pulp Poem of the Week

When one sells mattresses,

one has an in.

Talk comes quickly

to the point.

A woman wants to

purchase a mattress.

Take it from there.

Gil Brewer

Play It Hard

1960

Pulp Poem of the Week

I was as hollow and

empty

as the spaces between the

stars.

Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye

1953

Pulp Poem of the Week

Cars littered

the sloped lawn

like discards

on green felt.

Gil Brewer

A Taste for Sin

1961

Pulp Poem of the Week

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

Langston Hughes

“Suicide’s Note”

1925

Pulp Poem of the Week

he

needed

killing

Gil Brewer

Appointment in Hell

1961

Book Review: Gil Brewer, A Taste for Sin (1961)

David’s Femme Dépravée Theorem: The quality of a traditional Everyman noir is in direct proportion to the depravity of its femme fatale—and it doesn’t hurt if she also happens to be married to a clerk at the local bank. Brewer had written this book before, but not with this much panache. Available in a two-fer from Stark House Press. Grade: A-

Pulp Poem of the Week

Once you’ve

made up your mind,

it doesn’t

hurt so much.

Gil Brewer

“The Axe Is Ready”

1956

Book Review: Gil Brewer, Appointment in Hell (1961)

Gil Brewer didn’t like writing this book, and I didn’t like reading it. Brewer didn’t like writing it because its South American setting required him to do research; I didn’t like reading it because Brewer’s sex-driven characters aren’t believable in this setting. Three men, three women, their plane has crashed in the jungle, and, yes, of course, they want to tend to their injuries, to find food . . . but the main thing they want to do is have sex . . . oh, and to find shelter, too, and maybe to build a raft to take them back to civilization . . . but, hey, is it okay if they screw some first? Please? They’ll worry about that whole survival thing later. Really . . . they promise . . . right . . . after . . . the . . . next . . . LAY! Grade: D+

Pulp Poem of the Week

The halls twisted like a digestive tract
through the spacious house.
They hadn’t been designed to be complicated—
at least I thought they hadn’t—
and yet at each intersection I found myself
losing track of where I was.
As I walked along the black floorboards,
I started to feel the illusion of the halls
languidly moving
like the peristalsis of the intestines.

Otsuichi
Black Fairy Tale
2004
(translated by Nathan Collins)

Pulp Poem of the Week

do not suspend him until

he is reinstated from expulsion so

I can suspend him as of last month so

I can reinstate him to be expelled, so—

Jim Thompson

Bad Boy

1953

Book Review: Otsuichi, Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse (2000)

I read this one for the title novella, Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse, an excellent juvie noir pageturner narrated from the POV of a murdered little girl. Also included are a short story, “Yuko,” which reminded me of Hawthorne, and a novel, Black Fairy Tale, a J-horror story that weaves together an amnesiac and a serial killer, a winning combination if ever there was one. Translated by Nathan Collins. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

The sun was bright and

hot as the insides of

a Russian horse doctor’s valise.

George H. Smith

Bayou Babe

1960

Book Review: Jim Thompson, Bad Boy (1953)

Jim Thompson’s Bad Boy is tepid autobiography in the vein of Jim Tully’s early books: a series of broad-stroke anecdotes in search of a narrative. The book gets stronger as it goes, with its most famous section detailing Thompson’s encounters with the sheriff who inspired the creation of The Killer Inside Me’s Lou Ford. But this juxtaposition serves only to highlight the comparative thinness of Bad Boy: Thompson may have been haunted by his memories of this man, but in the real-life telling he is (perhaps unavoidably) the barest husk of Lou Ford. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

It was like being in a room

with no windows or doors.

You kept running against the walls,

slamming into them.

You knew there was no way out.

But back in your mind,

something told you

there had to be a way out.

So you rammed, and rammed,

smashing against those walls.

You’d reel around and try again.

Something had to give—

either one of the walls,

or you.

Gil Brewer

The Three-Way Split

1960

Book Note: The Best American Crime Reporting 2010, edited by Stephen J. Dubner

This year’s stand-out: David Grann’s “Trial by Fire,” the story of Todd Willingham, a man accused of burning his house with his children inside.

This year’s stinker: Ernest B. Furgurson’s “The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln,” a boring summary of the life of Boston Corbett.

Book Review: David Rachels, Verse Noir (2010)

Follow this link for a nice write-up of Verse Noir at Spinetingler.

Book Review: Gil Brewer, Play It Hard (1960)

Gil Brewer mashes up Cornell Woolrich (I Married a Dead Man crossed with The Black Curtain) with his own sexed-up Gulf Coast noir. Perhaps not his best, but I’m always a sucker for noir amnésique. Grade: B-

Pulp Poem of the Week

She moaned and she moaned.

After a while they lay still.

The house waited.

Gil Brewer

Backwoods Teaser

1960

Book Review: George H. Smith and Gil Brewer, Bayou Babe (1960)

You can have a remarkable time reading George H. Smith’s Bayou Babe, but only if you read Gil Brewer’s Backwoods Teaser first. Brewer's novel was published in January 1960; Smith’s book followed five months later. In between, Smith took considerably more than inspiration from Brewer. The books have the same premise, more or less the same opening scene, and many scenes scattered throughout are eerily similar. Historical bottom line: An unexpected payday for Brewer when someone alerted him to Smith's plagiarism. Grade reserved for plagiarists and The Colorado Kid: F-

Book Review: Gil Brewer, The Three-Way Split (1960)

The Three-Way Split begins with Gil Brewer reworking the opening of one of of his short stories. In “Death Comes Last” (Hunted Detective Story Magazine, October 1955), Brewer begins with an aggrieved protagonist, who runs a modest charter-boat service, getting shafted out of his fee because his obnoxious clients didn’t catch any fish and one of them lost a watch overboard. The Three-Way Split begins with another aggrieved protagonist running a charter boat, and this time a necklace falls into the Gulf. On this occasion, however, our protagonist—Jack Holland, which also happens to be one of Brewer’s pseudonyms—manages to find the necklace, and he finds something else too: a recently uncovered sunken ship. Perhaps it contains treasure? After this, Brewer rushes to get his other characters on stage: Jack’s girlfriend, his girlfriend’s sister, his friend the old treasure hunter, his ne’er-do-well father, and the men who want to kill his ne’er-do-well father. If you like this sort of thing, how much you ultimately like The Three-Way Split will probably hinge on how effective you find its ending. Currently available as part of a two-fer reprint from Stark House Press. Grade: B-

Book Review: Gil Brewer, Backwoods Teaser (1960)

Erskine Caldwell meets James M. Cain for swamp titillation. As much comedy as it is noir. Quick, professional, for Brewer completists only. Grade: C

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.