Danny Hogan - The Windowlicker Maker

[dem]

Danny Hogan - Killer Tease (Pulp Press, 2009)

Blurb:
"Smiling, winking, pouting, hinting, allowing a quick peek - she was more titillating than a thousand dead-eyed cover girls who would show their all for cash and a taste of the highlife. She danced, punters watched. They didn't touch. She had to perform - Burlesque was her reason to be."

Eloise Murphy was a pure thoroughbred of the old school. It had taken her years of work to pay her dues; and she had paid them the old-fashioned way. Her ink was proof. She had fought tooth and nail for what she had. No-one was going to take away what she had earned, no matter what low-life, foul, under-hand schemes they threw at her.

Set in and around Kemp Town and the seafront pubs and clubs of Brighton, Killer Tease is a mean tale of getting up after being kicked to the ground.

When we first meet her, Eloise Murphy, 29, dildo-saleswoman by day, classy burlesque dancer by night, has just lost her regular gig after beating up yet another customer, this one for attempting to spike her drink. "The rule is, I dance, the punters watch, they don't touch" she informs the manager, but this is evidently too much to ask of said punters and Eloise has often been called upon to defend herself from drunken gropers. A well-aimed stiletto heel to the groin is her favoured tactic, and this has secured her several enemies with peculiar walks down the years. Now Napoleon Hammerstein, a bent banker whose business card describes him as an "Entrepreneur & Philanthropist", has launched his first of several proposed Gentlemen's Clubs to cater for fellows of certain "specialist tastes." He has kept a file on Eloise going back to her childhood in Cork and unless she agrees to entertain his pervy clientele, the photo's will become very public property. On the night of her debut she shares her dressing room with a mad-eyed, toothless young woman who has been beaten senseless. "Don't worry about that", sneers the bouncer, "we got rooms upstairs full of 'em. You'll be joining 'em soon enough." That will be the "specialist tastes" that Hammerstein referred to ....

i'm not sure what i was expecting of Killer Tease but the last thing on my mind was an attempt at updating the sex & sadism horror pulps of the late thirties! Eloise - she takes her stage name from the Damned's smash hit - takes out her male and female foes like a psychopathic Vampirella and the violence-for-its-own-sake approach is so lunatic as to be hilarious. In one outrageous episode she sets about twenty fellow dancers with a hatchet, leaving each of them either dead, crippled or expertly scalped. Cat-lovers may like to look away when the cowardly Hammerstein sends the boys around to trash her flat, but the rest of us are in for a treat.

Danny Hogan has since followed Killer Tease with another Pulp Press original, the tastefully titled The Windowlicker Maker (May, 2010). i sure hope i can land a copy soon.

More info: Pulp Press Co.Uk

[dem]

Danny Hogan - The Windowlicker Maker (Pulp Press, 2010)

Alex Young

Blurb
"They reckon they can give themselves a pat on the back and go for a drink after and brag about it the live long night... and then carry on with their lives. No, not this time.'

Since the dawn of time man has been writing revenge stories. Whether scrawled on the wall of a cave, etched with quill and ink upon parchment or thumped out on a typewriter or laptop, we have, as a species, made many attempts to record our dissatisfaction with filthy greedheads and wrong'uns in the form of tales, odes and verse. None, however, none have come cose to encapsulating the unyielding savagery of righteous wrath as Danny Hogan's The Windowlicker Maker.

But we're not going to leave it just there folks. We are also throwing in Danny Hogan's short story A Gun Called Comeuppance. Shop around, you can't beat these prices.

It is quite possibly to my eternal shame that i so enjoyed Danny Hogan's previous Pulp Press original, the "psycho in pasties" effort Killer Tease, but evidently that was just him warming up, or, at least, being only a little bit un-PC. What are we to make of something called The Windowlicker Maker (They killed his wife ... vengeance will be a burden on the NHS)? Incredibly, The Seventh Black Book Of Horror arrived in the post earlier, meaning the three books vying for my immediate attention were all published THIS YEAR. Also, just now i'm immersed in Paperback Fanatic #16 (this week) and the soundtrack going on in my head is the final cut from Normal Man's That Joyless Vibe album, the almost psychedelic mantra I'll Call You A Prick (ditto). You know, there's something to be said for this modern stuff after all.

my small previous experience taught me that these Pulp Press books are perfect hangover reading, so you shouldn't have to wait long for an impenetrable 'review', but to spend your time wisely, check out their damnably attractive site at Pulp Press Co.Uk

[bushwick]

Incredible. The fact that stuff like this is being published gives me a warm feeling inside. I will have to get involved.

[dem]

I think you should! first time I clapped eyes on these in TYPE i thought back to your comments on the 'Men Of Violence' thread because it seemed as if someone had been listening.

Jul 7, 2009 11:23:01 GMT bushwick said:

These were written in the early 90s, and as we all know, things on the street have got a lot worse since. Maybe it's a good time for a completely exploitative, socially irresponsible modern tough-guy crime novel. Fill it full of the following current affairs hot tickets - knife crime, kid gangs, religious and ethnic tensions, human trafficking, bloody rivalries on the music scene etc - in reasonably priced, short novels cynically aimed at the very youth market it exploits, a la 'Skinhead'. Try and orchestrate some shocked-and-appalled publicity by getting quotes from shocked MPs and fascistic Daily Express writers. This could revive the pulp industry! People still read, don't they? Let's encourage the youth to read books - if there was enough negative publicity and the content packed a punch, it'd take off. Kids need something for when they outgrow Harry Potter...

Set in the UK, lead character either a cop, failed/ex-cop, or just a civilian with a grudge (and probably Falklands/Gulf experience) who's been pushed too far down the vigilante route. Maybe a lapsed liberal whose opinions regarding crime and offenders change drastically when THE GANGS START MESSING WITH HIS FAMILY. Something like that.

I'm serious. Who wants to tag-team write this with me?

As mentioned on the 'Killer Tease' thread, these come in at approx 100 pages a time and they're proper pulp size - they'll sit there quite happily next to your copy of The Rats paperback. Very impressed with Pulp Press and will be looking to pick up a few more of their titles over coming weeks.

[dem]

"Hove; the land of the disapprover. This was Vanessa Felts country. I had heard that Nick Cave lived here though I could never understand why."

Really, the blurb tells you just about all you need to know about The Windowlicker Maker, which took me all of an hour to read, and that while enduring a spitting headache. Joe Tatum is an aging dance teacher with an appalling past spent in various prisons and psychiatric hospitals on account of his flair for violence. Joe's life turned around when he met the love of his life, Ava, who persuaded him to turn things around, become a law abiding citizen. But now Ava is dead, shot by mindless thugs during an altercation in a cinema queue. Joe, who was stabbed and beaten in the same incident, hits the bottle. He's not out for revenge - Ava wouldn't have wanted that - but what's a man to do when he's threatened by a smug cop, mocked by his wife's murderer and hospitalised by a crew of bouncers? Special guest star Eloise (the psycho burlesque dancer from Killer Tease) agrees that maybe revenge isn't the answer - "Brighton couldn't handle a man like you going mental" - but her musician friend Hunter isn't so sure. Word has reached him that Spindleruv 'Spindle' Johnson, local bent businessman and Russell Brand lookalike - has recruited "the nastiest, most violent thugs he could find - he gets them to prove themselves taking a life at random". When a young couple are set upon in a motiveless attack and Amos, his harmless next-door-neighbour, is battered in a chip shop, Joe finally loses it - keep away from the fish fryer!

Not strictly horror perhaps, but it is unquestionably horrible - the real Windowlicker Maker, Danny Woollard, acted as consultant on the project - and, if you like your action very violent and taken at pace, a solid gold guilty pleasure. A few typos too many perhaps, but i'm sure we can all live with them by now.

[dem]

Apr 1, 2011 12:31:29 GMT pulphack said:

still haven't read the fiona as decided to read the two danny hogan pulp press titles - Killer Tease and The Windowlicker Maker - first. splendidly assured and ott pulp violence. i suppose the fact that i used to spend a lot of time in brighton at one point helped, as they were full of local detail that i could immediately identify with, but they read like richard allen filtered through stewart home with all the 'art' intent of the latter removed. knowing of the roots, but not winking at the reader. sincere, i suppose. short, sharp and recommended. there is a thread here somewhere about them, i'm sure, but i've just spent ages looking and can't find it!

pulp press have a new danny hogan novella - post apocalyptic sci-fi by the look of it - and also have a western from a 50's pulp writer (hmm, must check if that's genuine or a homage thing). there are other allen-type titles, but they look to be trying to cover the ground genre-wise. worth checking out.

Thought I'd quote a huge dollop of pulphack here to breath some life into a deserving thread. as retro jobs go, pulp press make a bloody good fist of it. I prefer Killer Tease over Windowlicker Maker, mostly, I suspect, because Eloise nursed me through a crippling fierce bout of the lurgy, but like the classic 'seventies model, theirs are the kind of disposable paperbacks you should never actually dispose of as you will only spend the rest of your days hunting down replacement copies.