A Bit Off The Beaten Path

         This book is two separate novels by Robert Silverberg, the well known and prolific author of many pulp yarns and science fiction stories. I reviewed Stripper a month ago and posted the review here.  I gave it five stars.  I cannot give Never An Even Break the same rating.  Here is why.  Every pulp novel, especially ones written 65 years ago, contains a good deal of risqué material.  Most of it is titillating and pushes the edge of the envelope when contrasted with the mores of the era.  That is why they were not featured in the local public library of Everytown, USA.  But Silverberg pushes the envelope to the edge and then jumps off the cliff.  The result is a crash and burn that, without the boorish and sick sex scenes, would have warranted five stars.  Let me explain.  

        Meet Harry Fletcher, a mundane accountant, living with his equally mundane wife and two teenage children in a suburban (or maybe Queens) apartment around New York City.  The novel has four sub-plots playing out at the same time.  First, we have poor Harry.  A schlub.  Hard working, low earning, boring, unappreciated.  In a word, anonymous.  Think Mad Men on the cheap.  But by happenstance, the urge for lust captures him in the form of Della, a gold-digging hussy who entraps him in her sexual charms and starts draining him financially, penny by penny.  Silverberg paints quite a devastating cent by cent descent into financial slavery.  The meals go from $3 to $10.  The theater tickets from the back of the room to front row.  Poor Harry is like a dope addict without the means to sustain the habit as Della bleeds him dry. But wait, our hero has found a solution!  While auditing an account for a big time grocer, he discovers an accounting error.  Or is it?  It's not a mistake but a clever scam devised by the son in law of the company founder, one Ed Ryan.  Rather than doing the right thing and reporting it to the founder, Harry blackmails Ed.  $50 bucks a week to keep his mouth shut.  As expected with Della, the extra cash keeps her going for a few weeks and she cannot help become suspicious of Harry's recent generosity so she does what every kept tramp does so well:  ups the ante.  That puts poor Harry with his back to the wall as he has a family at home whom he must support.  Like every successful blackmailer, he approaches Ed and bumps up the price for his silence. Now it is $100 a week.  But Ed is no fool and knows this will never end well.  

        Meet Marge Fletcher, Harry's equally downtrodden and boring wife.  While Harry is at work every day, Marge is, on the surface, a sort of Edith Bunker like housewife without the humor.  She is bored. Her sex life with Harry is almost non-existent.  To the extent it does exist, it is more akin to conforming to societal expectations once a month to at least pretend to have the trappings of a real marriage.  More monotony than pleasure.  But as with everything else in this novel, what appears to be is not.  Twenty years ago, the good wife Marge had a lesbian fling with a fellow high schooler.  All in the past.  Or so she thought.  There is a phone call in the middle of the day.  The old flame is back.  They re-unite.  But the girlfriend finds greener pastures with a wealthy widow and decides to spend the winter island hopping with her new lover in the Caribbean.  Poor Marge is now hooked on female fleshly pleasures.  She starts frequenting lesbian bars in Manhattan and hooking up with random women and paying for it, which puts a hole in her rainy day fund at home.

          Now the children.  And here is where it goes off the edge into a land of sexual perversion that, even for the genre, is a bit uncomfortable for even a hardened reader of trash fiction.  You have Nancy and Jack, two teenagers a few years apart who share the same bedroom.  They each have a girlfriend or boyfriend and are at the experimental stage of teenage sexual exploration.  Without going into the details and there are way too many of them, Jack gets Nancy, his sister, pregnant.  Yes, you heard it right.  

           Put all this together and here is how it ends.  Marge, in a fit of depression, overdoses on sleeping pills and meets her maker.  Harry gets drunk and loses it with Della.  In a fit of rage, he kills Della in her apartment and is run over by Ed Ryan as he leaves the scene of the crime.  And Nancy?  She goes to an abortionist who rapes her before he performs the deed.  But the procedure, which I guess is what they call it these days, is botched and she dies on the table.  All these loose ends are never tied up.  The novel just ends.  

          This story would have been much more interesting if the incest angle were left out.  There is simply too much page after page detail about sexual arousal that, like pornography, becomes very boring very fast.  The Harry and Marge side stories are very well written, especially Harry's dilemma which could have been a novel all by itself if it were more developed at the end.  All in all, three and a half stars.  Your mileage may vary.

                 Queenpin by Megan Abbott

 

     A bit of a switch in the genre. Has all of the elements of a traditional pulp novel of the 1950's except the protagonists are women and it is written by a female.  Our feminine lead, whose name I cannot remember, is a young woman, who, like all noir characters, gets mixed up with the wrong crowd at an early age.  She likes the taste of danger and the allure of a fast buck.  But she puts her trust in the wrong people and it all goes downhill from there.  The ending has a nice twist.  Worth reading.

 I watched Detour last night.  I last saw it about ten years ago.  Well worth seeing again.  The film is about an hour long but packs a wallop.  The story is told in flashback format.  Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a struggling piano player who is in love with barroom singer Sue Harvey.  For reasons that are unclear, probably because she wants to ditch our poor friend Al, Sue heads to LA sans Al, to start over and make it big.  Al, smitten about her, decides to hitchhike from New York to LA to re-unite with her.  Or so he hopes.  In true noir fashion the fun, or trouble, begins.  Al hitches a ride somewhere in Arizona with a fast talking con man who is on his way to LA.  Al drives for a bit as our hustler falls asleep.  A long sleep it is as he has a heart attach and dies.  Poor Al panics and thinking the cops will never believe the truth, steals the con man's identity and money and drives his car to California.  Al is beset with uncertainty and confusion. He stops for gas and sees a hitchhiker, Ann Savage, and offers her a ride. His moral uncertainty is now replaced with fear.  Savage plays the femme fatale to perfection.  Slowly, Al gets deeper and deeper into her web of deceit and blackmail.  It does not end well for Savage but our  noirish hero ends up broken spiritually and financially.  The film touches all the noir bases:  a decent man who is morally conflicted, an evil woman who pushes him in the wrong direction, and an ending that is anything but happy.  

  

 Stripper is one of those books/stories whose cover you look at and jump in with low expectations.  They used to call it trash fiction.  One of those thin paperbacks you bought in the back of variety store and felt guilty as you coughed up the ten cents from a cashier who reminded you of your grandfather.  Most of them rate a 2/5 stars if that.  Not Stripper.  Robert Silverberg has told a tale that captures the genre to perfection and then some.  Diana is a stripper/call girl who works at a club in Philadelphia for an organized crime syndicate.  She dances and then hooks up with, well, just about anyone:  customers, bosses, and bosses' bosses.  Therein lies the trouble and quite a turn paging plot.  The end is quite a shocker.  

 

David Goodis: Shoot The Piano Player

 

     David Goodis specializes in one genre: losers. And he does it very well. His novels are basically the same but each is unique if that is possible. The plots center around Port Richmond, a white working class area of Philadelphia that time has left behind. Bars, rowhouses, and a string of sad stories each the same but different in its own way. If you like your coffee black, your characters honest, and English written in simple prose, Goodis hits all the markers.

LOVE THIEF