Gil Brewer's The Vengeful Virgin

Doom. You recognize Doom easily. It's a feeling and a taste and it's black, and it's very heavy. It comes down over your head, and wraps tentacles around you, and sinks long dirty fingernails into your heart. It had a stink like burning garbage. Doom.

Gil Brewer ' The Vengeful Virgin

A terrible atmosphere of dread and inevitable disaster hangs over The Vengeful Virgin, a noir classic by the brilliant 1950s hardboiled author Gil Brewer and re-published by Hard Case Crime in 2007. The plot is routine enough. Jack, a working stiff in a nowhere gig running a penny ante TV repair shop, goes out on a routine job to install some TVs and an intercom system at the home of a sharp tongued and mean-spirited - but incredibly wealthy - invalid. The invalid is being cared for by his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, Shirley Angela.

Jack is all eyes for Shirley, a hot red head in a tight sweater and skirt that just barely conceal her shapely body. The TV and intercom are soon installed, but Jack has fallen in lust with Shirley and soon they are making volcanic sex just out of sight and earshot of her stepfather.

She began to groan and moan, writhing wildly. She was a tiger. She tore at my belt, then began tearing at her clothes, her hair swinging across her face. She yanked her sweater up to her neck and I got as crazy as she was. Those toreador pants of hers were as thin as silk and as tight as skin. They wouldn't come off.

"Rip 'em!"

I ripped...She dropped to the floor, dragging me with her. I knew I would never get enough of her. She was straight from hell.

Shirley has torn open the floodgates of Jack's thwarted dreams. Shirley, frustrated from having to spend so much of her life caring for an ailing but heartless old man, sees Jack as a way out of the prison that has become her life. They hatch a plot to kill the old man and take his wealth, only his death would be made to look like an accident.

This book has an inexplicable, almost hypnotic power about it. The plot is routine enough. The wages of sin is death and the road to hell imagery are driven home with sledgehammer subtlety. But what makes this book is the power of Brewer's descriptions - and the horrible power of his heroine Shirley Angela. She is almost a mythic force of nature - a deadly hybrid of Lady Macbeth with a barely legal Lolita. She is also the bearer of the wicked vagina dentata:She showed me her teeth, glowing and white and maybe even predatory, between her red lips.

The two evil-starred lovers follow through on their plot. The old man dies horribly of course, and of course the plot blows up in their faces. Jack goes on the run with Shirley and heads straight to hell - a damnation of his own making.

I'd like to say more about this book, yet saying too much would give a lot of the fun away. If you're curious about noir fiction and wondering where to start, this would be a perfect book to begin with.