Review: Gun In Cheek by Bill Pronzini

Damn you Bill Pronzini! I was jotting down authors names before I reached the back and discovered and neatly listed bibliography. I had every intention of taking your advice to seek out these B-grade gems of the mystery fiction genre, after-all, many a B-grade film has, with time, become a cult classic.

I liked the way Bill uses his chapters to tackle the different aspects of the fictional mystery - the amateur detective, the police investigator, the private eye, the gentleman rogue, the evil oriental - as well as the spy story. We gain an insight into the publishing - and specifically Phoenix Press, who apparently published the majority of these gems (see page 91). There are comparisons between more popular characters with, often, their not so well known contemporaries and imitators.

Pronzini peppers each chapter with some of the best (??) of the writing of these featured authors:

"He keeps on waiting awhile longer. Then, at five o'clock, he gets up, locks the office door, and goes out (in that order)." "Tomorrow was another day." (Robert Twohy's "Slime"). Even some of our more well-known authors make the list (ie: Spillane, West, Basinsky, Brown, Leroux).

The titles of some of these works border on the fantastical and highly imaginable (No Coffin For The Corpse, The Clue of the Leaning Chimney, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, When Last I Died, No Luck With The Hanged Man) ; the men are invariably rugged, macho and mysoginistic; the women sport bazooka bras and ooze sex appeal; the dialogue is cliched; the villains suitably nefarious. They were quick reads - they were escapism. But don't be fooled - many of these B-graders were at the height of popular fiction during their day and were prolific in their writing - these were the authors that contributed to what we now refer to as "pulp fiction".

"The good mystery gets all the credit, all the attention .... But what about the bad mystery?" Well, Pronzini has certainly brought together the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in such a way that you may look twice at some of the lesser gems. I know I have.

Review also posted @ Goodreads

Book Critics & Their Reviews

A couple of articles questioning where have all the critical reviews gone:

From the Atlantic Wire: Where have all the mean book reviews gone? - 

Literary critics have gone soft. Despite all the snark, sass, and anger in media and online today, one area has become remarkably nicer — book reviews. A look around the latest literary criticisms leaves you feeling upbeat, even excited about coming books, much to their publicist's delight. So where have all the hatchet jobs gone?

There really is something lost in the lack of hatchet reviews nowadays. They're fun! And even for the author, they might not be so bad. The Internet feeds on anger and hatred, and this can spill over to books. 

From the New Republic: This Guy Thinks We Shouldn't Have Negative Book Reviews. Two Thumbs Down! - 

In a strange and unconvincing essay in The New Yorker, Lee Siegel, who made his name as a slashing and smart critic (for a time at The New Republic), writes that he is through with negative book reviews. He mentions a Clive James essay from several months back which lamented the lack of nasty reviews in American publications. But Siegel notes, correctly, that politeness has not been a permanent feature of American reviewing, and goes on to mention the harsh pieces that appeared in the inagural issue of The New York Review of Books fifty years ago.

Lee Siegel's article - Burying the Hatchet - featured on the New Yorker, which started it all:

I didn’t realize how strong my revulsion against negative reviewing had become until some months ago I read, in the New York Times, an essay by the critic Clive James titled “Whither the Hatchet Job?” James laments the inability of American critics to lay into their scrivening colleagues with the exuberance practiced by their British counterparts. “America,” James wrote, “does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus.” In contrast to the soporific American scene James sets the thriving vitality of book reviewing in Britain, where “ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport.”

And Clive James' Wither the Hatchet Job which is featured on the New York Times:

In Britain, the realm of book reviewing is still known as Grub Street though the actual Grub Street vanished long ago. But its occasionally vicious spirit lives on; one of the marks of Grub Street is that the spleen gets a voice. Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today.

Such critical violence is far less frequent in America. Any even remotely derogatory article in an American journal is called “negative,” and hardly any American publication wants to be negative.