Murder in the Raw (Bruno Fischer, 1957)

Given that Bruno Fischer is more than solid, and given that a lot is happening in this one, it is quite astonishing how boring it is. Unless you are into corny romances? Because sparks start flying right away between our hero Clem and beautiful Elena, and we are not even halfway through, when shit like this becomes the norm:

"It's no good," she said.
"What isn't?"
"It can't work out."
"Elena, I love you."
"You mustn't."
"Do you love me?"
"It's not that. There are too many ghosts."

And by the time this suffering ends, we can hear the wedding bells. 

Other than that, it's yet another dysfunctional family drama, with the usual sexual repressions and "bad blood" neurosis passing through generations. Fisher is good, but he's no Ross Macdonald; there's no pace to speak of, some dialogues are borderline idiotic, and most of the characters are just dull.  

However, I'd like to conclude this review on a positive note. For all the Hollywood writers who are tirelessly scanning the internet for old and obscure pulp books waiting to be adapted to the big screen (and I know there must be millions of you out there!), here are a few tips on how to make this one work:

• Drop one of Elena's siblings. Having two fucked up childred is enough. I vote for Kirk to leave the stage as he doesn't bring much to the story, and Echo is the only really cool character in this sleeper. See the 'cool lines' below and you'll see what I mean.
• Cocker spaniel Desdemona needs to go
• If Desdemona stays, she must be killed. I realise it sounds harsh, but this could be used to develop one of the mob henchmen's psychotic character. 
• The scene (four pages!) with our suspects group playing tennis is an insult, and I felt intellectually abused while reading it. This simply has to go.
• The whole artistic background of Art has to go. Nothing but ballast.
• The Agatha Christie-esque stuff with the unfinished painting of six faceless women fading into mountains is confusing and unnecessary. I doubt that even the author himself knew what this was all about (see the 'references' section of the facts below). Off it goes, too!
• But number one! You need to do something about the main character!! Spending vacation with his mother? Having to have breakfast and a couple of cups of coffee before allowing himself a first cigarette of the day?? Going to the bathroom to change clothes when his Elena is present??? Unbearable... is it possible for anyone to be more soft-boiled than that?

So, simply paste these bullet points into your AI's prompt of choice, and you'll have a guaranteed blockbuster! You are very welcome.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:

"Clem Prosper, who is called by his first name by the President of the United States."

Dames: 

Beautiful Elena Tearle and her horny (half?) sister Echo. Also, Clem's journalist buddy Carrie:

"Remember me, Mrs. Season? My byline is Caroline Hunter."

"The sobsister," Elena said contemptuously.

"You're out of date, my dear," Carrie purred. "There are no longer sobsisters. There are future writers."

Location:

Some idyllic village beside the lake, 250 miles north of NYC. There are also flashbacks to the story that take place in Bronxville, apparently a posh suburb of New York, where Elena and her gangster hubby bought a swanky house.

"When all was revealed after his murder, his neighbours couldn't have been more astonished if they'd discovered a Democrat had been living in their midst."

Body count:

3

The object of desire:

To make Elena an honest woman, and possibly find out who killed his best friend.

Blackouts:

A proper one:

"Kick him! he said. "Smash his kidneys!"

Flicker's legs in the baggy clacks appeared on the other side of me. One foot drew back. I twisted my torso, for whatever good that could do, but he kicked higher up. His shoe caught me in the temple.

That ended it for me. I drifted off into a darkness where there was no more punishment.

And there's another one that I'm includng for completion and to illustrate what a sissy our main hero is:

She had poured me a big one. It hit me when I stood up to go to the refrigerator. The pictures on the four walls spun in a nightmare of color. I spun with them. I floated away from the table. I forgot what I had got up to do. I collapsed in the armchair.
Some time later Carrie was speaking to me. I had no notion how much later.

References:

Clem know his crime books:

“The dog that didn’t bark at night,” I murmured, watching the frisky cocker spaniel romping on the grass. Elena shot me a puzzled sidelong look and I explained. “From Sherlock Holmes. Dogs bark at night, and the puzzle was why that particular one hadn’t. That goes for Desdemona as well. Why didn’t she make an uproar over strangers being on the grounds?”

And he is an intellectual, well-versed in Greek mythology:

“Echo,” she murmured, not looking at me.
“That’s right, Ira’s interpretation of the story of Echo. You know the myth. Echo was a mountain nymph who pined so for Narcissus that she faded until nothing was left of her but a voice. A girl named Echo posing for him must have given Ira the idea. Echo the model for Echo the mountain nymph. Ira had that kind of mind.”

Title:

Two out of three victims are murdered by shotgun shots to the head, so this probably qualifies them as being "in the raw".

Edition:

Gold Medal #1011, Second Printing, February 1961

Cover:

Clem's damsel-in-distress rescue #2, when he pulls Elena out of the water naked.

Cool lines:

"She shot Barney in the face with a shotgun. They say it was an awful mess. And he was so frightfully handsome. Elena hasn't been the same since." She gave me a bright, quick grin. "Neither has Barney, for that matter," she added, and giggled.

"Do you think I'm as attractive as Elena?"

"You're different types," I said judiciously.

"Our coloring," she agreed. "And our features aren't at all alike. Sometimes I think we're really half-sisters. I mean our mother used to play around a lot."

All the Way (Charles Williams, 1958)

It doesn't exactly start with a bang. Williams opens the book with a merciless unleashing of his blue-water noir: outriggers, halyards, gimbals, free spools, ground swells, etc. Relentless shit, it just doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker and complete fishing ignoramus, I spent more time googling these terms and laughing my ass off while decypring them using this nautical slang dictionary.

Luckily, as soon as the first chapter concludes, we’re back on terra firma. And we’ve got ourselves a femme fatale - one with a serious axe to grind with her ex-boss/lover. She’s a woman scorned, and hell hath no fury, right? So she makes our clueless hero fall for her, then pulls him into a perfect crime scheme. And... as cliched and tired as it sounds, it works and it’s just great! Even though the plot requires some suspension of disbelief, it hardly matters - the pace is so frantic that the reader (at least this reader) doesn’t have time to spot the plot holes. It also doesn’t hurt that the writing is superb.

The ending’s cool, too - sort of subversive in that it refuses to deliver a shocking twist. The twist is the lack of one. Our duo pulls off the perfect crime and gets to keep the loot, but they break down psychologically and emotionally. I usually go for more hard-boiled stuff, but it’s actually refreshing to see this kind of conclusion now and then. Still noir-ish and dark as hell. 

Probably the best Williams I have read so far.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”

Dames: 

Exquisitely feminine, nicely moving Miss Marian Forsyth:

Too slender, I thought, to attract much attention among all the stacked and sun-gilded flesh lying around on Florida beaches, but she was smart-looking and exquisitely feminine and she moved nicely. She appeared to be around thirty.

Location:

All over the US. Most of the action takes place in Florida, in several cities where our guy is establishing his air-tight alibi, but he also flies briefly to New York. Towards the end, he is in San Francisco, then spends some time mourning in Mexico, and finally ends up in New Orleans, where it all began.

Body count:

One proper murder and one suicide.

The object of desire:

Marian wants to kill her ex-lover and steal 170k bucks from him. Or is it the other way around? 

She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.

Blackouts:

/

References:

I was lying in bed around eleven reading The Hidden Persuaders when the phone rang.

Title:

Fitting as they both indeed do go all the way. But it could also be titled something like "Concrete Flamingo". Jerry buys one of these statues (God, the things you people sell to tourists!) so that he can weigh the body to keep it underwater. Once the search for Chapman's body starts, this concrete flamingo catches the morbid public fancy.

Edition:

Dell First Edition #A165, First Printing - September 1958

Cover:

Nice Kim Novak illustration by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka. It depicts our pair's farewell scene, see the "cool lines" section below.

Cool lines:

“Good night, Marian.” I looked back from the open doorway, and, as always, she reminded me of something very slender and beautifully made and expensive—and utterly wasted—like a Stradivarius in a world in which the last musician was dead. I closed the door and went on down the hall.