Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories: Expanded Edition

Had never heard of this guy, and he wrote some interesting noir. Typical sordid and trouble personal story. I liked these and read some more.

Stark House's reissue of David Rachels' 2012 collection of Brewer short stories obviously reprints the collection of stories from that previous volume. But it also adds five new stories to the mix.The good news is that these new stories are all solid selections from the 50s that I hadn't read before. The bad news is, implausibly, Stark House has managed to take the 272 pages from the University of Florida Press edition, plus five stories, and a slightly expanded introduction from Rachels, and condense it into... 260 pages. This feat is accomplished by shrinking the text considerably. I'm not sure how much money Stark House saved by keeping the page count low, but they've done so at the expense of a comfortable reading experience.Apart from that, if you haven't yet read these stories, they're well worth the eye strain. I appreciate Stark House's work bringing Brewer's shorts (and novels, of course) back into print – check this year's stellar Death Is A Private Eye; Die Once - Die Twice is due in January 2020 – and hope these new editions are a sign of even more to come. Rachels' curation on these volumes is excellent and assures the stories you're going to read will always be great.

Love Gil Brewers work and would like to see a return of this genre on film. I'm on to The Red Scarf next.

Gil Brewer worked a number of different jobs after being discharged from the Army following World War II, but his goal was to become a writer. In the fifties, he did just that and wrote numerous pulp stories for Gold Medal. His “13 French Street” was probably his most successful selling book and it sold over a million copies, but was considered unfilmable because of its content. Other novels included Satan is A Woman, Flight to Darkness, Some Must Die, 77 Rue Paradis, The Brat, Little Tramp, Wild, A Killer is Loose, Vengeful Virgin, the Red Scarf, and the Angry Dream. In all, Brewer published fifty novels, not all under his true name, and over one hundred shorts. Many of his stories are set in Florida where Brewer made his home. Eventually, Brewer drank himself to death.Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories is a collection of 25 of Brewer’s short stories that were originally published in magazines throughout the fifties and sixties. Redheads Die Quickly is the title short from that collection and is presented here by itself. I recommend reading it for a taste of Brewer’s short work, but, from a financial perspective, you are better off just springing for the whole collection rather than just this sample.The story is about a robber who, with a group of other criminals, netted an $800,000 payday, but Caffery, who gave State’s evidence with regard to his accomplices and got out of custody in short measure, did not know where the loot was kept. It had been “a caper that had fayed the last of his nerves, ruined what was left of his digestion, weakened his heart, and helped bring back the old migraine of his youthful mob days.” But $800,000 “was a lot of moo” and Caffery aimed to find where Ritchie had hid it, hopefully before Ritchie croaked in prison where he was serving out a life sentence. Finding that loot was an obsession and Caffery knew, if he did not find it, he was done.Caffery’s solution to finding the loot that Ritchie certainly wasn’t going to turn over to him was to get it out of Ritchie’s girl, Helen, who was still loyal to Ritchie. She lounged around “on the couch in nothing-much of a black whatsit, looking lovely as ever in every respect” except that, after the beatings Caffery had given her, she had nothing left in her eyes and a permanent blank expression on her face. “Her eyes had that glazed look, and when she spoke” she sounded like “a punch-drunk fighter.” She simply “stared at the mute TV set with the pitiful air of a patient hound” and ran her hands through her “long red hair.” “Helen didn’t even know her own name anymore. It never mattered what was on television” either.Short as this story is, this is powerful stuff. You have the criminal element present. You also have despair and hopelessness and desperation. This could certainly have been made into a full-length novel. Good stuff, indeed!

The halcyon days of Gil Brewer’s writing life were the late 1940s, before he had ever published a word. He had returned stateside after serving in the army in World War II, and he was living with his parents in St. Petersburg, Florida. For a time, Brewer’s parents supported him while he wrote and drank and used his novels-in-progress to woo a neighbor’s wife, whom he would soon marry. Brewer was writing literary novels with titles like House of the Potato and chasing his dream of being a Great Novelist. Then his mother threw him out of the house, and he had to earn a living.In striving to make money as a writer, Brewer focused on what he saw as the lowest common denominator of the human condition: sex. He once explained to an interviewer his view that “sex . . . is the big element we deal with in life every day—the push and pull of human nature.” Of course, not everyone agrees with Brewer’s assessment of the centrality of sex. If we accept the judgment of Brewer’s first literary agent or his editors at Gold Medal Books or the members of the United States Court of Appeals First Circuit, then Brewer may have mistaken his own nature for human nature at large. But if we accept the judgment of the book-buying public, Brewer knew human nature all too well.1951’s 13 French Street, the most popular novel that Brewer would ever write, sold more than a million copies, despite the fact (or because of the fact?) that its primary appeal was sexual. Brewer’s first literary agent, Joseph T. Shaw, thought that 13 French Street was composed entirely of “sex angles,” and he urged his client not to rely so much on themes of the flesh. In May 1952, soon after 13 French Street surpassed 600,000 copies sold, Shaw told Brewer to tone down the sex in the opening scene of his current novel-in-progress: “I hope you will manage, in the beginning, to build up some sympathetic feeling for the hero . . . Opening as it did, in the cabin with the other fellow and the promiscuous girls, one couldn’t think too highly of him.” Then, the following year, Gold Medal Books, publisher of 13 French Street, rejected Brewer’s manuscript Shadow on the Dust outright, because its plot depended “entirely on sex.”Brewer must have felt frustrated and confused. Financial necessity had forced him to abandon his dreams of high literary accomplishment, but he had nevertheless laid claim to a theme that he felt was central to the human condition. Sales figures showed, unambiguously, that his handling of this theme had enthralled the reading public, yet both his agent and his publisher wanted him to stop it. Brewer, however, never stopped it, and, ironically, Gold Medal Books never stopped trying to milk the success of 13 French Street. In 1960, when Brewer published his last Gold Medal novel, Backwoods Teaser, the publisher was still billing him as “Gil Brewer, author of 13 French Street.”Today, Brewer’s reputation rests on the novels that he published in the decade following 13 French Street. (Most readers agree that 13 French Street has not aged very well.) Even if novels such as The Brat, The Vengeful Virgin, Nude on Thin Ice, A Taste for Sin, and Memory of Passion are sexually tame by today’s standards, Brewer’s insights into the psychology of sexual enthrallment and obsession still resonate. Remarkably, however, Brewer’s most wide-ranging explorations of sexual themes are almost completely unknown, as they appear in his short stories, which have just been collected for the first time. Furthermore, some of Brewer’s best short stories have, until now, been hidden behind pseudonyms that no one identified with him.Brewer’s great stories of the 1950s—as well as many great stories by other writers—appeared in digest-sized magazines with names like Accused, Guilty, Pursuit, and Manhunt. These magazines did not aim for the same respectability as Gold Medal Books, and their writers had considerably more freedom as a result. As well, there is a natural shift in judgment when an editor is deciding whether to publish a short story as opposed to a novel: What might seem an unhealthy subject for detailed exploration over the course of 200 pages may be acceptable at one-twentieth that length. Or, to put it another way, whereas Manhunt was willing to publish a 4000-word Brewer story about a panty-snatcher, a Gold Medal novel with the same protagonist would have been unthinkable.Manhunt’s editorial policies would ultimately land the magazine in considerable trouble, as its publisher and owner, Michael St. John, was charged with sending through the U.S. mail “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent matter”—namely, the April 1957 issue of Manhunt. The court found that the stories in this issue of the magazine “do not have even the slightest redeeming social significance or importance. Nor do they have any claim whatever to literary merit. In general, their dominant theme is illicit, often meretricious, sexual intercourse combined with a sub-theme of violent crime, usually homicide.” In sum, the magazine is “crude, course, vulgar, and on the whole disgusting.” Perhaps this is why Manhunt was the most popular of the mystery digests, and why they published several of Brewer’s best stories.This is why you should read the stories that were published in Manhunt and its contemporaries: Not because more sex necessarily means better fiction but because more artistic freedom often does. As well, the short story form encouraged noir writers to experiment. Some of Brewer’s short stories do read like miniature Brewer novels, but in others he veers away from his usual formulas. The best of these are noir seen from angles not present in his novels: noir from the point of view of a black man, noir from the point of view of a child, noir with an O. Henry twist. Short stories make the world of noir (and the corpus of Gil Brewer) that much richer.