Allan Guthrie's black shorts
Hilda's Big Day Out offers four gut- and heart-wrenching slabs of noir, including the title story, which is atypical in at least two ways: It has an arguably happy ending, and its narrator is a dog.
Of the remaining tales, "Bye Bye Baby," which gave rise to Guthrie's novella of the same name, may wring tears of pity from even the hardest-hearted reader. Like David Goodis' novel Cassidy's Girl, its noirness inheres not in a tragic ending, but rather in an inconclusive sort of non-ending. Not every tragedy has the easy out of catharsis or death. Sometimes the nightmare just goes on.
© Peter Rozovsky 2012
Labels: Allan Guthrie, noir, Scotland, short stories
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 3:32 PM
17 Comments:
Hi, Pete
Hope you don't mind me posting a link to my blog here, but I thought this was pretty funny - Spot the difference...
Cheers
gb
Hmm...Guthrie's cover model has a little more facial hair than yours?
I presume the two have the same cover designer.
Yup, the awesome JT Lindroos.
gb
Awesome, all right. The man has given the world some fine books and covers.
Agreed. I'm delighted that WEE ROCKETS can now be associated with him.
gb
I first heard of him through the Frank McAuliffe/Augustus Mandrell books. Crime readers owe him quite a debt of gratitude.
I see Guthrie has joined the Kindle generation. I just put up some stories and a short story collection, and will put up more this month I hope.
Lucky man: he gets publicity.
I think he makes much of his own publicity. The man's a publisher, editor, and publicist of a kind in addition writing fiction, and he puts lots of work into those.
Like David Goodis' novel Cassidy's Girl, its noirness inheres not in a tragic ending, but rather in a non-ending
Nice to see you keeping words like 'inhere' alive. I must look it up sometime to find out what it means.
I'm a bit confused about non-ending, though. Does that mean the story is still going on even as we speak?
Jesus, first you catch me using a word that made me wince even as I wrote it, then you follow up with an implication of imprecision that just might be accurate.
But yes, if one accepts the conceit that a naturalistic story offers a slice of life, then the story is still going on as we speak. If I can figure out a way to do so without giving away too much, I may go into greater detail in a future comment.
I can't help thinking of The Italian Job (1969) which has an inconclusive ending, which I suppose might be called a non-ending.
That was a damn fine ending, if you ask me.
That ending left viewers on the brink, that's for sure.
I've done a bit of editing to try to make the "non-ending" bit clearer. Thanks!
I like the PG Wodehouse stories that featured the villainous British fascist Roderick Spode and his followers the Black Shorts. Spode V Jeeves was never really a serious contest however.
John Mortimer poked some melancholy fun at British fascists in one of the few Rumpole stories I've read. Humor, as one or two people have said in the past, can be an effective weapon.
Criminy, I hope the title of this post doesn't get me on British fascist mailing lists.
Peter
When Google has taken me to the Stormfront website its evident that they read nothing, not even Mein Kampf so I think you're safe.
Yeah, I'm more likely to be troubles by spam for Russian generic versions of Viagra. McFetridge gets so much of that stuff that I'm starting to wonder about him.
Post a Comment
<< Home