From the archive and reviewed by Barry Ergang...
THE EDUCATION OF A PULP WRITER & OTHER STORIES (2014)
by David Cranmer
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
Barry Ergang ©2015, 2025
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