Gil Brewer: Wild to Possess

He did want a drink.  He wanted one badly.  However, a good share of the hell that was on his back right now was there because he'd been drunk for so long--jumping at chances, blundering, unable to reason properly.  For damned sure, gin had done him foul play.

Back in November, I spent a day in Minneapolis, mostly to go to the art museum, though I did also go to Trader Joe's where I bought the dried apricots that would make me sick when I ate almost a pound of them on the long drive back to my mother-in-law's.  Oh, yeah, I also went to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore at its new post-riot location to look around.  I bought a little stack of books as souvenirs of my visit to this storied institution in the social history of genre literature, and among the pile were three Stark House reprints of Gil Brewer novels.  You'll perhaps recall that we read Brewer's Gold Medal novel Backwood Teaser in 2022.  (Also note that tarbandu has been reading Gold Medal books and blogging about them--check out what he has to say at the links!)   

Today, let's read Wild to Possess as it appears in a 2006 omnibus edition of Stark House Noir Classics; the volume also includes A Taste for Sin and supplementary biographical material from critically-acclaimed crime writer Bill Pronzini and Brewer's wife Verlaine.  Wild to Possess first was published in 1959 by Monarch Books.

Neither Lew nor Janice had any living family when they left Ohio and moved to Florida and got married.  Janice was beautiful and horny and the sex was fantastic!  But after some months she turned cold towards Lew, started cheating on him.  Both of them began drinking heavily, making dumb impulsive decisions.  Janice wanted a divorce--Lew refused.  One day he found her in bed with her boyfriend Deke on Deke's yacht--both of them were dead, shot through the head, apparently while making the beast with two backs!  Instead of calling the cops, Lew, drunk as usual, decided to toss the bodies overboard and propel the boat out to sea.  That was four months ago. Lew has moved to a different Florida town, set up a little sign-making business, and is dating another gorgeous chick who loves the old in-out, Rita.  Every day he is haunted by the memory of Janice, every day he hits the sauce in an effort to forget, though the only time he really can forget is while he is banging Rita.  Rita is putting her promiscuous slut days behind her--she is in love with Lew and has foresworn other men.  Taking the path of least resistance, Lew has been saying he loves Rita, but it's a lie--to Lew, Rita is just "a good lay."

As the story begins (we learn all the above in flashbacks and exposition interspersed throughout the first 30 pages or so of Wild to Possess) Lew, working late at night hammering into the dirt along the highway signs he has made, stumbles upon a car parked out of sight of the road.  Inside are a man and a woman--they have sex while Lew listens (this guy Lew is always tripping over horny chicks) and discuss their plot to commit murder!  Upstanding citizens like you or I would inform the cops of this discovery tout suite, but Lew decides to play solo detective and try to figure out who these two monsters are so he can blackmail them!

The car in which the killers were participating in a little horizontal recreation is quite recognizable, and Lew soon figures out their identities: Isobel, owner of an antique shop, and her boyfriend Ralph, who runs a shoe store.  Lew approaches Isobel at the antique store and gets himself hired making signs for an ad campaign for the store.  Lew again hears Ralph and Isobel having sex, this time when he is hiding in Isobel's bedroom closet, he having broken into her home as part of his investigation.  He also hears them planning the murder of Ralph's wife Florence--they will claim Florence has been kidnapped and extract a quarter million dollars from Florence's mother for ransom.  The next step in Lew's project is to spy on Ralph's house, where he sees Florence naked--Florence is the fourth gorgeous babe in this book, and, in fact, she looks like Janice!  Lew begins to hope Florence doesn't get killed.  

As if Lew doesn't have enough on his plate already, Deke's brother Herbert shows up--while Lew investigates and starts putting pressure on Isobel and Ralph, this guy Herbert is investigating Lew and putting pressure on him!  Herbert is confident Lew has something to do with his philandering brother's disappearance and the way Deke's yacht washed up in the Bahamas with nobody aboard.  And of course there's Rita, distracting Lew from his complicated operations with her cloying love, her desperate lust--she is a real freak in bed, but when he is having sex with her Lew is often thinking of Janice or, now, of Isobel.  

     

The night Ralph ties up his wife and carries her to Isobel's car, Lew is watching from the shadows, and, when Ralph drives Florence to a remote cabin like 50 miles away, Lew is tailing him.  What is Lew going to do?  Rescue Florence?  Kidnap Florence himself?  Kill her?  Drunk as usual, suffering pangs of conscience and stricken with lust for Florence's perfect body, Lew isn't quite sure himself what he is going to do with Florence when he busts into the cabin after Ralph has departed.  Does Lew have the nerve, is he cold enough, is he greedy enough, to do whatever it takes to get his own sweaty hands on the quarter mil that Florence's mother is, presumably, going to fork over* when Ralph, impersonating kidnappers, demands it?      

*You are going to have to take my word for it that I had "fork over" in the draft of this blogpost before I read it in the spoiler-rich back cover text of the 1959 Monarch edition of Wild to Possess.

In the final 40 or so of Wild to Possess's 120 pages, Lew, half out of his mind with booze and fear, has to match wits and fists with Florence, Ralph, Herbert, and Isobel in his insane quest for the $250,000, and each of them is approximately as clever and as desperate as he is.  People get shot, there are gruesome hand-to-hand fights, and who lives and who dies seems quite unconnected to moral virtue, physical prowess or intellectual ability--Brewer depicts a world in chaos in which outcomes seem to depend on luck.  In a brief moment of sobriety Lew realizes he is going too far, has to cut out all this nonsense with committing crimes and chasing easy money, but he is already in too deep and things only get more dangerous and insane.  Lew manages to survive because of luck and because of the love of Rita, who endures one dreadful experience after another because of Lew.

The ending of Wild to Possess is a little disappointing, as Lew neither gets off scot-free with his insane schemes, nor does he suffer what I would consider a just punishment--as with the misbehaving protagonist of Backwoods Teaser, I feel like Lew gets off a little too lightly after his rank misdeeds; sure, he is going to do some jail time, but Rita is going to wait for him.  You might argue Wild to Possess is a redemption story in which Lew changes for the better after seeing the error of his ways, but Brewer fails to portray Lew as making any kind of sacrifice or doing any sort of good deed that would earn forgiveness or balance the scales.     

Even if I might have preferred seeing Lew get killed or make it to Cuba with the cash in one sweaty mitt and the evil Isobel or the wronged Florence in the other, and it is never really clear why Lew wants that money so badly (he doesn't seem to need money to bag hot girls), I enjoyed Wild to Possess.  The novel is fast paced, with short sentences, short paragraphs, and short chapters full of action and tension.  The novel is tense, suspenseful--Lew is constantly sweating, constantly drinking, and again and again we hear about how his heart is pounding, his mind reeling.  The way I am writing about it may make Brewer's novel seem repetitive, and when I was orally describing the plot to podcaster Munchie I kept laughing because it all seemed so ridiculous, but when I was actually reading the book I didn't find it silly or monotonous at all, but legitimately absorbing.  Thumbs up for Wild to Possess.

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We'll be reading more Gil Brewer, but first it is back to short stories by science fiction Grand Masters.  Stay tuned!