Satan Is A Woman - Gil Brewer

I’ve read and enjoyed many books by Gil Brewer over the years, but for some reason, two of his earliest and most successful novels have sat unread on my shelves for quite some time now. So I took the arrival of Stark House’s latest Gil Brewer double volume to be an omen that I ought to go ahead and read them. I’m going to start with SATAN IS A WOMAN, which was Brewer’s second published novel. He had previously expanded a Day Keene pulp novelette into a full-length novel that was published as LOVE ME AND DIE under Keene’s name. My review of that one can be found here. SATAN IS A WOMAN was published by Gold Medal in 1951 with a great Barye Phillips cover and launched Brewer’s career under his own name.

Larry Cole, the narrator of this novel, is one of Brewer’s everyman protagonists. He owns a not-too-successful beachfront bar on the west coast of Florida, is a World War II veteran, and is trying to live a respectable life even though he comes from a family of criminals. His father was a mob gunman, his mother was a prostitute, and his older brother Tad has been mixed up in plenty of shady deals. When they were growing up, Tad tried to keep Larry on the straight and narrow despite his own activities. As the novel opens, Tad is on the run from a murder rap and hiding out at Larry’s house. He gets caught and sent to prison, and while Larry would like to get him a better lawyer and try to help him, there doesn’t seem to be any way for him to do so. The guilt Larry feels over this tortures him.

He's about to feel a lot more guilty, because one day a beautiful blonde named Joan Turner walks into his bar, and that starts Larry on a path that includes robbery and multiple murders. Larry wants to do the right thing, but he’s so caught up by love, lust, and circumstances that he seems doomed right from the start, in the finest tradition of noir novels.

Then, late in the novel, Brewer springs a really nifty plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all. It was a real “D’oh!” moment for me because everything is set up fairly, right out in the open, and with Brewer’s angst-ridden, breakneck style, I just went right past all the clues. I love it when that happens.

SATAN IS A WOMAN is one of the best-written Brewer novels I’ve read, with plenty of action and some poetic, poignant moments that are very effective. There’s also a long scene set in a rowboat on a stormy sea that gave a confirmed landlubber like me the galloping fantods. It’s wonderful stuff.

I can see why SATAN IS A WOMAN sold well and made Brewer a successful author right off the bat. It’s really, really good. I give it a high recommendation. The new Stark House reprint, along with Brewer’s all-time bestselling novel, 13 FRENCH STREET, will be out next month and is available for pre-order now. I’ll be getting to that novel very soon.

Classic Noir: Sin For Me - Gil Brewer

SIN FOR ME is one of Gil Brewer’s later novels, published by Banner Books in 1967, the second novel of his published by Banner that year. The first was THE TEASE. Both books have been reprinted recently by Stark House in a very nice double volume with the usual fine introduction by David Rachels that puts the books in the larger context of Brewer’s triumphant yet tragic career. In my frequently bass-ackwards fashion, I read SIN FOR ME first.

The narrator is Jesse Sunderland, a real estate agent in Denver who is almost broke and drinking too much, because he’s still despondent over the break-up of his marriage to the beautiful Germaine, who comes from a rough family up in the Rockies. Germaine took Sunderland to the cleaners in the divorce and then quickly remarried.

Then a good-looking blonde with a secret about Germaine and her new husband shows up and enlists Sunderland’s help in a scheme that will both make him rich and gain him a measure of revenge on his ex-wife. Chances are that like me, you’ve read enough of these books to know that that’s not going to end well for Sunderland.

Sure enough, murder crops up, Sunderland is slated to take the fall for it, and he has to go on the run to clear his name and maybe, just maybe, get his hands on that fortune . . .

SIN FOR ME is a noir novel in the classic man-on-the-run style, with plenty of lust and greed and raw emotion propelling the story along at a breakneck pace, and few authors were ever better at that than Gil Brewer. At his peak, he may have been the best ever, although Harry Whittington and Day Keene belong in that discussion, too. By 1967, Brewer wasn’t at his peak anymore, but he was still capable of spinning a fine yarn, which SIN FOR ME certainly is. I raced through this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m glad Stark House has reprinted it and THE TEASE, because I don’t think I’ve ever come across a copy of the original edition of either book. This double volume is well worth picking up.