Crasses et Voluptés

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You want to know what the life of a working mystery writer is really like? Gil Brewer could tell you. He could tell you about the taste of success and fame that never quite becomes a meal; the shattered dreams and lost hopes, the loneliness, the rejections and failures and empty promises, the lies and deceit, the bitterness, the self-doubts, the dry spells and dried-up markets, the constant and painful grubbing for enough money to make ends meet. He could tell you about all of that, and much more. He would, too, if he were still alive. But he isn’t.

Gil Brewer drank himself to death on the second day of January, in the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-three, at the age of sixty.

. . . Last year [1981] I nearly croaked; not through drinking, but because I had an infected lung, emphysema, heart failure and pneumonia-all at the same time. It was a rough go at the hospital. Then nearly a year of sobriety and I figured I was ready for work, when things went to pot again. . . . I’m ashamed of all the evil damned things I’ve done when drinking. [But] I’m straight now, and must remain so, because one more drink and Gil Brewer goes down the slot.

Sure, it’s a cliche. Look at all the writers who have destroyed themselves with alcohol. Poe, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, O’Hara. And Hammett. And Chandler. And hundreds more. So does it really matter that a minor mystery writer named Gil Brewer also drank himself to death?

Damned right it does.

It matters because he was a gentle, sensitive, vulnerable man who felt too deeply and cared too much. It matters because he produced some of the most compelling noir softcover originals of the 1950s.

It matters because he understood and loved fine writing and hungered to create it himself, to just once write something of depth and beauty and meaning.

It matters because of the writer he might have been with a little luck, encouragement, and the proper guidance, for in him there was a small untapped core of greatness.

It matters because if it doesn’t, then nothing (fucking) does.




tag: necrophilia is fun