FORGOTTEN BOOK: BRAINQUAKE

Brainquake by Samuel Fuller (2014)

"There are rules, Paul.  Break one, you're dead. ..No girls.  No wife.  Not now, not ever.  No friends. No ambition.  No hobbies.  No alcohil.  No dope.  No gsambling.  No debts.  No talk when delivering the mail.  No borrowing from the bag.  No quitting.  No telling your experiences after you retire.  Never tell anyone you're a bagman."

Paul Page is a bagman for the mob.  The work suits him, perhaps because he was born different.  Paul has a rare brain disfunction, one so rare it does not even have a name.  At random times, he spaces out and enters a world of pink hallucination.  The only person who knows about this is the Boss -- the woman who runs the million dollar bagman operation for the New York.  She uses her position to protect Paul because she owes a great debt to Paul's late father.  If anyone else knew of Paul's condition, he would be dead.

Paul lives his quiet life blandly and without curiosity.  What is in those bags he delivers he picks up and delivers does not concern him.  He knows it's money, but it could one, two, ten thousand dollars or one, five, or fifteen million -- he doesn't know.  He doesn't care.  He doesn't look.  His one concern is avoiding pirates.  They could come out of anywhere and at any time, determined to get the bag from Paul.  In the past, Paul has had to use violence against the pirates, killing several.  This does not bother Paul; his concern is merely delivering the "mail," the bag, as he has been told to do.  Then Paul gors home to the three-room shack where he was traised., in a now abandoned part of the city.  and he waits until his next delivery.

Paul likes to spend time just sitting on a bench in the park.  There, a few weeks ago, he first noticed Ivory Face, an attractive young mother with a baby in a carriage.  Somehow, for reasons he cannot explain, he is drawn to this woman.  He watches her, the goes home each evening to write a poem about her.  Her knows where she lives and would drop a poem, along with a single rose, on her doorstep without her ever seeing him.

Which brings us to the first sentence in the book:

And

The baby carriage was rigged, and when the infant pulled on a stuffed toy hanging over its head, the gun went off, killing its father.  The father, a low level mobster, had recently reappeared on the scene, inserting himself back into the life of Ivory Face, who had fled him shortly after the baby had been born.  He had owed someone twenty thousand dollars.  And had been warned.

The worst was yet to come.  There was also a pressure bomb in the baby carriage, placed under the baby.  Should the child be picked up the bomb would explode.  There were tense moments as the police and the bomb squad worked to save the child, and Paul was watching all of it.

Ivory Eyes was in danger.  Whomever her husband had owed the twenty thousand to still wanted the money, and they would try to get it from her.  Paul could not allow that, so he inserted himself into her life to protect her.  And it just so happened that the bag he was carrying held fifteen million dollars -- more than enough to take them from danger, at least in theory.

Now Paul and Ivory Eyes are on the run from the mob, from those who killed her husband, from the police, and from a sadistic assassin who dressed up as a priest and whose preferred method of execution was cruxifiction...

Fuller has given us a fantasy world of violence and lawlessness, a wrold where the strings of eveil are pulled by a philanthropic madman with political ambitions.  A world where almost every dies, and dies horribly.  A fast-pace, hauntingly effective world with no one to root for.  And a world where Paul's "brainquakes" are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) was a noted film directer specializing in low-budget genre films with controversial themes, among them Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, The Big Red, Pickup on South Street, and The Steel Helmet.  He has been credited as a major influence on many directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch.  In addition, Fuller penned twelve novels, including Brainquake, a "lost" novel that had nevr ben published before in English, an oversight remedied by Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime -- something for which fans of Fuller and of crime fiction should be eternally grateful.