: Juri Nummelin
: Dark Places and Little Tramps Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres
: Kustantamo Helmivyö
: 9789527469729
: 1
: CHF 10.60
:
: Lexika, Nachschlagewerke
: English
: 212
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Dark Places and Little Tramps collects Juri Nummelin's writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other literary genres of yesteryear. The author has written extensively about genre fiction and popular culture for more than four decades, but this new volume is the first publication of his writings in English. Among many other subjects, it features a lengthy section on neo-noir and writers like Gillian Flynn, Allan Guthrie, Jason Starr and Duane Swierczynski. He also investigates British spy and crime fiction, and includes chapters on western and horror. Nummelin shines new light to many of these areas, such as the largely forgotten topic of sleaze paperbacks.

Juri Nummelin is a Finnish writer and publisher, who has had a life-long crush on hardboiled and noir. His blog, Pulpetti, was for many years a steady source of news and opinions about pulp and paperback fiction and edgy new crime writing. The texts in this volume are culled from the blog, but they have been newly edited and organized by genre. In the book, Nummelin also reminisces about his experiences in attempting get new neo-noir writers published in the Finnish language.

II CLASSIC NOIR


Lawrence Block: Grifter’s Game
(Fawcett Gold Medal 1961)

This was the first book Hard Case Crime put out. Lawrence Block’sGrifter’s Game was originally published asMona, by Fawcett Gold Medal. It really shows Block was a good writer even when he was very young (he was 23 when this was published, and I think this is his first, at least under his own name), the text is fluent and very readable. Block’s dialogue is paced well and crispy. It’s too bad there’s so little of it in the middle parts – the narrative turns pretty much into the protagonist’s monology. The protagonist is a con man in his late twenties. He’s quite sympathetic, though he’s a heel of the worst kind, seducing women to to live on their money for days or for months and then dropping them. There are no good people in the world ofGrifter’s Game, which, combined with the pretty nasty ending, makes this a worthwhile noir novel.

Gil Brewer: The Red Scarf
(Mystery House 1958)

Gil Brewer was one of the best crime and noir paperbackers of the fifties and early sixties. I’ve read several of his novels in Finnish translation and liked them all. They are fast and plausible, and the protagonists have to overcome some heavy obstacles in their way.

Same goes forThe Red Scarf. It was published in hardcover by Mystery House, a cheap lending-library publisher that paid $300 for the book, after it was rejected by Brewer’s usual publisher, Fawcett Gold Medal, and other paperback publishers. Still it’s an outstanding book, one of Brewer’s best, which is saying a lot. This is one of those books where your typical lower middle-class working person gets into trouble, can’t find his (or her) way out of it and just digs his hole deeper and deeper. InThe Red Scarf the protagonist is a nice young man who runs a motel with his wife. They have no money, and it seems there won’t be the new highway that was promised when they bought the motel. Then a femme fatale comes in, with loads of money. It’s just that the money belongs to the mob.

The Red Scarf is a very well-paced and tightly written little monster of a book. Before I read it, I was struggling with another book from the same era and thinking they must be all like this, but I was delighted to find Brewer’s book just bl