Well, this is the first Hard Crime novel that took me more than a couple of days to finish. I blame the first half of the book.
There's this sailor named Swede who has just decided to leave the sea, take his twelve grand in pay and move to Minnesota to find a farm and a wife. Of course the minute he gets on solid land he finds a bar, a card game and a whole lot of rum.
Saved by a mysterious blonde named Corliss, Swede discovers that she rescued him from losing all his cash and put him up in The Purple Parrot. A motor court on the coast.
It doesn;t take long for the two of them to become entangled, literally. Then Corliss gets raped by a local and Swede punches him in the side of the head so hard it caves in. Now, we have a dead guy and Corliss doesn't want to go to the cops. Swede loves her so he agress to help lose the body.
That's when things start to unravel and all isn;t as it seems in this tale of lust, greed and deception.
HOME IS THE SAILOR gives you a pretty standard story for the first half of the book. Then Keene takes it in some weird directions in the second half that force you to finish the book in a single setting. It's so good that they should put on the back of the book; 'Just make it through the first half of the book and you won't be sorry' because that's how I felt about it.
So, in the end, a good book. Slow to start, but finishes like a champ of this type of pulp fiction.
Next up is The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer.
5 comments:
In the 50s, these "man on the run" novels were being spit out by all the major paperback publishers. (Gold Medal sure had their share)And I agree with you that many come up as standard fare.
Day Keene used this theme in many of his novels and IMO "Home Is the Sailor" is one of his best. It's great to see Hard Case Crime come along and help re-sprout interest in these almost forgotten authors from that era,like Day Keene.
If you ever come upon Keene's novel called "Joy House" -you might want to give it a whirl. It's my favorite by him.
Hard Case does such a good job that I sometimes can't tell if they're reprinting a forgotten tale or spinning an entirely different one!
The Neo-Edwardian Hipster
Some of their stuff is new, some reprints. The best of the new ones, for me anyway, was Money Shot by Christa Faust.
Oh, I think you'll like The Vengeful Virgin. I really did.
Definitely we will like it.
Cannot wait to read it.
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