Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  With the success of 13 French Street, Brewer was indeed “off to the races.” Over the next nine years, Fawcett’s editors bought and published a dozen more of his novels, nine under the Gold Medal imprint and three under their Crest imprint generally reserved for hardcover reprints. All but one were contemporary suspense novels; the lone exception is Brewer’s only Western novel, Some Must Die (1954), an excellent variation on the theme of good people and bad thrown together and entrapped by the elements. (The cover art and blurbs for Some Must Die were carefully crafted to give the impression that it was modern-suspense rather than Western-suspense. Brewer’s readers weren’t fooled, though; Some Must Die sold the fewest copies of his early books.)

  Despite some lurid titles—Hell’s Our Destination,—And the Girl Screamed, Little Tramp, The Brat, The Vengeful Virgin—Brewer’s 50s GM and Crest novels are neither sleazy nor sensationalized; they are the same sort of realistic crime-adventure stories John D. MacDonald and Charles Williams were producing for GM, and of uniformly above-average quality. Most are set in the cities, small towns, waterways, swamps and backwaters of Florida, Brewer’s adopted home. (The exceptions are Some Must Die and 77 Rue Paradis [1954], which has a well-depicted Marseilles setting.) The protagonists are ex-soldiers, ex-cops, drifters, convicts, blue- collar workers, charterboat captains, unorthodox private detectives, even a sculptor. The plots range from searches for stolen gold and sunken treasure to savage indictments of the effects of lust, greed and murder to chilling psychological studies of disturbed personalities.

  Probably the best of his Fawcett originals is A Killer Is Loose [1954], a truly harrowing portrait of a psychopath that comes close to rivaling the nightmare visions of Jim Thompson. It tells the story of Ralph Angers, a deranged surgeon and Korean War veteran obsessed with building a hospital, and his devastating effect on the lives of several citizens of a small Florida town. One of the citizens is the narrator, Steve Logan, a down-on-his-luck ex-cop whose wife is about to have a baby and who makes the mistake of saving Anger’s life, thus becoming his “pal”. As Logan says on page one, by way of prologue, “There was nothing simple about Angers, except maybe the Godlike way he had of doing things.”

  Brewer maintains a pervading sense of terror and an acute level of tension throughout. Although the novel is flawed by a slow beginning and a couple of improbabilities, as well as an ending that is a little too abrupt, its strengths far outnumber its weaknesses. Two aspects in particular stand out: One is the curious and frighteningly symbiotic relationship that develops between Logan and Angers; the other is a five-page scene in which Angers, with Logan looking on helplessly, forces a scared little girl to play the piano for him—a scene Woolrich or Thompson might have written and Hitchcock should have filmed.

  A Killer Is Loose—in fact, all of Brewer’s early novels—was written at white heat and almost entirely first-draft. This accounts for their strengths, in particular the headlong immediacy of the narratives, and for their various weaknesses. It seemed to be the only way Brewer could write: fast, fast, with black coffee and cigarettes and liquor to help him get through the long sleepless periods, and pills to help him come down afterward.

  I batted out those Gold Medal books for so very long, never taking more than two weeks on one, and once wrote one in three days—in fact more than one—and often in five or six days—and they all sold. I possibly thought it would continue forever, poor fool that I am, but with never any encouragement toward better stuff, except on one occasion I recall that didn’t work.

  The 50s was Brewer’s decade; satisfied with his work or not, he was a commercial success. In addition to his books for Fawcett, he sold suspense novels to Avon, Ace, Monarch, Bouregy. He continued to write short stories, too, under his own name and such pseudonyms as Eric Fitzgerald and Bailey Morgan, and placed them with most of the digest-sized mystery magazines of the time—Manhunt, The Saint, Pursuit, Hunted, Accused—as well as with numerous men’s magazines. His new agent (Joe Shaw died in 1952) sold film rights to four of his GM books: 13 French Street, A Killer Is Loose, Hell’s Our Destination (poorly filmed as Lure Of the Swamps), and The Brat. Almost everything he wrote found a publisher. And almost every one of his novels, if not every one of his short stories, had more than a little merit.

  Outstanding among his non-Fawcett books of the 50s, and two of his best overall, are The Red Scarf (Mystery House, 1958) and Nude On Thin Ice (Avon, 1960). The former title has an interesting history. It was inexplicably rejected by Fawcett and other paperback houses, and eventually sold to the lending-library publisher, Thomas Bouregy, for a meager $300 advance; it was Brewer’s second and last book to appear under Bouregy’s Mystery House imprint—the first was The Angry Dream (1957)—and his second and last U.S. hardcover appearance. After publication of The Red Scarf, Fawcett’s editors had a sudden change of heart and decided the book was worthwhile after all: they bought reprint rights (presumably for much less money than they would have had to pay Brewer for an original) and republished it as a Crest title in 1959.

  The Red Scarf is narrated by motel owner Ray Nichols. Hitchhiking home in northern Florida after a futile trip up north to raise capital for his floundering auto court, Nichols is given a ride by a bickering and drunken couple named Vivian Rise and Noel Teece. An accident, the result of Teece’s drinking, leaves Teece bloody and unconscious; Nichols and Vivian are unhurt. At the woman’s urging, he leaves the scene with her and the money—and it is only later, back home with his wife, that he discovers Teece is a courier for a gambling syndicate and that the money belongs to them, not to either Teece or Vivian. While he struggles with his conscience, several factions begin vying for the loot, including a Mob enforcer, the police, and Teece. There are some neat plot turns, the various components mesh smoothly, the characterization is flawless, and the prose is Brewer’s sharpest and most controlled. Anthony Boucher said in the New York Times that the book is the “all-around best Gil Brewer . . . a full-packed story.”

  Nude On Thin Ice is a much darker and more surreal novel. Set primarily in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, it has a deadly-triangle plot reminiscent of 13 French Street, though much different in execution. The three main characters are drifter Kenneth McCall, the lonely widow of one of his old friends, and a strange and exotic nymphet who enjoys posing naked on ice for men and their cameras. Half a million dollars in cash and an implacable lawyer named Montgomery also figure prominently, as does explosive violence both expected and unexpected. What makes the novel memorable is its brooding narrative, its mounting sense of doom, and an ending that is both chilling and perfectly conceived. The narrator, McCall, is one of Brewer’s most striking creations—weak and immoral on the one hand, so sadly tragic on the other that the reader cannot help but empathize with his fate.

  At least some of the nightmare, existential quality of Nude On Thin Ice can be attributed to Brewer’s increasing dependency on alcohol and sleeping pills. By 1960 he was living a private nightmare of his own.

  His success had begun to wane. Overexposure, a slowly changing market, the darkening nature of his fiction . . . these and intangibles had led to a steady decline in sales of his Gold Medal and Crest originals after the high-water mark of 13 French Street, to the point where Fawcett decided to drop him from their list. In his world-by-the-tail decade, he published 23 mostly first-rate novels under his own name, fifteen of those with Fawcett; between 1961 and 1967, he published a total of seven mostly mediocre novels—one last failure with Gold Medal (The Hungry One, 1966) and the other six with second-line paperback houses (Monarch, Berkley, Lancer, Banner).

  In the late 50s he and his wife, Verlaine, had moved out West. It was not a good move for Brewer. In Florida he had had a coterie of writer friends, among them Harry Whittington, Frank Smith (Jonathan Craig), and Talmage Powell. In Colorado and New Mexico, he missed their counsel and support when he began selling less and drinking more. There was also the fact that he was beginning to be strapped for money; he had lived high
off the hog in his salad days, saving and/or investing little. Financial worries combined with the professional frustrations to lead him into protracted binges. More than once he entered a clinic to dry out, only to backslide again after his release. A major crash of some kind was inevitable; it happened in 1964.

  . . . I was drowning in alcohol and drugs, [and then came] the bleary morning I awakened to a tall, cold glass of vodka on the bedside table, left the house for breakfast at a friend’s, and was warned loudly by an echoing voice on a comer to “Turn back—go home,” which I ignored, only to, an hour later, total a creamy Porsche and pick up 8 broken ribs, 28 fractures, tom lung, etc., in the process. Then the wild, rather ribald, hallucinatory hospitalization . . . peopled with Bozo the Clown, Rhinemaidens, and other happenings that could only be described as otherwordly or science- fictional; a mad doctor, a hospital nightclub, etc.—the beginning of a transfer to hell during which, for a time, at least, I turned out novels and stories, all the while in the very depths of the pit.

  With medical help, he hauled himself out of the pit and he and his wife eventually returned to St. Petersburg, Florida. He was still able to write as well as ever, but his once-flourishing markets, both for novels and short stories, were then dead or dying or had passed him by. He had no marketable skills except those of the professional fictioneer, yet he couldn’t sell his own variety of suspense novel and he couldn’t afford to take the time necessary to write the serious fiction he yearned to do. He had only one choice, as he saw it: to descend kicking and screaming into hackwork.

  He wrote half a dozen sex books under house names for downscale publishers. He wrote stories by the dozens, mostly for the lesser men’s magazines, only now and then placing a crime short with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the lower-paying digests. In the late 60s he wrote three novelizations of episodes of the then-popular Robert Wagner TV series, It Takes a Thief; published by Ace in 1969 and 1970, these were the last novels to appear under his own name. He wrote four Gothics as by Elaine Evans for Lancer and Popular Library. On an arrangement with Marvin Albert, he wrote two of the Soldato Mafia series published by Lancer under Albert’s Al Conroy pseudonym. He ghosted an Ellery Queen paperback mystery, The Campus Murders (Lancer, 1969); a Hal Ellson suspense novel, Blood On the Ivy (Pyramid, 1971); and five of the novels about the Israeli-Arab war purportedly written by Israeli soldier Harry Arvay. (He had a chance to take over ghosting of the Executioner series as well—what would have been a major source of income—but while his one effort pleased the publisher, it did not please Don Pendelton.)

  He hated every minute of this type of work, but he always—or almost always—did the best possible job with the material he had to work with. And at this stage of his fading career, he always—or almost always—delivered as promised and on time.

  . . . I keep hoping for a [subsidiary] sale of some kind; something that might complement the exemplary qualities of my work, ahem. [I’m] up one minute when possibilities of movie rights, or perhaps reprint rights on some lost seed throng my konk, and down the next on Realization Flight 110, knowing that publishers simply are lethargic, fickle, disoriented-and-one- track-oriented . . . Ah me. (Ah Me’s a Chinese philosopher with rancid breath who appears as a ghost at my shoulder—he’s from back in 3,000 BC—andforever bids me to go with the tide.) Or maybe better yet, woe is me. At times I do feel exergued. Rats, how I ramble. The notorious Griffin, me, once again, with that dazzling old blue hope, ready to whoop it up at the party, hypostatic, ineffable, even, you might say, but unable to partake of the inducive viands and nectar because of insuforial earth-worms called editors who are, after all, so fucking hidebound, shade-eyed and ponderous it makes me scream—in agony. In agony.

  1976-1977. Even the hackwork was beginning to dry up by this time, the assignments—and the sales—fewer and farther between. He was drinking heavily again—so heavily that he and his wife agreed to separate. They continued to live in the same building, however, in separate apartments. Verlaine also continued to lend moral support, and as much financial support as she was able from a job of her own.

  Brewer managed to keep turning out short stories for Hustler, Chic, and similar magazines, as well as occasional novel ideas and proposals . . . until the drinking once more slid out of any semblance of control. It not only affected his ability to write, it put him in dangerously poor health. He knew something had to be done, and he did it: he voluntarily joined AA.

  The program seemed to work for him, at least for a while. Eventually he was able to return to work on a regular schedule. When his agent wrote to tell him that the Canadian publisher, Harlequin, was looking for mysteries for their new Raven House line, the prospect of once again writing suspense fiction under his own name energized him; he promised to come up with an idea, fifty pages, and an outline. But he soon realized that he was not as attuned to crime fiction as he had once been.

  Tried valiantly to read some contemporary suspense stuff, so I’d be up on how character was handled. Tisk. It coddled my fidgeting brain. Awful. Sparse and futile. . . . So many writers are taking old writers’ plots these days, like Raymond Chandler’s yams, and rewriting them. I just don’t go that way. Perhaps I’m stupid, but it seems a sloppy damned way to make a buck.

  And so he couldn’t seem to get his head into a book for Harlequin. He had what he felt was a good idea: a novel about the world of bisexuals and homosexuals called The Skeleton. The problem lay in putting the right words down on paper.

  Suppose you’ve been wondering why I seem to have been so bloody lax about this Harlequin project. The fact is I had a small relapse—no drinking, or anything like that, just an inability to read one of the [Raven House] books so I could get the formula down pat. Was trying too hard, obviously. Hope you’ll excuse any screwy letters dashed off during this hectic interim. Seem to be getting back in place now, for the most part, though my concentration isn’t perfect—but believe I’ll be at work soon. I have these spells, as you know . . .

  More time passed, and he still couldn’t write The Skeleton proposal. At length he shelved it in favor of a new novel concept, one that excited him tremendously because it was the sort of serious work he longed to do, and intensely personal and therapeutic as well: an imaginative-autobiographical novel about his alcohol- and-drug-abusing days in the early 60s. The title was to be Anarcosis.

  It’ll be written in sequences of dream-reality, with the dream as reality and the reality as dream . . . It peregrinates all over the U.S. and ends with that bedeviled incarceration in a mental institution back in ‘64 . . . a big sweep of both subjective and objective shocks, strung with startling characters who, phantom-like, pre-destined and Martian in appeal, connect with me in one way or another—traveling hospitals on the highways of America, a besieged trip to Mexico on sleeping pills and bourbon, various alky wards including the one I call Insanity Ranch in New Mexico, a pack of dogs chasing me at four o’clock in the morning in Albuquerque when I planned to walk to California, and many crazy, firefly incidents that send me screaming through the blinding tunnel of daymare into my own private Gehenna—to survive, or so it seems, anyway. There are dialogues with internationally celebrated dead such as Jack London, Arnold Bennett, Lytton Stratchy, and numerous others, political figures and men and women in the arts; psychic adventures with tortuous conflict, and, at the end, a promise of another book to come called Man on Tape . . .

  He had telephone discussions about the project with his agent, who was impressed enough at its potential to write to the Fine Arts Council of Florida in an (ultimately futile) effort to get Brewer a grant that would ease his financial burden. As excited as Brewer was about the project, however, he had trouble writing it. This led to another, albeit brief and different setback.

  . . . I was on a valium binge. There’s been no drinking, but that pill thing was evil—all done for good now. No more of that—ever! No more of anything except life, work, recovery. Recovery from a lifetime of knowing I knew as much as
the gods, was, in fact, perhaps, one of them—and all I want to do is write. Write with the knowledge now that I know nothing. Helpless, hopeless exactitudes.

  He managed, finally, to get 35 pages of Anarcosis written to his satisfaction and sent them to his agent in February of 1978. The regretful evaluation was that it was “just short of unreadable . . . uncontrolled, hallucinatory dynamism,” and it was the agent’s suggestion that Brewer rethink it and rewrite it in a more coherent and commercial fashion. The agent also suggested that because of Brewer’s financial straits, it would be best if he devoted his immediate energies to short stories for such well- paying markets as Hustler, or to the long overdue Harlequin proposal.

  At first, Brewer balked at this advice.

  . . . I am going to devote all my energies to Anarcosis. I cannot, so help me, face another pulp project—at least, not now. It turns my stomach. It has given me diarrhea; the very thought of it, the attempts to turn a plot again, again, again! I cannot do it.

  It was not long, though, before he relented. He had no choice; as always, he was living hand to mouth—mostly on a VA disability pension and a Social Security disability pension. He forced himself to complete the 50 pages-and-synopsis of The Skeleton. Then, encouraged by his agent’s favorable response, he wrote a portion-and-outline for a second mystery, Jackdaw. After that was delivered, he agreed to take on a massive rewrite-and-ghost job—an original manuscript bought by a minor paperback house of which there were two different, unacceptable versions, one of 426 pages and the other of over 1100 pages. He was to rework the mish-mosh pair into an intelligible, publishable book.