We’ve discussed a few Gil Brewer books without talking much about the man himself. Eventual author of thirty-three novels under his own name and a dozen more under pseudonyms, he started as a literary writer but after selling Satan Is a Woman to Gold Medal Books in 1950 decided that genre fiction was a faster and easier way to earn money. It was also after Satan Is a Woman that drinking began to take a heavy toll on him, to the point of hospitalizations, a near-fatal auto accident, and eventual death. 1961’s A Taste for Sin was written during his heavy consumption period, and it’s spotty, to say the least, a messily written book, but so crazy it’s impossible not to read in a state of wonder.
The story deals with Jim Phalen, a small time crook, an an unlucky one. He meets Felice Anderson, seventeen years old, married at fifteen, recklessly unfaithful from the day she took her vows, and so purely nuts that for sexual thrills she demands to be raped. Explorations of women’s alleged rape fantasies were common back then, and at first we thought A Taste for Sin was just another, but Phalen assaults her enthusiastically more than once, making clear that he’s had fantasies about this too. Thus, as a shortcut to getting to the essential core of his personality, it’s an interesting choice by Brewer. It’s clear that Phalen is a throughly bad guy, one who never had much of a chance in life. He won’t get much of a chance in this novel either, and doesn’t deserve one.
Felice’s husband works at a bank and she comes up with a plot to rob it for a million dollars. The only way to succeed is to commit murder. Phalen is horrified at first, but those bedroom games short-circuit his thinking and pretty soon he thinks he sees a way it might work. There are dozens of obstacles, including the police dogging his heels about a robbery he committed early in the story, but it’s Felice’s wild nature that threatens to become insurmountable. In trying to reflect the confusion in Phalen’s mind about her, the pressure he feels from all quarters, and the hasty logistics of the heist, Brewer’s narrative becomes like a rock skipping across a pond, hitting and bouncing onward, hitting again, bouncing onward. Phalen even flies to Lucerne, Switzerland, and Brewer expends only a few pages on the entire trip.
We don’t feel as if his writing is top notch through any of this, and in our view the narrative is especially loose during its latter third. The story is also rushed during that section—though we do understand that its acceleration may be intended to reflect the lead character’s barely maintained control. It just didn’t work properly. But we’ll give the story credit for its unflinching nature. Did Brewer build it around an underaged femme fatale so nuts as to be unbelievable because he was ambitious, or did she end up on the page due to a booze-fueled lapse in judgment? We’ll never know, but Felice, and whether you buy her characterization, is the key to whether you’ll like the book. She’s a rare creature in the annals of mid-century crime fiction.
