FALLINg into the sin pit

by Gary Lovisi

"She was dirt… and hungry and cheap and demanding. But it didn’t matter. She was all these things, and I know it, but she was much more, too. She was fire and ice and fury, and when she came up to me – that first time – her mouth making little squirming noises, I knew she was all I ever wanted.”

So says tough, and somewhat honest cop, Barney Black, about the girl of his dreams. He meets Grace on the investigation of her murdered 17yr. old friend, Randy. Randy is shot with one .32 slug in the head and her body is found with whip marks. From that point on begins one of the toughest, most twisted, hardboiled police procedural novels you’ll ever read. You will not be able to put this book down.

Sin Pit by Paul S. Meskil (Lion Books #98, PBO March 1954) is 127 pages of gut - churning crime intensity. A fascinating and fun read, tough-cop Barney takes us on a journey through the Sin Pit – better known as "Sin City", AKA East St. Louis, Illinois. He starts off by telling us that "Sin City" is a hell hole town so corrupt that basically everyone is on the take, or for sale, or running some kind of scam. Even the cops – especially the cops. He also presents one of the ultimate femme fatales in the guise of Grace. The first time Barney sees Grace he describes her like this:

"She wasn’t beautiful, like the movie dolls are beautiful, but she had more of what it takes to be a woman than anyone I had ever seen before. She was pure, raw sex. And I wanted her, just like that.”

From then on life is all downhill for Barney as he pieces together what turns out to be a case more twisted than you’d think Lion Books or any 1954 crime paperback would dare publish. No shit! The case, (and I’m going to give away the plot here so if you want to just skip this part go to the next paragraph) concerns what twists into a lesbian S&M whipping case between Grace and the murdered girl Randy. See, it appears Grace’s gambler "husband" just liked to ‘watch the special goings on in their basement S&M chamber between the two women’. But when Randy decided to get some cheating sex with Grace’s husband, Grace kills Randy – but not because Randy is cheating with Grace’s husband – but because Randy was cheating on Grace with a man!

So you can see Barney is stuck on this case and has to dig around, all the time a homicidal killer is murdering witnesses and then goes after Barney – even as his superiors on the police are watching him and getting increasingly suspicious that he may be the killer! In the meantime to solve this case, and to make the lovely Grace his, he has to find her and clear her. What he ends up doing is finding out that he is soon going way over the line, placing his career, his freedom, and even his life in dire jeopardy.

Sin Pit is a fine novel. This is the first novel by Paul Meskil, and his only book for Lion. I’ve heard that a few years back he was alive and living on Long Island. I saw him interviewed on some kind of police show back then. Meskil wrote a couple of other books that I know of, though I do not know the titles, one was a paperback original for Playboy Press, probably in the 1970’s and another was a Mob autobiography. Unfortunately I have no information on these books but I’m sure they’re worth looking up if Sin Pit is any indication of his hard hitting hardboiled style. Meskil understands cops & crime, and the hardboiled attitude that oozes through and rings true in a book like Sin Pit. It’s a good read, one of those neglected Lion Classics that deserves reprinting. It would make one hell of a Film Noir.

Copyright© 2003 by Gary Lovisi

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GARY LOVISI is the editor and publisher of Paperback Parade, the world’s leading magazine on collectable paperbacks of all kinds, published since 1986 and HARDBOILED, the toughest little crime magazine in the world. Samples are available at $10 for the first and $20 for the latter; subscriptions: 4 issues for $35, from: Gryphon Books, PO Box 209, Brooklyn, NY 11228, or see his website: www.gryphonbooks.com
Contact Gary via his website.