Review: Wild - Gil Brewer

WILD is actually the first Gil Brewer novel I ever read, approximately 40 years ago. I had heard of Brewer but didn’t know anything about him or his books except that my buddies Bill Crider and Ed Gorman said they were good. That was enough of a recommendation for me. When a copy of the original Fawcett Crest edition from 1958 came in at the used bookstore I managed, I grabbed it for myself and read it. All these years later, with Black Gat Books reprinting this novel recently, it seemed like a perfect time for one of my rare rereads.

Lee Baron is one of the few private eye protagonists in Gil Brewer’s fiction. Lee, who has been working as a private detective in California, returns to his hometown of Tampa, Florida, to take over the agency of his late father, who has just passed away. For his first case, he’s hired by an old flame to talk to her husband, from whom she’s estranged, and try to set up a reconciliation. This seems like an odd assignment for a private detective, but Lee takes the case and, wouldn’t you know it, discovers a dead body almost right away. The corpse has been mutilated, so it’s hard to tell who the dead man is. Is it the old flame’s husband? Is it one of the guys who was involved in a recent bank robbery that netted the thieves almost half a million bucks? Loot which is still missing, by the way. Or maybe the dead man was tied in with whoever hired the hulking, out-of-town thug to hand Lee a beating and scare him off the case, or kill him if he won’t scare. Let’s not forget the second murder, or the old flame’s beautiful but slutty sister, who Lee was also involved with in the old days.

And all of this is just in the first twelve hours after Lee takes the case.

WILD is a real whirlwind of a novel. Gil Brewer is known for the propulsive nature of his plots and writing, and that quality is in full force in this one. I had no clue what was going to happen next, and Lee Baron sure as hell doesn’t. But something is going to happen, you can be sure of that, and it’ll probably be bad.

I have a confession to make. When I first read WILD back in the Eighties, I didn’t care much for it. It didn’t make me a Gil Brewer fan, and I didn’t read anything else by him for quite a while. But then I read the Hard Case Crime reprint of his novel THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN (which just happens to be the next novel Brewer published after WILD) and thought it was terrific, one of the best hardboiled/noir novels I’d read in a long time. I’ve gone on to read many more of his novels and have enjoyed every one of them.

So what did I think of WILD when I reread it? I’m happy to report that I liked it much better this time around. The plot is suitably twisty, the characterization is vivid, and Brewer’s writing is quite poignant, almost poetic in places. At the same time, it still manages to capture the white-hot desperation of the people involved in this swamp of lust and greed. If you’re already a Gil Brewer fan and haven’t read WILD, you’ll definitely want to check it out. If you haven’t read Brewer, as I hadn’t all those years ago, you might want to start with one of his classics like 13 FRENCH STREET, SATAN IS A WOMAN, or THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN, as mentioned above. But WILD is well worth reading, make no mistake about that. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions.