This riveting story takes you back to 1940’s Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles and the surrounding area had palm trees and an ocean, but it had always seemed to me about as real as a Poverty Row movie set. In reality, as opposed to the publicity, Los Angeles was more akin to the goings on in a bad B movie, which Hollywood churned out faster than a Bob Feller heater made it from the mound to the plate. Los Angeles passed itself off in movies and advertisements as a glamorous paradise, but anyone who’d spent five minutes there realized the greenery might as well have been plastic, its beaches made of quicksand. There were few angels in the City of Angels as far as I could tell, but a whole lot of folks playing for the other team. The town was filled with two-legged creatures passing themselves off as human beings; the rest were real people who’d bought into the dream, but become disillusioned by what they’d found there. Sure, a ton of women out that way looked great from a distance, more than a few of them even from up close. The ones I’d encountered and spent any time with on my prior visits, however, had turned out to be about as real as an Andy Hardy movie.”

This is a perfect narrative in a style of vintage pulp, but it’s more than that. Although it has a noir element, it has more of a mystery feel with a spicy underpinning. Underwood combines all these elements better than anyone I’ve ever read. The collective parts add up to something much larger. His writing is up on another level above even the best pulp that’s ever been published. Even in this vibrant piece of 71 pages, his characters are fully developed with brilliant dialogue and description. The following quotes display some of the artistry from this extremely enjoyable story.

“Penny didn’t have to be confused about love and sex any longer. She no longer had to wonder which it might be, because it was both. Each time we willingly and enthusiastically entangled soft flesh and hard bone with one another, desire and love were so entwined the two became one, just as we did.”

“‘I was worried when you left me alone on the streetcar,’ she said softly. ‘I thought if I never saw you again, it would all be like a dream I’d had…you know, not real, not something I could cling to and hang on to. Then when I saw you standing there in front of the circus waiting for me…it was like I’d been dead, and the sight of you being real brought me back to life.’”

“...the circus was a world of mothers enjoying a rare day out in a new dress; a world of small children eating cotton candy and hot dogs while laughing at circus folk dressed like Keystone Cops, who were running up and down the ticket line in comically oversized shoes; a world of small smiling faces filled with bright-eyed wonder at the mysterious and magical sounds coming from just inside the tents; a world of tiny hands tightly clutching strings tethering their cluster of colored balloons to them so they wouldn’t fly skyward.”

Describing this story as riveting doesn’t really do it justice. I was so totally absorbed, I felt I was actually living in the time and world Underwood so vividly created. Fantastic story, all the way around. I enjoyed it immensely. ( )