Wednesday Paperback Cover

"A roaring saga of the male animal on the prowl"

Review of Flight to Darkness

Gil Brewer’s mini-revival (is the prefix even appropriate anymore?) continues with the republication of his 1952 Fawcett novel Flight to Darkness (New Pulp Press, 2009). The book represents the new publisher’s first foray into reprints, and it seems like a worthwhile effort. Brewer’s work usually follows a fairly straightforward formula: A desperate guy meets a bad girl and proceeds to make questionable decisions until bad things happen, and it’s too late to fix them. It’s easy to accuse Brewer of being repetitive, and it’s true, he was, but his books have a certain desperation about them which makes them seem more immediate than the countless other mass market paperbacks of the era that depended on the same basic plot. Brewer’s effortless conjuring of desperate heroes is because his own life was so full of desperation.

Still, he had his faults. His books often seem rushed, probably because he was under duress to crank something out to get paid and because back in those days no one wanted a hundred thousand word manuscript. The fact that he was an alcoholic probably didn't help.

Flight to Darkness aspires to be more than the average Brewer novel, and it sometimes succeeds, but it still suffers from its ending. Darkness is the story of Korean War vet Eric Garth, who has acted heroically in battle, saving an injured man while under heavy fire. The incident took its toll on Garth, though, and he suffers from what would now be called post traumatic stress disorder.

Eric, a sculptor, is constantly haunted by the thought that he murdered his estranged half-brother Frank with a sculpting mallet. As the novel opens, Garth is being released to return to Florida with his fiancee Leda, a nurse he met while hospitalized, to claim his half of the family business from his half-brother Frank. The happy couple's trip is derailed in Alabama when Garth is accused of a hit and run. Garth has no memory of the incident, and when his brother shows up, local law enforcement is only too happy to institutionalize Garth indefinitely.

When he finally escapes, he finds out the charges were dropped long ago, so he sets out for Florida, where he discovers that Leda has married Frank, who has conspired to screw him out of the family business. Matters are further complicated by Eric's old flame, Leda's professed desire for him, and the not insignificant fact that Frank soon turns up dead, his head bashed in with a mallet.

The desperation that pervades Brewer's stories works especially well in this novel, since the protagonist is not merely broke (as is often the case in Brewer novels), but of questionable sanity. It is a little difficult to dismiss some of Eric's actions late in the novel, however. After a good, if a little long setup, Brewer has his hero ignore about ten million red flags as the novel rolls toward its inevitable conclusion, and the conclusion is way too convenient. Flight to Darkness is missing the final part of Brewer's formula. At the end, everything turns out all right, which is just way too pat to be satisfying, especially considering the fact that Eric Garth spends ninety-nine percent of the novel doing his thinking below the waist. As is often the case, it seems like Brewer knew the necessary word count was close, so he just put a bow on it. A little more effort would have served this story well. The book has a rather well done pulp climax, but a little denouement would have fleshed it out just enough to make it have the resonance it should have had. It would have pushed this book from a good example of classic paperback fiction to an excellent one.

Patricia Highsmith's New York in the NYT

Here's an interesting article on Patricia Highsmith's New York, which should keep you occupied until I get around to posting a review sometime this weekend.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Cindy changed careers.

Goodbye Baby at A Twist of Noir

I know I said I was shuttering the blog for a couple weeks during my vacation, but I just wanted to point out that my story "Goodbye Baby," which was available for about 5 minutes in the final issue of Demolition, is up at A Twist of Noir. I am rather fond of this story because it turned out to be something more than what I intended. It ended up being much more quiet than what I originally set out to write, and I think that made it a much better story than it would have been otherwise. I was quite sad when Demolition disappeared from the Web and this one went down the memory hole. Anyway, I hope you like it.

Independent Crime Takes a Holiday

I'm making it official. I haven't shuttered the blog since I started it, but I'm about to go away for two weeks with limited to no Internet access, so I'm also taking a break from the blog. Have no fear, I'm taking a couple of books with me for review, and I'll be back around the second week of December or so, but I need a break from my life. So, I'm off to the middle of nowhere. Everyone have a great Thanksgiving, and try not to let the world fall into anarchy while I'm away.

Delayed Paperback Cover

Sorry for the delay. Anyway, this one's from Hard Case, and I like it.

My Apologies on the Wednesday Paperback Cover

I've been having technical difficulties. As soon as I get it sorted out, I'll get something up.

The Killer Inside Me: Pushing Buttons

First off, I'm reposting the trailer for The Killer Inside Me, since YouTube seems to have taken it down. Secondly, prompted by this blog post, and it's concern about the film's depiction of violence against women,I went back and reread Thompson's book, which I had not looked at in many years. My first observation was that the trailer seems to show a film that shows remarkable fidelity to its source material. The story, as far as I can tell, is the same as the book's, and even has a lot of dialogue lifted verbatim from the book. That makes me optimistic about the film, even though Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson aren't exactly the greatest actors in the world.


Now,I'll make a frank assessment: The violence depicted in the trailer isn't the result of some Hollywood desire to tart up Thompson's book with titillating and shocking detail. It comes straight from the novel. The filmmakers seem to have actually toned down the initial meeting between Lou Ford and Joyce (Jessica Alba's character). In the book, Ford beats Joyce until she's unconscious and then revives her. When she comes to, she comes onto him. It's an uncomfortable scene, but not nearly as uncomfortable as the scene where Lou kills her. The trailer is graphic, but so is the book. Lou describes killing Joyce as, "like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once." If that imagery weren't disturbing enough, Joyce, who is clearly almost as screwed up in the head as Lou, asks for a goodbye kiss while she is being beaten.

The murder of Amy Stanton (played by Kate Hudson in the upcoming film) in the book is even worse. Lou hits her in the stomach, and "[his] fist went back against her spine, and the flesh closed around it to the wrist. " After that vicious blow, Amy falls and the floor, and Lou sits there and watches her die. Then he kicks her in the head for good measure. I've got to say, this scene, particularly the description of the punch, stayed with me for years. I remembered it long after I had forgotten most of the book's story.

Now, Lou Ford is a complex character. His violence is not just reserved for women. He kills men. He puts cigars out on vagrants for fun. He corners people and repeats corny cliches just to watch them squirm, but the worst violence of the book is reserved for women because Lou Ford has a complex relationship with the opposite sex. Without giving too much away, let's say that what torments Lou, aside from an inherited tendency toward sadism, is his relationship with women. To say more than that would be telling, but Thompson isn't going for misogynistic thrills. He's doing a character study of a man who has an inner life he hides from the world, and a public face at odds with his true self.

The Killer Inside Me was published in 1952, seven years before Robert Bloch's Psycho (another novel that hinges on a killer's complicated relationship with women). You can probably lay a lot of blame at Thompson's feet for the boring and repetitive serial killer fiction that clogs up the crime fiction section of your local bookstore, but it would be a mistake to accuse him of misogyny. It's not a theme that runs throughout his work. Thompson, like Bloch, wrote a lot of novels, and they're quite different, with different types of characters.

Similarly, it would be a mistake to accuse the filmmakers of misogyny for bringing Thompson's disturbing story to the screen. Artists have no obligation to preach, or try to instruct, or to worry about whether their work depicts something that's "dangerous." If you can't depict "dangerous" behaviors or ideas in fiction, then where exactly can you depcit them? I can see how The Killer Inside Me trailer might make the author of that blog post uncomfortable. It's not based on a Little Golden Book. The book is disturbing. It's meant to be. Dismissing The Killer Inside Me, as "no better than a snuff film," however, based on five minutes of footage, an obvious ignorance about the source material and a misplaced sense of self righteousness seems silly, although such controversy will undoubtedly end up helping at the box office.




Bonus video: MC 900 Foot Jesus raps from the POV of Lou Ford in his 1991 song "The Killer Inside Me."

The Killer Inside Me Trailer

Self explanatory and NSFW.