The Vengeful Virgin

by Gil Brewer

Overview

HER WEALTHY STEPFATHER WAS DYING – BUT NOT QUICKLY ENOUGH

What beautiful 18-year-old would want to spend her life taking care of an invalid? Not Shirley Angela. But that’s the life she was trapped in – until she met Jack.

Now Shirley and Jack have a plan to put the old man out of his misery and walk away with a suitcase full of cash. But there’s nothing like money to come between lovers – money, and other women…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857683878
Publisher:	Titan
Publication date:	03/29/2011
Series:	Hard Case Crime
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	556,627
File size:	300 KB

About the Author

Gil Brewer was the author of some of the best-selling paperback original crime novels of the 1950s. He broke into print with the legendary Gold Medal imprint in 1950, and produced a series of hits that included 13 French Street, The Red Scarf, A Killer Is Loose, and So Rich, So Dead.  A number of movies have been based on Brewer’s work, including 3-Way, starring Gina Gershon.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
The depraved portrayal of the young, red-haired femme fatale in Gil Brewer's 1958 pulp classic The Vengeful Virgin -- a seductress "straight out of hell" -- is a fitting description for the novel's sexually supercharged and sordid story line. When Florida television repairman Jack Ruxton is called to the home of Victor Spondell, a wealthy invalid suffering from a degenerative respiratory illness, and his shapely 18-year-old stepdaughter, Shirley Angela, he soon becomes a willing conspirator in a scheme to kill the ailing man and run off with both Shirley Angela and a suitcase full of cold, hard cash. But Ruxton, who has a history of using women, gets in way over his head when the murder plot goes terribly wrong…

An undisputable pulp noir classic, The Vengeful Virgin succeeds in large part because of Brewer's anything-but-subtle use of dark symbolism throughout; the image of hellfire, for example, is masterfully employed to describe the movement of Shirley Angela's body and Ruxton's all-encompassing greed -- as well as the couple's insatiable sexual appetite -- and is used ingeniously at the novel's explosive and retributive conclusion. Discerning pulp noir fans who enjoy this Hard Case Crime reissue should make it a point to seek out other hard-to-find Brewer works like The Red Scarf, Nude on Thin Ice, and Satan Is a Woman. More than 20 years after his tragic death, Gil Brewer remains one of pulp noir's most underappreciated writers. Hopefully, this fortuitous unearthing of a classic will be the spark that ignites a much-needed revival of Brewer's works. Paul Goat Allen

Brewer's The Vengeful Virgin, first published in 1958 and reprinted now, is not much of a novel by today's standards, but it's a wonderful time capsule. The time, of course, is the 1950s, when America was, sexually speaking, a vast wasteland. I don't expect anyone younger than 50 to believe this, but in the '50s large numbers of young Americans of both sexes graduated from high school, and even college, innocent of sex. Young women "saved themselves" for marriage, and young men existed in a state of profound ignorance and frustration. Since meaningful sex education was forbidden in the schools, young people often looked for enlightenment to the novels of Spillane, Erskine Caldwell and Brewer. The Vengeful Virgin (love that title) is a feverish elaboration on a familiar theme in 1950s pulp fiction: that the meeting of a lusty young man and a hotblooded young woman leads swiftly to sexual frenzy, murder and, finally, the inevitable wages of sin.
— The Washington Post

Patrick Anderson