Sin Pit

by Meskil Paul

She was dirt ... and hungry and cheap and demanding. But it didn't matter. She was all those things, and I knew it, but she was much more, too. She was fire and ice and fury, and when she came up to me—that first time—her mouth making little squirming noises, I knew she was all I ever wanted.



I was a cop. An honest one. Tough, but honest. And she was the wife of another man. Maybe she was a killer. Maybe she was a--a kind of person even tough cops don't talk about except in dirty whispers.



But I didn't care. I had to have her.

Genres: Crime, Novels, Mystery

101 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, dark, dark, even by noir standards, showing the sinister underbelly of East St. Louis, Illinois in the 50s through the eyes of an ultra-corrupt, sleaze-ball detective on the hunt for the killer of a young drifter girl. Some of the twists can be seen coming from a mile away by anyone with even a passing familiarity with the genre, but the novel was ahead of its time with its matter-of-fact portrayal of taboo subjects (especially at the time) like S & M, back-alley abortions, police brutality/corruption, etc., and that makes this one worth checking out for fans of old-school crime fiction.

Author Paul Meskil's background as a newspaper reporter most likely informed his fast-paced writing-style as well as his knowledge of cop and criminal lifestyles. Too bad this was his only novel, as I'd definitely be up for reading more of his work. This had all the back-stabbings, femmes fatales, and sordid tough guys one could want out of a 50s noir.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of us would die. For the other, there would be Grace. I didn't know what she meant to him but, to me, she was worth all the risk.

Sin Pit was one of those cult pulp paperbacks that were notoriously difficult to find. But Automat.Press has come along and valiantly made it available again in e-book format, so I was stoked to get a crack at reading it! I was disappointed though to find that the book is more of a hard-boiled mystery than the sleaze noir that I hoped for. As a crime mystery, it's fairly enjoyable but at the same time, much of the developments and twists unfortunately were still pretty obvious. I could've done without much of the lagging bits featuring our unlikeable hero Barney Black pounding the pavement looking for clues and instead more of the interesting psychological touches of Barney confronting his hatred for women and himself, and how his infatuation with the aptly-named Randy Harding emphasizes it all.

A tiny warning bell sounded somewhere in my mind —the bell that had always meant danger. This time, I ignored it and told myself nothing mattered but this strange, catlike girl with the midnight eyes.

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Some rumpus room”. A mixed bag. This little crime procedural from yesteryear is certainly to be recommended to anyone looking for a little reprehensible fun from their prose fiction in 2023 and there is a brio here which suggests Meskil might have had petrol in his tank. However, Detective Barney Black’s own partner comes out with “For a smart cop, you sure can pull some stupid stunts” and there are too many moments when the reader will agree.

When reviewed “Sin Pit” is often described as gritty which is code for “Detective Black would be done for assault in 2023” but that’s part of the barbarian energy one seeks in reading these things. Certainly the opening scene in which the mutilated body of Randy Harding is discovered is a notch more torrid for even these waters but it’s merely an entrée for S&M dungeons, back-street abortionists, whips, broken wrists, slashed throats and bodies dropping everywhere. True Crime journo Meskil wants us to know he may be taking a holiday in the land of fiction but he’s no choirboy. His Detective Barney Black (as names go it’s not “Dirty Harry”) is your standard unrepentant, unreconstructed man of appetite with little patience for anyone, male or female (“The dead girl couldn’t talk, but this one would”), who might be withholding leads and he bulls around glugging brewskis at every opportunity, filling his face with carbs and disconcertingly musing on his distant excitement at the whip marks on Randy’s corpse. Such a man being an officer of the law is of course unthinkable in 2023. Throughout proceedings there is a noticeable tension between non-fiction writer Meskil who is steeped in the rules and parameters of real-world bad behaviour forcing himself into the land of male fantasy/wish-fulfillment pulp fiction and needing his protagonist to be a dumb lunk so stuff can happen. So Black crosses county lines to beat up a suspect, sleeps with a key suspect who then steals his car keys and does a runner while he’s on the can, picks up a weapon which links him to a crime scene and walks out with it and then, bizarrely, successfully ventriloquises a police officer after hearing only “This is the police. Open up in there” from him. He’d be having a high old time if Meskil wasn’t writing this but each time Black breaks a rule the author has him immediately – like next scene immediately – dragged in front of his superiors and torn off a strip. Meskil serves up genre fun but immediately tries to impose order. Actions have consequences in “Sin Pit” and although one wonders how the deuce Black made it to Detective in the first place the suits and higher-ups hovering over all of this with frowns on their faces suggest Meskil could really have gone to some interesting places if he’d stuck to the make believe.

Yet “Sin Pit”, regrettably, turned out to be both debut and finale and prose-wise you can occasionally catch tyro Meskil twanging the strings a little too hard. So we have “she loved as wildly as she fought”, “the smell of blood to a hunter is stronger than desire” and the proto-ChatGPT “a room that was blacker than a loan shark’s heart”. Fans of needlessly verbose, done-for-effect hard-boiled slang will get a kick out of “mouth china”, “boneyard”, “mattress mileage” and “Beneath the arm grass were blue tattoos of girls, hearts, the usual needle-parlor gallery” and while it’s not Meskil’s fault that “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” makes all this sound like it’s coming out of Steve Martin’s mouth “Sin Pit” was published fifteen years after “The Big Sleep” and eight years after the Hawks film adaptation. Meskil the non-fiction chronicler of mafia nut-jobs understandably struggled to match any of Chandler’s poetry. Who wouldn’t? So “Sin Pit” is fairly cartoonish, it has shock elements alongside plot idiocies and it’s trying to be adult while delivering scenes like Black’s first encounter with Grace Trudo (“Then she was in my arms”). The result is disappointment that Meskil never again took a holiday from the boring old real-world to finesse his voice but on the shelf a nice little guilty pleasure that is a pretty good calling card for the career that never happened. “No more boy scout hikes tonight”.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

1950's Pulp

Sin Pit, originally titled Blood Lust (by the author not the publisher) is a 1954 pulp paperback that was considered a rare find. It has now been re-issued as an e-book. Meskil only published one novel in his lifetime and this was it. Meskil has a smooth, easy writing style that makes this short novel a fairly quick read. There are a lot of classic pulp motifs present here from the good cop twisted by an irresistible woman, the dreadful power of desire, the poor country girl turning tricks, the innocent man on the run, the frame-ups, the tarnished badge. What sets this one apart is the sadomasochism, the whip marks on the murdered girl, the rubber hoses regularly employed in police interrogations, the drinking till the bars closed and the lead character is so toasted he's not even sure of what he's doing. When you read these pulp novels, you realize that there was another world in the fifties lurking beyond the sock hops and the jukeboxes and there were mean, nasty corners. Bottom line: a fairly easy read filled with some pretty good lines and twisted themes.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very hardboiled cop novel, typical for the early 1950s. It reminds me of Ed Lacy's early crime noirs. If you like your fiction hardboiled, it should fit the bill.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one rates a perfect 10 on the pulp-o-meter. It meets every criteria on the list. The list? Here:

1. A crime (can precede the timeline of the narrative).
2. Tough wise-cracking dialogue.
3. An unsympathetic protagonist (with whom you none-the-less identify).
4. A femme fatale.
5. Sexual tension.
6. A tough brutal thug (the nemesis of the main character).
7. Ironic plot twists.
8. A double-cross.
9. A sense though out that all the characters are doomed.
10. A lurid cover featuring a scantily-clad woman and a gun.

Great lines from the book:
“Mona was a gal who had made a fortune on her back, then spent a fortune on her back in expensive clothes.”

“Business or pleasure?”
“Business,” I replied.
“Hell,” she said. “That can wait. Business is so bad the girls are trying to give it away to keep in practice.”

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the gritty beginning that starts in the middle of the action. Plus great circa 1954 East St. Louis setting. I can see why this is considered a classic of the genre: the prose is lean and mean and the characters are all the opposite of the Ozzie & Harriet image that the mainstream media of that era was promoting. The first meeting between the cop protagonist and the femme fatale is explosive and that sets the stage for his trip to hell. More police procedural than noir, but all the behavior is beyond the norm, and that's what makes this an exciting read. In eBook format now, so readily available.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly collectible paperback from 1954 (a decent copy runs $300+) was given a primitive reissue by Gryphon Books in 2004. In the reissue, Gary Lovisi hails Sin Pit as a forgotten noir masterpiece, and he's more or less right. My only gripe is that the novel is so lean that sometimes it reads more like an outline for the book than the actual thing. But one could just as easily count this is a virture: Hardly a word is wasted in Sin Pit, and it hits all the right noir notes along the way--even if it doesn't hold some of them for very long. This was the only novel written by Paul S. Meskil, who wrote a brief afterword for the 2004 reprint. In it, he writes, "My original title was 'Blood Lust' and they changed that title without my knowledge. I also originally wrote the book in the first person." In fact, Blood Lust is a much better title for the book. Hard Case Crime would do well to give this book a proper reissue with its original title restored. As for narrative point of view, Meskil's novel was published in first person, so his comment on this point simply leaves me puzzled. Perhaps he originally wrote the book in third person?

First reading: 6 April 2008
Second reading: 26 April 2017

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty good. I had some issues with the writing, and it didn't really get under my skin the way the best hard-boiled novels do, but if you're in the mood for a classic '50s pulp, this definitely fits the bill. I kept thinking while I was reading it that it would have made a fantastic early '50s film noir starring either Charles McGraw or Robert Mitchum.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent Pulp

A classic pulp novel published by Lion Books in the fifties, this book is the epitome a hard boiled crime novel with a great ending a quick fun read. Highly recommended for pulp noir fans.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 — not bad. But not the lost noir “masterpiece” that some have touted.

[Tom Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sin Pit by Paul S. Meskil

A Paperback Warrior Blog review:

First published in 1954 by Lion Books, “Sin Pit” was the only known novel written by Paul Meskil. According to an introduction by academic David Rachels in a 2017 eBook re-release, Meskil was a New York crime reporter whose descriptive writing was lurid enough to catch the eye of a literary agent who encouraged him to write crime fiction. In short order, he turned in a manuscript called “Blood Lust” that was released by Lion Books as “Sin Pit.”

The narrator is East St. Louis Police Detective Barney Black who is thrust into a murder investigation involving a beautiful young woman with a .32 bullet in her skull and whip marks all over her legs. The novel is structured as a pretty standard police procedural with Barney following logical leads in a corrupt town riddled with poverty and vice.

The real appeal to this book is the character of Barney himself. At 6’2” and 210 pounds, the 32 year-old cop is hardboiled as hell. He’s not afraid to slap a witness around to start them talking or to take a belt of whiskey on the job to wash the taste of murder from his mouth. Barney is the kind of morally-compromised but highly effective police officer that James Ellroy later depicted in his classic his L.A. crime stories. Barney’s tragic backstory made him into a sociopath dedicated to holding criminals accountable solely because it’s his job and not because of a functioning moral compass.

The characters and writing in “Sin Pit” are about as good as it gets in 1950s crime fiction. When a sexy and alluring witness threatens to warm Barney’s cynical heart and generates human romantic feelings, the reader just knows that it’s not going to end well for the would-be lovebirds. The hunt for the killer takes some dark turns into the dungeon of an S&M freak and a world of darkness and corruption that exists right under Barney’s nose.

Meskil’s writing really is superb - some of the best I’ve read from the era. He makes me want to shake my fist at the heavens wishing he’d stuck with novel writing. You should definitely seek this one out if you like your noir twisted and perverse. The original paperback and reprint might be pricey, but an outfit called Automat Press has been quietly reprinting orphaned works from the era as eBooks at nice prices. Don’t let the grass grow under your feet. This one is highly recommended - a must read.

[Ron Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This classic noir novel, "Sin Pit," is the only novel written by journalist Paul S. Meskil. It has everything that makes great noir and then some. There are bad cops, worse criminals, juicy sex, graphic violence, and a variety of deliciously brutal killings.

The protagonist, a cop named Detective Sergeant Barney Black employs unusual methods that result in his suspension from the force for most of the book. He narrates in an honest and revealing manner. "This was it, part of my mind kept shouting. This is the woman you’ve spent your life looking for. The other half of my mind cried even louder that it wasn’t so. She was a tramp, it said. A no-good bitch who would never be anything but trouble to the men who wanted her...She was everything I had hated all my life. A scheming slut who would cheat on her husband with any man who came along when she was in heat. I told myself a woman like that could never mean anything to me. I told myself and knew I was a liar. " This is powerful inner-monologue!

The story takes place mostly in East St. Louis, IL in the 1950s. Barney reveals to the reader his upbringing in an orphanage, his mother being a tramp, and the fact he has never experienced love in his 32 years. So, he has a bit of a sensitive side, a human vulnerability that almost trips him.up. Overcoming that vulnerability is an important part of the plot.

The story moved quickly while Barney and the reader are both drawn in different directions. Beautiful descriptions like:
"Anyway, the front door was open so they strolled right in and there was Big Red waiting to greet them.

"What was left of him was lying on the floor in front of what was left of the bar. His throat was cut. So neatly that his head was almost lopped off.

" The gash started under one ear and ran all the way around to the other side. It looked like the wide, grotesque, scarlet grin of a circus clown.

" He lay in a pool of dried, still sticky blood. The fountain from his jugular vein had poured over just about all of him except the neat white cast on his shattered wrist."

This is tightly written and while it follows the noir formula, there is plenty to make it unique. Too bad Meskil didn't write more novels.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cop working to solve a murder in East St Louis gets involved with the wife of one of the victims. Gritty is an understatement, low-down too. It's a pretty messy thing with the cop doing everything wrong and in turn being wronged by the woman. Seeming good portrayal of the city at the time and the workings of the cop, but so grim it brings you down. A one-off from this author, published as a cheap paperback.

[John Marr · Rating 4 out of 5]

$300 for the original? Collectors can over-rate anything. what we have here is a solid above average tough guy 50's paperback that is better than many more heralded (and reprinted) writers. Meskill was, and probably never would be a Thompson or Goodis, but he displays plenty of potential here in what would sadly be his only novel.

[Frank Knuppel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard noir. Classic.

[John C. Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

good detective noir with a dark twist ending.