REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

JACK EHRLICH – Revenge. Dell #A168, paperback original, 1958. Cover artist: Robert McGinnis.

   A mention  in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Blog led me back to Revenge, and I thought I’d dig it off the shelf and have another look at it.

   I still remember buying this in 1970 at a used-paperback joint in Cleveland, back when a dime (or three-for-a quarter) would buy gaudy-covered tomes by Woolrich, Hammett, Jim Thompson or any number of then-forgotten authors whose works are now fashionable and high-priced. In fact, Bill compared Revenge to Jim Thompson’s work, and there are some similarities here for sure.

   Jack Ehrlich, though, ain’t no Jim Thompson. He ain’t even Dan J. Marlowe. Revenge is a workmanlike effort, fast when it needs to be fast and suitably tense in the suspenseful passages, but it’s the in-between stuff — the filler, motivation and set-up — that let me down here.

   Ehrlich’s protagonist is an outwardly normal guy who pushes himself from robbery to rape to murder, partly to settle old scores but mostly for the thrill of the thing. And he never rang true for me. Where Jim Thompson’s killers seem genuinely twisted, and Dan J. Marlowe’s are propelled by their own sick circumstances, Ehrlich’s sociopath seemed just too normal; the first-person narrative of Revenge doesn’t give us the compelling characterization a story like this really needs, and as a result it fell flat for me.

   Still, it’s a good enough book that I’ve hung onto it for almost forty years. And I’m glad I did.

— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #57, July 2008.