Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

Ed Gorman Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

This one is for my friend and colleague

Mary Powers Smith.

Such A Good Writer by Richard Laymon

If you choose to read this introduction before embarking on your journey into the actual stories in Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories, thanks. Let me assure you, I won’t give away any secrets about the stories. You’re safe with me. In that regard, anyway.

We’ll start off with a quote.

“Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without letting on.” That’s from Wake Up Little Susie, by Ed Gorman, the author of this collection.

Though Ed doesn’t preach or “let on” that he is contrasting how we are with how we should be, it’s there in every short story and novel he writes.

He seems to have, in the words of Robert Frost, “A lover’s quarrel with humanity.”

In story after story, we see Ed in the background shaking his head, muttering an occasional wisecrack, sometimes seething with rage, and maybe sometimes weeping over the way his characters, such real people, hurt each other.

I hear Ed’s low, sad, wry voice in every sentence he writes. He seems, so often, to be asking, “How can these miserable bastards behave this way to other people?”

He hates how they act, but he seems to love them all— even the miserable bastards.

Good or bad, in Ed’s eyes, they’re all just people. We’re all just people. He writes (in Wake Up Little Susie), “Good men don’t go around murdering people. Sometimes bad people are good people too. Or good people can do bad things. Life is like that sometimes.”

Life is like that sometimes.

More often than not.

The people in Ed’s stories — parents, kids, lovers, cops, criminals, victims or others — are just ordinary folks. Most of them are struggling along the best they can in a world of fading dreams and hopes.

And most of them — in the best traditions of noir fiction, literary fiction and life itself — are screwed.

They’re screwed by fate. They’re screwed by pettiness. They’re screwed by selfishness. They’re screwed by pride and greed and envy. They’re screwed by ignorance. They’re screwed by their own bad choices of action, and by the bad actions of others.

When we read Ed’s fiction, we feel the sadness of it all.

But Ed also reminds us regularly of how wonderful life really is. Even if most of us (or all of us) are screwed — man, how about a summer morning when you’re a kid and you’re just setting out on your bike? How about the way the wind smells just before a rainstorm? How about the first time you dared to take hold of a girlfriend’s (or boyfriend’s) hand? How about joking around with a buddy? How about the smile on your kid’s face?

A lover’s quarrel with humanity.

It’s a wonderful world, and what a shame that so much crap gets in the way of enjoying it. Bad enough that love so often goes unrequited, that friendships fade, that jobs get lost and careers fizzle out, that we so often lose those we love and that all of us have a rendezvous with death at some forgotten barricade — bad enough, so why do we make matters even worse with petty or vicious behavior against each other?

That’s what Ed seems to be asking (in the background) of all his stories, not only in Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories but in his many other short stories and novels. He is known and highly respected as an author of crime fiction, westerns, horror, political thrillers, science fiction and suspense novels of all sorts. Regardless of the “genre” he writes in, however, the same voice shows through. The sad, caring, sometimes angry, occasionally nostalgic, often funny voice of Ed Gorman.

Yeah, funny. This introduction might make it sound as if Ed’s quite a gloomy guy. He sometimes seems to be. Even while his fiction can break your heart, however, it can also break you into a belly laugh. Talking to him on the phone, I spend half my time laughing. And the humor turns up in his fiction. In his new mystery series (The Day the Music Died and Wake Up Little Susie so far), he has a running situation in which the main character is frequently ducking rubber bands shot at him by his boss — a very sophisticated, very tough female judge. And here’s a sample line from Wake Up Little Susie: “I’d rather be a petty bastard than a dipshit.” That one made me laugh out loud.

Though Ed often seems to be outraged or sad about what is happening to the folks in his stories (and in life), he also gets a bang out of good, fun, innocent, silly stuff — and he likes to take amusing pokes at petty bastards, dipshits, dummies and assholes.