The Girl from Hateville

by Gil Brewer

Originally published as The Angry Dream.

Genres: Noir

160 pages

First published January 1, 1957

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

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brewer would write feverishly for days in heated passion and then fall into exhaustion. He tried to kill his pain with alcohol and eventually drank himself into oblivion. His characters were all tormented by demons from the past, trapped by situations, tricked by temptresses that they
could not resist.

The Angry Dream is a bit of a break from Brewer’s general work which had at its focus St. Petersburg or other Eastern cities and involved characters framed by young women who had the main characters in a hypnotic trance until they finally realized who they had been with and what their “angel” had done to them. The Angry Dream takes place in a small farming town in the country. Brewer is never explicit as to where the town is. Pine Springs is somewhere where the first snows come at the end of October. It could be Wyoming or Montana, somewhere out west.

The back cover blurb of the old paperback suggests that it is a story about three women trapped in a town with only one way out – to kill the narrator. This publisher’s blurb, however, simply does not give a hint as to what the story is about and, truth be told, is simply not
accurate. And, the first of the women listed in the blurb- Jeannie – is but a bit character.

Al Harper has been away from Pine Springs for eight long years. He left because he couldn’t stand his father anymore. His father was a miser who held the mortgages on half the town’s properties and never gave anyone any slack. Harper left and never came back, not even when he heard that his father had hung himself in the bank where he had worked, found by his employees hanging from the antlers mounted on the wall. Harper had, instead, moved from town to town, never sticking anywhere. In New York City, he had gotten a job as a driver for a man, never realizing that he was the getaway driver for a jewel thief. During the time he had been driving the man, Harper had
a relationship with the man’s daughter, Noraine, but after he was left to take the rap, he no longer trusted her and felt betrayed. Nevertheless, Noraine followed him from town to town, proclaiming her undying love for him.

But, a man can only run from his demons for so long and it is now time for Harper to return to the town where he grew up and face whatever is left there. Throughout the story, the reader feels that the sun never shines, that a cold wind is always blowing, and the trees are all bare, the earth desolate. Harper returns to a town where he is a stranger in a strange land and every man is turned against him.

The story is that his father did not just kill himself. When his father was found hanging in the bank, the vaults were all empty and every bit of savings in the town had vanished. Practically every family in the town was bankrupted. The town had rioted and torn the doors and windows
off the bank.

Years later, Harper returned, but the stain of what his father was blamed for is on him now. He is warned by everyone he meets to turn around and leave town. No one will talk to him or do business with him. His house is vandalized and the sheriff suggests that the best solution is for Harper to leave and take his troubles with him. There are suspicions that Harper might have got the stolen
money and broken the town. There is no one on his side and no one
with even a kind word for him or a smile.

Not even Lois, the girl he had promised to marry before he left and never came back. He never even wrote. Lois still lives in her father’s house, up on the hill. She races around town in an alcoholic daze in her white jaguar and has not forgiven Harper for leaving her.

Harper is determined not to be pushed out of town no matter how many threats and how many beatings he has to take. And, when the bodies start piling up and he is set up to take the fall, the walls really start closing in on him.

Brewer takes this outline and makes a terrific story out of it. It is a book that is hard to put down until you get to the end. As the reader, you feel the emptiness out there in Pine Springs and you feel how every hand is raised against Harper.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Girl from Hateville reads like the outline of a Gil Brewer novel--the outline of a bad Gil Brewer novel. The narrative is so thin that it often feels like there are paragraphs missing. In one paragraph, Al Harper, the novel's narrator, will be standing in his house, and in the next paragraph he will suddenly be in his car. Or, in the course of a conversation, a character will "repeat" something that no one has previously said. (It makes me wonder if some text got lost when the original hardback became this paperback--not that the answer is particularly worth finding out.) But the big sin is all those missing paragraphs that are needed to make the behavior of Al Harper even remotely believable. Or to make the novel's ending a little bit less laughable. The premise in a nutshell: Al Harper returns to his hometown. Everyone hates him there because his father, who was the town banker, robbed everyone blind. Al's father (apparently) committed suicide after (supposedly) emptying more than $200,000 from the vault. Al wants to know the truth about his father, and of course there are a couple of good-looking women involved. In sum, conventional noir . . . that crashes and burns.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Al Harper is back in Pine Springs. Eight years ago he left town to get away from his father, Cy, the local banker and predatory lender. Some while later he heard that Cy had hanged himself, but not before clearing the cash out of the bank's strongroom and hiding it somewhere it's never been found. Just about all the locals were economically devastated. Small wonder that, illogical though it might be, they're unanimous in making it plain to Al as soon as he arrives that they hate his guts and that, if he knows what's good for him, he should get out of town -- and fast.

Well, not quite unanimous. There's his old girlfriend, Lois Gunther, whose passion for him still clearly smolders, even though she mostly views the world through the bottom of a glass these days. To complicate matters, his more recent girlfriend Noraine Temple, daughter of the crook who nearly got Al sent to the Big House, has come to Pine Springs eager for a reconciliation, and she's in no mood to take no for an answer.

Can Al stay alive long enough to sort out both the mystery of what happened at the bank that fateful night and his own love life?

It's been a while since I've enjoyed a hardboiled pulp as much as I did this one. I started it with the intention of reading it for just ten or fifteen minutes before nodding off; in the event I finished it before, with shaky hand, putting the light out. It's a tremendous helterskelter ride from start to finish.

There are some signs of haste in the writing -- the occasional repeated phrase, etc. Clearly the original publisher didn't bother with such niceties as copyediting. Actually I don't mind too much if texts are a bit rough around the edges; it adds to their vitality, if anything. However, I read the Prologue (F&W) ebook edition, where there was the additional problem that all the line spaces between sections had been omitted, so that sometimes it was momentarily hard to work out what was going on. I assumed this was the fault of Messrs Prologue, but, according to David Rachels's comments below his review, the mass-market Zenith paperback reprint (retitled The Girl from Hateville) suffers the same problem. I don't know if the paperback also eschewed the indentation of quoted extracts, like a couple of letters people wrote, but that too mars the enjoyment of the ebook.

These are minor complaints. Overall I found this a great read, and a welcome counterblast to one or two somewhat prissy books I've read recently.

=====

This is an offering for Rich Westlake's Crime of the Century feature at his Past Offences blog; this month's chosen year is 1957.

[Steven · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one is such a mess it is almost incomprehensible how it got published in this fashion. Even if it is a one of Brewer's first-draft-written-in-three-days novels, the lack of editing is astounding. The basic plot line is that Al Harper returns to his home town after being away for eight years only to find that everyone hates him because his father, the town's banker, apparently cleaned out the bank vault with everyone's savings before committing suicide and leaving everyone to default on mortgages etc. That plot line has some truck as it puts Harper in harms way immediately after he hits town. From that point on, though, the writing is chaotic. Too many characters just start showing up for no reason and Harper starts doing one thing and then changes to doing something else in mid-course for reasons unexplained. The best writing is found in the scenes where Al is getting the crap beat out of him, and there are three or four of those scenes, so Brewer was on his game for those at least. The novel could have been OK with a decent edit, but it would have taken a complete rewrite to get it up to the level of Brewer's other novels.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, this is not a great novel, but I hesitate to lay the blame squarely at the feet of Gil Brewer since I suspect it's as much the result of a hatchet job by some hack editor at a publishing house that hadn't published Brewer before and never would again.

I would also add that bad Brewer is still be better than bad Harry Whittington, who was his contemporary and wrote for some of the same imprints.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gil Brewer was one of the greats of the pulp era. His characters were all tormented by demons from the past, trapped by situations, tricked by temptresses that they could not resist. The Angry Dream is a bit of a break from Brewer’s general work which had at its focus St. Petersburg or other Eastern cities and involved characters framed by young women who had the main characters in a hypnotic trance until they finally realized who they had been with and what their “angel” had done to them.

The Angry Dream (originally the Girl from Hateville) takes place in a small farming town in the country. Brewer is never explicit as to where the town is. Pine Springs is somewhere where the first snows come at the end of October. It could be Wyoming or Montana, somewhere out west. Throughout the story, the reader feels that the sun never shines, that a cold wind is always blowing, and the trees are all bare, the earth desolate. Harper returns to a town where he is a stranger in a strange land and every man is turned against him. The story is that his father did not just kill himself. When his father was found hanging in the bank, the vaults were all empty and every bit of savings in the town had vanished. Practically every family in the town was bankrupted. The town had rioted and torn the doors and windows off the bank. Years later, Harper returned, but the stain of what his father was blamed for is on him now. He is warned by everyone he meets to turn around and leave town. No one will talk to him or do business with him. His house is vandalized and the sheriff suggests that the best solution is for Harper to leave and take his troubles with him. There is no one on his side and no one with even a kind word for him or a smile. Not even from Lois, the girl he had promised to marry before he left and never came back. He never even wrote. Lois still lives in her father’s house, up on the hill. She races around town in an alcoholic daze in her white jaguar and has not forgiven Harper for leaving her. Harper is determined not to be pushed out of town no matter how many threats and how many beatings he has to take. And, when the bodies start piling up and he is set up to take the fall, the walls really start closing in on him. As the reader, you feel the emptiness out there in Pine Springs and you feel how every hand is raised against Harper.

[B.G. Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm quite aware of the fact that Gil Brewer was not consistently brilliant. This one just didn't stack up to most of his other book's I've read, but so far his lesser quality books, for me, are in the minority. In this book, wayward son Al Harper returns to his hometown after his father, the banker overlord of the town, is found hanging from a rope in his office (from 🦌 antlers!) The money in the safe is gone,the sum of which by today's standards would not be much of course, but it's enough to cause financial ruin to most of the townfolk, who are still seething with hate and primed for vengeance when Harper arrives back in town

So there's your setup, which was at least a pretty cool setup.Then, of course, the son refuses to leave in the face of serious threats and imminent danger to himself. If this sounds to you like it could've been a western, I was thinking the same. Not every crime fiction writer could write westerns though. Gil brewer was great, but he was no Harry Whittington. The characters in this were a bit flat, even "the doll with hungry eyes" that's mentioned on the cover wasn't quite memorable enough, and the dialog was very one sided and kind of bizarre in places. Brewer also could've handled the plot better, but for some reason he didn't. Of course this one book doesn't change my opinion of the man. He was obviously one of the great noir fiction writers of the 50's and 60's. What's strange is that I believe this was one of the very few books of his published in hardcover. I'm just glad the interest in Brewer was renewed at all, and if you don't like "The Red Scarf" or "Satan is a Woman" then there's no hope for you anyway.