Barry Malzberg on Gil Brewer

Subj: and the girl screamed - by Gil Brewer Fawcett Crest Original 1956

A rodomontade on a troubled, forgotten writer.  To my close friend and collaborator, Bill Pronzini but I send it on to be unread by others..."what the hell" as my friend Larry Janifer (1933-2002) used to say.  Rara-avis was presented to me years ago as an online discussion group centered on the category...it's lifeless but then again so might be this short essay.

Regards to all,

       

Barry N. Malzberg

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Went through this in two hours yesterday it well reinforced the conclusion I had reached on Brewer (1922-1983): talent, real talent, no kidding, but a drunk, undisciplined and in a way contemptuous of himself and his own work (_not_ I must emphasize of the category)...the same old stuff here, the hasty improvisatory plotting, the absurd coincidences, the situational lurches, the shifts in direction, the random, unresolved intrusions and plot points and then as if he frantically typed drunk 48,000 words and then realized that he was coming up sheer against the wordage limit for this market, a hasty slam-the-doors hellbent false resolution which sweeps the characters and situation from the cluttered stage and turns to the audience to say with a winning smile "That's all folks".  Well, it may be all for him and Brewer in his dark way even here is some kind of a winner but all that he leaves this reader is a kind of querolous sense of loss...he could have been so much better.  Like his great model Big Ernie (they died at roughly the same age with booze a huge contributant) he had big ideas and precise, small treatment when he started but unlike Big Ernie he had no editors and no help and no literary culture of any kind to infuse as it surrounded him and it did badly, this zeitgeist, it little served him.

I suppose some Harold bloom of the category could take apart Brewer with greater precision than Brewer himself and show how his situation, his work refracted all of the strengths and ills of his very medium, the mass market slambang paperback original suspense market of the 50's which debased Chandler and was raised by John D. MacDonald (this was David Thompson's argument on Orson Welles) but I am no Harold Bloom.  In fact, I am no Gil Brewer.  Grateful on both counts.

Barry