Customer Reviews

A Devil for O'Shaugnessy/ The Three-way Split

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To begin, I haven't had a chance to read the new story Devil for O'Shaugnessy which is seeing print for the first time in this volume. The review below will only concern Three-Way Split.

For the last two and a half years, I've found myself devouring 50s and 60s noir books; ever since I read that their style was a primary influence on sci-fi writer William Gibson's. The taut sentences full of action, the sloughing of unnecessary details. To me, if you read noir for nothing more than the writing, you're in for a treat. More than any other type of novel, I find noirs to be like watching a movie in the mind. Since picking them up my favorite entries in the genre have been Elliot Chaze's "Black Wings Has My Angel", Benjamin Appel's "Plunder", Gil Brewer's "Three-Way Split".

Split's story revolves around the typically downtrodden noir anti-hero Jack and his battle of wills with his louse of a father. What makes this story standout from the others is the way Brewer presents it. Everything is so perfectly rendered (the setting, the characters, the situations) that you feel like you know everyone involved personally, could sit down and have a conversation w/ them if you were so inclined. Since the story involves a sunken treasure and battle over ownership, Brewer has several chances to take us underwater and, being skittish around water myself, I would literally pull myself out of reading to find I was holding my breath while the scene played out. That's how realistic the writing was. You felt you had to conserve your oxygen because you didn't know when you'd reach surface again, in many case, much like the characters who went down.

In Jack's father you have one of the ultimate noir antagonists. I can't recall having felt such anger towards a fictional character, the want to strangle and throttle him. By the end, I wanted to tell Jack, move over bud, lemme take a whack at 'em!

Recently I've begun snapping up as many Stark House editions as I can. They each have excellent introductions and afterwords and are printed in a much sturdier edition than most of these stories originally saw. Gil Brewer's entries are both worth your time as well as Hard Case Crime's reissue of the Vengeful Virgin, and well, anything else you happen upon by this author. He can't be more highly recommended.

Just finished reading THE THREE-WAY SPLIT (1960) and this is a great, action-packed example of noir writing at its best. In this grueling noir adventure tale, Gil Brewer never lets you catch your breath, forcing you to turn the page because you just know it's going to get even better (and by that, of course, I mean worse for the hero). A down-on-his-luck skipper discovers buried treasure on the bottom of the ocean only to have his get rich quick salvage plans jeopardized by his monstrous father and the trouble he brings with him. Seriously, the father character is one of the most messed-up pieces of work in all of noir fiction and you just love to hate him because you you can't wait to see what horrible thing he'll do next! Add to this more conflict with the good girl love story (including some hot and heavy sex scenes for the time) and you have one hell of a book. My previous experience with Gil Brewer was Hard Case Crime's reissue of The Vengeful Virgin which, like THE THREE-WAY SPLIT, was another story that grabbed me by the throat. But THE THREE-WAY SPLIT is even better! Don't miss it.

On the other hand, the previously unpublished A DEVIL FOR O'SHAUGNESSY (1971), took some getting used to. The author's sparse, hard-hitting style (with no words wasted) had changed over the intervening decade, becoming needlessly verbose with archaic words most people have never heard of such as "peregrination", "nepenthe" and "perspicacious". These bizarre, two-dollar words have no place outside of academia and only serve to jar the reader out of the narrative and go running for a dictionary. Frankly, the story could have benefitted from some ruthless editing. The story does pick up once you get used to it (and for me, that was about 40 pages in). It certainly does have its share of amusing moments, but remains a minor work in the author's career. The paint-by-numbers plot revolves around an alcoholic con-man (and ex-con) with a conscious that always gets in the way of hitting the big score. He foolishly gets mixed-up with a murderous heiress who wants to seize control of her grandmother's estate by seducing him into doing the old lady in. To do this, he has to impersonate her long-lost grandson who is to get the bulk of her fortune. The plot may sound rather contrived but did I mention the old lady is nuts and keeps a pet monkey that she believes is her reincarnated husband? That bizarre twist sounds ridiculous but it did up the fun factor considerably, as did the inclusion of a sexy, lisping private secretary to the grandmother whose pink tongue keeps poking out of her mouth when she talks, driving the poor con-artist crazy with desire. I never thought of girls lisping as a fetish before but the way Brewer tells it, it must be.

No one else has mentioned it yet, so I'd like to point out that not only do you get both A DEVIL FOR O'SHAUGNESSY and THE THREE-WAY SPLIT in this double feature, but you also get three of Brewer's short stories: DIG THAT CRAZY CORPSE, LOVE... AND LUCK and INDISCRETION (from the pages of Pursuit, Swank and Cavalier), plus two brief but mildly interesting retrospectives on the author. However, the only good short story is LOVE... AND LUCK, a nasty little thriller that somehow manages to condense what could make an entire novel down into just a few fun, nasty pages. An ex-stripper is happily married until a brutal boyfriend out of her past turns up and forces her to take him into her home posing as her cousin. To say more would be to spoil it. INDISCRETION, easily the worst of the shorts, is the incomprehensible tale of a housewife's infidelity that belongs on a garbage heap. DIG THAT CRAZY CORPSE is a mediocre hardboiled private eye parody. Not bad, but not very good.

My main complaint is that like other Stark House books I've read, there are an annoying number of typos (obviously introduced by the publisher's scanning method). For example, sometimes "how" becomes "bow" and "he" becomes "be," where you can see the software could not tell the difference between certain letters due to the font used in the source material. And every so often, punctuation is either missing or in the wrong place, or words after the beginning of a sentence are capitalized. And there is rarely any consistency between use of the single dash and double-dash to separate text. A DEVIL FOR O'SHAUGNESSY in particular is riddled with typos (far more than THE THREE-WAY SPLIT) and they seem to get worse and worse as the story goes on, to the point where there seem to be at least one or more of the blasted errors on every page. At least Stark House always formats their books nicely, which sets them apart from Black Mask, another hardboiled/noir reprint house, but one who is utterly, irredeemably incompetent and incapable of scanning, editing and formatting their books.

Despite an erratic career brought on by alcoholism and a failure to adapt to changing tastes and times, when Brewer was at his best (The Gold Medal years, 1951-1960), he is right up there with Jim Thompson and other giants of the genre. I will definitely be picking up some more books by him, including The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose, reputed to be two of his best, the latter supposedly up there with Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Stark House has another Brewer double feature, Wild to Possess / A Taste for Sin (Stark House Noir Classics) that looks good (and I really dig their retro B&W girly covers, although they are nothing compared to the sexy paintings that used to adorn the old 1950s paperback originals).