Patrick’s Comments (group member since Aug 07, 2026)

Patrick’s comments from the Pulp Fiction group.

Simon wrote: "I've resumed reading Georges Siménon's novels about Inspector Maigret this August. Started with My Friend Maigret, where Maigret has to solve a case in an isolated fishing village on ..."

I am having a grand time reading the Maigret novels in Penguin’s re-publication order. I just finished the third, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, which has an extra level of interest since it is based on events from Simenon’s own life. It is hard to say much more without getting into spoilers.

I had never read any of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott private eye novels, so I am starting with the first, Case of the Vanishing Beauty (1950), and enjoying it very much. Shell has an engaging good-humored personality. As a menswear aficionado, I like that he describes what he is wearing. There is a neat passage where he has to regretfully discard a 200 dollar tan gabardine suit because it got too roughed up. See, this is one reason (among many) why I could never have been a PI. I couldn’t bear a clothing tragedy moment like that, and in detective fiction, they happen ALL THE TIME. I would have had to be an accountant or something safe and boring, to protect the sartorial investment. 🙂

Peter Gunn is also described in one episode of his TV series as wearing a 200 dollar suit (and 30 dollar shoes). The price multiple between the 1950s and now is approximately 10x, so that would be a 2,000 dollar suit and 300 dollar shoes today, sounds about right. Not chump change.

Anyway, apparently the Shell Scott books get wackier and more humorous as they go along. Shell’s hedonistic and wisecracking approach to life is akin to that of Henry Kane’s Peter Chambers - a series I am also reading in order (I am finishing up the second, Armchair in Hell).

Dennis O’Keefe’s Wikipedia page is completely inadequate. He really paid his dues. He started as an extra in 1930 and did that work in almost 200 films before he received his first feature credit in 1937. Even then, it was a slow grind working his way up from B films to the A minus level where he eventually parked. It seemed that no one knew what they had. He was tall, handsome, athletic, had a fine voice, and wore clothing well. He could do drama, action, and comedy with equal aplomb.

I recently finished the late Tim Dorsey’s Florida Roadkill, the first in his Serge Storms series, and am undecided whether to continue. I do like Florida-based crime fiction. I had read that Dorsey tries to out-Hiaasen Hiaasen, and that does seem to be the case. But in this first effort, at least, Dorsey doesn’t seem to know how to modulate (which Hiaasen is brilliant at). Each chapter tries to top the last, and since the tone is lurid, garish, hyper-violent, and a touch surreal to begin with, this left me feeling a little ragged. And I thought, can he really keep this up for 26 novels and a short story, and with a psychopathic protagonist to boot? Hmm…

However, there is no denying that I did laugh out loud, quite a bit. And no problems whatsoever with blandness here. 😏

Thoughts?

I didn’t vote because I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to participate, but I would have voted for this title, although liking the other three also (all four books represent new authors for me). Lost novels and authors have an inherent appeal. I am pretty hopeless at the schedules of group reads, but I will try to dig in here.

The 1968 Southern Illinois University Press edition, in their Lost American Fiction series, with an Afterword by George V. Higgins, is available to read for free at the Open Library.

Algernon wrote: "I've read Serenade back in 2012 and wasn't really keen on it. I liked the writing but not the muddled plot and especially not the main narrator - racist and abusive with the girl.
Still, it is a sh..."

I agree with everything you say here. Not an uninteresting book, but far from Cain at his best.

I am not quite sure what to make of James M. Cain’s Serenade, a novel about a down-at-heel opera singer and his Mexican girl-of-the-night mistress. It is utterly deranged, and I don’t exactly mean that in a good way, although the end result is sort of memorable. The protagonist-narrator is a real jerk, and I never felt a bit of sympathy for him. The sexual politics are…out there, and would have been weird at the time. The view of Mexico and Mexicans, well let’s just say that it’s not insightful. There is enough plot for four seasons of a cable drama, in under 200 pages, and none of it makes a lick of sense. There was a movie version, but given the Production Code, it can’t have had much to do with the book.

People looking for something to be offended by would have a field day here, but that’s not why I read.

Have any of you read this? What was your take?

Randy wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Randy wrote: "After reading several short stories, decided to follow up The Fabulous Clipjoint with The Dead Ringer by Fredric Brown...."

I was aware of the 1950s film, but like you, I have not seen it, doubting it would come up to the book.

I am reading Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels in the Penguin re-issue publication order, and just started #3, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien. These are just so good! I have also read one of Simenon’s stand-alone romans durs, Dirty Snow, and was very impressed by it.

Randy wrote: "After reading several short stories, decided to follow up The Fabulous Clipjoint with The Dead Ringer by Fredric Brown."

I need to read more Brown. I thought The Screaming Mimi was amazing.

I am reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in publication order, and just started the fourth, The Case of the Howling Dog. The well-known Perry Mason formula is not yet settled in these first few books, and as many have noted (and the most recent Mason TV series with Matthew Rhys reflected), the style is more hard-boiled.

Zygmunt Miloszewski, Entanglement – Hefty, compelling “prosecutor procedural” set in Warsaw about 20 years ago, and drawing heavily on Polish history in the decades before that. The investigating prosecutor, Teodor Szacki, is a somewhat disillusioned professional approaching his 40s, with a taste for good suits and good movies – my kind of protagonist!

I happened to be reading the first in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ Bill Slider series, Orchestrated Death, at the same time, and couldn’t help noticing the correspondences between Slider and Szacki – specifically, their increasing boredom in their marriages, and their willingness to explore extra-marital affairs not as some kind of transgressive amoral move, but simply as a lifeline.

I just finished Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939; UK and movie title, The Mask of Dimitrios). Ambler is one of those authors I have been meaning to read forever. He was a specialist in what – spy fiction? But there are not always spies per se. Suspense? Thrillers? Those are pretty broad designations. I think the best descriptor is “novels of international intrigue”.

Anyway, this is perhaps Ambler’s most famous novel, partly because of the top-notch 1944 movie adaptation, directed by the underrated Jean Negulesco and featuring the legendary Peter Lorre / Sydney Greenstreet pairing. I think it is best if I say nothing about the characters or plot. But it is terrifically entertaining. There is good reason why this is a celebrated book.

Reading in James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand, I chortled at this:
——-
Gusts kicked in. The plane dipped resultant.

The sky was black. The air was cold. Ice hit the props. Altus, Oklahoma – due east.

Chuck flew low. Chuck flew radar-proof. Chuck flew minus landing log. No airstrip. No runway.
——-
The compression is insane. The next step would be to omit the vowels, as in written Hebrew.

Oddly, Ellroy makes for slow reading, because those rat-a-tat three and four-word sentences with only periods as punctuation, especially noticeable in The Cold Six Thousand, slow you down considerably. The style is very effective for purpose, but it is like a hammer to your skull, so I can only manage 20 pages at a time.

I heard that was a mini-series a few years back.

The great spy novelist - but that is an inadequate descriptor - Len Deighton passed on Sunday at age 97. I adored his first novel The IPCRESS File, and need to read more. The mixture of high literary language and postwar UK slang and pop culture is fresh, sometimes startling, and probably now requires annotation. Deighton wants you to know that he can write, a bit of a show-off that way, and you do know it.

The IPCRESS File started a series of novels about an unnamed operative, but when adapted to film, he was named Harry Palmer, and Michael Caine played him thrice: The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain.

Randy wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Hillary Waugh, Last Seen Wearing (1952).- This novel is referred to in histories of crime fiction as a landmark in the development of the police procedural, and that i..."

I can definitely tell why it is considered an important novel in the development of the police procedural.

Hillary Waugh, Last Seen Wearing (1952).- This novel is referred to in histories of crime fiction as a landmark in the development of the police procedural, and that is a form I have been enjoying recently. So I ordered a copy of the Library of Congress Crime Classics edition, which has useful notes.

And wow, they were not kidding, this is a GREAT mystery novel. It takes place at a women’s college in Massachusetts where a student has gone missing. Waugh was inspired by the never solved 1946 case of Paula Jean Welden, who disappeared from Bennington College in Vermont. I have an obsession with missing persons cases, so this Waugh plot and its basis have an obvious fascination.

I am baffled that no one has ever seen fit to make a movie of this. There are so many scenes here that would be tremendous on screen, like the dredging of a lake, that I think any screenwriter would be tempted.

RJ - Slayer of Trolls wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Just Finished: Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die...."

I've been reading the series in publication order so this one is next up for me. I'm glad to hear you enjo..."

We are on the same track then. I like to do a series in order when I can. Also working on Nero Wolfe and Travis McGee that way.