Nude on Thin Ice

by Gil Brewer

Under the bed was half a million bucks and in it was a lovely, lonely widow. Both of them just waiting for me.

Only one thing stood in the way.

A hot-eyed little tramp with a mind like ice and a body that could melt iron. She was out of this world, this hopped-up nymphet . . . and that's where she almost put me.

Because this little girl had it all mapped out. She knew which side of the bed was buttered, and that the quickest way to the hidden loot was me . . .

And murder!

Genres: Noir

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Florida writer Gil Brewer was the author of dozens of wonderfully sleazy sex/crime adventure novels of the 1950's and 60's, including Backwoods Teaser and Nude on Thin Ice; some of them starring private eye Lee Baron (Wild) or the brothers Sam and Tate Morgan (The Bitch) . Gil Brewer, who had not previously published any novels, began to write for Gold Medal Paperbacks in 1950-51. Brewer wrote some 30 novels between 1951 and the late 60s – very often involving an ordinary man who becomes involved with, and is often corrupted and destroyed by, an evil or designing woman. His style is simple and direct, with sharp dialogue, often achieving considerable intensity.

Brewer was one of the many writers who ghost wrote under the Ellery Queen byline as well. Brewer also was known as Eric Fitzgerald, Bailey Morgan, and Elaine Evans.

http://www.gilbrewer.com/

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy classic pulp fiction from the fifties and early sixties, then at some point you will become acquainted with the work of Gil Brewer, one of the true masters of the craft. Brewer's novels are portraits of lust-filled characters who are compelled by money and passion to do things those with sane minds wouldn't do. His characters are stuck on a path to destruction and can't stop even when they can see quite clearly where they are going.

Nude on Thin Ice is a particular type of pulp novel where almost every character in it is twisted in some way. Few of the characters offer any redeeming qualities, including the protagonist Ken McCall, who is about as swarmy and slimy as they come, out to use anyone he can get his hands on, motivated by greed and lust and panic, woman-dumper, woman-beater, playboy, degenerate, etc. What makes the book great is how Brewer makes the reader care about what happens to this miserable creature.

Others in the book are greedy, vain, manipulative, conniving, incestuous, violent, sneaky, lying, and hateful. What do you expect from a story about a jerk who dumps his girlfriend and hightails it across the country merely to attempt to seduce his best friend's widow and get his hands on her fortune? And,

Slimy Ken may just be the most sane and levelheaded one in the veritable madhouse that buddy Carl Schroeder left behind.

The story is well-plotted and compelling but it's Brewer's writing filled as it is with pulpy goodness that blasts this novel into the hall of pulp fame.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pulpy tagline: “A red-hot hellcat in the frozen night—and murder on the prowl!”

Yep. It’s another potent cocktail of greed and lust by noir master Gil Brewer! This one stars one of his most sleazy protagonists, a womanizer and scam artist who drops the ladies he uses like a bad habit and skips out on the hotel bills. After an old friend dies, Ken McCall concocts a plan to seduce his widow and take her for all the money he left behind for her. But a wrench is thrown in his plans in the form of a pretty young thang named Justine who steals his heart and has plans of her own as well.

"My father. I always called him Daddy. He was the first. He was the only one, other than you."

This is a pretty standard pulp novel for Brewer, but what really makes it memorable is how truly crazy the entire cast of characters is. And if you've read Brewer's other books, that’s really saying a lot! Once you get to Justine's kinky daddy issues and all the ruthless blackmail and double-crosses, you’ll find yourself actually rooting for that poor asshole McCall!

I suddenly wanted to leave this house, fast. I didn't, though. Somehow you never do. It's so damn easy to ignore wisdom when it whispers.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the opening pages of Nude on Thin Ice, you can hear the plot gears grind before Gil Brewer gets his machine in gear: Our noir anti-hero, Ken McCall, is summoned to console Nanette Schroeder, the widow of a recently deceased acquaintance. The acquaintance, Carl Schroeder, was a lecherous bastard who didn't live long enough to spend his fortune. Ken heads to the Schroeder residence with dollar signs in his eyes, but he arrives to find that he is not the only one with designs on the dead man's money. In the trajectory of Brewer's career, Nude on Thin Ice is remarkable primarily for its heightened sexual content. Dating to his earliest days with Gold Medal, Brewer was forced to reign in the "perverse" sexual content of his writing, but by 1960 he had considerably more freedom. In Nude on Thin Ice, he doesn't use that freedom tastefully, but in noir this is not necessarily a bad thing.

First reading: 10 April 2011
Second reading: 28 July 2013

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of a Stark House Press double. I read this in a single afternoon. Granted, it was 108 degrees outside, but there was plenty of heat going on inside the pages of this novel as well. I love stories where the anti-hero gets so twisted up over a hot babe that he gets his one-way ticket to crazy-ville punched.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might just be my favorite Gil Brewer noir thriller because he holds nothing back. The protagonist is about as unsympathetic as you can imagine, and yet all the other characters are just as sleazy so maybe, just a little bit, you root for Ken McCall to get his root of all evil: a big pile of money. The novel kicks off with McCall skipping out on his girlfriend and sticking her with the unpaid motel bill. He's received a letter from a rich dying friend who asks McCall to go console his wife and McCall fantasizes about turning it into a stupid rich score. Only when he gets to her house a menagerie of whack-jobs is already on the scene hoping to make a similiar score. The femme fatale - Justine - is sixteen and Brewer's description of how she teases McCall for the first 60 pages is pure art. She works him to a fever pitch and then the killing begins. And then that girlfriend McCall ditched shows up looking to cut herself in, too. What's a noir protagonist to do? The action gets steamy and it gets bloody and it all rips along with Brewer's typical frenetic pacing. A Nasty, brutish, and short page turner. Set aside a couple of hours when you won't get interrupted because this is one you'll want to race on through to the end.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much raunchier than the better known Brewers — quite explicit, actually — and with something of a Beat aesthetic. Top-notch

[Vicent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una novel·la negra ben curiosa. No hi ha violència extrema, els personatges estan ben desenvolupats, i de tant en tant les escenes tenen alguna cosa d'oníric, d'irreal. M'ha recordat (salvant mooooltes distàncies) El llop estepari, de Hermann Hesse. Una novel·la de lectura molt agradable, amb una trama sòlida. Curiosament, per a ser una novel·la que es va publicar el 1960 (quan encara estava en vigor el Codi Hays), la cosa acaba raonablement bé per als delinqüents. No bé del tot, però Déu n'hi do.

La traducció de na Concepció Roca és magnífica. Si distribuïm els errors i els encerts a cada plat de la balança, en el plat dels errors n'hi ha alguns, però molt pocs: possessius prescindibles, pleonasmes, presents continus que podrien ser presents simples, ultracorreccions amb el verb ser, algun problema de morfologia...

En el plat dels encerts, en canvi, hi trobam coses que, agafades individualment, es veuen molt poc sovent a les traduccions de l'últim quart del segle xx, però agafades en conjunt no s'hi veuen mai: preposició composta per a davant infinitiu, pretèrit perfet simple, article personal, combinacions de pronoms febles genuïnes, riquesa lèxica, locucions genuïnes (amb tot i això, si et plau...) No he trobat mai a cap altra traducció totes aquestes opcions juntes. Si no fos per aquestos petits errors que s'hi troben molt de tant en tant, seria una traducció excepcional.

[xavi · Rating 3 out of 5]

me hubiese encantado cn 15 años cuando leía a Bukowski...(?)

[Carles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sempre ho acabaven trobant tot. Sempre hi havia algú que et descobria. Sí, sempre ho acabaven trobant tot. Ja ho sabia. Però no podia fer-hi res.

Autor de frases curtes. Es llegeix molt ràpid. La trama és simple. La trampa és simple.

El protagonista, entre glop i glop, va narrant el seu periple.
Travessa la tempesta, va cap els diners, primer. Desprès...

[The Professor · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You’ve stepped straight into some kind of mucked-up psychiatric ward where the doe is out to lunch”. Psychosexual shenanigans plus schadenfreude. Penniless wrong ‘un Ken McCall drives across country to “look after” the money-bags widow of a dead mate but her Hell House of Doom is whacko-central. Much fun watching Ken fail to adjust to the new normal ensues.

This is the usual delicious read from Gil Brewer with some tropes familiar from his whisky-powered factory of fiction. There is a rogues gallery of designing women, a stash of loot the anti-hero is fated never to get his hands on and things get jolly hot at the finale; Brewer liked a literal inferno. Ken McCall is your average recognisable weasel, a ten-a-penny 27-year old on the make who Brewer is careful to detail: he’s an ex-car thief, maudlin (“I thought for a moment I was going to cry”), nostalgic for an ex (“B.H. Before Helen. Now it was A.H. Ah, hell”) he has artistic pretensions and his treatment of women (“I put the heel of my hand on her forehead and gave her a shove”) had this reader gagging for his comeuppance. With all the usual money problems (we meet him glugging Martinis on a beach then doing a runner) he stitches up his current squeeze Betty (big mistake) and dashes across country and into a very well described icy tundra to the grieving widow of an old, and rich, drinking partner to relieve her of four hundred thousand beautiful dollars. However, the moment the door of said widow’s mansion is opened by sixteen year old Justine, Ken really should back away from the bomb and slink back to Betty but, of course, he doesn’t.

Justine, you see, is Krakatoa in a nightie and you can sense Brewer’s powers starting to slip when it comes to his treatment of her. McCall all but howls at the moon with lust for the luscious sixteen – yes, sixteen – year old Justine (“Horizontal calisthenics showed in her eyes”) and McCall’s fixation on a) Justine and b) the loot (in that order) becomes almost comical, he’s the sort of rampaging lust monster George MacDonald Fraser would later play up for laughs in “Flashman”. Primal lust as a motivating force is standard for these waters – a way to get the lead in a half-Nelson so he doesn’t stop the story by walking out – but Brewer goes just one notch too far here, sacrificing believability. Plus Justine, as a character, is…problematic. The male 1960s reader is invited to join McCall in a lust-a-thon involving an incest survivor who happens to be drop dead gorgeous, psychotic and an Auntie killer. Brewer is a much better writer than the click-baity covers and titles of his novels imply (and certainly a better writer than he himself believed) but you sense those jugs of whisky are starting make him miss a few strings here.

Nevertheless, as always, the enjoyment of this style of storytelling lies in the way everything is heightened to almost operatic levels (“I drank the drink straight down, went over and filled the glass to the brim and drank that, and filled it again and drank half”) and Brewer once again brings, one feels, lived experience of unalloyed despair to his characters (“It was like being tied hand and foot, sinking, sinking into deep water. A crazy, excitable, desperate feeling”). His existential pain is our reading gain. Every decision McCall makes is totally in character and watching him frantically try to secure the loot, the girl and evade his undoing is most enjoyable. Brewer’s novels are short too. That was expedient in 1960 and a relief in 2020. “Wonderful and evil, and I liked it, every bit of it.”