Review: "The Sleeping City" by Marty Holland

 

The Sleeping City
by Marty Holland
Stark House, 2023

 

 

The Sleeping City is a hardboiled novella-length crime tale by Marty Holland originally published in the Fall 1952 issue of Thrilling Detective. Holland, born as the very feminine Mary Hauenstein, has a knack for capturing the post-World War 2 male tough guy persona; which is on steady display in this nicely executed undercover cop / heist story. Wade is a sergeant with the Gangster Squad in an unidentified, but likely LAPD, police force. When Jim Cox, an habitual criminal from Chicago, is nabbed by the police and admits he is in town to participate in a heist, Wade’s boss, Captain Roberts, assigns him to go undercover as Cox.
     All Cox knows about the job—since his partner Les Ties, who was murdered days earlier in Chicago, set it up—is how to contact the crew pulling the job. So Wade says goodbye to his fiancé, takes a deep breath, and heads to meet Cox’s contact at the White Lion Club. Wade finds is an over-the-hill gangster, Louie Thompson, and a handful of toughs planning a risky armored car heist worth a cool million. What Wade doesn’t count on is falling for Thompson’s beautiful and hard-as-nails girl, Madge.
     The Sleeping City has all the best elements of mid-century crime fiction: concise, tight plotting, bitter and desperate criminals, a hard-tongued and beautiful moll, and a hero with a dilemma. And what a dilemma! $200,000 and a gorgeous and poison dame or Wade’s settled and quiet life. A dilemma that could easily twist into noir, as is foreshadowed by an early passage where Wade is wondering about moths and flames: “…what screwy quirk of nature attracted them [moths] to light—to the point that it killed them.”
     The heist is revealed slowly, as slowly as Wade’s dilemma tightens around his guts, and those last dozen pages pop and sizzle with action. The Sleeping City is an above average pulp story featuring some fine writing. A couple passages that really crackled:

“But then I knew that we both realized that last night couldn’t be repeated. To go on meant hanging on to a straw in mid-ocean.”

“Everybody in the world should be a cop, I thought wildly! Everybody should know the elation of turning some poor weak bastard over to the law! Or a dame—a dame that somehow had crawled into your blood stream, a dame that was afraid of the dark.”

     If you enjoy these old crime stories, you will like The Sleeping City.
 

The Sleeping City is the second half of Stark House Press’ The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City, by Marty Holland (2023).

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.
Click here to purchase The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City and other titles by Marty Holland at Stark House’s website.

THE ACTION AT REDSTONE CREEK by Merle Constiner

I have been reading an unusually high number of westerns recently, and older westerns at that. I continued the trend with an ACE Double—one-half of an ACE Double—published in 1967; The Action at Redstone Creek by Merle Constiner (G-638). Mr Constiner’s work was unfamiliar to me—it was recommended by Ed Gorman—and I found it unusually literate, if not a bit odd, for an old genre western.

Mark Townsend is a gladly out of work tracker, but as the novel opens he is sitting at an ax-cut table in his rustic home staring at his final three silver quarters. He isn’t overly worried, but he is realistic—he doesn’t care for money, but he knows there are necessities only coin money can buy. His money problems only last a page or two until a dandy walks into his home and offers him a job.

The dandy, a man named Joe Teague, wants him to find his son who disappeared on his way to an engineering job at a mine in Idaho. The pay: one hundred dollars. Townsend takes the job, but quickly realizes Teague was less than honest with him, and the job is much more dangerous and involved than simply tracking a man. In fact, it isn’t too far into the story that he runs into a pair of toughs who have ill intentions towards Teague directly and Townsend indirectly.

The Action at Redstone Creek is vintage ACE. It starts with a bang and hurriedly moves from one scene to the next. There are gunfights, intrigues, cattle rustling, dueling ranchers, and lonely frontier dwelling men. The difference, or what separates it from most of the other ACE westerns, is the writing. It is fresh with a witty sense of humor. The prose and dialogue—not to mention a few of the situations and character relationships—is sharp, realistic and, at times, damn funny:

“It was midafternoon. He was staring at the quarters, trying to think of them in terms of cornmeal and fat pork, but thinking mainly what nice conchos they’d make, when the man stooped down and came through the door. 

“‘No offense meant,’ said the stranger, ‘but for a white man’s shack, this place has a sort of stink, a little like Indian smell.’ 

“‘Thank you,’ said Townsend. ‘Maybe some kindhearted Indian sometime will say as much for you.’”

The story doesn’t do the expected, and the characters are never typical; they dress and walk like the typical western character, but their actions, language, and responses tend to shy away from genre norms. An example is Townsend. He is far from the archetypal hero in both appearance and form. He is described as: “thirty-four, short, a little humped, big nosed, almost lizard eyed, and pretty ragged for the gaze of any white man.”

The Action at Redstone Creek is different, but its unusualness separates it from the herd. It is a story that will appeal to readers of traditional westerns, but its quirky nature will also appeal to others who are less inclined to read a western.

When I read Redstone Creek I did a little research on the author and I was saddened by what I learned. He died broke (the plight of many pulp writers) and alone. His life reminded me of Townsend's, particularly the opening scene when Townsend is staring at his final three quarters.

There is a detailed article at Pulp Rack about the life and work of Merle Constiner. It is titled “TheHunt for Merle Constiner” and written by Peter Ruber. Read the article, and then find one of Constiner's novels.

This is another repeat. It originally went live November 14, 2009. Since I wrote this post I have read several more Merle Constiner novels, and he has become one of my favorite writers of western pulp. I few years ago I reviewed his fine novel Death Waits at Dakins Station.

I will have some original content soon. I have a few posts started, but nothing finished, but with a little luck things will settle down at work and home and I will soon have a little more time for blogging. 

Visual Pulp: The Ace Double Titles of Jack Bickham

Jack Bickham died of lymphoma in July 1997 at the age of 66. He is best remembered as a teacher of writing. He wrote several successful, and still in print, how-to writing titles for Writer’s Digest and he lectured in the journalism department at the University of Oklahoma. While he is mostly remembered as a teacher, Mr Bickham was also a fine novelist. He wrote in several genres; mystery, suspense, Western, and science fiction. His most successful novels, stylistically, thematically and commercially, were his Brad Smith suspense novels. A series that featured an aging tennis pro who is also something of a semi-pro spy. The Brad Smith novels were published by Tor/Forge between 1989 and 1994. See the line up here.

The Brad Smith novels were written and published late in Mr Bickham’s career. A career that began in the pulp paperback era. It started with one the pulpiest producers of all: Ace Books. He wrote seven novels for Ace between 1958 and 1961; each as one-half of a double. Six Westerns and a lonesome mystery. The covers are lurid, and the writing is brief and stark. These titles are different than his later work, but also the same. They are certainly shorter (mostly running about 125 pages in mass market), and absolutely by the hand of a writer still learning his craft, but, much like his later work, each is strong on sensible plotting, reliable cause and effect action, and entertaining and likable characters. 

Below is a list of Mr Bickham’s work published by Ace. The pertinent information is all there: title,year published, Ace serial number, and the companion book. And, more importantly, a nice fresh, newly minted, scan of the cover—front and back—of each book. 

Gunman’s Gamble. Ace D-308. Published in 1958 with Draw and Die! By Roy Manning. The first sentence:

“The sky had already begun to streak with pink and purple of nightfall when he rode to town, but the townsfolk came alive when they saw him.” 

Feud Fury. Ace D-384. Published in 1959 with Mountain Ambush by Louis Trimble. The first sentence:

“‘Trouble’ Clayton Hartung muttered.”

Killer’s Paradise. Ace D-442. Published in 1960 with Rider of the Rincon by Rod Patterson. The first sentence:

“The eleven men stopped their steaming horses at the crest of the treeless hilltop and paused for just a moment, still in the driving, cruel July Kansas rain.”

The Useless Gun. Ace D-462. Published in 1960 with The Long Fuse by John A. Latham. Read the Gravetapping review. The first sentence:

“Four killers, honed to perfection in a series of raids and county seat wars, rode west out of Dallas County, Texas.”

Dally with a Deadly Doll. Ace D-489. Published in 1961 with Somebody’s Walking Over My Grave by Robert Arthur. The first sentence:

“‘Celery’ said Larry Crystal”

Hangman’s Territory. Ace D-510. Published in 1961 with The Searching Rider by Harry Whittington. The first sentence:

“The late spring storm was breaking.”

Gunmen Can’t Hide. Ace F-120. Published with Come in Shooting by John Callahan. The first sentence:

“The winter of 1880 had been cruel in Colorado.” 

This post originally went live January 17, 2010 in a very different form. The text was adjusted (hopefully for the better) and the book images were changed out for the bigger and better versions. I hope you enjoy.

"In a Small Motel" by John D. MacDonald

This week I have another short story to talk about from the nifty anthology American Pulp; an anthology that every reader of hardboiled mystery should own because it simply rocks. The story: “In a Small Motel” by John D. MacDonald. It was originally published in the July 1956 issue of Justice.

Ginny Mallory is a widow. She owns a small motor-in motel on a major highway in South Georgia. The summer heat is still strong in the waning days of October, and she is tired from a long summer season. The story opens with Ginny fighting an uncooperative rollaway bed. The guests are not cordial and treat her less like an equal and more like the hired help.

As the evening progresses Ginny’s motel begins to fill-up and we are introduced to the four secondary players in the story—Ginny’s dead husband Scott, a full-time motel resident named Johnny Benton, a strange motel guest who insists on parking his car behind the motel, and a would-be suitor named Don Ferris.

The story revolves around Ginny—a single and lonely woman trying to operate a business in 1950s America. Ferris wants to marry Ginny, but he admits it is not entirely because he loves her; Benton is a friend, but he seemingly has a dark underside that may surprise both Ginny and the reader; a guest that is the catalyst for a long and frightening night; and a dead husband whose long shadow is cast across Ginny’s life like a long heavy rain.

“In a Small Motel” is an accomplished and full-bodied story—the characters each have their own subtle and convincing motives. The setting is brilliantly realized. The climate is described with short visual blasts:

“Thick October heat lay heavily over South Georgia. Though she walked briskly, she felt as if all the heat of the long summer just past had turned the marrow of her bones to soft stubborn lead.”

And Ginny is perfectly cast as a strong and resilient woman in a quandary—she doesn’t know whether to go forward or back. The memory of her husband is a prison. A prison she does not want to escape, and the motel is its literal translation.

“In a Small Motel” is a character study cast within the confines of a rich and textured crime story. The characters—the way they act, talk, and shift from one desire and fear to another—control the story and plot. It is also a tightly woven story that MacDonald never loses control of; everything is in place and works perfectly on the reader. The suspense is pure and it ratchets tighter and tighter as the story plays out. 

There are more than a few surprises and the writing is so fresh and alive—even after 54 years—that the reader can nearly smell the autumn Georgia air, the car exhaust, hear the highway noise, and feel the empty and hard fear escalating from a nervous vibration to a deep and harrowing roar.

This post originally went live July 31, 2009 after my first reading of “In a Small Motel”. I have since gone back to the story several times, and after each reading my appreciation and enjoyment of it only increases. 

"Birth of a Monster" by Richard Stark

I found a small collection of old digest-sized science fiction magazines in a thrift shop last summer and I finally took a serious look at them this past weekend.  The first magazine I picked up was the August 1959 issue of Super-Science Fiction.  It included eight stories with beautifully lurid titles—“Planet of the Angry Giants,” “Monsters That Once Were Men,” “Man-Hunting Robot,” “Which Was the Monster”.  And even better, the magazine is subtitled: THIRD MONSTER ISSUE!  Of the eight stories included, an even half were written by Robert Silverberg and published here under various pseudonyms, and another, which is the one that caught my immediate attention, was written by Donald E. Westlake and published as by Richard Stark.

The Stark story is titled, “Birth of a Monster”.  It is the story of a doctor who receives a late night call from a man whose wife is in labor and, even though the soon-to-be mother isn’t a patient, the doctor agrees to rush to the couple’s home and deliver the baby.  When the doctor arrives he discovers something a little unusual.

“Birth of a Monster” is a decent little pulp story.  It runs only about six double column digest size pages, and it is straight up horror, 1950’s style (i. e. heavily influenced by The Twilight Zone without the social commentary).  While it is a relatively pedestrian story, Mr Westlake played with the tropes a bit (to tell how would ruin the tale and I shall remain mum).  The language is a tad stilted and very sharp, which doesn’t devalue the story, but rather adds to the unease it generates with the reader—

“He hung up, hurried back to the bedroom and dressed.  He knew the estate, at the end of Larchmont Road.  Empty for years.”

“Birth of a Monster” reminded me a little of an early Richard Matheson story, although not quite as vibrant and polished—it appears to be straight forward, but a little twist at the climax reveals the true complexion of the story.  And while it is not as mature and solid as Mr Westlake’s later work (he was only 26 when it was published) it is a story that will bring a smile.  

This review originally appeared on the now defunct blog Dark City Underground July 6, 2010 in significantly different form.  I will be moving a few other reviews from DCU to Gravetapping over the next several weeks.  I will also be posting some ori

Best of GT: "Terrorists" by Stephen Marlowe

A week or so ago I was cruising through the back posts on Gravetapping, and there were several I found to be really quite good. More than I ever would have thought. In a moment of extrement vanity I decided, and I am now executing that decision, to repost a few of the posts I thought were particularly interesting. This is the first. It is a little story I have read once or twice since I wrote this article, and my opinion of it hasn't changed, except I think even more of it now than I did when I wrote this. I hope you enjoy reading this little flash from the past as much as I did.

I recently read a short story by the late Stephen Marlowe titled “Terrorists”. It was published in the January 1956 issue of Accused; I read it in the 1997 anthology American Pulp. It is a hardboiled private eye story.

Chester Drum is a Washington D.C. private detective, and on a late and warm August night as he walks past his office he notices a light inside. He makes a routine check with the elevator operator who tells him the cleaning staff should be done. Drum then takes the elevator to his floor and quietly approaches his office; inside he finds a cleaning woman with a very cold war tale.

Her son is involved with a Puerto Rican youth group and they plan to assassinate the Secretary of State. The group is concerned with an independent Puerto Rico, but the mother tells Drum the boys are being used by a socialite Red—a communist—who cares nothing for Puerto Rico or the youth group, but is using them to further her own cause; the embarrassment of the United States and the advancement of Soviet-style communism.

The story is swift and, as expected from Marlowe, exciting. The plotline is sleek and straight and there really aren’t any surprises to a twenty-first century reader. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story, because it is a terrific story, but rather it means it is a story of its time. A small capsule filled with the popular fear and turmoil of the 1950s.

The plot can easily be traced to two events that occurred in 1950. The era of extreme paranoia brought on by McCarthy with his wild accusations of communist spies everywhere, and the failed assassination attempt on President Truman by three Puerto Rican terrorists.

I make this point not to weaken“Terrorists,” but rather to make the point that fiction, including popular fiction, is a mirror of the culture that creates it. Go into any used bookstore or library and take a novel from the shelf and you will find a nugget of truth about the time and place it was written; not the whole truth, but rather an image that represents the truth and atmosphere of the era. The fiction of the 1950s was saturated with communism and paranoia, just as the fiction of the 1980s was ripe with greed, drugs and Vietnam.

“Terrorists” is a brilliant example of both entertainment and place. When it is read it grabs the reader by the ear and jerks him into a past that only exists in memory and archive; it is a capsule that helps the reader’s understanding of where he came and, hopefully, where he can go or, at least, avoid returning. It also allows the reader to understand how little civilization has changed over the past fifty years; the enemies have changed (maybe), but the fear is very much alive.

And it does it all in a brilliantly entertaining fashion. Can it get any better? Maybe it can, because Chester Drum can be found plying his trade in no less than 20 novels.

RIDERS OF THE SHADOWLANDS by H. A. DeRosso

I recently read another H. A. DeRosso collection—after Under the Burning Sun—edited by Bill Pronzini . Its title: Riders of the Shadowlands. It was published by Five Star in 1999, and it is similar to Under the Burning Sun in that it collects ten of DeRosso’s western-type stories—two were published by mystery magazines, although one is a strange kind of mystery. The tales are less eclectic than the first collection, but no less entertaining, existential, or downright terrific.

The stories in this collection are also lightly edited—James Reasoner in a comment to my post about Under the Burning Sun said, “I compared a couple of the stories in the collection to their original magazine appearances and found only a very few changes.” Mr. Pronzini also states that he only edited superfluous, and redundant words. I only mention the editing because of the recent Internet flare-up about the new Harlequin pulp editions that were edited for content—a situation that is far different than the editing in this volume.

My favorite stories included in the collection are both tales of the “shadowlands.” One is a short story and the other a novella. The novella is the title story, “Riders of the Shadowlands,” a fairly conventionally plotted rustler tale. Its ordinariness ends at the plot however. It is a violent story in a hellish setting with a hardboiled / noir attitude. It has more in common with the hardboiled crime written in the 1950s, but the western setting and attitudes are accurate and beautifully described in a hard-bitten, stark prose.

There is a terrific mystery titled “Dark Purpose,” which was originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (April 1958) under the title “Kill the Killer.” It is a manhunt story set in the wilds of Northern Wisconsin. The wilderness, and landscape, are as central to the story as they are in DeRosso’s “shadowlands” tales. In fact it is as much a western as any of the stories included in the collection.

Riders of the Shadowlands does not include a dud; each is vibrant, entertaining, and dark. The stories were published between 1950 and 1962, and each is an example of how talented and original DeRosso was as a writer.

UNDER THE BURNING SUN by H. A. DeRosso

I read an astonishingly good collection of stories by pulp writer H. A. DeRosso titled Under the Burning Sun. The collection includes twelve stories; two are novelettes. Ten are straight westerns, although generally far from traditional, and the other two are suspense with a western voice. It was compiled and edited by Bill Pronzini; in his Foreword he writes the stories, save one, were lightly edited “to eliminate superfluous and repetitive passages contained in the original magazine versions.”

This collection is my first experience with DeRosso’s work and I was stunned by the power of his writing. It tended toward the unusual and bleak, the mythical and surreal, but it also vitalized the characters with a hard-bitten sadness and self-awareness that is rarely found in genre fiction. A major theme in the stories is one of hope, but it is hope that is never fulfilled.  The characters—the protagonists—can see a better place and future, but can never quite get there.

The best story in the collection is a novelette titled “The Bounty Hunter”. It is what Bill Pronzini labels a “shadowlands” story—a surreal western that is related more to the bleak other worlds of The Twilight Zone than a traditional western. It reminded me of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger.  It is a relatively simple story, and follows the track of a bounty hunter called Spurr. Spurr kills an outlaw who, he is told later, may be his own son. It is a mythical story—from the beautifully surreal landscape to the internal demons that drive Spurr to search for the truth.

The other stories range from the more traditional “Hold-up”—the story of the father of a failing rancher who is forced to choose between his self-identified morality and both his, and his son’s, future—to the rich rendering of the final months of the Chiricahuas’ fight to stay off the reservation in “The Last Sleep”.

Under the Burning Sun is more than a collection of western stories. It is a sample of how good the genre story can be. The violence—and there is some—is realistic and vivid. It is examined with a neutrality that allows the reader to see its effects on the characters and story. The “shadowlands” tales—“The Bounty Hunter” and “Those Bloody Bells of Hell!”—are brilliant.  The prose is written in a surreal form that depicts the landscape as a hellish nightmare where only monsters exist. It is best related to a high quality comic book; something like Jonah Hex.

Under the Burning Sun is a wonderful collection. It reads like a train steaming through the vast deserts of the Southwest; desolate, beautiful, and deadly. Bill Pronzini relates DeRosso’s style to the Black Mask school of hardboiled in general, and Cornell Woolrich’s work particularly.

THE LAWBRINGERS by Brian Wynne Garfield

The American western novel has a bad reputation. It is reputed to be ethnocentric, violent and, even worse, simple and inaccurate. The good guys are too good, and the bad guys are too bad. The natives are deemed to be one-dimensional cutouts and often misrepresented. The townsfolk—the common working class—are either portrayed as stupid or weak, or both.

In many cases this poor reputation is deserved—there have been some really, really bad westerns introduced on television, film and fiction. But there have also been some damn good westerns over the years—both past and present. To quote Theodore Sturgeon—he was defending SF, but the same rule applies to westerns—“ninety-percent of everything is crap.” It is the other 10% that separates a viable genre from a dead genre and the western is far from dead, whether we are talking about golden age stories or the modern novels that are published today.

An example of an older title—it was published by one of the more maligned houses, ACE, in 1962—that holds its own against the often valid arguments against westerns is Brian Garfield’s The Lawbringers. It is a traditional western from beginning to end. It is short, seemingly simple, and very much to the point, but it is also clever, intelligent, and subtly complex.

The Lawbringers is a biographical novel about the formation of the Arizona Rangers—a law enforcement agency created by the territorial Governor to combat the seemingly endless supply of toughs and criminals that haunted Arizona in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its focus is directed at the chief Ranger, one Burton “Cap” Mossman, but it is told in a less direct fashion than expected. It is a multi-perspective novel that never attempts to get into the head of Mossman. Instead he is painted and defined by the characters around him—some real, others created by Garfield—as a hard, stubborn and tough man.

The novel is dedicated to Burt Mossman—“a chivalrous gentleman, a lawman, and an Arizonan.” But it is far from a one-sided novel of adoration. It tackles the man’s complexity as well as his flaws. He is depicted as a hard man doing a hard job. His decisions are made with the citizens of Arizona in mind, but with a frightening lack of color. There are no gradient shades, but rather his view is strictly black and white, and more often than not, the end justifies the means. He wasn’t above lynching a man to make his point, and the Mexico-Arizona border was less a concrete end to his jurisdiction and more a line on a map that could be ignored and crossed at will.

Mossman is a man who withstood political pressures and did what he thought best, no matter the consequences. He typified the mythical western protagonist, but is portrayed by Mr Garfield as nothing more than a man—stubborn, sincere, and flawed. He had friends, enemies, and admirers, but still, he was a man who hid behind a wall of secrecy and loneliness. He was a man that fit into the demands of an era, but whose era passed quickly and without much fanfare.

The Lawbringers does all of the above while telling an exciting and tight story. It has its fair share of gunplay, but it is told with a peculiar heavy quality. It is packed with emotion and wonder; wonder at the basis and definition of right and wrong. It is a western with a conscience, but it isn't limited or judged by that conscience, rather it is simply expanded into the realm of believability. It is complex and wondrous. In short, it is very much part of that 10% that has allowed the western story to survive for more than a century.

THE QUAKING WIDOW by Robert Colby

“A man can get into a lot of trouble if he’s lonely. If he’s just lonely enough and has time on his hands. That’s a combination made for trouble.”

Burt Keating is from New York—just outside Buffalo—where he manages a small loan branch. He is mid-thirties with a beautiful wife and very comfortable life. That changes when his wife leaves on an icy night for some butter, and a few blocks from their house she is crushed between a Buick and a tree. Burt can’t seem to function anymore. He sells the house, takes a leave of absence from his job and purchases a new car—

“I wanted to flee to a new world and I knew that short of some South Pacific island, southern Florida was as close as you could come. After a few restless days in Miami, I took an apartment on the beach at Ft. Lauderdale some twenty miles away. It was a place called the Tropic Moon Apartments.”

Unfortunately the miles and warmer clime can’t set Burt’s mind right. The only thing that has any meaning is the memory of his dead wife and the life they had, but that is over and there is nothing he can do to change it. Then he meets Alicia Shafton. A woman who seems as lost and lonely as Burt, but she has a secret. Her husband, a gambler and shyster, died and left a lockbox with a note attached. It instructed her to sell the box to a man named Ralph Emory for $200,000. The only problem: Everything goes wrong and Burt can’t help but get involved.

The Quaking Widow is the first work by Robert Colby I have read and it won’t be the last. It hit a note with me—the story, setting, characters—that many works of fiction don’t. It opened with a blast—an immediate and drastic change for a protagonist with an uncertain future—and cruised forward into ever increasing peril. The characters were the expected: sleek, beautiful, mysterious, and good and bad in varying measures.

The setting is drawn marvelously. As I read, I mourned the Florida that was. The pre-Disneyland and Miami Vice Florida that was one part hillbilly and other parts chic, wealthy and dangerous. A Florida that a person can get lost in. The same Florida that was painted in the novels of John D. MacDonald with his vivid and beautiful flashes of prose.

The plotline is the expected—the dangerous and unknown femme, murder, a wildcard nympho and mysterious opponents that will stop at nothing to get the prize. In this case the box and its contents. I guessed the major plot turns before they were revealed, but it didn’t bother me because the story, while plot-driven, is textured with enough humanity to keep it more than interesting. The pacing didn't hurt either. It is perfectly developed with a well balanced mixture of action and suspense, with a dash of romance and mystery. The prose is hardboiled and, at times, clever and rich:

“She turned around and walked briskly across the room, her high, firm buttocks waving an insolent goodbye.”

The Quaking Widow is worth tracking down. It is fifty-three years old, but it is more than just nostalgia. Heck, I wasn't even on the radar when it was written. Instead it is a fine example of a linear and well-told tale that is both entertaining and exciting.

It was published by ACE (D-195) in 1956, and coupled with Owen Dudley’s The Deep End.

"Top of the World" by Bill Crider

This is becoming a trend—a short story for Friday morning. This time it is a more recent story. A story published in 2002 and written by Bill Crider. The title: “Top of the World”. It originally appeared in the anthology Flesh & Blood: Dark Desires. I read it in The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, Vol. 4.

The date is never clarified, but the story takes place in a dusty town in 1950s or 60s Texas. The protagonist is a mechanic with dreams—he wants his own shop and maybe even a dealership. But to make his dreams he needs money. Enter Sam Cobb, a middle-aged man who robs banks less for the money and more for the act robbing.

One early summer day Sam finds the protagonist—a young guy who is never assigned a name—in the small-time shop where he works. Sam has a job planned and he needs a driver. It is a situation the mechanic is used to, but there is something new this time. Sam has gone in with a woman and it makes the young man nervous; at least until he meets her.

Her name is Vicky. She is older, but beautiful with red hair and a wildcat style and insatiable appetite for men. The mechanic and Vicky hit it off after that first heist and then start a regular thing. Sam warns him off, but the youngster doesn’t listen. To give more would ruin the story, but damn is it a swift and twisted little plot.

“Top of the World” is a throwback. It has the feel, pacing, and style of a 1950s noir story. It very easily could have come off the typewriter of a pulp era writer, but it is all Bill Crider. It is a sort of black widow story twisted sideways and then turned upside down and shaken.

The prose is smooth and dusty with a pinch of melancholy:

“He shook his head again. He didn’t look mad, just kind of sick, or maybe just sad, and he turned and left the garage, settling his hat down carefully on his head.”

The narrative is first person, but it is executed in a manner that both the reader and narrator are emotionally distanced from the story. It loses a sense of rushed suspense, and is replaced by a bittersweet melancholy of lost past. It somehow feels old and new all at once.

“Top of the World” is the real deal. It is literate, beautiful and dark. It showcases Crider’s broad range as a writer—it is nothing like his Sheriff Dan Rhodes novels—and more than that, it is entertaining.

You can read "Top of the World" by clicking Here.