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, description of a corn tamale smothered in chili gravy is not the only example of sensory delight. In fact, if Goodis is known for having his characters stuck with the worst food, McGill served his protagonist the most delectable. And he had the descriptive powers to make it so.


Nick is out to find out who bludgeoned the brains out of his friend and teacher, Phillip Sparrow. In the best noirs, the protagonist uncovers motives for crime which transform him. The prototype is Jake Gittes in Chinatown (“forget it, Jake”). Oakland has its metaphoric Chinatown too.

 

Jay A. Gertzman

 

Professor emeritus of English Mansfield University, author: "Pulp According to David Goodis"



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
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...
Read more
Image
  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...
Read more