Jazzman in Nudetown by Bob Tralins (Gaslight Books, 1964)

Well, vis a vis my previous post on the subject – I gave in. I went back for it. And furthermore, I’ve read it. Another legend lies dead at my feet, slain by nerdly curiosity and the willingness to spend money on weird junk.


Although I very much enjoyed the book, I’m gonna come right out and say that, sadly, I don’t think that Big Bob Tralins is really the smart, self-aware yukk-meister that various of his titles and cover copy might suggest. The bulk of the prose and plotting in “Jazzman..” is standard issue pulp doggerel, full of long stretches of the kind of autopilot writing that quickly turns to mush on the journey between eyes and brain. I've encountered far worse, but I've certainly read better.

Sadly, the approach to hip culture taken by the book is flat and off-message enough to convey the impression that Big Bob had never actually been without spitting distance of a real life representative of the counterculture. His arsenal of 1964 jazz reference points seems limited to the strictly trad likes of Louis Armstrong and Leadbelly, and in one chapter our beatnik narrator repeatedly refers to a bunch of aggressive rednecks lounging outside a small-town barbers shop as “hep cats” – a glaring error bespeaking a woeful failure to grok the hip vernacular.

BUT, what “Jazzman in Nudetown” may lack in authenticity, it more than makes up for in lively, if sporadic, imagination. The book’s saving grace, the thing that truly raises it to a kind of cracked, outsider poetry, is Tralins’ gloriously unhinged attempt at first person beat narration.

What Bob really seems to have taken on board here is the multitude of possibilities offered to the bored hack writer through the introduction of a free n’ easy beatnik writing style. After all, laying down some sub-Kerouac blather is easy AND fun, and Tralins seizes the opportunity with both hands here, happily throwing out whatever instinctive/alliterative crap boiled up from his noggin with gleeful abandon. Why have your hero drink whisky when he can ‘suck down on woozle juice’? Why have girls when you can have ‘wiggle witches’? And if, like Tralins, you start occasionally producing sentences that just plain make no sense whatsoever, well – cool it pops, this just ain’t your square ‘makes sense’ kinda read, you dig? Big Bob is busting out some first-thought best-thought, and it’s beautiful, man. No redrafting needed.

These outbursts of good-humoured beatitude seem to explode from the book every couple of pages like a transition from black & white into Technicolor, but sadly they become fewer and further between as the novel proceeds, with the good ol’ ‘workmanlike slog’ approach predominating from the halfway point onward. Nevertheless though, some of the best passages in ‘..Nudetown’ are timelessly demented, rendering it essentially reading for any connoisseur of beatsploitation.

So, for the record, “Jazzman in Nudetown” tells the tale of Jock Midnight, erstwhile leader of Jive Midnight and his Jive Cats, a somewhat unconventional clarinet, trombone and hambone percussion trio whose popularity has made Jock a hep-cat supreme back home in California, or so he tells us. But Jock is a long way from home as the book opens, on the lam from a Georgia correctional facility, having been framed by some racist cops who didn’t look kindly on his investigations into the disappearance of his trombone player and best buddy Fat Joe Bullets.

As he stumbles out of the woods, Jock is immediately picked up by one Lilly Mae Tinch, a gigantic, high maintenance nymphomaniac, and her accomplice Phoebe, who offer him a job, prompting the following exchange, which surely deserves a place in the history of spectacularly ill-advised chat-up lines;

--
“How’d you like a job?”
“For money?”
Both girls laughed at my expression. “What else?”
“What kind of job,” I said, locking my gaze with the big blonde’s. “You both look like a couple of sex jobs to me”.
I got away with it. They were swingers, just like I’d figured. Groovy enough to collar the jive without blinking their eyes into question marks.
--

This being a pulp smut novel, Jock’s bold approach to seduction pays swift dividends, and the extraordinary opening to the next chapter bears quoting in full;

--
“I kept feeling the empty giggle bottle under my pillow. That’s what finally woke me up. It wasn’t made to sleep on. It was dawn and the faint rays of the sun were streaming down upon the bed from between the drawn slats of the venetian blinds. I started to get up, but a heavy thigh over my hip held me fast. Lily Mae’s big arms were entwined around my chest from the back, I could feel her breath on the top of my head, and the delicious warmth of those huge breasts against my shoulders. Man! What a way to wake up!

Phoebe was on the other side of me, lying on her stomach, the pillow over her head. The creased and wrinkled sheet covered half of her lush body, exposing flesh from the center of her back in one sweep all the way down to her sleek, rounded hocks. Even in the fresh wash of morning sun she was grooby. Beautifully grooby. A ginch with a figure like a Greek cat in the Louvre with the delicate complexion of bare marble. Feeling no pain.

I never did get around to finding out if Lilly Mae was the fairy lady though. The lack of sleep, the booze, the weariness and fatigue that had been ragtiming after me finally cornered the market on my energy and swamped me. Zazzle! Did I pass out before – or after? No. I smiled at myself, remembering. Old Jock Midnight hadn’t let the girls down. Neither wiggle witch had been disappointed.

Untangling myself from the sleeping blonde boa, I eased myself down to the foot of the bed and got to my feet. I was wobbly, but I made it to the bath. Closing the door, after sloshing cold water on my face I greeted my reflection in the mirror. I looked good, real good. My complexion was as ruddy as a piece of mouldy swiss cheese that had been left in the pantry of an abandoned summer camp for girls. After the mice finished with it. Only difference was, I’d been gadzooked by two swinging cats!”
--

It is Lilly-Mae who leads Jock to ‘Nudetown’, which, disappointingly, is not some chaotic paradise of lecherous vice, but simply our freewheelin’ protagonist’s pet name for ‘Newton’, a depressingly fully-clothed redneck shithole in and around which the rest of our story takes place.

In one of the pleasantly eccentric plot twists that render this book worth reading, it turns out that Lilly Mae is a distant descendent of Blackbeard the pirate, and is seeking to retrieve his long-lost treasure from its hiding place in the Georgia swamplands. What follows is about one hundred pages-worth of crossings and double-crossings and characters being menaced with shotguns, sapped on the head and dumped in swamps, seemingly endless chase scenes and confrontations with redneck cops. Eventually, the whole thing turns into a kind of ham-fisted civil rights-era protest story, as Jock Midnight finds himself incarcerated in Nudetown jail on the basis of his being an obvious “negra-lover”, yelling beatnik-tinged obscenities from his cell window at the villainous pigs who are squaring up against the town’s peace-loving black community in the street outside.

I realise I’m making “Jazzman in Nudetown” sound pretty fantastic here, but really, it isn’t. If Bob Tralins had been able to keep up the pace of the extract quoted above, it would be a stone-cold classic, but as is I think I’d merely deem it a moderately grooby waste of a few hours.

POST-SCRIPT:

In one of Bob Tralins’ flights of beatnik fancy, he makes metaphorical reference to a “jinky board”, whatever that is. This immediately reminded me of the fictional pulp writer Jack Steinblatt featured in the Daniel Clowes comic “MCMLXVI” (which you can find in the excellent “Caricature” anthology);


Could Steinblatt be directly based on Tralins? Did Clowes actually plough his way through “Jazzman in Nudetown” at some point? Or were these mysterious “jinky boards” in fact a common element of smut-pulp vocabulary?

If you know the answers to these questions, well… probably best seek help. But let me know first.

The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen (John Lane editions, 1894)

“Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet - I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

“It is wonderful indeed,” he said. “We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?”

-----

Although unburdened for the most part by conventional literary merit, the fifty pages of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ somehow remain unique, and indeed shocking, reading, over a century after they were composed.

Now clearly I don’t ACTUALLY own an original edition of ‘The Great God Pan’ with Aubrey Beardsley cover illustration, but the great Welsh mystic writer has been on my mind a lot this week, so it seems a good opportunity to post some covers to his work that are more worth looking at than the volumes I do own.

Firstly, I was thinking on Machen because I’ve been reading S.T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale, which begins with an essay on his work. A nice drive through the rolling hills of Brecon and Herefordshire on the way to hunt books in Hay On Wye brought him to mind again, and upon arriving, I actually managed to grab a copy of a Joshi-edited Machen collection, incorporating both ‘The Great God Pan’ and his much sought after (by me, at least) weird novel ‘The Three Imposters’.

This collection (The Three Imposters and Other Stories) is published by the fiction wing of Call of Cthulhu role-playing game magnates Chaosium, a circumstance which initially seems bizarre given how little of Machen’s wider work has even the vaguest connection to Lovecraftian horror. One overnight re-read of ‘The Great God Pan’ later however, and the fact that Machen’s legacy is largely kept alive by Weird Tales freaks, despite his authorship of endless, rambling stories in which nobody does anything more exciting than go for a nice walk, suddenly makes perfect sense.


Aside from anything else, the vast influence the story must have held over H.P. Lovecraft as he created his Cthulhu Mythos tales is self-evident. Machen’s fragmentary structure, full of aimless digressions, portions of letters and detailed descriptions of drawings and architecture, his flat, utilitarian characters, his ‘nameless horrors’ that immediately drive men to madness and suicide, and above all, his endless dark hinting, hinting, hinting, bursting occasionally into orgiastic stretches of purple prose – all of these devices will be intimately familiar to Lovecraft fans, however baffling and poorly realised they must seem to outsiders.

Beyond that though, ‘The Great God Pan’ provides a perfect example of my frequently spouted notion that the best literary horror stories are always those that spring from unsound minds. For, moreso even than Poe or Lovecraft, Arthur Machen was, shall we say… a complicated man.

I first read ‘The Great God Pan’ in the Dover edition where it is printed alongside his later work ‘The Hill of Dreams’(1907), a thinly veiled autobiographical novel which, perhaps uniquely for a weird tales author, manages to be even more strange and upsetting than his horror stories, as he speaks in naive and almost self-delusionary terms of his deep loneliness and confusion with life, of his obsessive hatred of modernity, of his endless faith in finding transformative spiritual ecstasy within the landscape around him, and, most worryingly, of what modern readers can only interpret as his ‘punishment’ of his errant sex drive through frequent self-flagellation.


All of these themes can of course also be found bubbling away under the surface of Lovecraft’s writing, but the difference is that for Machen, the metaphysical ideas he made central to ‘The Great God Pan’ were actually very dear to him. Whereas Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors – though still incredible – were gradually formalised in his later stories into a kind of grand, archaic science fiction, Machen’s conception of the material world as merely a ‘veil’ that could be lifted from the eyes of man revealing the shining face of the ‘true’ universe were key to most of his life and work.

What is terrifying about ‘The Great God Pan’ then is the way that it sees Machen’s pure spiritualism perverted (by the author himself, or by the imperfect human beings in the story?) into terms of chaos, insanity, darkness, mad science, deformity and Luciferian evil, with the monstrous sexuality implied by the figure of Pan looming large, if never explicitly referenced.

In fact, it could be said that the enduring power of ‘The Great God Pan’ lies in the fact that VERY LITTLE is explicitly referenced. Beyond the shortcomings of the story’s muddled narrative, Machen’s understanding of the power of suggestion is necessarily masterful, managing to coerce readers into drawing the threads together themselves, providing just enough leathery yarn for us to construct ourselves one ugly lookin’ pentagram, while Machen stands outside, his conscience ‘clean’, reminding us that HE never used any dirty words.

Perhaps Machen was even TOO successful in achieving this effect, as he still saw his tale roundly condemned as decadent garbage upon publication, with a reviewer for the Westminster Gazette memorably dismissing ‘The Great God Pan’ as “an incoherent nightmare of sex”, despite the fact that Machen is at pains not to make so much as a single reference to sexual relations or human physicality in the whole book. (Machen's early work actually attracted so many negative or baffled reviews that years later he published a whole volume of them, under the title “Precious Balms”.)


Nonetheless though, there is a lot more at stake in ‘The Great God Pan’s avoidance of direct explanation than mere Victorian prudishness. The central idea underlying the story is so vast in metaphysical scale, whilst its earthly expression in Machen’s imagination has become so cruel and sickening, that when the author commences his ‘dark hinting at nameless things’ routine, he is genuinely tiptoeing around ideas that he either wouldn’t (for fear of ridicule of his deeply held beliefs), or couldn’t (for fear of censorship and public disgust), state explicitly.

This genuine fear of revealing the story’s ‘truths’ is a rare thing indeed in horror fiction, where writers are more usually assumed to glory in their dark revelations, and Machen’s simultaneous fascination with, and repulsion toward, his own subject matter, itself the result of his obsession with atavistic mysticism crashing headfirst into his deeply buried sexual repression, makes ‘The Great God Pan’ stand out, for all its technical faults, as one of the foremost Cosmic Horror stories of all time.

Savage Night by Jim Thompson (Corgi, 1988; originally published 1953)

Well I’m not posting this one for the cover, that’s for sure.

In fact, the more I look at this cover illustration, the uglier and stupider it gets – an unhappy reminder of the dark days of the ‘80s when publishers weren’t sure whether to wrap up classic crime books in old-fashioned pulp style, or go for the more upmarket ‘classic books’/noir heritage look that’s predominated in the past few decades, instead going for a thoroughly unsatisfying halfway house approach.

I seem to remember bland, cardboard cut-out characters like these inhabiting the covers of a lot of the books I used to get out of the library as a kid during the '80s. Who the hell are they anyway? They certainly don’t resemble anyone you’ll find in Thompson’s book. The two main female characters in “Savage Night” are the scheming, ex-nightclub singer wife of an alcoholic mob stool pigeon, and an emotionally-scarred maid-servant with a deformed leg. Did the illustrator even bother reading a plot synopsis? At least when cover artists used to make shit up back in the old days, they’d usually make up cool shit. What a drag.

Oh well, I guess all the pill-poppin’ maniacs and long-gone daddies in the illustration game had moved on to churning out eye-boggling VHS covers by the time this edition came out, so we can still enjoy looking at those.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying (if that’s the right word) a few Jim Thompson books recently. Quotes on the back tend to say things like “read Thompson and take a tour of hell” (The New Republic), and to be honest it’s hard to convey the sheer, unremitting bleakness of his work without resorting to similar hyperbole. Seriously, Nelson Algren and Raymond Chandler were happy-go-lucky funsters compared to this cat.

Or at least, however dark things get in Chandler, we see events through Philip Marlowe’s withering eye – a man of reason, ready to reluctantly clean up the mess, quietly asserting his moral authority in the process. We get no such reassurance from Thompson, who prefers to plunge us straight into the minds of the most lowly and doomed operators he can conjure, all struggling like rats in a trap.

Thompson’s characters are uniformly cruel, brutalised, self-centred, confused and misguided, capable of slitting each other’s throats on the flimsiest pretext. But they’re not villains, or freaks, or drop-outs or psychopaths… at least, not on the surface. They’re guys who might work next to you in dead end jobs, or that you might meet at the bus station, or see killing time at the library. Their world is devoid of the romanticism usually implied by gangster and noir shtick. They all had rough upbringings, they all work hard and do their best, and where does it get them? Fucked, that’s where.

The protagonists of probably Thompson’s best known book “The Grifters” are so screwed up, they never even manage to get a proper crime narrative rolling before they meet their inevitable demise. The characters, the situations, the language, are all those of a crime novel, but when you reach the end you realise you’ve been suckered into reading a study of brutish, existential despair rather than the heist/double-cross yarn you may have been expecting. And somehow we can’t help but want to read more.

I know I’m making it all sound pretty comedically grim, and it is, but the depth Thompson manages to invest in these characters in the space of a 120 page “American groin kick novel” (thanks to Vanity Fair for that one) makes his work absolutely devastating. Really one of the great mid 20th century writers, irrespective of genre, and I look forward to dipping into more of his tales whenever my approach to human nature starts to get a bit too rosy.

I didn’t mean to write quite that much here, because actually this post was supposed to be the first in an occasional thread where I’d post brief illuminating and/or amusing extracts from books I’ve read recently, and keep the commentary to a minimum. Oh well, maybe next time.

Anyway, I thought you all might this rare moment of brevity from “Savage Night”, wherein our "hero" Carl Bigelow lays unable to sleep next to an obnoxious, snoring dame, and thinks back to the time he once hitched a ride with an eccentric pulp novelist…

------

He was a writer, only he didn’t call himself that. He called himself a hockey peddler. ‘You notice that smell?’ he said, ‘I just got through dumping a load of crap in New York, and I ain’t had time to get fumigated.’ All I could smell was the whiz he’d been drinking. He went on talking, not at all grammatical like you might expect a writer to, and he was funny as hell.

He said he had a farm up in Vermont, and all he grew on it was the more interesting portions of the female anatomy. And he never laughed or cracked a smile, and the way he talked about it he almost made you believe it. ‘I fertilize them with wild goat manure’, he said. ‘The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night, when they stand on their heads, howling.’

I grinned, wondering why I didn’t give it to him. ‘I didn’t know goats howled,’ I said.
‘They do if they’re wild enough,’ he said.
‘Is that all you grow?’ I said. ‘You don’t have bodies on any of – of those things?’

‘Jesus Christ!’, he turned to me like I’d called him a dirty name. ‘Ain’t I got things tough enough as it is? Even butts and breasts are becoming a drag on the market. About all there’s any demand for anymore is you know what.’ He passed me the bottle, and had a drink himself, and he calmed down a little. ‘Oh, I used to grow other things,’ he said. ‘Bodies. Faces. Eyes. Expressions. Brains. I grew them in a three-dollar-a-week room down on Fourteenth street and I ate aspirin when I couldn’t raise the dough for a hamburger. And every now and then some lordly book publisher would come down and reap my crop and sell it at two fifty a copy, and lo and behold, if I praised him mightily and never suggested that he was a member of the Jukes family in disguise, he would spend three or four dollars on advertising and the sales of the book would swell to a total of nine hundred copies and he would give me ten percent of the proceeds… when he got around to it.’ He spat out the window and took another drink. ‘How about driving a while?’

I slid over him, over behind the wheel, and his hands slid over me. ‘Let’s see the shiv,’ he said.
‘The what?’
‘The pig sticker, the switchblade, the knife, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you understand English? You ain’t a publisher are you?’

------------

I suspect our agrarian friend might have felt more comfortable within the covers of this older edition of “Savage Night”;


More classic Thompson cover art can be found here. Most of the Lion covers are pretty cheesy, but the Signet editions of “The Getaway” and “Wild Town” are both incredible pieces of work, and make the above ‘80s cover look even more stupefyingly tepid in comparison.