My Flesh Is Sweet

by Day Keene

Ad Connors, pulp writer, has been in Mexico grinding out his masterpiece. Fresh off a rejection by the Saturday Evening Post, he witnesses an auto accident. One of the drivers is a beautiful American woman who can't speak Spanish. Connors, fluent, steps in. Then, bam, a lecherous Mexican general, a mysterious veiled women, a murdered Mexican lawyer, another murder buried 20 years in the past, and enough material for Connor to get a-cracking on his typewriter, and us to read enthusiastically.

Genres: Noir

Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Day Keene, whose real name was Gunnar Hjerstedt, was one of the leading paperback mystery writers of the 1950s. Along with writing over 50 novels, he also wrote for radio, television, movies, and pulp magazines. Often his stories were set in South Florida or swamp towns in Louisiana, and included a man wrongly accused and on the run, determined to clear his name.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

About a third of the way into this novel our detective writer protagonist Ad Connors is holed up in a Mexican hotel and needs money to get back across the border before the Mexican police arrest or kill him. He calls his agent in New York and asks him to wire $50, a loan against future sales. The agent agrees but tells Ad to crank out a couple of manuscripts. So Ad snags a typewriter from a pawn shop, buys some paper, and heads back to the hotel room to start writing. The first night he cranks out a 15,000 word potboiler - Kill me, Mañana - but has more difficulty with the second novelette, "It took him two nights, a day, and part of a third morning to get it down on paper." This second manuscript - A Corpse For the Bride, which he thinks less of, actually leads to a big sale. But that is getting ahead of the story. The significance of these two manuscripts Ad cranks out is that they essentially mirror the structure of this novel. The first half of My Flesh Is Sweet is pure potboiler. Ad witnesses a car crash and then rescues the driver, American school teacher Eleana, from the lecherous general whose car she crashed into, but in the process the general is shot and Ad thinks he's killed him. So Ad and Eleana are on the run trying to get back to Texas and it is fast paced and full of disguises and close calls. There is, however, the business of what she was doing in Mexico in the first place, and that is the more involved plot that takes up the second half of the novel. Good fun read with the added kick that you can see a writer at work who was quite aware of his genre's conventions and also how to play with them.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My Flesh Is Sweet" is dripping with pulpy goodness. It reminds me a bit of Richard Stark's "The Damsel as it takes the reader on a harrowing flight through Mexico, although this book was written decades earlier. The main character is a pulp writer who is in Mexico to write because rents are cheaper and stumbles across "a little brunette turista" who had an accident with a Mexican General, who offers to settle up the affair over drinks at her hotel room "Connors didn't blame him for looking. She was a little honey" dressed "in white slacks so sheer the rolled hem of her scanties showed, and a V-necked bolero to match that left her mid-riff bare." One thing leads to another and after gunshots and bodies falling, Connors and Eleana are in full flight across the entire country of Mexico with every member of law enforcement out to get them. The story is top notch and truly cements Keene as a pulp writer. The interactions between these two ring true and the heat flowing between them is red-hot.

[Chris Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

No such thing as a bad Day Keene story.