Picked this one up a few weeks ago and enjoyed it
tremendously. Its strengths are all outlined in the review
below - and its nod to yesteryear's attitudes and mores (sp?)
are a delight. Cave's workmanship skills as a pulp writer are
as finely tuned here as in his seminal horror collection,
MURGUMSTRUMM AND OTHERS.
Ron Clinton
> Top of the Pulps
>
> Hard-boiled PI fans interested in the subgenre's
origins in the
> pulp-fiction magazines put out between the two world
wars might want to
> look at Bottled in Blonde (Fedogan & Bremer,
$29), which contains nine
> stories written by Hugh B. Cave for Dime Detective
magazine between 1934
> and 1942. Now 90 years old, Cave made his name
during and after World
> War II as a nonfiction writer and still later as a
horror novelist. But
> his earliest stories, featuring raw, crude,
alcoholic Peter Kane, Boston
> ex-cop and anti-social private eye, were popular in
the '30s, and it's
> easy to see why.
>
> They're written with vulgar energy and
non-Beacon-Hill-Boston savvy, and
> with traces of the mean-streets poetry that a few
writers like Raymond
> Chandler mastered and turned into American
literature. In his
> introduction, Don Hutchison doubts that Kane's
lurching around Boston
> perpetually drunk would pass muster in "today's
politically correct
> climate." Nope, it wouldn't. Kane drives while
"soused" and spends every
> spare minute in a Stuart Street dive called Limpy's.
But there are
> razor-sharp sketches here, like the one of Lou
Finch, "a big, sober,
> hard-working cop with no flair for showmanship," and
the mean flatfoot
> Moroni, who says things like "Put that between your
toes and use
> Absorbine Junior on it!" A "girl" named Mabel Jilson
won't take any crap
> from Moroni. She snaps, "I used to be on the stage
and I done a
> knife-throwing act. Make something of that,
Glue-face!" Glue-face! Where
> have all the Mabels gone?
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