They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy (Harper & Sons, 1934; Signet Books, 1935)

I have only now discovered Hoarce McCoy, a best-selling noir novelist who wrote in a combination of Hemingway’s minimal style and Nathaniel West’s existential angst of Hollywood back in the 1930s-50s.

McCoy was a newspaper and radio man and small theater actor/playwright from Dallas who moved to Hollywood to act and wound up as a screenwriter — most notably an uncredited hand in the script for the first King Kong. While he worked with many fine directors and wrote in many fine genres, he never produced a memorable or classic film.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was his first novel and put him in the limelight — the French existentialists loved him like they did Jim Thompson and James Cain. This is a very short novel, 120 pages, maybe 25-30,000 words, narrated by Robert Syverten as a memory text as he is being sentenced by a judge to death row for murdering Goria Beatty, using a .22 to her head on the Santa Monica Pier.

He meets Gloria by the Paramount Studio lot at Melrose and Western, both looking for extra work and having no luck, as they are not registered with Central Casting. His goal is to be a great director; hers is to be a grand actress even though she does not have the Hollywood looks, and may be too old to start from square one.

Gloria is a bitter, pessimisstic narcissist, bipolar before there was a word, suicidal and angry: “As long as I am a failure I’m jealous of anyone who’s a success,” she tells Robert.  She thinks she can act better than most famous actresses. She comes from Texas, having run away from her abusive aunt and uncle, basically selling herself to men for food and a bed; after a failed suicide attempt, she took off for Hollywood.

Througout the story, she constantly talks about how she wants to die, how she hopes someone will kill her, how she hates life and hates everyone, etc.  She talks Robert into beng her partner in a dance marathon by the Santa Monica Pier — where many couples dance for hours, days, weeks, the winner getting $1500. It is the Depression, they cannot find work, the marathon offers meals for all and cots to sleep on during breaks.

The marathon is grueling, a rackett — it draws in an audience who want to see the couples suffer. It draws Hollywood in. It is like a reality game show before TV had them. So many desperate people enter, hoping for sponsors and money, or just to get free food and a place to crash. The whole situation is depressing and brings Gloria down more and more…there is the daily derby where the couples have to trot and run like horses around the dance hall and people make bets and cheer them on, and contestants fall down and pass ouyt from exhaustion. A doctor and nurses are always on hand. Some couples do tap dances and other enetertaining tricks and have coins tossed at them for tips. It all seems rather humiliating for these struggling wannabe actors and such…and apparently these sort of events were around back in the Depression, kind of like drawf-tossing today, or people doing humiliatting things on TV in shows such as Fear Factor.

Noir elements enter: loose women, crooked show runners, a contestant who is a prison escapee and wanted killer, a murder from an argument and a stray bullet killing an innocent bystander.

And then Gloria asks Robert to end her miserable life for her, to do her a favor…he sees her as a wounded horse, and there is only one way to put a wounded horse out of misery…

Apparently Charlie Chaplain had optioned this fine terse novel in 1950 for Marilyn Monroe to star in, but when J.Edgar Hoover had Chaplain’s re-entry visa from England revoked (Hoover fingered him as a Communist sympathizer and a danger to US culture and ideals), the project was shelved and was not made intil 1969 with Jane Fonda playing Gloria. McCoy had been dead for 14 years so never saw a notable film with his name on it — this one with Fonda and Bruce Dern garnered many Oscar nominations. I have not seen it yet…

I definitely have to read Horace McCoy’s other books…

Candy by Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block), Midwood #40 (1960)

Early Lawrence Block is always a mixed bag of good and not-so-good, such as some of the very early Nightstands. Midwood published Block’s first book as a Sheldon Lord, Carla [Midwood #7, 1958]  (later reprinted as Puta), although his first sale was the Lesley Evans lesbian novel, Strange Are the Ways of Love, for Fawcett Crest, 1959.  Seems Midwood had less turnaround time from manuscript sale to publication.

Bock excelled in the lesbian themed novels as Sheldon Lord, some Andrew Shaws, and as Jill Emerson, who went from sleaze paperbacks to several mainstream novels with Putnam in the 1970s.  Many critics were convinced that Jill Emerson was actually a woman, and has been included in some lesbian pulp fiction anthologies without a mention that Emerson is really a man.  Block was more convincing a female writer than Silverberg.

So Block continued to write more books for Midwood, most lesbian themed works, and one he collaborated with Donald Westlake, Of Shame and Joy.

Candy is considered a lesbian novel, or a novel with lesbian sex going on…an instance where the woman, Candy, leaves the narrator for what a wealthy Park Avenue lesbian has to offer a sexy girl from the backwoods of America.

Candy is also one of Block’s finest Sheldon Lord books and early works, better than April North, better than the Sheldon Lords that Hard Case published. His early Nightstands were about college kids and young sexuality, and then he started to move toward crime noir/erotica, like Shame Dame as John Dexter.

In one typical Block line, he has a character reading a book by Alan Marshall (Westlake), with one hand in his pocket…

Jeff Flanders is 34 and works at a finance company that gives personal loans with a high rate of interest.  They are basically legal loan sharks without the leg breakers.

One day a sexpot 19-year-old blonde from the sticks, now in the big city, wanders into the finance company looking to borrow $1000.  She has no job, is new in New York, and no credit or collateral, but she figures her looks and sexuality will get her the loan.  She suggests Jeff co-sign her loan and in exchange he can have sex with her….

The Many Faces of John Dexter #2: Shame Dame Penned by Lawrence Block

Published in 1963 as Midnight Reader #471, Shame Dame is the only John Dexter book that Lawrence Block has admitted to writing, although there are probably others since in the past he has denied writing any Dexter, and denied writing any Sheldon Lords when he wrote many. His general pen name at Nightstand was Andrew Shaw, with one or two Don Hollidays and J.X. Williams tossed in there, maybe a Alan Marshall collaboration, since Dnald Westlake collaborated on some Andrew Shaws.

A better title for this would have been Bad Wife, as there are two of them.  The novel opens with Frank Fisher, 20s, sitting in a bar on Hollywood Blvd. and celebrating a letter he just got from his agent, stating that a publisher wants to buy his first novel.

He had been working on the novel for several years, since getting out of the Marines, and then meeting Helen, a rich woman who has been his sugar momma.  He feels good that he will have an income now.

He meets a girl in the bar and almost has sex with her but backs out, pissing her off. He has to think of his wife.  But when he goes home to surprise her with the good news, he overhears her and another man talking — her lover, and they make fun of him, and she says she used him for sex but now he isn’t enough, and she ridicules his desire to be a novelist.

Frank sees red. He attacks the other man and beats the other man to such a pulp that it’s murder.  Frank takes off, on the run.

The next chapter opens a year or two later in Fort Lauderdale, FL (Gil Brewer and Harry Whittington country, I can’t help but think Block did this on purpose) with Hank making a meager living as a drifter and boat hand.  His novel was published but he has been unable to collect on the money or else the cops would find him.

A series of strange events happen…this is definitely Block’s style here, and by 1963 he had honed his crime fiction pacing well, publishing alternately between Cornith, Gold Medal, Beacon, and Midwood. There’s plenty of sex in this one, sometimes lacking in his Beacon sleaze books as Sheldon Lord.

Frank has a series of encounters with three women — 30 year old Norma, married to a rich older man (again that theme); her 19 year old stepdaughter, a rebellious wildcat; and a revivalist preacher who was a former stripper and still has a body.  He has sex with them all. he’s a stud.  Norma wants him to knock her up and she will pay him $5K, so she will have something to hold onto her husband’s money…the stepdaughter needs sex because her boyfriend won;t do it until they are married…and, drunk, he rapes the preacher but she gets into it, since she once liked rough sex in her sinner years,  and then she falls in love with Frank…

What Norma doesn’t know is that her rich husband will also pay Frank to knock his wife up, because she does not know he had a vasectomy and he will use it as  a surprise on her plan during the divorce…but seems Norma really wants Frank for something else…she has had a private eye do a background, she knows Frank is wanted to murder in Los Angeles, and she puts it this way: shoot her husband dead or she will turn him into the cops.

This is a fast paced and enjoyable read and with some toned down sex, this could have been a Gold Medal crime novel; perhaps Block gave it to Hamling to meet his contractual obligation.  There are some interesting sub-plots: Hank working on another novel, Hank getting caught up in a student street riot, the preacher woman’s sordid past and her own sins and crimes…

Frank is indeed a “fisher” in Florida, fishing for crime noir and trouble everywhere he turns.  Seems he can’t make a move without having strange things happen.

The ending was a little too moralistic and unrealistic for my tastes — Frank is a likable character and who could blame him for killing his wife’s lover on what was supposed to be the greatest day of any young writer, the sale of a first novel…I wanted to see Frank vanish with his love and the money and getting away from jail…

Two thumbs up as both a Dexter and Block book.

Pads are for Passion by Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block), Beacon Books

Another early Lawrence Block novel from Beacon, with some sex, drugs, and crime to make it a 60s sleaze title.

It’s a hipster tale, baby, about Greenwhich Village beatniks and reefer pushers, daddy-o.  Some of the period language seems funny reading it today, but at the time, had its place and rang true.

Joe and Shank share a little pad. Shank sells marijauna, Joe just hangs out and picks up girls.  One, Anita, is a Hispanic virgin from Harlem who hates that her life is heading toward medicore-ville: marriage to an engineer student, “2.3” kids — “One a boy, one a girl, and who knows what the fraction will be.”  She lets Joe take her virginity and moves in with the two in their pad.

Joe goes from selling pot to heroin — better money.  He rapes Anita at knife-point.  Anita wants to move out with Joe, 27, who has never held down a real job.

The sex scenes are ho-hum.  The characters are not sympathetic –they’re all rather stupid, in fact, especially Anita, who has no idea what she’s doing half the time.  Perhaps that was the intention: these nowhere people with no goals are as dull on the page as they would be in real life.  There is a sort of existentialist nature about it all.

A cop is on their tail.  Before he can bust them for selling H, Shank kills the cop with his shank.  They go on the run, from Buffalo to Cleveland.

Shank robs a man on the street, kills the man with the dead cop’s stolen gun.

Not the best Block or Sheldon Lord, but better than some of the early Andrew Shaws for Nightstand that are unreadable.

Hard Case Crime reprinted this as A Diet of Treacle.  Neither are good titled.  Shank and Joe or Reefer Pusher might have been better.

Silverberg and Juvies: Gang Girl by Don Elliott (Nightstand #1504) and Streets of Sin by Mark Ryan (Bedstand #813)

In the 1950s, juvenile delinquents and gangs were hot stuff, the fodder for evening news, rumor, tabloids, fear, and pulp fiction.  Publications like Manhunt featured juvie stories of all kinds.  Hal Ellson’s Tomboy was a bestseller, as was Evan Hunter’s The Blackboard Jungle.  Harlan Ellison joined a street gang so he could write about juvie gangs with an authentic voice in his books The Juvies, The Deadly Streets, Gentleman Junkie, Memos from Purgatory, and his first novel, Rumble (aka Web of the City).

Gang Girl was Robert Silverberg’s second title for Nightstand, after Love Addict and before Naked Holiday.  It came after Ellison’s Sex Gang by Paul Merchant, which featured some juvie gang stories and a cover of a woman about to be raped by a man with a switchblade.

Writing about teenage hellion hoodlums on the urban prowl in the city’s gutter streets, raping and mugging and rumbling and sinning and lusting, was an art form of genre, much like the Western or the P.I. tale.

And like the Western and gumshoe yarn, full of romance and fiction.

Who knows what was truly true and what was good story-tellin’.

Gang Girl is about Lora Menotti, 16, deb in the Scarlet Sinners in the Bronx.  Her family has moved to a Manhattan lower east side project, so she needs to roll with a new gang: the Cougars.  She knows the moves.  She dresses in a tight sweater and tight jeans and goes to the soda fountain where the Cougars hang, finds the leader of the pack, seduces him, has his deb kicked out, and is instantly the No. 1 girl.  The Prez wants to carve his initails in her flesh so she seduces another Courgar to fight him for leadership — it ends in death.

Lora doesn’t have much ambition but to get high on reefer, drink cheap wine, have sex, and get into fights. Her goal at 17 is to quit igh school and at 18 to become a syndicate call girl, where former debs she knew can help set her up.  She will live the good life then: she figures why not get paid well for what she gives out for free and likes?

She feels she can manipulate the Cougars into anything — from gang raping (“lining up”) a girl she doesn’t like to getting into a big rumble for no reason other than to inflict violence.  She secretly enjoys her power, which she uses her body and looks to wield.

But she doesn’t know the other debs, and the deb that was kicked out and the deb that was gang raped, have plans for her — to make sure she is never pretty again…the book ends in horrble violence.

In fact, the book skirts some tricky ground for a softcore: underage sex.  Not only is Lora 16 and screws a bunch of guys, there is a detailed flashback of her losing her virginity at age 11, something she instigates just to get it over with.  Other debs talk about losing their virginity at 10-13, at the hands of uncles or rape; there are stories of girls getting pregnant by their brothers or step-fathers.  Some heavy stuff for softcores that couldn’t even use words to describes genitals or swear words.

Earky that same year as Gang Girl, 1959, Silverberg also published Streets of Sin as Mark Ryan with Bedtime Books.  It has a similar set-up as Gang Girl: Frankie Alfono is a NYC hood whose family moves to Brewsterville, Ohio.  He’s new and seeks out the area gang: the Barons. at their soda fountain (funny how these tough kids like to kick it at candy shops and soda joints, whereas today it’s liquor stores and crack houses).  He challenges the Baron’s Prez, they get into a knife fight, and Frankie kills (“cooled”) the guy…suddenly, this outsider is running the gang, he claims the dead leader’s deb, and plans some crimes: a gang rape of a girl who turned him down for a date, destroying a bar that wouldn’t serve him beer, and rumbling with the town’s other gang.

The copy I have and paid $15 for, the six page gang rape scene was missing.  Someone took it out for other uses, I guess.  The girl winds up dead by walking into the river…either accident or suicide.

Frankie is tough and good with a blade, and he has short man syndrome: he’s only five foot three inches and gets dog mean mad at anyone who calls him short and midget (why do I have a feeling that Harlan Ellison was a model for this character?).  Like Lora, he pushes people too far, taking other members’ debs or kicking members out, so that they eventually turn against him.  Plus, the boyfriend of the gang raped girl has it in for him.

Most of Slverberg’s vintage sleaze protagonists are characters we like, even with their lusty and sinful flaws: we identify with them, from the lovelorn fool  in Love Addict to the wayward hooker in Party Girl…Lora and Frankie, however, are both soulless, violent kids who are sadistic and manipulative, so when they come to horrble ends, you cheer for their pain, for they had it coming.

Apparently, Silverberg published a Don Elliott book as Streets of Sin in 1961 but was different, and this one was reprinted in 1966 by Nightstand as The Passion Barons.

Both are intetestng books as representative of the juvenile crime genre, but also a look as how the public perceived juvie gangs, and how the gangs of the 1950s-60s differ from the gangs of the 1970s, 1980s, and today.  Yet, they are the same as well:  they are just kids looking for a sense of cmmunity and beloinging to something greater than they are, with gang codes, and gang girls, that have not changed much over the decades.

Juvie fiction comes along way from the sociological study The Jack Roller, and so has gang fiction and movies like The Warriors.

The 1973 reprint of Gang Girl has an updated cover: