Nick Pascal is a gigolo. He may call himself a male escort, but his real business is romancing and bedding rich, lonely women, usually older. He lives in San Francisco and is doing very well for himself, but he hasn’t forgotten his childhood as a poor Polish boy and the son of a drunk in a small Northern California town. Despite those memories, he’s put all that behind him and life looks pretty good . . . until a rich, powerful gangster decides that Nick is just the guy to carry out a crooked, dangerous job for him.
A GAME OF FLESH was John Trinian’s first novel, published as a paperback original in 1958 by Bedside Books, a middle-of-the-pack hardboiled sleaze publisher. I don’t know who did the cover on that edition, but Black Gat Books is reprinting it with a nifty George Gross cover. That edition will be out tomorrow.
I’ve been aware of John Trinian’s books for many years, but I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of them until now. I’ll have to do something about that, because A GAME OF FLESH is pretty darned good. Over the first half of the book, as Nick Pascal gets enmeshed deeper and deeper into a web of criminals, Trinian also gives the reader several flashbacks that fill in the backstory of Nick’s younger years and how he drifts into his current profession. Then the narrative picks up momentum as layer after layer of the plot gets revealed, and it’s a well-constructed, fairly clued puzzle, at that, more so than you sometimes get in books like this.
Like most noir novel protagonists, Nick is out for the big score, and he’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is. The question is whether his ambition and his recklessness will catch up to him in the end. Trinian creates a considerable amount of genuine suspense as we keep flipping the pages to find out.
Trinian, which was not the author’s real name, also adopted the name Zekial Marko, which he used to write scripts for various TV detective series after publishing seven novels in just a few years in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I believe now that this one has been reprinted, all seven are available again, the others in Stark House Press double editions. I have those around here somewhere. Time to dig them out. For now, I give A GAME OF FLESH a high recommendation for noir fans. I raced through it and had a really good time reading it.
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