56.
Title: [The G-String Murders]
Author: Gypsy Rose Lee
Genre: Pulp
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Beach Read
Date Completed: June 23, 2016
Rating: *****

Before there was Dita Von Tese there was Gypsy Rose Lee, a vaudeville performer turned strip teaser who went on to become a cultural icon with fluctuating media success.  According to her son’s introduction, Gypsy Rose Lee was never formerly educated, having spent her whole life travelling for the stage, but had a voracious appetite for reading, individual books becoming her tutors and her windows into different worlds and different lives.  Lee is no stranger to the pen, either, and in 1941 turns to pulp fiction with her publication of The G-String Murders.

The G-String Murders takes readers behind the scenes of a burlesque theatre, illustrating contentious and complex human relationships between stage performers, which leads to the very real (and welcomed, at times) murders of women with more enemies than back-door Johnnies. Gypsy Rose Lee herself is the protagonist, adding a realistic and identifiable voice to the telling of a series of garish murders, when strip-teasers are found strangled with glittering g-strings in a performance that seems fit for a stage. A classic whodunit, nearly everyone is suspicious, and the animosity between burlesque performers and the police force add a tension to the plot that adds believability to the suggestion that a comic and his dancer girlfriend need to investigate on their own.  The scenes backstage and in the dressing rooms are just as grand and engaging as the acts on stage, and the pace runs high and keeps twirling from beginning to end.  The G-String Murders will delight fans of mystery, pulp, and cozy-mysteries alike, and would be a real treat for anyone interested in burlesque and strip tease. Strong personalities and an intimate understanding of narrative make this pulp a real winner.

57.
Title: [Mother Finds a Body]
Author: Gypsy Rose Lee
Genre: Pulp
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Beach Read
Date Completed: June 25, 2016
Rating: ***

The sequel to The G-String Murders, Mother Finds a Body directly follows the conclusion of the first, removing Gypsy Rose Lee and a handful of familiar characters from the theatre, and and places burlesque performers in a tenuous position in the "real" world. Outside of the performing space, these characters lose a bit of their polish, and with it the interest of the reader. Though the introduction of Lee's mother as a principal characters adds a layer of enjoyable anxiety, the narrative as a whole is more traditional as a murder mystery, and thus less successful overall, as it is the unique perspective and setting which makes the first such a success.  The suspension of disbelief is a bit more difficult, as it's impossible to imagine travelling for several days in a packed trailer with an undiscovered murder victim in a bathtub, and the rest of the story is just as contrived. The saving grace is the character of Gypsy herself, who can still charm readers into going along for the ride. The second book is definitely second-best, but it's worth a look for a quick beach read.

58.
Title: [Sex Criminals: Vol. 1]
Author: Matt Fraction
Genre: Graphic Novel
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Beach Read
Date Completed: June 27, 2016
Rating: ***

The premise of Matt Fraction's Sex Criminals is curious and compelling: a young girl discovers at her sexual awakening that her orgasms stops time for all but her, allowing her variable stretches of experience in what she dubs "the Quiet Place." Faced with grief over the death of her father, and her mother's subsequent withdrawal and alcoholism, the Quiet Place gives Suzie the time and space she needs to heal and come to grips with her life, even as it leaves her feeling extraordinarily isolated and lonely following intimate bodily and emotional connections. Just when se determines that she'll never share this quiet moment with another she meets Jonathan, who has the same ability, albeit with a far more lascivious understanding, and a destructive inclination that leads him to use the time freeze for juvenile delinquency rather than quiet reflection and self-discovery. Together, they decide to use their intimate powers for both harm and good: robbing banks to raise the money to keep Suzie's library out of foreclosure.

For a book that uses sex as its narrative vehicle, Sex Criminals is not itself pornographic, keeping far from Alan Moore's level of sexual revelation, and playing the sex shop for gags rather than titillation. The artwork itself is oddly sweet and cartoonish, setting the tone of the book as approachable and well=meaning, with none of the grit and hard lines of, say, caped comics. However, the introduction of the sex police derail the story, adding an unnecessary layer of conflict and distracting fro the stories already put into motion. This, and the abrupt conclusion of the first volume, keep the book from being a full success, and ultimately will prevent me from seeking the next volume.