Reader beware: This ain’t your daddy’s crime. Start with strippers, blackjacks, combat boots and blood. Lots and lots of blood. Add in some double-crossing, a jigger of comeuppance and three fingers of revenge. Shake a couple times and drink it straight in a smoky room surrounded by cheats and cutthroats and cutthroat cheats. Welcome to Pulp Press. Blasting their way through the UK, the 100-page novellas from Pulp Press are lean and damn mean jewels. Not the kind that sparkle and garner Oh mys at reservation-only restaurants where waiters present bottle waters. These are the kind you stumble across in the gutter, the ones that slice you when you try to clean them.
Take My Bloody Alibi for example, penned by Dominic Milne. Our two lovely ladies, Cass and Marcella, are fresh out of Holloway prison and looking for revenge on the scum who put them in there. They concoct a personality—Sylvana—and take turns dressing up as her, then go about seducing their way into position to wreak said revenge. Sylvana winks her way into the crooked heart of PC Jack Thorne, the man who shares a dark past with Cass, and Sylvana stomps her way up the platform and slides down the pole at The Alley Cat Club. Our two ladies have every angle of their twisted path to justice covered. Except, of course, for the ones that they don’t.
It’s never that easy, is it?
The inevitable kinks sink their claws into our ladies and force them to use all their fishnetted wits to scratch, hack, punch and shoot their way to freedom. Did I mention that there’s a lot of blood? Just remember Cock Boomerang while reading this novella. Oh yeah. It’s that awesome. For me, it was even more fun to read because I studied at a university just a few blocks from Soho, where most of this novella takes place. I could remember the smell of the Fitzroy tavern while reading one Sylvana seduce PC Thorne, could feel the slippery grime that covered Berwick Street as the other Sylvana strutted what the good Lord gave her. Milne hit the mark perfectly when creating atmosphere, and, man, did it make me nostalgic.
On the flipside (sort of) we have Eloise Murphy, the combat-boot-wearing, Agnostic Front-blasting heroine of Danny Hogan’s Killer Tease. Eloise isn’t posing as a stripper to seek revenge (and she would break your face if you referred to it as stripping.) Rather, burlesque is her life, yet the baddies find her anyway. Named after the girl from The Damned song, Eloise is the old guard of burlesque. She appreciates custom made corsets, understands that the pleasure is in revealing and not just showing. She’s the type to name her cat Sinatra and find comfort in eight-inch stilettos. But, she is also the type of person we like to see get pushed down. She’s quick to strike out with a vulgar comeback or a set of knuckles at the slightest indiscretion. Granted, the indiscretions laid on her generally involve some kind of sedative which results in memory (and undergarment) loss. But still: you want to tell her to just chill out. So when, within the first few pages, Eloise gets booted from her burlesque gig and replaced by girls younger, richer and with more…moral flexibility, you could say… you can’t help but feel a bit I told you so. Now down on her luck, she seeks solace in a cold G&T and her cat.
Enter the aptly-named Napolean Hammerstein, who makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Suffice it to say, things get bad. Real bad. Pulp bad. And this middle section is when Hogan’s character really flourishes. Eloise has already presented herself in a certain light, but despite her brash and abrasive demeanor, the few quiet moments we see take the genre stereotypes and flip them on their head. When previously we were rooting for her fall, we’re now screaming for her to stand up and fight against her oppressors. Oh, and she does: ‘She was going to bring it to them, old school.’ And for her, old school involves a hatchet. Did I mention there’s a lot of blood? Probably, but I think I forgot about the bits of skull that she wipes from her boots onto an assailant’s doormat. In true pulp tradition, Hogan unleashes fury, ‘opening face like a bag of crisps,’ and includes one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve read in a long while involving Sinatra the cat. I still cringe when I see my own cats lying in a certain position. As in My Bloody Alibi, some perverted sense of justice is finally achieved, and it comes with a sidecar of inventive, excessive violence.
On a side note, Pulp Press has a very noble philosophy behind it. They understand that reality TV and the internet are, in many ways, changing the way we read and think. They acknowledge that people today have much shorter attention spans than they used to. But instead of railing against that like so many other ‘Literature’ columns, they use it to their advantage. They look for stories of a certain (shorter) length in order to entice people who normally don’t read to pick up a book. The awesome covers don’t hurt their case, either. Staying true to the roots of pulp and crime writing, when the dime novels and penny dreadfuls gave a more accurate representation of the collective experience than the ‘accepted’ novels, they are an outside entity who is generally overlooked and disregarded and quietly lighting fires that, hopefully, will consume the elitism that plagues a lot of literature. These writers are paying homage to those who ground out stories on Underwoods and simultaneously reinventing these tropes, showing that stories, like evil and violence and love, have no boundaries.
So: ‘Turn off your TV and discover fiction like it used to be…’
The Books
The Press
Review by Nik Korpon
