Saturday, March 23, 2024

#17: Room Service by Alan Williams

An affluent but cuckolded husband decides to get revenge by picking up a prostitute, only for it to have deadly consequences, in Alan Williams' Room Service.

This lost noir from the 1930s, with its drunks, prostitutes, and back-alley abortionists, is as brutally frank as any contemporary novel.  

This previously out of print book and its forgotten novelist has been brought back by Stark House Press, and that's a good thing, as I would rank Room Service in the same category as the best of Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich.

Absolutely propulsive storytelling capped with an inky-black denouement means I almost consumed this in one setting on a camping trip.  Recommended for fans of dark noir.

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