The Bitch

by Gil Brewer

“What I can’t stand is knowing she’s out right now playing around.” The tall, heavy-set man stared at me, his eyes burning a hole in my bullet-proof vest. “Trail her every minute, Morgan. Every minute. Don’t let her out of your sight!” It was the easiest assignment in years. I’m Morgan - and I’m one of the guys she played with. The trouble came later - when I found out that her game was MURDER - and I was picked for the fall guy!

Genres: Noir

128 pages

First published January 1, 1958

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]

Gil Brewer is far and away one of the top noir-era writers, but sadly he is not as well-known or as well-read today as some of his contemporaries. At first glance, many of his books might seem to be dime-store garbage quickly scrawled and sent off to the publisher. However, despite the lurid titles and the tittilating covers, Brewer was a first-class writer and his writing was so skilled that he draws the reader into his ordinary joe on the run novels, often set in the swamps and small towns of Gulf Coast Florida.

“The Bitch” is a terrific example of fifties-era noir. It has everything in it: femme fatales, armed robbery, murder, gangsters, frame jobs, desperation, and madness. The story is about two brothers, both in love with the same woman. The brothers (Sam and Tate Morgan) run a security agency and, among other things, they are charged with protecting the payroll of a bottling company on payday. It is really Sam’s agency. Sam is the hardworking guy who always tries to do the right thing. Tate is the screw-up who is always getting in a jam. All Tate’s life, Sam has played the big brother and bailed him out and Tate sure resents it and resents Sam’s superior attitude towards him. Although both brothers have it in for Janet, somehow the screw-up Tate marries her and Sam resents that just as you’d think he would.

Meanwhile, Tate has met up with the bottling company boss’s wife (Thelma) and she is many years the boss’s junior and as cheap and bought as anyone could be. Thelma convinces Tate to join up in a scheme with some hoodlum friends of hers, a scheme to rob the payroll. With a quarter of a million dollars in cash, Thelma can walk away from her old sugar-daddy (Halquist) and Tate can go and make something of himself. See, Thelma isn’t planning on sticking around with Halquist and the way Tate met her is that Halquist hired him to follow her around and find out the dirt on her.

Of course, it all goes to hell in a handbasket and, when the robbery goes down, shots are fired, people are killed, and Tate grabs the money and he is off running. Luck being short for him, no one believes Tate when he says he didn’t kill anyone and somehow lost the money. His brother doesn’t believe him. The police don’t believe him. The hoodlums don’t believe him.

What makes this book an essential piece of noir-era reading is not so much the plot, but Brewer’s fantastic writing.

He sets the dark, somber mood from the beginning: “you might have called it a morning like all mornings. If you had, you would have been dead wrong – dead wrong, for me. There was no sunshine in my morning.” Ouch! Tate knows the robbery is supposed to go down that night and that he “was the guy who was wrong,” who would step on the other side of the Law, into a deal that would wreck his brother’s career. “Yet it was something I had to do,” he explains. “It was a lousy thing to live with, and when tomorrow morning rolled around it would be that much worse.” Why does he need this money? He explains: “Maybe it would help remedy all the sour and hellish dreams gone dead. Right or wrong, it no longer mattered.” Wow! Brewer has Tate swimming around in a deep, dark place, doesn’t he?

Tate complains that he never succeeded at anything and never “made it any damned way.” He was a failure in Janet’s eyes and couldn’t stand it. “My life,” he says, “was a thick volume of glorious errors, of hurt to other people, of angry mistakes.”

You also get the feeling that Tate isn’t such a bad guy. He wants to do good. He wants to succeed, but it all gets mucked up. Once the robbery starts going down, for Tate, “It was a little like being socked in the chest with a board.” “It was like a movie nightmare scene.”

And, this book is noir all the damn way down the hell hole. Thelma lies among the pillows “in a tired, wanton knot, half on her side, one knee in the air. “She wore some kind of a pink, smoky-looking getup with little white and red bows along the edges.” But, she is dangerous: “A small, distant look of brooding animalism came into her eyes and twisted at the corners of her mouth. He neat, tiny white chips of teeth showed between her lips, and there was something trance-like about her.” Tate knows “she was a beautiful woman. Only you knew it would be good for a time, and then she would be beautiful to someone else, too.” Right there, Brewer, in just a few words, tells the tale of Thelma.

Brewer’s characters are not happy-go-lucky types. These are tormented souls that are compelled to try this and that to make their lives right, but nothing is ever right or pure or safe. These characters are always on the run. But, no matter how fast they run, they can’t escape themselves or what they’ve left behind.

Having never read a Gil Brewer book that was anything less than excellent, I wholeheartedly recommend this one for an pulp-era readers. This is just such good stuff.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once this one gets into gear it is a typical Brewer nitro propelled plot of robbery, murder, chase and evasion. Starts a bit slow compared to most of Brewer’s other novels, but the slow setup actually pays huge dividends. Tate and Sam Morgan are brothers and partners in a private detective agency and as the novel starts we glean that it is not all brotherly love between them. The plot picks up quickly when we learn that Tate is planning a robbery with Thelma, “the bitch” of the title. There is the usual late 1950s misogyny at work here, but the book could just as easily have been titled “The Bastard” as our narrator Tate has no illusions about what he is. I thought the effort put into character development, although it slowed the pace at times, made this a much stronger and deeply felt book than some of Brewer's more breakneck noirs.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tate Morgan is a many-time loser who has long relied on his brother Sam to get him out of tight spots. In The Bitch, Tate faces his tightest spot of all after he betrays Sam's trust and helps to plot a robbery that goes horribly wrong. This novel resembles what I call Everyman noir, in which the main character is typically an ordinary, likable guy who, desperate for money, sets out to commit what seems a harmless crime (but then noir ensues). The Bitch is interesting novel of this type because Tate is an unusually unsympathetic protagonist. (As a title, The Bitch is just a gimmick to sell books--much more accurate would be to call it The Asshole.) Gil Brewer sets himself quite a challenge in trying to make readers care what happens to Tate Morgan, and he is, I think, at least partially successful.

[Still · Rating 4 out of 5]

It ended almost exactly as I thought it would however I enjoyed it.
I was carping earlier about how much I disliked the principle character & narrator but it's a nice read and it's a fast read.
You could do worse.
I'm giving it 4 stars out of 5 because ...it's Gil Brewer!

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

In looking around for some older, hard boiled crime fiction, I came across this book by Gil Brewer.

It is a short novel about two brothers that are investigators in a private detective agency. One brother is setting up a scam, while the other brother is portrayed as the better of the two brothers.

The book is so-so, the story, okay. My main criticism of novels like this is that for the story and novel to work, the lead protagonist, if one of questionable character, has to be likable, or either so nasty the story is compelling with his/her depravity.

This does not happen, or for me, it didn't seem that way.

Hopefully, other works by Brewer are better.

[Victor Whitman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddly titled, it is really about a hapless man who gets involved in a bungled robbery.