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 Red Scarf - Gil Brewer

 

Classic noir from a classic noir author - that is to say, alcoholic and frustrated by his lack of success.  Gil Brewer drank himself to death in 1983, barely sixty years old.  Still, he had managed to more or less support himself and his family with his writing, entirely for the pulp paperbacks. The Red Scarf was published by Mystery House in 1958 and falls round about the middle of his oeuvre.  Roy Nichols and his wife Bess have gone about things the right way, the American way, starting out with nothing and working hard, damned hard, to build their little nest-egg and get into business.  They have bought a nice little motel right where a brand new highway is planned.  But then the highway is put on hold and they are living hand to mouth.  In desperation, Roy has headed up to Chicago to try and tap his brother Albert for a loan.  Albert, of course, will do no such thing.  Roy is down to his last few dollars - can't even afford the bus home.  So he cops a ride with a couple of grifters, Teece and Vivian.  They have a car, they have drink, Vivian has curves in all the preferred places and there is a briefcase of stolen money, held together with the red scarf of the title, Vivian's good luck talisman, which turns out to be not so lucky after all.

Plot is clearly paramount with Brewer and he does it really well, the fugitives holed up in Nichols' motel with Nichol's suspicious wife, the cops and the mob both hot on their trail.  The prose is proficient and the end perfectly satisfactory.  A paradigm of the genre - and only half the fun to be had from this Stark House Classic Noir ebook.