Eventually, I'm going to read something that's easy to summarize for this blog, but today, I didn't manage it. Fast One, by Paul Cain, is a 1933 hard boiled crime novel about Kells, a criminal who gets framed for murder after refusing to help another denizen of the underworld, Jack Rose, with some trouble on a gambling boat, and has a rather strong reaction to it. After he gets double crossed over and over again, he somehow comes to the conclusion that he needs to be in charge of all of the gangsters in town. Once Kells achieves this, things escalate quickly, and he proceeds to get double crossed for over one hundred more pages.
Fast One really should have been an exciting book. There are gangsters, gambling, political conspiracies, some inexplicable episode in the middle with boxers, and enough dead bodies that I think a sheet of notes would be helpful in keeping track of all of them. For all that goes in the book, though, I was bored during a lot of it. The characters, other than a few that spend the entire novel in the forefront, lack personality and come and go quickly, making it somewhat meaningless when a more important character kills them off. Beyond that, there are so many nonsensical plots both by Kells and engineered against him that at some points, the book stops making sense entirely.
Though I have plenty of complaints about Fast One, it wasn't totally without its merits. Some passages, especially towards the end of the book, were actually quite exciting. It also had the perfect ending, one that was very logical and made it hard to imagine another way that the story could have possibly ended. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I have other, more outlandish pulp novels.
If Fast One sounds like it would be more your cup of tea than it was mine, an eBook of it can be found at Munsey's, which is a super-nifty eBook database for out of copyright novels. There are some bothersome typos in it, but nothing that affects its readability. Most of them are simple capitalization errors or strange bits of punctuation resting where they couldn't possibly belong.
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