So Nude, So Dead aka The Evil Sleep! (Ed McBain, 1952)

Wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time mystery. Of the amnesiac-awakened-by-the-corpse sub-genre. With a touch of a particular flavour because our hero is a junkie in this one. Which is cool - I prefer that the leading character in this average-guy-turns-amateur-detective type be some sort of societal reject rather than the usual doctor, schoolteacher, priest, etc.

It works well for a while. But then it slowly drifts into unreal or even surreal. Stuff like our poor Ray being totally strung out on heroin, disguising himself by painting his hair with shoe polish (!?) and then impersonating a police inspector (he is only 26 btw) to interrogate the husband of a woman he's wanted for the murder of. Sure enough, his pathetic "cover" gets blown, but that doesn't discourage him. He goes straight to the club where he picked up the victim the night before and starts interviewing the barman. In the middle of this charade, a beautiful woman approaches him and takes him to her luxurious home, where she tries to seduce him. Eventually (pretty soon, in fact), she will fuck him, but you could see the final 'surprise' twist miles away, couldn't you?

There's more of such stuff, and it's pointless to go through the entire list. Let's just say it culminates on the third day of his cold turkey. Instead of banging his head against the wall of some cheap Harlem hotel and slicing himself with razors, Rey is still vital enough to escape from cops by running eleven floors up the staircase (beating and disarming one cop in the process) and then jumping to several rooftops to complete his escape.

During all this time, his investigation doesn't progress much, and he resignedly concludes towards the end that:

"It's one hell of a rat race, " he went on. "There are so many loose ends, so many blind alleys. I keep asking people questions, but I'm not sure I'm asking the right ones - and I'm not sure the answers mean anything. All I know is that I've got to find the real answer before it's too late."

So the whole thing is a bit amateurish. However, it also has some nice touches. I liked the idea of running against the clock, which is simply trying to stay sane without a fix in Ray's case. And his character is superbly developed. At first, I found flashbacks to his past distracting, but they don't really slow down the pace. And they do help us understand our hero and make him human, so we don't judge him too hard and simply feel sorry for him. For fuck's sake, in a city as huge as New York, he doesn't have a single friend (not even among junkies), and he calls his father when he gets into this mess.

The plot is okay, and its development becomes quite enjoyable once you stop paying too much attention to the story holes (like where are the cops?!?), loose ends and coincidences. The final whodunit is decent, although far from shocking. All in all, it's good, honest and unpretentious writing without moralising or preaching on the complex subject of drug addiction. I imagine it was pretty ground-breaking 60 years ago.

3.5/5 (adding an extra half point for the included excellent short story Die Hard)

Facts:

Hero: 
Ray Stone - ex-pianist, these days a heroin addict

Location: 
New York

Body count:  

2

The second one is pretty funny:

There was a neat little hole right between his eyes, and it dribbled blood down along the side of his nose and over his mouth.
Ray stared at the drummer.
"Massine? Mass-"
He was dead.

Well, people with little holes between their eyes tend to be dead. Elementary, Watson...

Object of desire: 
The answer seemed logical and simple to him: find that bastard. Find him, and the pressure would be off. The cops would have a new sucker to toy with. And then Ray Stone could contact Louie or any other damned pusher in the city.
 

Dames: 
Besides Eileen (lady on the cover), there is Barbara 'Barbs' Cole - "The warmest pair of brown eyes he'd ever seen" and (unfortunately, too) briefly Chinese/Irish cutie Rusty O'Donnell ("They bill her as an artistic dancer. That means strip artist in English.")

Blackouts: 
Yes, he blacks out during the beatings that bad guys give him:

His eyes opened as he saw the gun butt reaching out for him. There was an explosion alongside his left ear, a fiery display of screaming stars. He struggled to keep his head up, felt the next solid blow crush into the base of his skull. He stopped struggling then.
 

Title: 
Pretty cool sounding, but not very profound - Eileen was simply nude when he found her dead. But I think it's still better than the original The Evil Sleep.

Edition:  
Hard Case Crime #120, July 2015

Cover: 
Love it! I think it's so good it qualifies for a painting and not "just" an illustration. Great perspective from above, and the light bulb (although it could be placed a bit over to the left) casts cool shadows and creates nice shades of red and scarlet. Very noir-ish, very stylish.  But not 100% accurate - the murdered girl is blonde, her arm is supposed to have lots of needle marks, and there should be two bullet holes in her belly.

By Gregory Manchess. Who, btw, ought to do some work on his website.

Notable cover blurbs: 
New York Times Book Review blabs the usual nonsense but finishes really cool: "Ed McBain owns this turf."
  

Cool lines:  
Can't think of any really memorable in So Nude, So Dead, but I found this one from Die Hard pretty funny:

"Give me the police."
"Do you wish to report a crime?"
"No, a strawberry festival."
"What?"
"For Pete's sake, get me the police." [The Coolest!]

The Vengeful Virgin (Gil Brewer, 1958)

I knew I'd never get enough of her. She was straight out of hell.

Shirley and I generated something together that drowned out conscience. This was just something we were going to do together. And, of course, the money. I wanted it. I would get it.

Shirley Angela was under my skin like the itch and it was going to take a lot of scratching.

He was ready to die. He was old enough. He sure as hell was rich enough.

Doom. You recognize doom. It's a feeling and a taste, and it's black, and it's very 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.

Boy meets girl. They are both young, horny and greedy, and the only thing standing between them is the girl's wealthy stepfather. Sounds like a postman is ringing twice, doesn't it? Feels almost like heresy writing this, but in many ways this one is even better than Cain's famous masterpiece.

We know the whole plot (and its ending) after reading just a few pages. But what Brewer manages to pull off masterfully is the immense build-up of the tension and suspense as we dive deeper into the vortex, approaching the inevitable doom of our condemned lovers.

And the trick is that in this crime book, there will be no mystery! There are some characters introduced (Victor's doctor, Shirley's horny neighbour, Jack's ex-girlfriend) that could (and usually would) form some sort of alliance with one of our protagonists to double-cross the other. There's no such thing here; the final big twist is essentially nothing more than a lack of any twist.

And Jack himself - as one would expect from the TV fixer-upper - is a pretty lousy killer. To be blunt, he's a total amateur! He even prepares a list of all the possible fuck ups and then forgets to destroy it, so it can be found by the cops when they search his apartment. He also has second thoughts about the whole thing and is prepared to call it off  (He'd croak natural, and everything would be perfect). But of course, there's no way out; the greed got hold of him, and he's doomed.

Great stuff, just don't expect an intriguing story full of twists and subplots centred around some colourful anti-hero. Without a question, still pure pulp with both sex and violence pretty graphic and disturbing ending, but this is for me foremost a sad, cold and intense book about the dark places in our souls and addictions in our heads.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Jack Ruxton, a TV repairman and the owner of a small electronics shop.

Location:
Miami. However, it doesn't play a significant role except on one occasion when our hero is in the water and becomes concerned about the alligators.

Body count: 

3

Dames:
Shirley Angela, a confused and horny combination of femme fatale and damsel in distress. Her neighbour, Mayda Lamphier (nervous type, and loud). Jack's neurotic ex-girlfriend, Grace.

Blackouts: 
None, but there's a funny description of the nightmare where Jack is chasing Mayda through an endless living room full of TV sets. 

Title:
Obviously, and without some major spoilers, it refers to Angela. And the second part is a kind of twist.

Cover: 
Cool and very hot! By Gregory Manchess. But not 100% accurate - although there is a scene involving piles of money and fire and a naked (not just in underwear!) chick with a gun. And for some reason, two empty whiskey bottles are missing.

Cool lines:
Not many witty one-liners or cool descriptions here. It goes as far as "The language she used would have shamed a drunken Marine"

Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence (Lawrence Block, 2011)

Kitty used to be regularly molested by her father when she was in her early teens. Maybe not really molested because she did enjoy this "education" a lot. In fact, she enjoyed it so much that she killed the old pervert after he had decided to end their "relationship". And while she was at it, she also killed her mother since she was turning a blind eye to this whole affair.

Now she is wandering around the country, getting off on fucking guys and killing them afterwards like a true American serial killer should. No motives or explanations are needed because "This is what I do. This is who I am." Then, out of the blue, approximately around the first third of this 330-page piece of shit, she gets (even more) disturbed when she realises that she has actually left five of her former playmates alive. And we finally get at least something resembling the plot - she feels the urge to find them and fuck them and kill them so "she can be a virgin all over again".

Halfway through this excruciating mess, Rita comes into the picture, and our ladies start some sort of bizarre sexless phone-sex affair. No worries, there will be a happy ending, and our heroine will finally get psychoanalytical revelation that she was just "Fucking and killing her daddy, over and over."  However, I doubt that 'Getting Off' will be part of any Freudian course curriculum anytime soon.

It has a frantic pace as Kitty travels the entire USA killing (and of course fucking) 20+ people, but it never truly takes off. It's just repetitive stuff that doesn't move anywhere. Bodies are piling at a minimum rate of one corpse/chapter. There are a few corpse-less chapters, but they mostly contain just some blabbing about sex (Rita's story). Desperately trying to be shocking and visceral by using language that is too vulgar and "dick jokes" humour.

A notable exception is an episode featuring the unfortunate Graham, who had joined the SLA after having an affair with our Lady of Death. So he cannot be seduced, and this is something that Kitty is most definitely not getting off on. Instead, she's pretty pissed off (see 'cool lines' section of the facts). At least until she realises that she doesn't have to fuck the guy to kill him. She's a bit slow. I was wondering about the necessity of that "rule" from the very beginning.

There are other attempts to spice this thing up. While the episode with a Mormon moron is mildly amusing, one with the veteran soldier doesn't work and is more or less pathetic. Also, introducing three additional serial killers crossing paths with Kitty (on two separate occasions) just makes everything even more confusing and boring.

So let's just finish this. Obviously, the main question here is why? Or why the fuck? To me, Getting Off seems like a result of some sort of joke or bet between Hard Case editor Charles Ardai and Lawrence Block. Something like "let's publish some trash published previously as short stories and see if people will actually go for it". Not sexy, not funny and not violent (except for the scalping scene). Even crap like Money Shot is a masterpiece compared to this.

1.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Katherine Ann Tolliver, daddy's little soldier. Now at age 23, Kitty the serial fucker and killer

Location:
Criss-crossing the whole USA

Body count: 
A bit hard to sum them all up. Twenty-one are confirmed kills, and I doubt that last guy made it, so let's officially make it 22. There's also a carton of poisoned Marlboros that Kitty smuggles into a prison, and since cigarettes are used for trading, I speculate that a few packs did their intended job for sure. And let us not forget this curious thing called proxy baptism (see facts section 'title'), meaning that Kitty could also be responsible for killing an additional 151 souls!

Dames: 
Kitty aka Kimmie aka Gloria aka Marsha aka Lindsay aka Pamela aka Gloria etc etc etc + Rita aka Ree + Angelica

Blackouts: 
One, resulting from a car crash.

Title: 
Kitty is getting off on fucking and killing people.

And funny enough, on page 212, I've found clarification of the term "New Hope for the Dead", which is, of course, the title of one of Charles Willeford's masterpieces whose meaning escaped me. In fact, I'm still not sure if I got it, as it has to do with Mormons and a thing called proxy baptism (see 'cool lines' below).
 
Cover: 

Nice and sexploitative as the title suggests, but not very accurate. Indeed, there is a scene where she kills a couple, but not with a knife. Gary is done with an icepick, and Angelica is strangled with a scarf. Hermes scarf! By Gregory Manchess.

Cool lines: 
Forget it. Fucking thing was locked up tighter than an SCA member's asshole. 

Did the SCA people know about the GPS? Like, were they okay with him having an authoritative female voice telling him where to go and what to do? Like, couldn't he have a male voice, just to remove another possible occasion of sin?
Fucking moron.

"He was baptized a hundred and fifty-two times."
"He was? Why, for God's sake?"
"Exactly."
"Huh?"
"For God's sake, and for the sake of a hundred and fifty-one poor souls who went through life without being baptized. It's a Mormon thing, Kimmie. It's called proxy baptism."

[From Kitty's marriage vows that she wrote herself under the influence of too much and too strong coffee:]
"...to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to suck and to swallow, to admit and to welcome into all the openings of my body..."[The Coolest!]

Quarry's Ex (Max Allan Collins, 2011)

My favourite Quarry so far, without a doubt. Not as violent (or dumb) as The Last Quarry and even more suspenseful and overall entertaining than Quarry in the Middle.

This time around, our anti-hero hit-man of hit-men operates on the location of the B-movie shooting set. Show business related crime novels are usually good fun and since this exploitation flick is titled Hard Wheels 2 we can expect lots of weird characters. Its main star is a former Playmate of the Year who is also a mistress of the mobster who financially backs the movie (=executive producer). This guy also fucks another member of the cast, but lovely bunny is not too concerned with that because she's fucking the director (and also gives our hero a quick blowjob). The male star is gay (queer as a three-dollar bill), and there are some suspicious extras/bodyguards, bikers, and of course, the creative duo of producer and director.

Quarry is hired to protect the director, but his assignment becomes a bit unusual when he discovers that his ex-wife is now married to this guy and that she also stars in the movie. And this is the first cool trick that Collins pulls because we all know that coincidences don't just happen, at least not in pulp novels. There must be a connection, right?

The action is good, and the violence is more than decent (and even funny at times). This one, too - like Deadly Beloved - is driven by great dialogue and would make a terrific comic book or movie adaptation. Just imagine a scene where Quarry gets a blowjob and afterwards the girl apologises for spitting his cum and not swallowing it - "You don't think I keep my figure not watching my calories, do you?". I know, I know. It's a bit silly macho crap, but what the hell - it's still a good, harmless laugh.

But here we also get a solid plot that thickens slowly and nicely. The author knows exactly what he's doing and where he is going. Quarry is no detective (hell, he doesn't even pretend to be one!) and doesn't go around interviewing people. Still, he efficiently solves the second part of his job (finding out who ordered the hit) using a simple process of elimination. The ending is good and surprising in more than one way. Double indemnity will be the name of the game, but I won't reveal how Quarry will manage to deal with his ex. Get the book and find out for yourself. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
Quarry, using the name Jack Reynolds

Location: 
80s, in a small town, Boot Hill, sixty miles south of Las Vegas, Nevada. However, since we are accustomed to Quarry being elusive and secretive, it's not surprising that this location cannot be found on Google Maps.

Body count: 
4 + another one from the past, not related to this story

Dames: 
His ex, Joni, and Miss Tiffany Goodwin.

Blackouts: 

/

Title: 
It's okay, although his ex is not really the central character. Maybe something like "Quarry goes to Movies" would be better.

Cover: 
Really cool and dark one. Loved those colours. Illustration is copyrighted by Gregory Manchess, and it's accurate enough, as there's a scene where Joni is swimming in the pool and Quarry comes over with a gun. But she's not naked; "her bikini tonight a red skimpy thing"

Cool lines:  
"Will there be nude scenes?" 
"Frequently. She was not hired because she gets mistaken for Meryl Streep"
"Jim, you and I know the number of Playmates of the year who have gone on to star in films can be counted on one hand and maybe a dick. What makes Miss Goodwin special?" 

I skipped lunch. It's not that killing some fuck freaked me out or anything, but neither did I work up an appetite.[The Coolest!]


The producer looked exhausted, maybe from having to deliver that speech about the choice of Tiffany being artistic and commercial.

He was on my left, the .38 in his right hand. and was aiming his dick with his left. Ambidextrous pisser, Jake was.  [The Coolest!]