Kurt McGill

Night Pictures by Kurt McGill Reviewed by Jay A. Gertzman   This might be the best pulp noir crime novel since the 60s, when Horace McCoy, Charles Williams, Peter Rabe, Charles Williford, Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane, Day Keene, and David Goodis were writing. This was the late classic period, before the genre which had done so much to gain attention from European readers began to fade into the soft-core erotica of the 70s. Kurt McGill must have read a lot of books by the aforementioned.   He has almost uncannily melded into one thriller many of their best sinister bad guys, mean streets and alleys, protagonists stunned into self-reflection, and obsessive, addicted social isolates. He gets the soft-core howlers right also: “she unzipped his fly with her teeth.” Night Pictures is the correct title because McGill gets atmospherics perfect. The story is set in downtown Oakland. Tamale and red-hot pushcarts, guys lurking in doorways, empty storefronts. Nick, the na...

Jack Woo's Clams by Kurt McGill Reno, Nevada “Vultures.” On the roof again today. That peroxided divorcee who blew her alimony on the craps table hasn’t been out much . . . her red Hyundai’s still sitting out in front of her room. “Motherfuckin’ hot.” Thirty-nine buck shithole . . . death-rattle A/C. They let ‘em ripen up around here for a couple of days . . . minimum . . . down on the linoleum floor . . . all fuchsia and turquoise . . . while her poodle mistakes her toes for Doggie Bon Bons. Two days is forever for a dog. Six broke-dick cable channels at the Thunderbird Inn had reduced me to reading the obituaries in the local paper:  pancreatic cancer—complications of fifteen-to-one dry Martinis . . . Velveeta-induced frontotemporal lobar degeneration . . . diabetic asymmetric neuropathy—Twinkies-triggered . . . Lucky Strike epistrophy  . . .  black lung disease . . .  “Is this place radioactive or just floating on a sea of shit?”  And w...

THE FLY HAS NO PITY by Kurt McGill Cooch Behar, West Bengal, India       That week the rains came. On the morning of July 21 there was a heavy shower and a good deal of thunder. In the afternoon it was hotter than ever. But the following day, cascades poured down from the leaden sky, driving us from the swimming pool in Nripendra Park to take shelter in the Narayan Pavilion. And, as if life wasn’t complicated enough already, a general uprising of the native population had started in Agra, moved rapidly to Lucknow, on to Patna overlooking the Ganges, and then to Kisanganj – within striking distance of our city.      Now unemployed pulp mill and textile workers were tooling around in autoricks from Uttar Pradesh to Bihar menacing retired people who had worked hard all their lives and only wanted to pound the odd chapatti, tend their ridge gourd and okra, and run the irrigation on days when it was ...

DEAD BRIDES FOR SALE by Kurt McGill                                                                    Red Light District, Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico Night must fall in the Tolerance Zone, the same way it does everywhere. Tonight it fell hard. I watched the shipping crate in the bed of the Escalade pickup parked behind the cantina: the crate filled with the ripe kumquats—three snuffed mail-order brides—that Yee Chung Toy tried to smuggle from Guangdong province to Veracruz, then across Mexico, through Ensenada, and into San Francisco. Tried and failed. Those kumquats would have brought a nice price from some stodgy middle-aged Chinese businessman: a limping fishmonger, a balding importer of black fungus. Real cozy. But this fruit was spoiled, tainted, gone way wrong on the way over. When ...

Useful and Accepted Definitions that will help you survive and proceed in the modern world... IMAGINATION : Always "lively." Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination. FRICASSEE : Only good in the country. ABSINTHE : Extra-violent poison: one glass and you're dead. Newspapermen drink it when they write their copy. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouin. Io non mori, e non rimasi vivo : I did not die, but nothing remained the same. In the evening it was the mosquitoes, and in the day tsetse flies with wings swept back like tiny jet fighters. I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive... EXILE LETTER Ezra Pound: after Li Po Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jeweled table And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning You would walk out with me to the Western corner of the castle To the dynastic temple, the water around it as clear as blue jade With boats fl...