Ed Gorman
Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories
This one is for my friend and colleague
Mary Powers Smith.
Such A Good Writer
by Richard Laymon
If you choose to read this introduction before embarking on your journey into the actual stories in Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories, thanks. Let me assure you, I won’t give away any secrets about the stories. You’re safe with me. In that regard, anyway.
We’ll start off with a quote.
“Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without letting on.” That’s from Wake Up Little Susie, by Ed Gorman, the author of this collection.
Though Ed doesn’t preach or “let on” that he is contrasting how we are with how we should be, it’s there in every short story and novel he writes.
He seems to have, in the words of Robert Frost, “A lover’s quarrel with humanity.”
In story after story, we see Ed in the background shaking his head, muttering an occasional wisecrack, sometimes seething with rage, and maybe sometimes weeping over the way his characters, such real people, hurt each other.
I hear Ed’s low, sad, wry voice in every sentence he writes. He seems, so often, to be asking, “How can these miserable bastards behave this way to other people?”
He hates how they act, but he seems to love them all— even the miserable bastards.
Good or bad, in Ed’s eyes, they’re all just people. We’re all just people. He writes (in Wake Up Little Susie), “Good men don’t go around murdering people. Sometimes bad people are good people too. Or good people can do bad things. Life is like that sometimes.”
Life is like that sometimes.
More often than not.
The people in Ed’s stories — parents, kids, lovers, cops, criminals, victims or others — are just ordinary folks. Most of them are struggling along the best they can in a world of fading dreams and hopes.
And most of them — in the best traditions of noir fiction, literary fiction and life itself — are screwed.
They’re screwed by fate. They’re screwed by pettiness. They’re screwed by selfishness. They’re screwed by pride and greed and envy. They’re screwed by ignorance. They’re screwed by their own bad choices of action, and by the bad actions of others.
When we read Ed’s fiction, we feel the sadness of it all.
But Ed also reminds us regularly of how wonderful life really is. Even if most of us (or all of us) are screwed — man, how about a summer morning when you’re a kid and you’re just setting out on your bike? How about the way the wind smells just before a rainstorm? How about the first time you dared to take hold of a girlfriend’s (or boyfriend’s) hand? How about joking around with a buddy? How about the smile on your kid’s face?
A lover’s quarrel with humanity.
It’s a wonderful world, and what a shame that so much crap gets in the way of enjoying it. Bad enough that love so often goes unrequited, that friendships fade, that jobs get lost and careers fizzle out, that we so often lose those we love and that all of us have a rendezvous with death at some forgotten barricade — bad enough, so why do we make matters even worse with petty or vicious behavior against each other?
That’s what Ed seems to be asking (in the background) of all his stories, not only in Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories but in his many other short stories and novels. He is known and highly respected as an author of crime fiction, westerns, horror, political thrillers, science fiction and suspense novels of all sorts. Regardless of the “genre” he writes in, however, the same voice shows through. The sad, caring, sometimes angry, occasionally nostalgic, often funny voice of Ed Gorman.
Yeah, funny. This introduction might make it sound as if Ed’s quite a gloomy guy. He sometimes seems to be. Even while his fiction can break your heart, however, it can also break you into a belly laugh. Talking to him on the phone, I spend half my time laughing. And the humor turns up in his fiction. In his new mystery series (The Day the Music Died and Wake Up Little Susie so far), he has a running situation in which the main character is frequently ducking rubber bands shot at him by his boss — a very sophisticated, very tough female judge. And here’s a sample line from Wake Up Little Susie: “I’d rather be a petty bastard than a dipshit.” That one made me laugh out loud.
Though Ed often seems to be outraged or sad about what is happening to the folks in his stories (and in life), he also gets a bang out of good, fun, innocent, silly stuff — and he likes to take amusing pokes at petty bastards, dipshits, dummies and assholes.
Don’t get the impression, here, that Ed is a comedy writer. Fiction doesn’t get more grim than Ed’s sometimes does. The humor is there, however, brightening things up sometimes like the sun shining through a gap in the clouds.
There are plenty of clouds in Ed’s work. Dark, rainy clouds and storms... violence, passions running amok, obsessions ruling the night... but there’s sunlight, too. There’s the bright shining example of the man or woman doing the right thing.
To borrow from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Ed writes about “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
Ed Gorman’s Yoknapatawpha County is the untamed wilderness of the human heart.
His stories may remind you of early John D. MacDonald. Sometimes, they may feel a bit like Winesburg, Ohio as written in collaboration between Sherwood Anderson and Jim Thompson.
But they aren’t.
They’re Ed.
His fiction, including the stories in this book, will sometimes break your heart, sometimes make you laugh out loud, sometimes make you angry, frequently remind you of how wonderful and painful life used to be when you were a kid, before you knew too much... and how nice it can still be once in a while when the sun shines through the clouds.
If Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories is your first Ed Gorman book, you’ll find out what you’ve been missing. It’s not a bad place to start. He has other story collections, however, and a great many novels you don’t want to miss. I like them all, but a couple of my big favorites (in addition to those already mentioned in this introduction) are Cage of Night and The Poker Club. They’re a couple you don’t want to miss.
Like several other major writers of crime fiction — including Elmore Leonard and Brian Garfield — Ed has also written some fine westerns. Whether or not you’re a fan of “oaters,” you might want to give Ed’s a try. They’re set in the old west, but they have the same qualities as his contemporary fiction. They’re dark, sometimes amusing, often violent and shocking. Guess you could call them “cowboy noir.”
Well, if you’ve actually bothered to read this introduction, thanks for bothering. Now it’s time to get on with the stories. Have a good trip.
Richard Laymon
Los Angeles
All These Condemned
Sailing to Atlantis
“Love between the ugly is the most beautiful love of all.”
1
Matt Shea always smiled when he walked into the house he’d bought his mother. It was a perfectly fine little house, a standard development little house, central air, attached garage, core appliances including self-cleaning oven and ice-making machine in the fridge.