Thuglit

Abstract

Thuglit Man Martin (bio) Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll Edited by Todd Robinson Introduced by Sarah Weinman Kensington http://www.kensingtonbooks.com 318 pages; paper, $14.00 Of all genres, for some reason it is noir that receives the most serious critical attention, and this may be because it embodies a genuine, if crude, metaphysic: the world is arbitrary and cruel; abstractions like love, justice, and fair play are delusions for the weak and sentimental or ploys for the ruthless to exploit the weak and sentimental; at bottom, all people are selfish, pitiless, and amoral, although they sometimes possess a limited capacity for a kind of animal shrewdness. Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll is the second compilation of stories from Thuglit. If you don't know, Thuglit is an online neo-noir journal edited by Todd Robinson; his wife, Allison Glasgow; and John B. Moore, whose online personas are Big Daddy Thug, Lady Detroit, and Johnny Kneecaps. The monikers say it all; Thuglit is brought to you with the in-your-face glee William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman used to bring to MAD magazine in the 1950s: "This is pulp, we know it, we revel in it." Nevertheless, Thuglit stories have received their share of accolades, an Edgar and several Derringer nominations, as well as inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories and Best Noir 2006. Noir has plenty of formulas—the crooked detective willing to sell out his client or anyone else to the highest payer, the lowlife criminal in thrall to the bigger fish, the femme fatale who seduces and betrays. The stories in Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll work through these tried and true formulas, tiredly and truly at times, but even so, there is a guilty pleasure in just getting down and wallowing in a good old-fashioned story with a nice little nasty ending where evil triumphs—in the world of noir, there is only evil, so evil always triumphs—a welcome antidote to "quiet" literary stories in which not much happens and that end with the protagonist staring at sandpipers along the seashore or dusk falling along a line of trees or whatever, like we're supposed to make something out of that. The stories in Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll fall roughly into two categories: those that are in the box and those that are out. Of the stories that are in the box, traditional noir with typical characters and settings, most are gratifying reads, and pleasingly unpleasant if perhaps overly familiar. We can too often anticipate the kidney punch before it lands—these are dark alleys we have been down before. Jason Starr's "Double Down" features a delightfully corrupt detective with a gambling problem and an unwise client; in "Customer Service," Matthew Baldwin's hit man fulfills his client's wishes to the letter. Among the best of the in-the-box category is Marcus Sakey's "The Days When You Were Anything Else," a story about a kidnapping which delivers the required blend of criminality and deceit along with the requisite twist ending, an ending in which the real twist is the unexpected tenderness of the narrator. Tenderness is always suspect in noir, and it is the rare author who earns the right to portray it. The out-of-the-box stories experiment with the form in ways that are not always entirely successful. Even at that, however, they are solid and satisfying in a way that a lot of literary fiction fails to be, and their authors can be congratulated on escaping the straitjacket of a sometimes too-confining genre. Lyman Feero's ambitious "The Switch," for example, tackles a disjointed narrative of a man enduring repeated botched attempts at execution, and Allan Guthrie in a piece reminiscent of "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" finds a noir setting in Viking Europe in "Haerman Hardaxe Was Here." Of the latter group of stories, however, far and away the best to me is Richard J. Martin Jr.'s remarkable "Eulogy for a Player." Not even a story proper, but a monologue that is as interesting for what it reveals about the speaker as what it only hints at. Best advice for a would...