Reading Richard Ford (a non-pulp writer) in his pulp venture The Ultimate Good Luck, I particularly enjoyed this passage which serves as (one of) the great definitions of Noir.
“The guy who had it in for you was the guy you had never seen. The one you loved was the one you couldn’t be understood by. The one you paid to trust was the one you were sure would cut and run. The best you could think was maybe you’d get lucky, and come out with some skin left on.”
Some good moments from Peter Cheyney’s Dark Bahama:
He had another look at the corpse. He thought it was rather a pity that a young man with such a long, slender, straight body should meet such a sticky end–literally sticky. Then he went back to the drinks wagon and poured himself another brandy and soda. He sat down in the armchair and waited. He thought it was nice that the drinks were free.
Isles said, “Nature always presents two faces. The more beautiful she is the more ruthless she is. Like women.”
Perhaps to call Eric Ambler a “pulp” writer is a stretch. But his work definitely contains pulp elements and what struck me most while reading his novel A Kind of Anger was not between the pages but what surrounded them on that delicious cover. Fontana books released a series of Ambler spy thrillers with a consistent theme in the cover design. These are definitely “pulp”.
-TM
There’s one scene in the Demon Dog’s first novel that will stick in my guts forever. When classical music junkie/private detective Fritz Brown goes down to Mexico to investigate his caddy/nazi/porn addict client, he encounters a group of post-hippies on the beach. He’s just come from a baptism of blood and a binge of booze. He eats dog with these long-haired free spirits and develops a crush on one big-bozoomed lady. She sees straight to peoples’ souls and knows he’s in trouble so she hangs with him in the sand. He wants to fuck but that’s not what she’s there for. She puts his face between her big fat tits and let’s him sleep and rest and recover between her breasts so that he can go back to L.A. and rid the world of some corrupt mother fuckers.
One thing Ellroy gets about pulp (and lots of writers don’t) is that there has to be a lady at the end; there is a light at the end of the tunnel with soft skin and a mouth to kiss. It doesn’t matter if the “him” of the story gets there or not. But it means shit if he’s not reaching for that destination.
-TM
One good scene in Ed McBain’s The Gutter and the Grave (my latest Hard Case find) has drunk/bum detective Matt Cordell visit the apartment of a lady detective: Fran West. Busty and black-haired, she tells him she was a model first (not skinny enough to be a fashion model, so she posed for the porn mags) and claims she’s too stupid to have passed the cop exam, so she got a job working for a detective’s agency. Moments later, she lays down her rules. I think these are some mighty admirable rules for a lady:
“Rule one: never touch a drink before three in the afternoon. Rule two: never wear a girdle. Rule three: never invite a man up for a nightcap unless I plan to let him stay the night. Rule four: be a lady. Rule five: except when it’s impossible.”
-TM
My first impression of Lawrence Block wasn’t so good. He laid down a plot with an ending I could see coming a mile away. His detective Matthew Scudder was dense if I was five steps ahead of him. It was a book called A Time to Murder and Create: a good title, that’s why I picked it up.
So I gave up on Block for a while. But time wore me down on a second chance. This time I bought his first Scudder mystery, 8 Million Ways to Die: a better title. And from what I read for the first few chapters, a much better book. It was clean and fast. But then I got distracted.
Hard Case Crime covers are good for that, distracting attention. And the front of their reprint of The Girl with the Long Green Heart is no exception. I’m fifty pages into the paperback: I can feel the desperation, betrayal boiling under a clean surface ready to explode, the sucking sensation of an alright guy drawn into a mess he can’t get out of. So, I’m glad I gave Block a second and third try. Here’s a bit I just read that I liked very much.
You damn well have to know who’s working with you. When you’re all wrapped up in a big one you live a whole slew of lies all at once, and if you have a few people in it who are lying back and forth and conning each other as much as they’re conning the mooch, then you are looking for trouble and fairly certain of finding it. This doesn’t mean that good con men are inherently honest in their dealings among themselves. They aren’t. If they were honest, they woulnd’t have gone on the C to begin with. I expected Doug would lie to me, and I expected to lie to Doug, but not to the point where we’d be fouling each other up. If there were things I ought to know about him, I wanted to know them now.
–Travis Mills
David Goodis – Poet of the Damned
All good writing is autobiographical someone once said. In general that’s true but I would have to qualify that by saying in some authors more than others. There is a kind of professional writing that is more about expertise, structure and craft than it is about self revelation. It isn’t easy to do and requires a lot of hard work to develop those skills. I respect those who can do it and do it well. But I love the kind of writer who can’t help but bare his/her soul everytime they sit down and put pen to paper. One such is the pulp noir writer David Goodis (1917-1967) best known for the novel Down There (1956) that was adapted by film director Francois Truffaut into the French New Wave classic Shoot the Piano Player (1960).
Now long before I knew anything about writing or literature especially the middle class hierarchy that placed original paperback novels on the bottom shelf of the literary woodpile I had been reading guys like Frederick Brown, Jim Thompson, Day Keene, Charles Willeford and Charles Williams not just as entertainments but as literature as well. And later on when the teachers of various academic courses tried to tell me different I stubbornly held on to the notion that I was right and they were wrong. Not just wrong but foolishly and snobbishly so. And I still hold to that.
Lately I began reading Goodis again and now I’m more convinced than ever. He has been called “The poet of the down and outers”… “The spokesman of the losers”… “The Herald of the bad dream Bogarts” etc. All of those descriptions are wholly appropriate. Read any one of his novels and you’re not just immersed into his world of waterfronts and cheap whisky bars, you’re submerged into a no-exit zone of low lifes and disenchanteds whose only escape from the twilight world they live in is the crime they can get away with. His principal characters are drunks, sexy and frequently possessive women, and a whole herd of weak men in the service of heartless cruel ones. They are works that for the most part rob us of our innocence and take us into the underbelly of society where alcohol and violence define the boundaries of existence. It’s a world we don’t want to see or acknowledge but somehow can’t look away from. All thanks to Mr. Goodis. Someone had to speak for these lost souls and I as a reader am grateful that it’s him.
And as it turns out his writing reflected the life he lived. They reflect his world both inside and out. He was down and out in a way that George Orwell never experienced in either London or Paris. But damn could the man write. Here’s a quickie from his novel Black Friday (1954).
Frieda was a big woman. She was one sixty if she was an ounce, more solid than soft, packed into five feet five inches and molded majestically. He guessed she didn’t wear a girdle and when she turned her back to him and leaned over slightly he was certain of it…She bent over even further and her calves were the same as the rest of her, solid, round fat coming down rhythmically to slim ankles giving way to high heels that she hadn’t been wearing before.
From Cassidy’s Girl (1951)
He was seeing the night -black hair of Mildred, the disordered shiny mass of heavy hair. He was seeing the brandy-colored eyes, long lashed, very long lashed. And the arrogant upturned curve of her gorgeous nose. He was trying with all his power to hate the sight of her full fruit-like lips, and the maddening display of her immense breasts, the way they swept out, aimed at him like weapons. He stood there looking at the woman to whom he had been married for almost four years, with whom he slept in the same bed every night, but what he saw was not a mate. He saw a harsh and biting and downright unbearable obsession.
Most of the books, the best ones anyway, are still available and I recommend them without hesitation. Some titles besides the ones already mentioned that you might want to look at include; Nightfall (1947), Street of No Return (1952) and The Burglar (1953). The Black Lizard editions come with a terrific introductory essay on his life by Geoffrey O’Brien.
Our literary heritage is considerably richer than we think but we sometimes don’t know it. The reason being that so many worthwhile writers fall through the cracks because of middle class/ academic elitism. David Goodis is one of them. It is now time to bring him out and into the light.
– GE.
Pulp Quotes
From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made to be seen from 30 feet away.
Bogart can be tough without a gun. He has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt.
What did it matter when you were dead…You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
I do a great deal of research, particularly in the apartments of tall blondes.
I knew one thing. As soon as anyone said you don’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.
-Raymond Chandler
Others
Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and occasionally, a hearty meal.
-A. Hitchcock.
I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.
– Walter Neff (Double Indemnity-1944)
And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper.
-M.Gunderson (Fargo-1996)
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
– John D. MacDonald
I don’t like jail; they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
– C. Bukowski
There’s nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
– N. Mailer
I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday
– R. Chandler
What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.
– R. Stout
Some people never go crazy. What horrible lives they must live.
– C. Bukowski
Love; when you get fear into it, it’s not love anymore. It’s hate.
– James M. Cain
The world’s really wild at heart and weird at the top.
-Barry M. Gifford
Los Angeles is the world’s biggest third rate city.
– J. D. MacDonald
I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
– R. Stout
Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing. But stealing his car, that’s larceny.
– J.M. Cain
Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car.
– R. Chandler looking at A. Hitchcock
Dreaming of Babylon: Thinking about Brautigan
by Gus Edwards
I’ve just finished reading Richard Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon (A Private Eye novel 1942) and I think it’s a doozy. It’s Brautigan which means that it’s kooky, absurd, insane, hilariously funny and completely fractured even in the way the novel is constructed. Now those should be reasons enough to recommend it, but in addition to all those virtues I have to add another. And that is respect. Because in spite of its absurdities the novel adheres to the traditions of the genre with a respectful degree of intelligence and affection.
The story is told in the first person by the Private Eye of the subtitle a Mr. C. Card who might just be the worst PI in the business. Of course just as he’s feeling completely down and out, along comes a job. He is hired by this beautiful blonde with a seemingly bottomless capacity for beer. She is accompanied by a murderous looking bodyguard/driver referred to as “The Neck”. The job is to steal a body from the San Francisco City morgue and deliver it to them at midnight in an appointed graveyard. Card takes the job because he’s been down so long that a job, any job, looks like up to him. He owes his landlady six months back rent, his mother eight hundred dollars and because he has no car so he has to take public transportation to get him from one place to another. He can’t afford cabs. That’s how bad things are.
But our Mr. Card is no ordinary down-and- out Private Eye. He is a man who exists fully on an alternative mental plain. A city not unlike San Francisco where he is a tough guy detective in the Dashiell Hammett’/Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler/ Phillip Marlowe tradition. Where like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, who came along later, he has a sexy, knockout secretary who’s crazy for him. So where everything’s wrong for him in San Francisco, everything’s right for him in Babylon. And much of the novel’s narrative is addressed to him balancing these two plains of existence.
Now as we go through the story we come across a plethora of curious characters. His mother, his landlady, a peg-legged manager of the city morgue, a tough cop (Sgt. Rink)that no criminal should ever want to encounter and a couple of Femme Fatales that neither Bogie or Dick Powell ever had to deal with. Then there are some thugs who seem to come right out of Laurel and Hardy or a Mack Sennett movie.
This is the 5th or 6th Brautigan novel I’ve read and I’ve loved them all. He makes me laugh with his unexpected turns of phrases and lines of dialogue. I can’t think of too many writers I can say that about. And whenever I’m reading one of his novels I always find myself asking; “Why hasn’t somebody made a film out of this?” But when I think about it some more I realize that most of the humor and the originality in his work is in both his idiosyncratic use of language and the attitude he brings to the enterprise. Both would be difficult if not impossible to translate onto film. Brautigan, in his novels and short stories too, often incorporates a kind of American “magic realism” that critics don’t always credit him for and appreciate. But it’s there in books like The Hawkline Monster, Sombrero Fallout and others. It is here in Dreaming of Babylon too. And he makes it work in a way that defies all expectation.
He may be gone but the books are here to be read and re-read, to treasure and to laugh about. Richard Brautigan was a one-of-a-kind talent. And it’ll be a millennium before the likes of him appears on the literary horizon again. Check him out if you haven’t already. He’s a pip.
Pulp Fiction Bumper stickers – Part One
I have always felt that there should be bumper stickers taken from hard boiled pulp fiction and films. Here are some I would start with.
Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle. – Jim Thompson (author of The Grifters and other books.)
When the phone rang Parker was in the garage killing a man. – Richard Stark (author of the Parker series including Point Blank)
“Who shot him?” I asked…The grey haired man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.” – Dashiell Hammett (author of The Maltese Falcon and other books)
“I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived for a few weeks when you loved me.” – Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele (In a Lonely Place -1950).
There will be more in the future. And please send in any that you think of. I would love to add them to the list. – GE.
The Pulp Journals 