Kurt McGill

  A voice from the dead. But who speaks from behind the veil? Phil Sparrow. Needle-name of Blackwell Wren: writer, pornographer, sex outlaw, tattoo artist who would "tattoo anything on anybody anywhere." Intimate of Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann. College professor who flushed his PhD diploma down the toilet and descended into a cutthroat world of sleaze, cheap vulgarity, skid row. The world of tattoo. In the shadow of the waiting-to-explode West Oakland ghetto, amid the political upheaval of Berkeley in the 60s, a nihilistic art student, Nick, makes his pitch to Phil. An experimental film shot in the tattoo parlor capturing the ebb and flow of outlaw bikers, treacherous lesbians, a charlatan Satanic priest, malevolent cops, and one cold-blooded killer. When Nick stumbles on Phil's bludgeoned body in a pool of blood, he is faced with a choice: the duck-it road, or the road to a police jam and all the trouble that goes with it. Nick chooses trouble and is transformed by it

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 narrator’s,