It's Cold Out There

by Malcolm Braly

Book by Malcolm Braly

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It’s Cold Out There (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on On the Yard. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly’s parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), and a final work of fiction, The Protector (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.

Reviews

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. Neither the story nor the characters gelled in any sensible way.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noir is a French word meaning black, which in English describes a bleak, cynical style of crime fiction and film marked by moral ambiguity, fatalism, and dark aesthetics. (Merriam- Webster.) Here, Braly gives us a fatalistic noir. Our lead character is J.D. Bing, entered prison at 17 following a gas station robbery in which a police officer was shot. His buddies got the death penalty. J.D., being a juvenile, did twenty solid years. He’s out now, still wearing the clothes they gave him at the prison gate. He’s never lived on the outside as an adult. Never had to figure out how to keep a roof over his head or three squares a day.

But the outside isn’t quite what he dreamed it would be. He goes door to door as an encyclopedia salesman. ‘But there was nothing else he could turn his hand to. At thirty-seven he found himself completely inexperienced, untrained, and unconnected because of the thirty-seven years he had lived he had spent twenty of them in prison and now, discharged into this alien world he had been told was the real world, he was almost as bewildered and helpless as an aged nun cast from her convent.” And now he’s “wondering if his long-dead partners weren’t after all the lucky ones, he walked out into the awful freedom of a world as alien as the bottom of the ocean.”

And that’s before he gets to know the characters populating the outside world. For most among them, Kristie Olson, a blonde living in her own dream world where she’s a maiden in a tower or a girlfriend of a jewel thief or captured by pirates. “In her dream, which she knew wasn’t real, she had the bandit captain tell her that her ransom would be $25,000; $25,000 American, he stipulated, will save your life. Anything else is between you and me as man and woman. My father will pay, she said, for my life, and if you get pleasure from taking a defenseless woman, I can’t stop you …”. Kristie has all the men ogling her, but when the curtain is lifted, she’s as desperate as J.D., but perhaps twice as crazy.

The others in her motor court include senior artists, counterfeiters, and no one who seems to do an honest day’s work.

J.D. can’t believe all these people on the outside are all connivers, cheats, and out to roll anyone even their buddies for a few bucks. J.D. “was stunned. He had turned a corner in his empty life and stumbled into a Chinese carnival.”