Over the years, I’ve read quite a bit about Paul S. Meskil’s only novel, SIN PIT, all of it favorable, so now that it’s being reprinted by Stark House in another triple volume of novels originally published by the legendary Lion Books, it seemed like a good time for me to finally get around to reading it. And I’m glad I did, because it really is a mostly lost gem.
The narrator is Barney Black, a detective sergeant on the East St. Louis,
Illinois police force. Barney is a distinctive character, to say the least.
He’s a little corrupt. He’s coarse and brutal and doesn’t mind in the least
beating up a suspect while questioning him. He slaps around dames when they
give him trouble. He doesn’t believe in love, and lust is just a basic animal
need to be satisfied when necessary.
But for all his unlikable qualities, dump a murder in his lap and Barney Black
will do anything, go to any lengths, to solve it and bring the killer to
justice. In SIN PIT, he’s driven to uncover the truth about the killing of a
beautiful young blonde who’s dumped in a junkyard after being whipped cruelly
and shot in the head. This sets him on a quest through a series of squalid
gambling dens, taverns, and whorehouses, all of them depicted with garish
vividness by Meskil, whose main career was that of a journalist specializing in
crime reporting.
Along the way, Barney meets a beautiful brunette (the way Meskil describes her
kept making me think of Bettie Page) who makes him reconsider his belief that
love isn’t real. But is she trustworthy? As always in this kind of book, you
have to ask yourself that question if you’re the narrator, especially after a
couple more murders take place. Will Barney sort everything out in time to
deliver justice to a killer?
Meskil’s writing is top-notch in this novel, delivering the sleaziness of his
characters and settings in fine fashion. SIN PIT’s strongest quality for me is
its pace. The tension just never lets up. Barney has to sleep sometime, but
even when he does, his slumber is haunted by violent dreams and as soon as he’s
awake he plunges right back into the investigation at breakneck speed. I read
this novel in one sitting, which is unheard of for me these days. Granted, it’s
fairly short, but if it was much longer, the reader would be exhausted from
trying to keep up with Barney. I had a great time reading it and give SIN PIT a
high recommendation. It’s available in LION TRIO 3: FEMMES FATALE from Stark
House, which you can pre-order now.
3 comments:
Nice review of a great noir thriller. I had the pleasure of reading it in the original Lion edition, which I always prefer, to get that old paper smell and take you back to the times!
I love the smell of old books. Most of the time, reading a 70-year-old paperback is just a wonderful sensory experience. I've run across some that smelled pretty bad, but that's rare.
The reeking ones have lived a tough life (even from birth/manufacture with substandard materials or warehousing). This definitely sounds like Mike Hammer pared down to essentials, Paul Cain to Spillane as, say, Chandler. And as Lowell Wilson the Anonymous and you know all too well, so often one worries about destroying the bindings of older paperbacks (or book club editions)...so, time to give Greg Shepard some money! (and, in my case, find more library space in the house).
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