Kershed@aol.com
Thu, 7 Oct 1999 05:01:29 EDT
Hi All,
I've been away, and have been catching up on a month of
digests, which makes great reading. I have a pile of books
waiting for me to read, including Anderson's Night Dogs,
Block's Hit Man, Stark's Comeback, Colin Harrison's Manhattan
Nocturne and Jim Nisbet's Prelude...To A Scream. Some authors
I know and enjoy, some new to me.
Whilst reviewing for Crime Time, I get sent books which,
quite frankly, are attrocious. Vicki Hendricks' Iguana Love
was one of them. Another is Kiss Me Judas by Will Christopher
Baer. Both reviews were pretty vicious, which is probably why
they weren't published in CT. I have included my review of
Judas below. However, my question is: are there any
hardboiled/noir books you hate with a passion? If so,
why?
Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer, Viking, £9.99, ISBN
0 670 88441-3 It's always a bad sign when I am writing the
review before I have finished reading the book. Either the
book has prompted my mind to ponder a subject, or the book
has annoyed me to such an extent I can't wait to spew my
vitriol. By the end of this review, you will know which is
the case. I picked up a copy of Whiplash by Hank Janson
yesterday because it has a great cover by Heade - a very
collectible paperback. It begins: 'The guy was dead. Horribly
dead. As dead as a stone gargoyle and just as ugly.' Janson
was the pseudonym of Stephen Frances, and one of the
top-selling English pulp writers of the Fifties. These were
unpretentious writers, who knew their market and wrote to it.
People say that this pulp market died, but I beg to differ.
I've been sent some very pulpily-written books over the past
couple of years and Kiss Me, Judas is one of them. As far as
I'm concerned too many people have read Jim Thompson. They've
gotten to the end of The Killer Inside Me or Savage Night or
whatever where the central character goes nuts and Thompson
writes fever-dreams, and these writers have thought 'that's
cool.' So, they go merrily off and write bits in the same
vein, leaving out all the bits that came before that contain
character development, motivation, tension and sundry other
things that get in the way of masturbatory fiction. Or
they've read James Ellroy, especially White Jazz, with all of
that stream-of-consciousness shit, or some Jerome Charyn with
all his crazy, frenetic characters. However, Ellroy and
Charyn, like poets, place their words like bombs, ready to go
off at a later stage in the book. Their books have plots,
characters, real feelings. There may even be a point to them.
Kiss Me Judas, is pure titillation. This is a book about
Phineas Poe, an ex-cop who has just left a mental
institution, a place he found himself in after he killed his
wife Lucy, or there was an accident, or she killed herself
because she was dying. Poe was in a division of police
internal affairs which policed internal affairs, which means
he's paranoid. Poe meets a stunning girl in a red dress,
Jude, pays her $200 for a fuck, and wakes up in a bath of
ice, bleeding, reading a note from her saying he should
telephone 911 if he wants to live. While he was knocked out,
she took one of his kidneys, then stapled him up. To make
matters worse, she took his gun as well. To top that, he's
fallen in love with her. She obviously took his heart along
with the kidney (and his common sense, too ). Jude=Judas The
plot follows Poe as he meets a succession of men and women
who, more often than not, get killed: Crumb, Eve, Rose, Moon,
Blister, Pooh, Georgia etc. There is sex, drugs (Poe's high
on drugs throughout), blood, cops, S&M, etc. Poe's
ultimate aim is to reunite with Jude, so that she can either
fuck or blow his brains out. The publishers call this A
Masterpiece Of Modern Noir. I call it crap. It's written in a
hyper supposedly-descriptive style which falls flat and
breaks its nose time and time again. 'I'm cold. Religiously
cold,' thinks Poe in the first paragraph. What the hell does
'religiously cold' mean? 'The scar of a bullet on my left
thigh like the mouth of an unborn twin.' This description of
a scar has no point, since no brothers, or twins, or the idea
of duality is developed in the novel. 'The air is sour, like
artificial fruit. It smells like violence.' I have never
tasted artificial fruit, so I do not know if it tastes sour.
And I don't know what violence smells like. Perhaps there
should have been a glossary in the back of the book
explaining what the writer meant by all these ill-chosen
words? I enjoy good old-fashioned pulp writing because it's
honest and straight-forward. Kiss Me Judas has
pretentiousness emblazoned all over it. And a surprisingly
limited vocabulary - virtually everything is described as
being in shadow, or shadowy, whilst most things are like
knives, or scars. Kiss Me Judas? My ass! Well, I certainly
felt betrayed.
- paul duncan
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