Customer Reviews

The Vengeance Man / Park Avenue Tramp / the Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed: A Trio of Gold Medals

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Stark House is to be commended for bringing out this compilation of noir fiction from the 1950's and 60's.

The first book, The Vengeance Man, is a 5 star effort with shamelessly selfish characters engaging in the typical noir web of intrigue that leads to bad outcomes at the end for all. The characters are well drawn, the dialog is tight, and the ending fully completes the circle drawn by the author.

I rate the second and third books 4 strong stars. Park Avenue Tramp, the second book has characters that are exceptionally well developed and elicit great sympathy. However, the plot borders on the melodramatic and is far too predictable. Still, the writing is deft and characterizations rich.

The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed is a bit misleading as it is seldom told from the killers' point of view. However, there is a heck of a plot here, which one can only appreciate at the end when it has all played out. Unfortunately, the characters are less well drawn than either the first two books.

All that said, this book was a great way to while away a rainy weekend.

This Trio of Gold Medal paperback reprints definitely did make me want to read more by authors Dan J. Marlowe, Fletcher Flora and Charles Runyon. All three of these guys can write! I really loved Park Avenue Tramp with each chapter told from a different character's perspective. I love books like that, whether it's George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) or Jim Thompson's The Criminal or The Kill-Off. Park Avenue Tramp was reminiscent of despair master David Goodis at his best. The characters are so doomed and desperate for love it hurts, yet you can't help but root for them to find some small measure of happiness in their bleak existence. The Vengeance Man reminded me a lot of Thompson's Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me; like them, it tells the story of a ruthless yet somehow likable redneck murderer in the first-person. The first few pages were pretty badly written; so hard to get into that I almost didn't bother to finish it (in fact, I saved it for last after making two aborted attempts), but I'm glad I came back to it because the story (and writing style) quickly warmed up and became red-hot after the first few clunky pages. The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed doesn't spend much time telling the story from the killer's perspective but it's still a fun whodunnit (and why) set in a sleepy redneck town. Unfortunately, the climax ends up being like a really good Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week (if there is such a thing) so I'd say that made it the weakest story of the three. Still enjoyable but not noir at all.

All three novels are fun reads but publisher Stark House needs to be reprimanded for their abysmal editing; typos are consistent throughout. For example, "be" is substituted for "he" and "clown" for "down," so you end up being yanked out of a perfectly good story by ridiculous lines like "be burned the house clown" instead of "he burned the house down." You also get lines like "the car turned the comer" instead of "...turned the corner" and "she angled the minor so I could get a look at myself" instead of "she angled the mirror..." This is my first Stark House book and the only thing that impressed me was their excellent choice of novels to reprint in this collection. I've been badly burned by Black Mask's series of reprints before (all horribly formatted with awful covers on top of all the typos!) so I was hoping for more from Stark House. Their books certainly look more professional, being nicely formatted and (mostly) sporting decent covers but so many typos makes me think twice about buying another book from them. Still, I'll probably give Stark House another chance. Wild to Possess / A Taste for Sin (Stark House Noir Classics) looks pretty cool...