Gil BrewerRezensionen

“Doom. You recognize Doom easily. It’s a feeling and a taste, and it’s black, and it’s heavy. It comes down over your head, and wraps tentacles around you, and sinks long dirty fingernails into your heart. It has a stink like burning garbage. Doom.”

A tv repair man goes out on a call and immediately falls in love with the gorgeous young woman at the house and agrees to help her kill her sick stepfather. Snap! Just like that!
So, of course, it goes to follow that the plan is terrible and suspicion falls on them immediately. And that is the story. The end. On the positive side, it reads quickly!

The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer

Eighteen year old Shirley Angela is the caretaker of her ailing stepfather (Victor), a task that she finds more than unpleasant. She meets a television repairman Jack (and) falls head-over-heels for him. Blinded by love they decide to end Victor's life and live off his money, what could go wrong?

The Vengeful Virgin is an intense, suspense filled dramatic page-turner. A thrilling story of love, lust, greed, and revenge. I highly recommend to those who enjoy a gripping read.

For me, this 1958 crime novel is to the anfractuous-girl-with-money-wants-affair-with-me fantasy what PKD's A Scanner Darkly is to recreational drug use. The ending will scare the bejeebers out of you—in an intellectual don’t-challenge-the-gods kind of way—but you can't stop turning the pages. I haven’t read many books in this genre so I can’t tell you if it is superior in that way, but an underlying subtext of sincere regret and spurned grace enables us to sympathize with the protagonist and say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

If you enjoy classic pulp fiction from the fifties and early sixties, then at some point you will become acquainted with the work of Gil Brewer, one of the true masters of the craft. Brewer's novels are portraits of
lust-filled characters who are compelled by money and passion to do things those with sane minds wouldn't do. His characters are stuck on a path to destruction and can't stop even when they can see quite clearly where they are going.

Nude on Thin Ice is a particular type of pulp novel where almost every character in it is twisted in some way. Few of the characters offer any redeeming qualities, including the protagonist Ken McCall, who is about as swarmy and slimy as they come, out to use anyone he can get his hands on, motivated by greed and lust and panic, woman-dumper, woman-beater, playboy, degenerate, etc. What makes the
book great is how Brewer makes the reader care about what happens to this miserable creature.

Others in the book are greedy, vain, manipulative, conniving, incestuous, violent, sneaky, lying, and hateful. What do you expect from a story about a jerk who dumps his girlfriend and hightails it across the country merely to attempt to seduce his best friend's widow and get his hands on her fortune? And,

Slimy Ken may just be the most sane and levelheaded one in the veritable madhouse that buddy Carl Schroeder left behind.
The story is well-plotted and compelling but it's Brewer's writing filled as it is with pulpy goodness that blasts this novel into the hall of pulp fame.

Gil Brewer should be better known than he is. This book is a masterpiece
from cover to cover. It is up there with the best of Jim Thompson's
work. The descriptions of the people, the places, and the moods are
crazy good. This is noir as it was meant to be. A man is down on his
luck, way down. His wife, Ruby, is at least nine months ready and he
hasn't found a lick of work in six months or more. Selling the last of
his gun collection ought to pay a few bills. So he goes to his favorite
bartender to sell it. Trouble finds him though in the person of Ralph
Anger, who is do aptly named. And, hours of pure terror with a crazed
gunman ensue. This book is so good you'll want to read it again as
soon asyou finish it

Gil Brewer is one of my favorite pulp writers. His stories are easy to read and highly emotional. He is such a good writer that, as a reader, you are drawn into the story before you ever know it. Many of his stories have familiar pulp motifs such as the evil seductress, the man being framed for a murder he did not commit, a man on the run from the law. The Brat is no exception to this rule and has at its source a femme fatale from the Florida swamps, a creature from the swamp. The narrator explains that the first time he saw her "she was sitting on the edge of a deserted wharf. The warm swamp air was tugging at her thin cotton dress. She was a fused explosion, a direct hit. Everything about her was boldly evident. It was like being struck - hot and hard." This is Evis. It is a story of greed and a story of obsession. It is, most of all, a damn good story.

Lee Sullivan's wife was killed in a car crash and he wandered around morose and dying inside and living off his savings until he met Evie in the Florida swamps. "A thick mop of ash-blonde hair. Long, tight roundings of thigh beneath scant, clinging white cotton." "it was like diving at her through the air. Nobody else around. No sound, save for the steadied and myriad swamp confusion. Like a dream, with the yes, yes, yes of her eyes and mouth and body under the too thin, too tight cotton - bare and ripe under the cotton." "Stranger, swamp-whore -- no matter what she was, I no longer cared. I had found her - and that did matter."

Evie was a backwoods girl and she was determined to get out. Sullivan wondered if she had fallen for him or if she would have fallen for anyone who had come along and been willing to take her out of there. They married and made a life in Tampa with Evie constantly wanting more, a bigger house, a nicer dress. He gets a job as a printer and she works for a savings and loan. Eventually, all they have isn't enough and Evie wants him to help her steal from the savings association. Sullivan wants to back out, but when he gets up from his drunk, she's gone. He explains that she was willful, overwrought, and he now knew crazy in a lot of ways. He had to reach her before she did this thing. "The little trigger in her brain that should scare her about the Law was missing. I loved her for that, too. I loved her, even knowing what she was."

And, at the savings association, he finds the president of the company shot, a note from Evie indicating he might stop by, and the gun wrapped up in Sullivan's jacket. "There was a round, blood-clotted hole in the side of his neck and he was dead."

Evie had set him up to take the fall and skeedaddled with $100,000 to the swamps and what's more she seems to have left with Sullivan's best friend in tow. "Right then," Sullivan explains, "maybe I died too. The whole thing was one great big thunderclap over my head."

At some point, Sullivan realizes what Evie is: "She was an animal. She'd done this to me. She'd ripped me apart ever since I'd known her." But his only chance to stay out of jail was to "find that crazy bitch and get the money back."

Sullivan tracks her to the swampland and, staying one step ahead of the sheriff, tries to catch her and the money before he takes the rap.

But, what's so terrific about the story is not necessarily the plot, but the incredible writing. Brewer takes you into Sullivan's world as he tracks Evie through the swamp and the backwoods world where she lived. He makes you feel the distrust and the betrayal as Sullivan catches up with her and realizes what she really was and that no man alive could ever trust her.

Brewer is at his best describing the hypnotic spell that Evie has Sullivan under. "She knew all I had to do was look at her, and if I touched her I'd go blind. It was like that. The juice was turned on. I didn't want to turn it off. I couldn't turn it off."

He also nails it with his description of Evie's family, spitting tobacco juice, discussing fish and Fords And Cadillacs and how her mother had gleaming black hair and uncurious eyes. Of course, then there's the cousin, a black-haired, rawboned man in a flannel shirt and dungarees, who had her bent back over a bracing two-by-four, sucking mouths, moaning like animals.

Little Tramp is a terrific noir-era pulp story, although it is not one of Brewer's best known works. The story involves, Gary Dunn, a man who runs into trouble wherever he goes and there's generally, as in many of Brewer's books, a woman behind the trouble.

Dunn is on the right track now. He has a job at a lumber yard. He is engaged to Doll (short for Dolores), who works at a strip club at the edge of town, and they are making plans to do everything right. Gary wants it now "after all the hell-for-leather-bottle-and-a-babe years, an after what Jane Matthias had done to him up in Alexandria." Only there wouldn't be a story if there wasn't a monkey wrench in his plans and here the monkey wrench is in the form of the Boss's daughter, who asks for him by name to come out to the house and build some shelves. Only he had met this one before: "He had seen her twice and she'd come damn close to being a problem." She flagged him down when she had a flat tire. "Anybody would have stopped for a looker like that one, though she was damned young." While he changed the tire, "she leaned against the side of the car, watching, the long tanned legs disturbingly near his arms." This one was trouble with a capital T. When he gets to the mansion where the boss lived, he saw her bare feet with neat crimson toenails, "silver shorts, high and snug around warm brown thighs." He wanted out. He didn't know what was going on, but "she was scheming and he couldn't take being played like a fish." "He knew the way he felt, he had to get away from her. From the moment he'd seen this girl standing at that intersection, calling to him about a flat tire, he'd been suspicious. Now he had every reason to hate her, and just looking at her told him there was nothing he'd be able to do about it." But this one is hell on wheels, and when he doesn't go for her proposition and her father is pulling up in the driveway, she tore her jersey, exposing herself, scratching at him with her nails. "She mussed her hair, and he heard the zing of the zipper on her shorts." Franklin Harper walks in, his face beet-red, and Gary is now out of a job and his life is falling apart. All because of Arlene Harper, the manipulative little ---. Brewer paint a guy into a corner and a no-win situation.

This one is a terrific fast-reading pulp piece. Best thing about it is as a reader you can feel Gary's anger and frustration as he backed into one corner after another with no way out by Arlene, this crazy girl. "That wild, crazy, scheming little bitch." "She was either crazy as hell, or the deadliest schemer he'd ever met up with." Nobody would ever believe this was my plan, she tells Gary. "He'd been too close to hell too many times not to recognize the furnace when he was inside walking on the burning grate." "He did not move. He was sick, and it was like a dream." "Her body moved close and he heard her tight breathing. She slid onto his lap, holding the drink in one hand, circling his neck with the other arm."

Brewer takes the reader into a journey that is the hell Gary's world has become with this she-devil, one second manipulating him and one second seducing him and all the world thinks he kidnapped her. One terrific pulp story. Highly recommended.

It begins with Lew Brookbank drunkenly driving up the Florida highways in the middle of the night with a bottle of gin and a bunch of signs. The mood of this piece starts right at the beginning. "The bottle is on the floor of the car. He reached in, brought it out, uncapped it, and read the label." He hated Florida and wished he could get away from it -from "every last flat wet stinking acre." "He drove sullenly now, feeling the rotten core of what was always with him, down inside his vitals, squeezing and tugging at his heart." He has plenty to drink about. It had been four months earlier "when he had swum out to Clarkson's yacht, the Bayou Belle, and found his wife, Janice, and that pop-eyed Lousiana on one of the bunks in the deck cabin. Thinking of it again, remembering the everlasting pain, his heart seemed to squeeze dry like a sponge. Like a scream." And with that, the reader is lost inside Lew's world - Lew's painful, alcoholic, depressed world. Of course, he didn't just catch Janice in the act, but remembered: "Janice's face was frozen in the throes of her lust. Whether or not death changed things, her eyes were glazed with that wild, wanton, uncaring passion."

He left that city and found another town, another name, another life. Made a sort of living painting signs and drinking. Until one night, he overhears a couple plotting what might be a kidnapping and murder of a man's wife and thinks he can figure out a way to cut himself into the boodle that is going to paid in ransom. "Somehow she didn't' appear to be the type of dame who would plot murder. Her face was faintly heart-shaped under a dark blonde mass of rich ringlets, swept up around her head." "She walked a shade on the balls of her feet, her behind bouncing, her skirt clinging tightly to her hips and thighs. It wasn't overdone, but it had tremendous sock and she knew it."

It is a terrific story. It is solidly noir. It is dark, foreboding, depressing, miserable. Boy, can Brewer write. This story just sails along and it is filled with intense emotion and solid description.

And The Girl Screamed is a 1956 pulp classic by Gil Brewer, who wrote like crazy for many years, churning out top-notch pulp novel after top- notch pulp novel. This one centers around a familiar theme of a man on the run from the law because of a murder he did not commit and his single-minded pursuit of solving the crime before he is put behind bars for good. It also features other pulp motifs such as an obsession with a illicit affair and juvenile delinquency. Like all of Brewer’s novels, this one is fast-moving and the action does not let up from page one to the end.

He’s on the run and the law is on his heels as he tries to solve the crime himself, first going to the murder victim’s parents and posing as the investigator and then visiting the girl’s best friend, who lives without parents and thinks Cliff is just another man sent over for her to entertain for a few kicks and a few bucks. There is a theme running throughout the book about the teen delinquents who are running over town and acting immorally, without regard for the law. The narrator explains that the town had been getting hot on a delinquent kick. High schools had been torn up and painted up with gang names. “Kids would be kids, but the past few years it sometimes got so it would scare you.” There are some vivid scenes of a teen party out of control and the drunken parent partying with the kids and teens assaulting adults who are out to stop them.

Overall, it is another excellent piece by Brewer that moves quickly and vividly through the man-on-the-run plot. Well done.

77 Rue Paradis is a bit of a departure from Brewer’s norms. It is not a hardboiled crime novel. Rather, it is a bit of European espionage fiction, but told in Brewer’s own way as it also involves a man faced with betrayals and at the end of his rope. The address in the title refers to an apartment in Marseille, France, where Frank Baron has sunk to. Baron is on his last dime, without the wherewithal to pay the rent or even pay his bar tab. His only companion is streetwalking girl, Elene. He is reduced to this: “this cheap room with this cheap cocotte who somehow still possessed her soul. And to what was left of himself.” “Ruined, destroyed, shattered by a lie.” It is a compelling story and races on to a conclusion, but it is strikingly different than what most readers of Brewer’s works have come to expect.

The story though has little to do with the cover picture or the publisher's blurb about an angel from the streets.

It involves another drifter, another loser, who finds himself involved somehow in a huge bank robbery, in murder and kidnapping. He also has a past: Jinny, the old nightmare he couldn't rid himself of. Jinny was another faithless woman. He found her one afternoon in the backroom of his shop, making it with his friend. Theirs had been an innocent pure romance, walking through the square in Santa Fe right after it rained, cutting across the park. Jim had come into the shop and saw Les "had her up on the work bench between the vise and the table saw. She wore a white fluffy dress. She squealed with delight." The blood was then all over everything amid the screaming. He explained: "Blood shot all over the workshop behind the Navajo blanket curtains of the front part of the store, as I carefully fashioned Les Pine into something that would look like a man when he wore clothes. If he lived." After several months in the asylum, Jim came home and "found Jinny in the same fluffy white dress, hanging with her arms in the bathtub, her head hanging, kneeling on the floor." "She had cut her wrists with a leather-working gouge. They hung in tepid water which faintly resembled tomato soup." Wow and that's just the background to explain Jim's state of mind. No one writes like Gil Brewer. These characters are just filled with too much emotion and pain for any human to bear.

He works as a clerk in a liquor store and is months behind in all his bills. But, this one involves a more classic femme fatale: Felice Anderson. She had a husband, but "So far that hadn't mattered, the way we'd looked at each other when she came to the store to order booze." "She could balance your libido with her eyes." "She reached and held her thick black hair up away from her head, those dark lips spread and the white teeth gleaming with an expression that was pure animal." Felice entices Jim with her rape fantasies and then pushes him to rob the bank and murder her husband, the bank manager. Meanwhile, Jim robbed the liquor store where he worked and beat a cop in the process and there's a detective using his vacation time to chase down who did it. The detective has his eye on Jim as Jim and Felice are trying to pull off the million-dollar caper.

Gil Brewer was one of the greats of the pulp era. His characters were all tormented by demons from the past, trapped by situations, tricked by temptresses that they could not resist. The Angry Dream is a bit of a break from Brewer’s general work which had at its focus St. Petersburg or other Eastern cities and involved characters framed by young women who had the main characters in a hypnotic trance until they finally realized who they had been with and what their “angel” had done to them.

The Angry Dream (originally the Girl from Hateville) takes place in a small farming town in the country. Brewer is never explicit as to where the town is. Pine Springs is somewhere where the first snows come at the end of October. It could be Wyoming or Montana, somewhere out west. Throughout the story, the reader feels that the sun never shines, that a cold wind is always blowing, and the trees are all bare, the earth desolate. Harper returns to a town where he is a stranger in a strange land and every man is turned against him. The story is that his father did not just kill himself. When his father was found hanging in the bank, the vaults were all empty and every bit of savings in the town had vanished. Practically every family in the town was bankrupted. The town had rioted and torn the doors and windows off the bank. Years later, Harper returned, but the stain of what his father was blamed for is on him now. He is warned by everyone he meets to turn around and leave town. No one will talk to him or do business with him. His house is vandalized and the sheriff suggests that the best solution is for Harper to leave and take his troubles with him. There is no one on his side and no one with even a kind word for him or a smile. Not even from Lois, the girl he had promised to marry before he left and never came back. He never even wrote. Lois still lives in her father’s house, up on the hill. She races around town in an alcoholic daze in her white jaguar and has not forgiven Harper for leaving her. Harper is determined not to be pushed out of town no matter how many threats and how many beatings he has to take. And, when the bodies start piling up and he is set up to take the fall, the walls really start closing in on him. As the reader, you feel the emptiness out there in Pine Springs and you feel how every hand is raised against Harper.

"The Hungry One" is a fairly short - 128-page pulp novel -- by Gil Brewer. This isn't one of his better known pulp novels, but it is an enjoyable, quick read.

The plot is simple and lacks some of the twists and turns of Brewer's more complex work, but it consists of a square married couple on their way to an important business meeting running smack into a hopped- up pair of counter-culture hooligans. The counter-culture pair includes a rich girl who wants to get back at daddy and her streetwise violent boyfriend. The plan is to tell Daddy that Joy, who just happens to have the hair color and voluptuous body of Mansfield and thinks everything is just for kicks, has been kidnapped and collect the ransom. Wilma and Herb fall into their hands and they are going to use them to collect the loot.

It is a story of the shock of two diverse lifestyles banging against each other and the terror of this square couple held against their will at gunpoint. While the story may not be unique, Brewer is always a master storyteller and turns this dime store paperback into a compelling read that is really hard to put down. While it is generally not considered one of Brewer's greatest hits, it's a worthwhile read.

Vengeful Virgin might at first glance appear to be just another Postman Rings Twice triangle of lust, passion, greed, and self- destruction. It's got the mean old man who won't die, the young sexy nympho who can't leave the old man, the money she stands to get when he goes six feet under, and the character who is seduced by the young woman and loses his mind over her. But: this is Gil Brewer's take on this seductive tale and it is red hot noir like you've never read before.

How good is Brewer's writing. Well, he grabs with the first paragraph and never lets go of his death-grip on your throat. "She wasn't what you would call beautiful. She was just a red-haired girl with a lot of sock," is what he opens with. Shirley Angela is her name and she is the eighteen-year-old stepdaughter of a rich, old man confined ninety percent of the time to a hospital bed in his home. She has spent three years tending to his every need and can't walk away because he has $400,000 socked away in the bank and she stands to inherit it if she survives.

Jack Ruxton is the tv repairman. She, it seems, hires him to install televisions and remote controls and intercoms in every room. "She was a puzzler. I knew she was in her teens, yet she had the poise and direct and deadly poise of a woman beyond her years." He couldn't keep his eyes off legs and she knew it. As she helped the old man, Jack watched her across the bed and knew she knew what he had been thinking- what if the bed were empty and he wasn't there. As he leaves there, he thinks about the feeling you get, just a little tight in the chest, not quite enough air.

The next day, Jack realizes that she isn't even looking at the brochures he brings. She came up against him, "watching [him] with big round eyes." And, he went "nuts for her." "She began to groan and moan, writhing wildly. She was a tiger." He explains: "I knew I'd never get enough of her. She was straight out of hell." Wow. Doesn't Brewer just say it all there. This femme fatale is no innocent babe in the woods. Nope, she is "straight out of hell." And, she is going to drag him with her back into hell, isn't she?

The third day, Jack comes over and she tells him, "I wish he was dead." When he tells her that she doesn't want the old man in the hospital because the doctors might just keep him alive forever, she wrenches her hands loose and rakes her nails down the side of Jack's neck. "She squirmed and writhed and kicked." There is nothing but raw red hot emotion in Brewer's stories and the people are filled with passion so scorching that their guts are just ripped apart inside and they never can find peace.

Brewer does an amazing job of letting the reader see the world through Jack's eyes, feeling his pain and his desperation. But, maybe that was the point. This is his story -- his confession. He is a womanizer. He beats his girlfriend Grace like she's a punching bag. He seduces a barely legal teen and convinces her to kill her stepfather so he can get his hands on the money. And, throughout the story, it's not his fault. This temptress from the gateway of hell made him crazy, made him sick in the head. Grace wouldn't leave him alone do he had to teach her a lesson. The old man was taking advantage of his stepdaughter rather than spending money on a nurse. The nosy neighbor can't stay out of it, won't leave him alone, Is he the devil or just another hard luck case?

This is one terrific noir story on do many levels. It's worth reading more than once.

In looking around for some older, hard boiled crime fiction, I came across this book by Gil Brewer.

It is a short novel about two brothers that are investigators in a private detective agency. One brother is setting up a scam, while the other brother is portrayed as the better of the two brothers.

The book is so-so, the story, okay. My main criticism of novels like this is that for the story and novel to work, the lead protagonist, if one of questionable character, has to be likable, or either so nasty the story is compelling with his/her depravity.

This does not happen, or for me, it didn't seem that way.

Hopefully, other works by Brewer are better.

My first Gil Brewer.

I'm having a Pulp Writers binge right now, and I've always wanted to read him. What better time than now?

The best Noir can be a far more intoxicating experience than I can find reading almost any other kind of Crime Fiction. Why? Well, I think it's because it exposes truths about the human condition that other types of Crime fiction barely hints at. There’s a fullness in the best noir fiction that’s almost impossible to find elsewhere in genre fiction.

The narrative here is so crepuscular that it often feels like there are entire chunks of text missing. In one scene, the novel's main male-character is standing in his house, and in the next scene he will suddenly be in his car (with nothing in-between). There also several instances where a character will repeat something that no one has previously said.

You can find the rest of this review on my blog.

This is a twisted piece of crime fiction about greed and lust. Beautiful 18 year old Shirley Angela is the adopted daughter and carer of the elderly invalid Victor, but she feels angry trapped and miserable looking after the old man. When TV repairman Jack arrives to install a new intercom system the pair immediately fall for each other. They’re soon lovers and before long are hatching a plot to get rid of Victor and make off with his money. It’s never that easy however, as there’s nothing like money to come between lovers. Originally published in the 1950s, the novel is a marvellously written book full of a dark noir momentum and a sense of doomed inevitability. Brewster’ story and writing overflows with murderous intent and a relentlessly growing paranoia. Shirley and Jack are marvellously drawn flawed (possibly psychopathic) characters whose actions spiral out of their control before ending in one of the most horrifically retributive climaxes in all of noir fiction. Gripping and entertaining throughout “The Vengeful Virgin” is a deadly morality play about lust for money and the sordid downside of the “American Dream”.

The Vengeful Virgin is a Hard Case Crime Novel. Originally published in 1958, it has VengefulVirginvestiges of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. The beautiful eighteen year old Shirley Angela has to take care of her aged, bed-ridden step father, Victor Spondell, primarily because she’s heir to his fortune and he has no one else. However, she’s lonely for a man and has devised a plan to meet one. On the pretext of putting an intercom throughout the house and purchase new TVs she decides TV repairman Jake Ruxton is the man (patsy) for her.

She tells Ruxton of the horrors of being at Victor’s beck and call. All her sexual frustrations come out after their first meeting and after having sex with her, he’s got it bad. Upon hearing how much money Shirley will inherit, he tells her that what she really wants, subconsciously, is to murder Victor and have the money to herself. He convinces her that that’s what they should do and she ultimately agrees. Ruxton, having no lack of ego, devises a plan, but, as with The Postman Always Rings Twice, things don’t necessarily go according to plan.

The Vengeful Virgin is caught between the old pulp mystery and the noir genres. Brewer’s career started with stories for the pulps in 1929 and continued through the early 1950s when he began writing crime novels. However, his stories never made it to Black Mask, the pinnacle of pulp mystery magazines and you can tell why. Although hard hitting and tough, the writing lacks something…finesse, location, I’m not sure what. According to Twentieth Century Mystery and Crime Writers, most of his books reflect an average guy getting caught up with a beautiful, but evil and manipulative woman. So it is with The Vengeful Virgin, although, one can make a strong case that Ruxton was the evil and manipulative one. This was an OK read, but not one to make its way to my home library. (I do like the cover, though.)

The proto-typical 1950's drugstore cheap noir crime paperback; it doesn't get any better than this.

Brewer starts with a great premise. A Florida motel owner, in dire need of cash and just turned down by his brother in Chicago, ends up as a hitchhiker in a car with a squabbling couple and a big big secret. No spoiler to tell you it has to do with money. The settings, such as the decrepit restaurant where they meet and the motel in Florida are well done. So are most of the characters, including the couple, the cops, and the motel owner's wife. The problem is, that once he has set up this great premise, Brewer's central character, in true pulp fiction boob-fashion, proceeds to do one stupid thing after another, resulting in a story that is neither believable nor particularly enjoyable. It's a shame he didn't just hand off the idea to John D. MacDonald or someone who knew how to build true suspense and deliver a shocking scene or two.

Republished pulp fiction from Hard Case Crime! A morally flawed guy meets a young, hot girl with a lot of money to inherit. They make a deal! A quite entertaining story with a »The Postman Always Rings Twice«-kinda vibe to it! This is not my last Hard Case Crime novel for sure!½

Very gritty & well written for this type of novel, but the main characters were a bit too unreal for me, especially the girl. It was a good believable plot & everything got logically & wonderfully out of hand. Kind of depressing & I don't understand why it is titled the way it is. There wasn't a virgin to be found.

I was introduced to Brewer by a short story in BBC Radio 7's "This is Pulp Fiction" series (the story was "The Getaway", which is also included in The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction) [I must have missed the Brewer story, "Home" which is included in Adrian & Pronzini's Hard-Boiled collection]. "The Getaway" has a great twist at the end which I didn't see coming. Having heard the radio short, I was keen to read a longer Brewer story and I was struck by the marvellously lurid retro-style cover painting on the Hard Case Crime reprint of Vengeful Virgin.

Vengeful Virgin is a great read, in the tradition of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice: a short, fast-paced tale of greed and lust. There is a twist, of course, but as we know the outcome from the beginning, a good deal of the reading pleasure is derived from how the author accomplishes the dénouement. There are also some great descriptive passages in what must have been considered quite a racy book when it was first published in 1958.

The Vengeful Virgin is another fast-read reprint from Hard Case Crime. Shirley Angela, the titular character, stands above the typical crime genre moll, she devolves from a normal girl in a difficult situation into an antic and scary force by the end of the story. The portrayal would be overly sexist if not for the narrator-protagonist, Jack Ruxton, a weak man who reveals himself to be inept and more and more detestable as the story continues. As is typical for HCC, the double-cross arrives near the conclusion which requires comeuppance, but I was a bit surprised by how it developed in the final few chapters.

The Gregory Manchess cover illustration for the Hard Case Crime reprint is delightfully lurid, even by the standards of the series, but it risks giving too much of the endgame away.½

Sad to say the book doesn’t live up to my expectations. The good parts: there’s no cookie cutter ending (which I won’t reveal anyway) and the language is blunt and effective. The biggest bad part though is that the criminals (and this is told from the point of view of one of the main criminals) are stupider than my cat. Some parts are repetitive and drag too.

(Full review at my blog)½