Memory of Passion

by Gil Brewer

Bill Sommers has got it all. At 39, he's got a beautiful wife, Louise, and a wonderful daughter, Lolly, and a successful career in commercial art. Oh, sure, maybe things aren't perfect between he and Louise, but that's life. And then one rainy night Karen calls. Karen, his lost love. Karen, his high school sweetheart. Karen, the one who got away. She insists they meet. Bill is too curious not to agree. But he's not prepared for the young lady who shows up, claiming to be Karen Jamais. She's got all of Karen's memories—even her looks, her moves, her delicious figure—and all of Karen's passion. But that was over 20 years ago! How can this be Karen, unchanged after all these years? It's like a crazy dream. And Bill is about to enter a hidden world of passion and violence on his way to find out if the dream has come true.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Florida writer Gil Brewer was the author of dozens of wonderfully sleazy sex/crime adventure novels of the 1950's and 60's, including Backwoods Teaser and Nude on Thin Ice; some of them starring private eye Lee Baron (Wild) or the brothers Sam and Tate Morgan (The Bitch) . Gil Brewer, who had not previously published any novels, began to write for Gold Medal Paperbacks in 1950-51. Brewer wrote some 30 novels between 1951 and the late 60s – very often involving an ordinary man who becomes involved with, and is often corrupted and destroyed by, an evil or designing woman. His style is simple and direct, with sharp dialogue, often achieving considerable intensity.

Brewer was one of the many writers who ghost wrote under the Ellery Queen byline as well. Brewer also was known as Eric Fitzgerald, Bailey Morgan, and Elaine Evans.

http://www.gilbrewer.com/

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over and over as I was reading this book I would break out into spontaneous gleeful and admiring laughter because Brewer was so twisted, so out of control, and yet so in control of this propulsive bit of tease and deny pulp fiction. Totally channeling Poe and Woolrich at their obsessive best, Brewer, with a blistering style of short sentences and short paragraphs takes the foreplay of tension to the limit. The light is red, the tachometer is at the line, the tires are smoking - won't this light ever turn green?! - and then Brewer releases the clutch (plot twist!) and we blast forward and then quickly skid to a stop and do it all over again, engine racing at an impossibly high idle. Over and over and back and forth between multiple obsessed points of view. Bill, who thinks Karen, his old girlfriend, has contacted him after 22 years. Karen/Jean, stalker, stalking Bill. Walter, serial killer, stalking Jean. Louise, Bill's wife, having an affair. From one to the next we go, but always, the narration is from the view point of extreme obsession. Don't expect depth in this psychological noir. The minds, driven by Brewer's breakneck prose pacing, are racing way too fast!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contrary to what you may have heard, Gil Brewer had his mojo working well beyond the 1950s. Memory of Passion tells of a husband wife who still have "active glands," though not for each other. Things get complicated when the flame of the husband's teenaged years reappears in his life--having not aged a day in more than 20 years. Things get more complicated still when we learn that this ageless flame is being stalked by a serial killer. Another excellent Brewer ripe for rediscovery.

First reading: 22 September 2011
Second reading: 28 August 2013

[Edwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and disturbing rollercoaster of a novel that just keeps ratcheting up the tension as the deliriously insane plot unwinds. Brewer’s machine gun fire of staccato short sentences helps fuel the break neck pacing. Full of “WTF?” and “Holy crap!” moments this one is an easy five stars. Highly recommended for this who like their noir on the wild side.

[WJEP · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Nostalgia was a slow disintegration, something like the ponderous loomings of white dangerously poisonous fogs, mushrooming after an atomic blast."

I approve of this message, but the story had too many nuts for my taste. Bill drowned himself in a swamp of nostalgia over a crazy kitten named Karen. Stalking them both was Hogan, a beatnik pervert maniac. Crazy, man, like dig this scene.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frantic, Bizarre — not one psychopath, but two…. Unusual pacing… one of his best, imo

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The ache was crazy”. Return Of The Living Ex. Always a pleasure to stop off at the saloon and enjoy one of Old Man Brewer’s crazy tales although here it must be said the rivets are starting to come loose on this thing. Bored house husband Bill Sommers gets an out of the blue phone call from his first love Karen Jamais saying long time no see and how about a little ooh-la-la? Being a man Sommers says “don’t call me again”, puts the phone down and the novel ends. Then Gil Brewer looks at the pile of bills in front of him and the novel restarts. Licking his lips at the prospect of Great Sex: Season 2 Sommers makes like the Road Runner to, ah, reacquaint himself with his lost love and, more vaguely, his lost self.

Hooking-up in a romantic little back street garage and spied on by a creepy stalker guy the long lost Karen proceeds to bamboozle Bill by appearing to have spent the years since he told her to get lost in cryogenic suspension (we have a slumbering fairy-tale princess on our hands) and, less believably, bears him no malice for ending their relationship in the first place. To his credit Brewer doesn’t make Sommers a complete putz and gives him – generously, in, um, this reader’s experience – a single backup neuron still weakly firing above the waistline which just about enables him to comprehend the situation is all sideways and almost certainly a scam (“It’s nuts”) but Sommers is an obvious sex addict as well as an alcoholic and Brewer at this stage of his career is noticeably more explicit than allusive. Back home Sommers’ wife Louise, we suspect, is going to be thrilled/destroy the solar system when she hears hubby has randomly hooked up with the Ghost of Christmas Past particularly since she has been paying the bills while he drinks his days away doodling for dimes. This is a familiar electric cable characters like Sommers shouldn’t be messing with but we buy this because thanks to Psychology and Pringles we are familiar with impulse control problems and Bill hasn’t yet had his oats (“years of defeat”). Crashing his car on Karen’s curves, Sommers quickly finds himself inside an American 1950s pulp crime novel in which fully half of the text goes by before significant developments which is a long time to spend in the company of the drunken self-pitying Sommers, the monologuing sicko Hogan or the cuckoo Karen. A development at the half way point makes the rest of the plot fairly obvious.

Karen is alcohol and “Memory Of Passion” is tacitly about self-sabotage, the sober conventional life being wrecked by a single unbidden whisper in the ear. There are multiple references to drowning ("Something inside him drowned"/"He'd drowned himself in a swamp of nostalgia"/"He wanted to erase, drown, obliterate") and, helpfully, Sommers starts the novel three martinis in which blurs his edges and stops him telling the voice at the end of the phone claiming to be his ex to sod off (Brewer/Sommers needing a drink for the plot to happen). The phone is a glass and if Sommers hadn’t picked up none of what follows would have happened but he did and his reality immediately switches to Hell Mode; skid-row encounters with low types, criminality, brushes with death, loss of confidence in memory and wifey going to DEFCON 1. Stalker Walter Hogan adds sicko luridness, acts as a plot engine and enables Brewer to write about the difficulties of abstinence, Hogan fighting to control himself as he spies on Karen from afar. What there is left of the Brewer cortex buries most of this as subtext and despite this being a lesser work he still manages to keep the pages turning because a) he’s Gil Brewer and b) he wouldn’t be able to sell this if he didn’t. It would probably have to settle for winning the Booker Prize. Indeed there was a time Brewer may well have aspired to winning that prize outright with the serious literature he dreamed of writing and the memory of that passion sits behind a lot of this material.

“Memory Of Passion” allows bruised romantics, randy school-boys and anyone who has had a sub-optimal encounter, digital or IRL, with the one that got away to live vicariously through the chump Sommers and murmur “see?” when he gets his arse kicked. It also allows Brewer to talk about his addiction without talking about his addiction and the novel, if one cares to unpack it – which is not a requirement – has a sense of baggage being processed. It is, however, a second tier piece of mass market flim-flam with a come-on cover enabling yet another hard drinking male writer, miserable because he’s economically obliged to not be Shakespeare, to make a few dollars poeticizing his inner angst while the long-suffering woman in his life tucks him up in bed at night. “Well, why the hell not?”

[Laura C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could not put this down! Right away, I had to know what the hell was going on.