Thu 29 Jul 2021
EDWARD ADLER – Living It Up. Ace S-114, paperback original, 1955. Cover art by Verne Tossey.
Buried pulp treasure.
Living It Up opens in David Goodis territory, with Joe Rodick in a spot labor hall, waiting with a bunch of winos and Bowery bums looking for work. He gets hired on at the Haven, a summer resort in the Catskills owned by Abe Sole, a hard-ass businessman with a lovely wife. And we can feel trouble coming just pages away.
But in fact, Adler lets things stew for a few chapters while he limns a world of toil and trouble, populated by toilers transient and temporary, with their eyes on the monthly paycheck and the binge that awaits when they get it. He paints a word picture of manual labor — scrubbing, painting, roofing, digging, repairing and construction — so vivid I felt my back ache. And then when he’s evoked his sweaty milieu, he rings in Sex, as the boss’ wife Hanna makes a play for Joe.
This would put us in James M Cain territory in any other novel, but Adler has other aims, and Living It Up becomes a steamy thing, with sweaty sex, sweaty work, and a bit of depth in the characters. Turns out Joe isn’t a habitual bum, just a guy who fell apart when he found his wife cheating on him. And Hanna has some very good reasons for taking up serial infidelity.
Add to that some colorful low-lifes, an aspiring waitress, slumming college boys, violent drunks and chaotic fights, and the result is an Ace book that could stand beside the best Gold Medal Originals of its time.
I wasn’t able to find out much about the author. There was an Edward Adler who worked in Television, but that may not be the same one. Whatever the case, I’ll be looking for more by this guy.
July 29th, 2021 at 7:30 pm
I don’t know if the TV writer Edward Adler is the same Edward Adler as the fellow who wrote this book, but the gent who wrote for TV also wrote, well here’s a brief snippet from Wikipedia:
“During that time, he produced a novel that was published in early 1962. Notes From a Dark Street was a Joycean compendium of Lower East Side eccentrics, and it was mentioned in the New York Times, favorably or neutrally, no less than six times during the first half of 1962. One review compared the book to Hieronymous Bosch; another declared it “a carnival of the senses†and proclaimed Adler “the literary find of the year.â€
By the way, this Ace book, along with author is *not* in Hubin’s CRIME FICTION IV. Is there enough criminous content to say that it/he should be?
July 29th, 2021 at 7:42 pm
I moved fast on this one and just nabbed a copy described as in good condition for a very reasonable price. I remember having seen the hardcover edition of Notes from a Dark Street, and will pick that up too. So reviews and mentions make a difference!
July 29th, 2021 at 8:33 pm
There is a small but fairly well represented sub culture in the paperback original market of books like this that may briefly brush the mystery genre in style and subject, but are mostly about middle and working class people wallowing in fairly steamy sex. It’s actually a reflection on mainstream writers who were exploring this same country and probably descended from John O’Hara out of Cain.
No few hardcover bestsellers of the era come directly out of this market.
The particular setting of this one, the Catskills, is a sub genre in itself among New York writers of this era, some comic and some steamy and some a bit of both.
JDM even penned a few in this sub genre that only tangentally touch on crime if at all (CANCEL ALL OUT VOWS is the suburban version), and as noted above quite a few of these are published by GM. Eventually a lot of Beacon and Midwood titles will fall into this category with a lot more sex and a lot less sweaty work.
July 29th, 2021 at 10:07 pm
The author‘s information in Notes from a Dark Street, published in 1961, reads: “Edward Adler whose many jobs reflect a traditional pattern among American writers, has been at various times, a country-man, a chauffeur, a technical book editor, and a fur worker; he has put in stents too as a technical writer, grocer, draughtsman and Cab driver. A First lieutenant in the air force during World War II, he served for three years in Europe with the troop carrier command. Born in 1920 in New York City he is married to the former Elaine Lipton and is the father of a three-year-old son. Mr Adler is presently at work on his second novel.“
July 29th, 2021 at 10:25 pm
Good work Moe.
That pretty well disqualifies the author of NOTES as the of LIVING IT UP.
July 30th, 2021 at 3:44 am
Dan,
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the author of this book and that of Notes are the same person.
From an interview with the author of Notes in 1964:
“Believe it or not, I’d never even read a book until one day in Holland during World War II I happened to pick up one of those overseas paperbacks the Army used to distribute for free. It was Joseph Conrad’s ‘Victory,’ and it absolutely threw me. It came as a complete revelation to me that such an intense vision could be communicated with so much passion from one man’s mind to another man’s mind, and I thought that the next-best thing to living must surely be writing, if you can write that well.â€
Thus began Eddie Adler’s self-education.
“I was a late starter, both at reading and writing, so I read everything I could lay my hands on, and I kept plugging away at writing,†he said. “Nelson Algren’s agent got interested in me, but she tried for years and couldn’t sell my stuff. I never thought any of those earlier things deserved to be published.â€
Nelson Algren published at least a couple of titles with Ace. Adler (of Notes fame) also wrote TV scripts. Notes met with critical approval and Adler may have been reluctant to associate his name with the earlier novel.