THE EDUCATION OF A PULP WRITER &
OTHER STORIES (2014)
by David Cranmer
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
Besides editing and
publishing Beat
to a Pulp, David Cranmer is a
skilled and versatile writer. This e-book presents five stories to give readers
a very brief but entertaining sampler of his work. The stories are generally
dark in tone and content, and readers who dislike explicit sexuality, street
language, and raw violence should avoid them. Those who like sharp-edged noir, on the other hand, will probably
find them quite appealing.
The nameless young college
student who prostitutes herself via the Internet to pay for her education can’t
have anticipated a client who looks like an enormously obese slab of “Blubber” the way this one does. She can’t
possibly anticipate the outcome of their meeting, either.
A case of “Clouds in a Bunker,” Ian Spaulding
suffers from dementia but is still reasonably functional. His wife is not.
Spaulding has both of them locked up inside an underground fallout shelter behind
their home, and plans to take both of their lives once he’s had a chance to
talk to their daughter Anna, who’s outside with the police. Both the police
chief and the hostage negotiator wonder why Spaulding keeps interrupting their
phone conversations to deal with a whistling tea kettle in this poignant—and
potent— story.
When his sister tells Lars
that his ex-wife Danielle is eight months pregnant, “the wiring in Lars’s brain
short-circuited.” Still bitter about Danielle’s decision to abort a child he
conceived with her and their subsequent divorce, a “Cold Gray Dawn” descends upon him as he determines to eventually
have his revenge in a particularly vicious manner. The results will likely
repel some readers and relieve others—or possibly do both.
Wanting to please editors
with the kind of descriptive prose exemplified by Raymond Chandler while at the
same time delivering the kind of forensic realism modern audiences seem to
demand “(T)hanks to crime and medical television,” Kirby MacGregor, for the
sake of “The Education of a Pulp
Writer,” and contending with nosy neighbor Marta Knolls, may or may not be
able to deliver, despite his studies of different types of death.
Edward Morash, who prefers to
be known as “Kid Eddie,” is wanted for a number of
particularly vicious crimes. He’s in jail in Vermillion, and Marshal Cash
Laramie is assigned the task of bringing him back to Cheyenne to stand trial.
When he meets the young man who looks and comports himself as anything but
murderous, Laramie begins to wonder if he’s indeed as innocent as he claims to
be. An incident on the trip back to Cheyenne proves revelatory. Readers old
enough to recognize the references, as well as those who watch the Encore
western channel on cable TV as of the time of this writing, will appreciate
references to a bounty hunter named Randall who “had a sawed-off Winchester”
and to a Reverend McQueen.* Western noir, the story is one in a series Cranmer has written under the
pseudonym Edward A. Grainger.
As mentioned at the outset,
this e-book is a fast-paced, vividly-written “teaser” that should tempt fans of
this kind of fiction to seek out other titles from David Cranmer/Edward A.
Grainger, and is emphatically recommended.
*****
*“Wanted: Dead or Alive” starring Steve McQueen as Josh
Randall
© 2015
Barry Ergang
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