Son of a Gun Got the Drop on Me: Recycled Pulp

Chandler writes that a guy looks "as guilty as if he'd just kicked his grandmother." A woman's "eyes were set like rivets now and had the same amount of expression." Cornell Woolrich's heroine says, "The ticking of my heart sounded like a cheap alarm clock."

Sometimes, this could be elevated to art. In Chandler's "Red Wind," a story in this collection, detective Philip Marlowe is wrapping up an investigation in which he's had an intense relationship with a married woman, whose husband has decided to leave her. They have no real bond to go forward, Marlowe knows.

The parting takes place in a bar. Marlowe, rising to leave, narrates:

"I stood there a moment with a hand on the table. 'If anybody ever bothers you,' I said, 'let me know.' "

Hard-bitten valor, a sense of loss . . . man. It's not bad at all.

But more often, then as now, you just needed cleavage.

Virtually every cover of every pulp magazine featured a woman, usually blond, usually with her dress ripped, being menaced by some scar-faced thug who needed a short sharp one to the jaw.

"The Girl Who Knew Too Much," typical of the sort, opens with a desperate woman sprinting out of an alley, shirt ripped down to the waist, her skirt clutched in one hand to let her run faster. The hero of the story (a newspaperman!) steps in front of her and deadpans, "What's the matter? Something scare you?"

Seconds later, "Out of the alley came a flash of orange flame," a body falls over in a heap and the story is off and running: A half-naked woman, a corpse in an alley and a tough guy with a quip -- all in the first 10 paragraphs.

Then there's Woolrich's "Angel Face," the story of a stripper who bares it all to save her no-good brother from the electric chair for a crime he didn't commit. We would think this is pretty much adolescent male nirvana -- savvy, whiskey-sipping stripper, dressed in a hot little number as the bad guy closes in -- but we haven't even told you about Sally the Sleuth!

Oh. Never mind. We've just been reminded this is a family paper.

In noir, the breasts were never just perky. They were evil.

Cain is in this collection with a short story called "Pastorale." As Penzler writes, Cain "wrote stories and novels so hard-boiled that he made the other pulp writers of his time seem like sissies."

"Pastorale" tells of Burbie, a young stud in a small town, his flame, Lida, and Lida's rich geezer of a husband. Burbie and Lida -- you can see this coming -- plot to kill the geez and pocket the bills. Burbie enlists an even tougher dude named Hutch to help him carry out the deed. They kill the old guy with a wrench and then cut off his head with a shovel.

Burbie throws the head off a bridge into the river, but the river is frozen, so the head just sits there on the ice. Hutch goes to get it, falls in and dies. The unnamed narrator shows up with a bunch of other guys and they try to get the head: "Believe me, a head laying out on thin ice is a pretty damn hard thing to get, and what we had to do was lasso it."

The story ends with Burbie a few days away from hanging. Lida's not far behind.

So maybe some of these stories ring true and maybe some of them don't. But the best of them get at something there in the American void, something true about late nights and lost men and bare bulbs in apartment hallways and, under it all, the taste of cigarette smoke, like regret, lingering on the tip of the tongue.