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duparker's review against another edition
3.0
A fun romp through pulp fiction. The characters are downtrodden, the scenarios are tough and the writing captures it all and allows the story to play out. Fun book
dantastic's review
3.0
James and Cora Bevan go to Jamaica in an effort to repair their ailing marriage. Instead, their marriage undergoes more stress than ever when James accidentally kills a man and Cora finds solace in the arms of another. Can they put their marriage back together before Jamaica manages to destroy it forever?
This book sure is a downer. While it's well written, the whole thing is unsettling, much like Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle. James's alcoholic benders and Cora's temptation are well done. You feel for Cora but still aren't that enamored with her as a person, not until the end. Once James tries to pull together to save a man who's going to hang in his place, you really get behind him. The ambiguous ending was a very nice touch.
While not a cheerful book, I'd say The Wounded and the Slain is a well-written one, and a fairly powerful one for a book of its kind. While it looks like a crime book from the outside, at its core it's a study in psychological trauma and self-destructive behavior. Not what I normally look for in a Hard Case but still good.
This book sure is a downer. While it's well written, the whole thing is unsettling, much like Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle. James's alcoholic benders and Cora's temptation are well done. You feel for Cora but still aren't that enamored with her as a person, not until the end. Once James tries to pull together to save a man who's going to hang in his place, you really get behind him. The ambiguous ending was a very nice touch.
While not a cheerful book, I'd say The Wounded and the Slain is a well-written one, and a fairly powerful one for a book of its kind. While it looks like a crime book from the outside, at its core it's a study in psychological trauma and self-destructive behavior. Not what I normally look for in a Hard Case but still good.
writermattphillips's review
2.0
Goodis is one of my favorites, but this isn't his best––in my opinion.
davidwright's review
4.0
Every now and then I know it is time, time to go down there, down to that place where nothing matters anymore, and hope is just a lost dream of yesterday that you turn to when today gets to be just too much to bear, when the night sweats come back, and the dark secrets come welling up from below, down, down deep. Down to David Goodis country. Goodis is one of the most essential noir writers – his lyrical prose sings with the plangent dying fall of his obsessive damned souls as they chase their twisted Freudian tragic flaws to grim guttering ends. To enter one of the Goodis nightscapes is to step into a world thrillingly awash with regret, secret shame, and the pulsing, throbbing call of taboo urges. His doomed characters send up a gorgeous wail that is something like Aeschylus’s Prometheus tied to his rock, or the exquisite torture of Wagnerian music that yearns and yearns toward resolution but never seems to get there; the prose is both pain and its easement in one. Turgid, torrid Goodis skirts dangerously close to a parody of a stereotypical impression of noir, but in so doing he creates a special reality that is all his own. I didn’t even have to go looking for my fix this time; I opened my mailbox and there it was in my latest shipment from Hardcase crime, looking back at me tauntingly, the lurid cover of the torrid 1955 novel, The Wounded and the Slain. James Bevan is on vacation in Jamaica, where he hopes to pull out of his alcoholic tailspin and maybe rekindle a long lost physical intimacy with his frigid blonde wife Cora (in Goodis, they’re always blondes, and frequently frigid). We join him on page one, on his umpteenth gin and soda (he has yet to discover the joys of rum), idly contemplating various methods of suicide. But oh no – you don’t get out of this vale of tears so easily, Jimmy my boy. Its not so simple – not by half. There’s a whole tangled past to unravel, and further fatal tangles ahead. ‘nuff said – great pulp fiction, built for speed and total immersion.
jakewritesbooks's review
3.0
There are good ideas in this David Goodis noir tale: ideas about marriage, accountability, colonialism, loss, sense of place and justice. But they're buried underneath Goodis' inability to really develop either of these characters. Slim noir volumes have their place and Goodis is great at them but he gives both characters a heavy burden and then makes the reader wonder why we should care, only to layer on some back story at random spots in an attempt to make us care. Needless to say, the attempt fails. I wonder if Hard Case Crime was able to get their hands on this one because it's of lesser quality than the rest of Goodis' work. His books are so tough to find.
whatmeworry's review against another edition
5.0
This was just exceptional. An utterly gripping tale of despair and determination. Beautifully written and yet so grimy and dark it makes you itch.
rickklaw's review
2.0
There was a reason that this book wasn't reprinted for over fifty years. While Goodis is a writer of superior skills, this title does not approach the quality of other Goodis works such as Shoot the Piano Player, Dark Passage, or Cassidy's Girl.
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