Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.

Nothing More Than Murder - Jim Thompson

 Nothing More Than Murder (1949) is a pulp psychological thriller knocked out by Thompson at the height of US film noir.   It is begging to be adapted by Chandler and directed by Fritz Lang with either Robert Ryan or Sterling Hayden in the lead.   It even has a movie house setting.

Joe Wilmot, a former juvenile delinquent, has built up a thriving picture house in the town of Stoneville.   Ok, he got the premises by marrying the heiress of local bigwigs but he built it up, saw off the competition and negotiated his way through the bewildering and wildly corrupt picture distribution business.   Joe's wife, Elizabeth, has a habit of bringing home strays, the latest of whom is a pubescent Plain Jane called Carol Farmer.   Inevitably Joe and Carole have a fling.   Inevitably Elizabeth finds out.   She wants out - more importantly she wants half the value of the business.

A murder plot is concocted whereby they will lure a housekeeper to Stoneville.   Carol kill her and they will burn the woman's body in a fire in the garage where Joe stores and rewinds and checks his films.   Joe will then claim on Elizabeth's life insurance and mail her the lot.

It sounds like the perfect murder.   Of course there's no such thing.   Suspicion falls on Joe, Carol gets clingy, Joe tries to scam his way out of the jam, only to fall victim to the several scams of others.   Thompson could concoct this sort of story in his sleep.   He keeps it short and punchy and the reader is happy to tag along for the ride.   It's not Thompson at his very best - King Blood is my favourite - but it's still miles better than most of his rivals.

A Killer is Loose - Gil Brewer

 

A Killer is Loose (1954) is the second half of this two-for-one ebook from the golden age of pulp.  Steve Logan is down to rock bottom.  His wife Ruby is about to give birth any minute.  He is out of work and out of luck.  He is thinking of selling his treasured luger but first he wants to collect a couple of hundred bucks he's owed by a local bigshot for work did on his yacht.  Purely by chance he comes across Ralph Angers, who literally tries to walk in front of a bus.  Steve saves him, Ralph naturally feels obliged.  He insists of buying Steve a drink in the very bar where Steve planned on selling his luger.  Before Steve knows it, Ralph has the gun and the bar owner is dead.

Steve is dragged along as Ralph runs amok.  Ralph's girlfriend Lillian is another reluctant accomplice. Ralph is an eye surgeon gone mad.  He is carrying the blueprints for a state of the art eye hospital he plans to build - which is bad news indeed for the realtor he consults.  And while all this is going on, Steve knows his wife is in hospital, undergoing an especially difficult labour.

By compressing the timescale into a single day, Brewer cranks up the tension.  By limiting his characters to three principals he can offer us plenty of psychological insight.  I lapped it up.  A minor classic of its genre.

The Sins of the Fathers - Lawrence Block

Having recently read and reviewed Block novels from the early days and his most recent, here we have mid-period Block, when he was starting to make a serious name for himself. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Sins of the Fathers dates from 1976 and is the first of his Matt Scudder series.

Scudder is an ex-cop, now open to filling his time with the odd private inquiry. Scudder doesn't charge for his time or expenses, but is willing to accept gifts which he then pays tithes on to a local church. Not that he is a believer or anything, it just squares things with his conscience. Scudder is divorced but on friendly terms with his ex. He has girlfriends and probably drinks a little too much. He lives in a cheap New York hotel and spends a lot of times in bars. He hires a car if he needs one, otherwise he walks and uses public transport.

Anyway, a contact puts him on to Cale Hanniford, a businessman from upstate NY, whose daughter has recently been brutally murdered. The case drew publicity for all the wrong reasons. There is no doubt who killed her - her 20 year-old roommate Richie Vanderpoel is found in the street, drenched in Wendy's blood, telling all and sundry that he's killed her. That night, in the police cells, he hangs himself.

What Hanniford wants from Scudder is an insight into his daughter's life since she dropped out of college and took to prostitution with older men. Scudder accepts. He soon finds out that Wendy was actually Hanniford's stepdaughter. She was born out of wedlock, her real father killed in WW2. Scudder tracks down her previous roommate, who also knew her in college. She confirms the prostitution and also tells Scudder why Wendy dropped out of college. There was a scandal involving one of the professors.

Scudder can't help looking into the killer, too. Richie, it turns out, is the son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. As a child, Richie found his mother exsanguinated in the bathroom. He is homosexual but has no real interest in sex, certainly he is not interested in an ongoing relationship with other men. Scudder determines that Richie and Wendy, the closeted gay guy and the prostitute, actually established a loving sexless relationship. Why then did Richie kill her? That's the twist - and it's a zinger.

Block's style is phenomenal, so easy you don't really notice. Yet his characters leap off the page, the dialogue zips along, and there is no shortage of description or depth. Here, for example, we get a thorough insight into the New York gay scene in the mid-Seventies and the coming of age of the free love generation. Recommended.

The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes -Lawrence Block

Earlier this year I discussed the extraordinary output of the American pulp maestro Lawrence Block. The novel I was reviewing then, Borderline, was one of his first. This is a Hard Line original, published in September 2015, and there is no appreciable difference. Well, perhaps just one. Here, Block borrows his core idea from noir movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. He is perfectly open about it. His hero, ex NYPD officer Doak Miller, is a fan of old movies and gets his idea from watching them.

Now living in Florida, Miller does a little PI work to supplement his pension. The local sheriff, no less, has heard that a local woman is looking for a hit man to rid her of her much older, much richer husband. Miller agrees to meet her, wearing a wire. But first he checks her out, sees how gorgeous she is, especially her deep blue eyes. So he meets her as arranged but slips her a script whereby she changes her mind. Miller knows he will sleep with her - he already has one friend with benefits and he's not long in town - but doesn't realise he will fall in love with her.

It gets complicated, of course. Miller meets with the girl's horrible husband. The horrible husband hires him to investigate his wife, whom he suspects is having an affair. Miller also learns about the pre-nup whereby if they divorce there's no big pay-off. The husband has to die for his widow to get her due. It's all a question of how to do it.

Block still writes like a dream. His characters are multi-faceted, with flaws and predilections. They are ruled by sex and, to a lesser extent, money. What grips the reader, though, is the layering of story, each layer, no matter how bizarre, inextricably linked to the main narrative.

An absolute gem. Essential reading for any fan of modern US crime fiction.

The Wench is Dead - Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown (1906-72) was a prolific author of pulp mystery and sci fi stories. The Wench is Dead (from 1953) is more of a novella, albeit a very short one. I read it as an e-book which didn't have numbered pages; I'm guessing it was somewhere around the 40 pages mark. And yet it is more novel than short story, encompassing the entirety of the convoluted action and a good measure of backstory.


Thus we learn that Howie is a scion of a Chicago business family who has won himself a Bachelor of Sociology degree but nevertheless finds himself washing dishes in a rundown Los Angeles chow house. He has a friends-with-benefits arrangement with B-girl prostitute Billie the Kid. His grand amour, however, is for nasty sweet wine. Drink, as so often, has been his undoing. Billie sends him to her neighbour Mame to borrow wine. Mame is a hype not a drunk but one of her customers the previous evening left her a bottle of the sweet stuff and she is more than willing to oblige Howie.


The next thing Howie knows, Billie is shaking him awake with the news that someone has killed Mame. Worse, the milkman saw Howie enter her apartment. His description is in the paper. Obviously Howie needs to scram - Billie will lend him the money. Howie feels obligated and offers to marry her. But Billie is a B-girl and knows she will never be acceptable in Chicagoan business circles.

She's a diamond in the rough. Howie is a poor sap in a jam. The Wench is Dead is pure noir. The publisher of the e-book even contrives to have him played on the cover by Elisha Cook Jnr, dead before the titles roll in countless noir classics of the Forties and Fifties. And Brown distils it like fine Scotch on the rocks rather than the nasty pints of cut-price muscatel favoured by his anti-hero. Great fun.

Quarry's Choice - Max Allan Collins

I found this thanks to paperbackwarrior.com, which has fast become a Facebook favourite of mine. Max Allan Collins I vaguely knew as a prolific writer of contemporary pulp (although I had no idea how vast his range was before looking him up on Wikipedia) and Quarry rang a bell somewhere at the back of mind. I soon realised, on reading the set up chapter for this story, that the bell was the TV series Quarry which I had enjoyed last year but which had nevertheless got cancelled.

Anyway, the book series which Collins began at the time it is set (mid-Seventies) is about a Vietnam vet who returns home to find nothing waiting for him. No job, an antipathetic if not downright hostile citizenry and his wife having an affair with a local petrolhead, who soon suffers a nasty and highly memorable accident. Quarry (not his real name) is, however, exactly what the Broker is looking for - a hitman who can be relied upon to do the wet work efficiently and permanently. The Broker is the go-between. Quarry never knows who the client is or - up front - the reason the nominee needs to die.

Except in this case. The Broker is the client after Quarry saves him from an initial hit. The job takes him down to Biloxi where he signs up with the progressive wing of the Southern Mafia, which controls the casinos, bars and strip joints along the coast.


Turns out there is more wet work in Biloxi than anyone envisaged. Quarry's services are in high demand. He has choices to make - hence the title.


Collins writes with fluid grace. His phraseology is just sufficiently hard-boiled; it never even threatens to spill over into pastiche. His book, written in 2015 (39 years after Quarry's debut) but still set in 1972, is historically convincing with just the right amount of period detail. The twist, when it comes, is a great one. I did guess who it would involve but got nowhere near how.


Excellent. I want more.


And by the way, I love the cover.

The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson

Thompson (1906-77) was the king of American pulp noir.  Nobody of his era did it nastier and he can still shock today.  The Killer Inside Me is probably his best novel, though I quite liked King Blood when I read it twenty or so years ago.  He takes great liberties with first person narrative, yet he gets away with it thanks to sheer bravura.

That is not to say Thompson was in any sense a poor or sloppy writer.  Let us not forget, as so many do, that he wrote the scripts of Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory.  The Getaway and The Killer Inside Me have both made into Hollywood movies twice, The Grifters once.  Several others have been adapted as French movies.  Maybe it's the resolutely humdrum name, but Thompson really should be much better known than he is.

What we have here is the account of Lou Ford, Hicksville TX deputy, good old boy and psycho killer.  There are all sorts of reasons why they can't catch him.  Mainly, he's much smarter than they think he is.  Secondly, he simply doesn't care whether they catch him or not.  He's not to blame.  It's the sickness (italicised throughout), which first troubled him as a boy.  In the end, by unexpected literary sleight of hand, they do catch him.  Lou still doesn't care.  He has already prepared the final spree - for himself and others: "All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad."  A sentence that pretty well defines the form.