The Bitch - Les Edgerton

You'd think that in a noir novel called THE BITCH, the title character would be a woman, but that's not the case in Les Edgerton's compelling novel from New Pulp Press. As it turns out, "The Bitch" is prison slang for getting a life sentence as a habitual criminal.

That's the threat that two-time ex-con and master burglar Jake Bishop faces as he tries to live a normal life with his pregnant wife. Jake has a decent job and is about to open his own business, when his former cellmate shows up to blackmail him into taking part in a jewel robbery. In a book like this, when one of the characters starts talking about "one last job" and "a sure thing", you know it's going to turn out to be anything but.

Boy, does it.

In fact, just about everything goes wrong for Jake that possibly can, and the choices he makes in response are, you guessed it, also wrong and just drag him deeper into trouble. Any time Jake—and the reader—thinks that things couldn't possibly get any worse, they do.

Edgerton's tough prose and sure hand with the plot twists make this novel race along at a very satisfying pace. He proves to be a master at making the reader care about and almost sympathize with Jake, even when he does terrible things. Ultimately, Edgerton goes places you don't think he'll go, but he drags you along so that you have no choice but to go with him.

THE BITCH is an excellent crime novel. Not what you'd call a fun read, by any means, but to use a cliché, it's a book you can't put down.

THE BITCH e-book at Amazon.

THE BITCH trade paperback at Amazon.

Hell on Church Street - Jake Hinkson

I'd read some short stories by Jake Hinkson and enjoyed them, so I expected to like his first novel, too. But HELL ON CHURCH STREET turned out to be even better than I thought it would be. It's a very strong debut.

Except for a framing sequence that concerns an armed robbery gone wrong, this novel is narrated in flashback by one Geoffrey Webb, a young man from a bad family background who becomes the youth minister at a small Baptist church in Arkansas. Maybe Geoffrey isn't exactly a sociopath, but it's pretty obvious that, as folks from the country might say, that boy ain't right. For one thing, he gets involved with the underage daughter of the church's pastor, and then when a corrupt local lawman horns his way in on Geoffrey's plans, things get really bad. Then, as they always do in noir novels . . . they get worse.

I don't know anything about Hinkson's background, but I grew up in a Baptist church much like the one in this book, and he really nails the setting and the characters. The prose is very readable, and the pace races along just the way I like. Geoffrey Webb isn't really an unreliable narrator; he's pretty honest about himself and what he's doing. Nor is he the least bit sympathetic. But he is very compelling. I don't think most readers will root for him – I certainly didn't – but I did want to find out what was going to happen to him.

This is the second extremely good debut novel from New Pulp Press that I've read this year, the other one being Heath Lowrance's THE BASTARD HAND. And in both of them, oddly enough, organized religion plays an important part in the plot. Is this the beginning of a new sub-genre?  Church noir?  Eh, probably not, although that would make a good theme for an anthology, wouldn't it?  Let's just say that HELL ON CHURCH STREET is a fine novel, and it's available now in both print and e-book editions. You should check it out.

(By the way, I have my own church noir novel I'm going to write one of these days . . . when I get around to all the novels I'm going to write one of these days.)

Update From New Pulp Press

New Pulp Press is proud to announce that all of our books (save Jesus Angel Garcia's recent release badbadbad) are now available as ebooks. Get 'em where you want (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords etc. etc.). If you've been wanting to buy one of these books but already spent most of your money on a Justin Bieber signed fanzine, now is your chance to read a great crime novel for $3.00-$5.00. Not bad, eh?


Our books and authors have been praised by publications such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, as well as superstar authors such as Megan Abbott, Michael Connelly, Allan Guthrie, Roger Smith, Vicki Hendricks, Tom Piccirilli, Duane Swierczynski, Christa Faust, Jason Starr, Sara Gran, and Ken Bruen. Don't be the last one on the New Pulp Press train! Go to New Pulp Press and click on the links, or head directly to Smashwords and buy the ebooks there.


Speaking of Jesus Angel Garcia, he's in the midst of an unprecedented (for a small press author) 32 city tour. You read that right: 32 damn cities. Check out the filthy details here. Go see him if he comes to your city, or simply buy his book, badbadbad. It's a hell of a read.


Also, keep your eyes out for our upcoming release, Crime Factory: The First Shift. It's a book of short stories including works by Ken Bruen, Dave Zeltserman, Roger Smith, Adrian McKinty, Dennis Tafoya, Craig McDonald, Leigh Redhead, and many, many more.


Thanks as always for your support of indy publishing. We couldn't do it without you. Well, we could, but it would involve embezzling money, and I don't want to go there unless absolutely necessary.


Best,
Jon Bassoff
New Pulp Press


(I don't know about you, but I'm grabbin' e-books of the ones I haven't read.)

The Bastard Hand - Heath Lowrance

Some of the blurbs for Heath Lowrance’s debut from the great New Pulp Press compare it to a Gold Medal novel. There are certainly some similarities, especially early on.


THE BASTARD HAND starts out with its protagonist and narrator, Charlie Wesley, being thrown out of a bar in Memphis. Charlie is on the run after escaping from a mental institution in the Pacific Northwest. He’s on his way to Florida to visit his brother’s grave, but he’s taking his time about getting there and is basically drifting. Charlie is maybe crazy, maybe not, but his dead brother talks to him and gives him advice.


Before Charlie can get out of Memphis, though, he has another mentor, because he encounters and befriends an eccentric and vaguely sinister preacher, Reverend Phinneas Childe. The reverend is on his way to become the pastor of the Baptist church in the small northern Mississippi town of Cuba Landing, and he asks Charlie to come with him. Being in no hurry to get anywhere, Charlie agrees.


If you’ve read very many books like this, you already know that’s probably not a good idea.


Of course it’s not, because when Charlie and the reverend get to Cuba Landing, they discover it’s one of those wonderful noir novel towns where nearly everybody has a secret, and most of them are pretty dark. The previous pastor of the church has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, there’s a beautiful blond femme fatale, the mayor and the chief of police may well be corrupt . . . you know the drill.


If a well-written Gold Medal pastiche was all THE BASTARD HAND was, it would still be a very good book. But about halfway through the book, in a subplot that involves some Memphis gangsters who are after Charlie, Lowrance throws a curve and introduces an utterly bizarre twist and turns this novel into something that may have been influenced by those Fifties Gold Medals but is a whole other creature all its own. As the book progresses, the small-town secrets get weirder, too, as Lowrance weaves together the various strands of the plot and ramps things up into a fascinating combination of throwback noir, gritty crime thriller, Southern Gothic, and pure fantasy.


There’s no way to say much more about the plot without ruining things. The characters are vividly drawn, the action scenes are well done, there’s just enough humor to offset a little of the grimness, and every time Lowrance takes such a risk that you think the book is about to crash and burn in silliness, he finds a way to pull it off in spectacular fashion. Yes, THE BASTARD HAND is a little over the top. I have no problem with that. In fact, this is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I’m already looking forward to seeing what Heath Lowrance comes up with next. Needless to say, THE BASTARD HAND gets a high recommendation from me.

Rabid Child - Pete Risley

Here’s another debut novel, Pete Risley’s RABID CHILD, published by New Pulp Press, one of the excellent small presses that have been founded in recent years. RABID CHILD is about as bizarre as any crime novel you’re likely to read, starting with that creepily effective cover.


The protagonist of this novel is a young homeless man named Desmond Cray. Desmond is not a nice guy. He has a history of being a peeping tom and child molester, and as the novel opens is leading a squalid life, eating out of trash cans and sleeping wherever he can find a place. Then he runs into a former foster parent of his, Mrs. Honnecker, and allows himself to be persuaded to go back to her home with her. As with every noir novel – and RABID CHILD is about as noir as you can get – this seemingly innocent decision turns out to be a bad mistake.


Because Mrs. Honnecker is crazy, the crippled religious fanatic who lives with her as a boarder is even crazier, and her daughter, who has a sordid history with Desmond, may be the craziest and most dangerous of them all. Desmond, who’s really not that bad a fellow if you can get past that whole child molesting bit, finds himself in deeper and deeper trouble. He knows he should get away from them but can’t quite bring himself to do it. Inevitably, things spiral down to a violent, grotesque, unsettling climax.


You’ve got to admire Risley’s sheer guts for taking a character as unsympathetic as Desmond and making him the nominal hero of a novel. I’m not quite sure how he manages to pull that off, but he does. This is a fast-paced, nightmarish yarn with something to offend and/or disturb just about everybody. I’m not sure what to make of Risley. There’s very little information about him in the book, and the quality of the writing is good enough that it makes me suspect the name may be a pseudonym for an experienced, better-known author. At the same time, there’s a raw quality to RABID CHILD that really makes it seem like a first novel. Either way, this is a fine book that really kept me turning the pages, but I’m not going to recommend it for everybody. If you’ve read this far, you already know whether or not the subject matter bothers you so much you ought to avoid it. But if you want to read something that’s probably unlike anything you’ve read before, you ought to check it out.

Flight to Darkness - Gil Brewer

The first Gil Brewer book I read was WILD, and I didn’t much care for it. But since then I’ve tried his work again, most recently THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN (the Hard Case Crime reprint with the great cover) and LOVE ME AND DIE, published under Day Keene’s name but actually a ghosted expansion by Brewer of a Keene pulp novelette. I’ve become a confirmed Gil Brewer fan, like a lot of you are, I’m sure. One of his rarer novels, FLIGHT TO DARKNESS, is about to be reprinted by New Pulp Press, and it’s a very good one verging on greatness.

FLIGHT TO DARKNESS is the story of Eric Garth, a sculptor from an old, fairly well-to-do Florida family who is wounded in the Korean War. The book opens with him about to be released from the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital in California. His physical wounds have healed, but he’s been troubled by a recurring dream in which he murders his brother. Eric has fallen in love with one of his nurses at the hospital and plans to marry her, but first they’re going to drive cross-country to return to his family home in Florida.

I’ll bet you can guess that doesn’t turn out to be a good idea.

Actually, they make it all the way to Alabama before trouble crops up, but when it does, it lands Eric in a sanitarium, and then his girlfriend disappears, and then he escapes, and when he does finally make it to Florida . . . well, you guessed it.

Things get worse.

And looming over the whole thing are Eric’s doubts about his own sanity, so always in the back of his mind (and the reader’s mind) is the possibility that he really is crazy, and when he’s framed for murder, well, maybe he wasn’t framed after all. Before the book is over, Eric can’t fully trust anything or anybody, including himself.

Murder, madness, swamps, gators, a savagely beautiful woman . . . it doesn’t get much better than this for noir fans, and the last fifty pages or so are about as crazed and breakneck as anything you’ll find in the genre. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Throw in the fact that New Pulp Press has produced a top-notch trade paperback reprint with a very evocative cover, and you’ve got a book that I don’t hesitate to recommend very highly. I think the official publication date is tomorrow, but I’ll bet you can go to Amazon or NPP’s website and order a copy right now.