The long Thursday morning: My last Bouchercon 2016 book arrives

The book I'll need to complete preparation for the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 next week arrived today. 

The novel is The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams, the panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and, for the third straight year, preparation for the "Beyond Chandler and Hammett" panel has expanded my idea of what crime fiction is.

This year's version includes four of today's sharpest, savviest crime writers talking about their favorite crime writers of the past: Eric Beetner on William P. McGivern and Charles Williams, Martin Edwards on Michael Gilbert, Rick Ollerman on Peter Rabe and Jada Davis, and Gary Phillips on Clarence Cooper Jr., with a word or two on Gil Brewer.

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"From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" happens Thursday, Sept. 15. at 9 a.m.,  at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Man, that Gil Brewer could write

I'm reading The Erotics, a previously unpublished 1970s novel by Gil Brewer, part of a three-fer from Stark House Press. I once ranked Brewer behind Charles Williams and Peter Rabe in my small pantheon of Gold Medal paperback original writers, but Brewer may be moving up. He's almost as good as David Goodis at portraying doomed men, and his prose style is very much better than those of most other writers America was reading in the middle of the last century. (Despite its late date, the novel reads as if if had been written in the 1950s, and I mean that in the best possible way.)

By comparison, I've also been reading some Mickey Spillane and, while Spillane was indeed capable of noir poetry, he can also read like a first draft by a newspaper reporter who had something else on his mind while he was writing. Brewer was a better writer, and he could come up with lines that Spillane might have liked. Here's an example from The Erotics:

"Her name's Bernice. She's a sex-pot. I saw her once. Somebody pointed her out to me. Wow, is all I can say. And Wow again. She's a walking mattress."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2016

Charles Williams' Man on the Run: Unpacking a lesser book by a great paperback-original crime writer

Man on the Run (1958) is the weakest of the nine novels I've read recently by that excellent writer of paperback originals, Charles Williams, but those weaknesses stimulated some thought about what we mean by weak writing, what makes some books worse than others, and possible explanations for why those books fall short.

First of all, Man on the Run is a pretty good book; it just suffers by comparison with Williams' Nothing in Her Way (1953), A Touch of Death (1954), or his classic comedy Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959). I'd give those books five stars each, and maybe three to Man on the Run, with The Hot Spot (1953),  Aground, (1961), The Concrete Flamingo (1958), The Big Bite (1956), and The Diamond Bikini (1956) somewhere in between.

So, what makes Man on the Run weaker than the rest? For one thing, an occasional tendency to talkiness. For another, repetition of mildly odd phrases, including "intensely silent" and "sobbing for breath."  That this repetition occurs with greater frequency toward the end of the book suggests to me that Williams may not have had his heart in it.

I noticed this especially because Williams' work (and also Peter Rabe's) had previously stood out for me precisely because it avoided such repetition. That's part of why I considered Williams a more polished writer, if not necessarily a better one, than Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, and Day Keene.

The plot of Man on the Run also stands out. Williams was at his best writing about duped, infatuated, deluded men, but this book, as one might guess from its title, is instead about a fugitive. It was also published in 1958, and that's where things get interesting: 1958 was also the year of 77 Sunset Strip, a republication of three novellas by Roy Huggins, one of which I would bet the take of my next heist was the germ of the idea that Huggins later turned into The Fugitive. Men on the run were in the air in 1958.

My tentative conclusion: Whether urged by a publisher or agent, or whether on his own initiative, Williams wrote Man on the Run to satisfy a perceived market demand for fugitive stories and, in so doing, painted himself into a corner where he was less accomplished and less comfortable (hence the repetition).

To be sure, the suspense is well written, and Man on the Run contains elements of Williams' more customary infatuated-man tales. It also has one of the odder endings in noir fiction and, if that end seems a bit contrived, Williams had laid careful groundwork for it throughout the book. Even here, he remained an admirable plotter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The hunted man in American crime writing, plus some questions for readers

Saturday's post about Gil Brewer's novel The Three-Way Split prompted some thoughts about the hunted-man motif in American crime writing of the 1950s.

The Fugitive was on television from 1963 through 1967, for example, but the idea belongs to the previous decade. The series' creator, Roy Huggins, had written a virtual prototype for The Fugitive as one of three novellas published in 1958 under the title 77 Sunset Strip.

In the 1950s, Gil Brewer wrote novels about men trapped and on the run. So did Charles Williams, Day Keene, and Harry Whittington, and those are just the authors I've been reading recently.

Here are the names of magazines where the stories collected in Brewer's Redheads Die Quickly first appeared: Manhunt.The Pursuit Detective Story Magazine. Hunted Detective Story Magazine. Accused Detective Story Magazine. Trapped Detective Story Magazine.

I had previously heard of none except the celebrated Manhunt, and I have no idea if they were issued by one publisher or several, or of who started the craze. But something about the hunted man captured the fancy of the American public in a big-way for a few years there. Why? If you're up on your crime-fiction and American cultural history, who started the rage for such stories, and who were its leading publishers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Noir, while you stand on one foot

I've found the quintessential noir sentence. It's from Gil Brewer's 1960 novel, The Three-Way Split, and it goes like this:

"For the first time, I felt a sense of real fear."

The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Gil Brewer: Squalid, but funny

Some things that surprised me about Gil Brewer's 1961 novel A Taste of Sin:

1) The protagonist drinks too much, but his drinks are absinthe and Pernod. 

2) The morbid (and mordant) humor, as in the ending of the first chapter: 

"In my mind there was the sound of broken glass."  

and its segue into the beginning of the second: 

"I got in the Volks and sat there. 

"Well, a sane woman could be a bore." 

3) The virtuosic sarcasm of some of the best of that humor, as this observation about the cop who questions the protagonist: 

"He was very bright. He sighed brightly."

 4) That no one could write squalid, desperate sex like Gil Brewer could. Lots of books of the time tried, and their scenes often read like something out of a sex version of Reefer Madness. Not Brewer's

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Five shots

While I gather some thoughts on the apparent difference of temperament and style among the paperback original writers whose work I've been reading (Peter Rabe, Gil Brewer, Day Keene, Harry Whittington, Charles Williams), here are some more of my recent noir shots along with one at least as blanc as it is noir.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Wake Up to Murder, Peter Rabe, sticking it to Florida, and a question for readers

If Day Keene's Wake Up to Murder had appeared this century rather than in the middle of the last one, someone would have turned protagonist Jim Charters quest to remember where he picked up the mysterious $10,000 into an interactive video game.

2) Gil Brewer knew what to say to hot-weather chauvinists who lord it over the friends in the Northeastern United States in wintertime. Here's Lew Brookbank,protagonist of Wild to Possess:

"He took a short quick one. snapping off the neck. and turned to stare at the wall of Florida jungle growth beyond the road shoulder. 

"Florida, he thought. Why can't I get away from it?  Shove it--every last flat, wet, stinking acre."

3) I was not crazy about the first Peter Rabe novel I tried to read, but The Box is different, a slightly darker, slightly funnier version of that familiar theme of non-natives stranded in North Africa with nothing to do but wait ... Highsmith, Casablanca, Camus ... Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia apparently exercised considerable influence over makers of crime novels and movies in the middle of the last century, even before the wars that ended French colonial rule there. Why, readers, was this the case?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

"Saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied..."

Mid-twentieth-century hard-boiled American crime fiction abounded in over-the-top physical descriptions of women, with extravagant curves decidedly in favor. Think of Richard S. Prather, author of the phenomenally bestselling Shell Scott private-investigator novels, from whose typewriter

"There was a lot of her already in the room before the rest of her got in."

is one of the tamer examples.

Gil Brewer's 1954 novel A Killer Is Loose, about a down-on-his-luck father-to-be who saves the wrong man's life, shares the predilection for tall, curvaceous women, but its descriptions of them are brief, matter-of-fact, and almost chastely decorous.

Instead, Brewer saves his verbal steam—enough of it to run several turbines, a manufacturing plant or two, and a small city—for the opposite physical type:

"She was one of those ash-blonde, bony, saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied, angle-posing, empty-thighed in betweens they stamp out like tin slats for Venetian blinds in some bloodless, airless underground factory to supply that increasingly bewildering demand for sexless models such as she for certain women's fashion magazines, where they loll backward gaping and pinch nostriled in tight red and silver sashes, over an old freshly varnished beer barrel, holding long skinny umbrellas, point down in a sand dune. Sometimes you see them swooning pipe-lidded, paper-pale over a swirling Martini in a triple-sized cocktail glass with their long fleshless golden-tipped claws clamped buzzard-like around the stem. Give me curves, dimples, and swollen thighs, every time. I'm an easy man to please."

I'm not sure I like that invocation of buzzards (animal comparisons are often problematic), but the overall description contains much to enjoy and to provoke thought. For one thing, it goes beyond physical description to sketch the woman's character. (She's shrill, cruel at no risk to herself, and not a nice person.) For another, though I don't mean to suggest that such was Gil Brewer's intent, the description might strike a chord today, in a culture suffused with worry over obsessive desire by some women and girls for unhealthy skinniness and of occasional outbursts of anger toward a fashion industry that glorifies such a look. Gil Brewer would have had no trouble agreeing that real women have curves.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"What did he do with the horse?"

Today's reading and browsing has included Gil Brewer, Robert Musil, and my introduction to another Austrian writer often mentioned alongside Musil and who, in fact, knew him.

But no sentence I read today was more delicious than the one that ends Chapter Two of the fourth of the day's books:

"All I could think to ask her was: `What did he do with the horse?'"

And that leads to today's Detectives Beyond Borders question: What words have you encountered for the first time in books and had to look up in a dictionary?

P.S. My admiration goes out to anyone who recognizes the quotation or who can figure out its source from the clue provided here.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Paris, city of crime

What started with Poe and continued with Humphrey Bogart and David Goodis persists to this day. France still loves American crime fiction. The French movie version of Gil Brewer's novel 13 French Street opens this week.

Also on the cultural agenda: A stage production of Crime and Punishment (Crime et châtiment in the local tongue) opens with an all-Lithuanian cast. And we took a stroll along boulevard Richard-Lenoir this evening. Perhaps I'll knock on the door at Number 132 tomorow to see if Mme. et commissaire Maigret are at home.

Finally, a copy of Debout les morts by Fred Vargas (The Three Evangelists, in its English version) caught my eye in a bookshop at the Gare du Nord this afternoon. If I make suitable progress reading this excellent and highly entertaining French crime novelist in her own language, I'll be sure to spread the news.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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