From Booklist His real name was Marvin Leroy Schmoker, but in his heyday, he was better known by his pseudonym, John Trinian. These two books, originally published in 1960 and ’64, respectively, have been out of print for decades, and that’s a real shame. North Beach Girl, the story of a beautiful San Francisco woman who’s tired of working for a living and who rather conveniently comes into a lot of money, is written in a hip, swinging-sixties style (“I just don’t dig working”) but with an impish sense of humor. Scandal on the Beach follows a group of people—a cop, a Mob hit man, a drug-addicted actor, a photographer who specializes in nudes, a self-deluded man and his would-be girlfriend—who find themselves gathered around, of all things, a dying, beached whale. The novel feels very different from North Beach Girl: less breezy, more noir. But thematically it’s very similar: both books are character studies of mixed-up, desperate people caught up in situations they can’t control. Almost completely unknown today, except by collectors, Trinian is long overdue for republication, and we can only hope further titles are waiting in the queue. --David Pitt Read more Review For tightly plotted, deeply characterized stories, not many have ever done it better than Trinian. --Rick Ollerman from his Introduction[Scandal] offers just about everything I ask for from a novel. --Ed Gorman, Ed Gorman's BlogBoth books are character studies of mixed-up, desperate people caught up in situations they can't control. --David Pitt, Booklist Read more See all Editorial Reviews
D**E
North Beach
Stark House Press gives us a double collection of two Trinian novels. Trinian, when he operated under his real name, hung around North Beach with Kerouac and the other beats. North Beach Girl pays homage to the beatnik life, dead end jobs, poetry readings, drug use, shacking up, heading from here to there. Great character development but, as a crime novel, real slow to develop until the end.Scandal on the Sand, the second of the two novels, is really novellete size, meaning it’s really short in the 80 to 90 page world. It is, at least initially, told from the perspective of a giant beached whale 🐳. It is a languid Southern California where couples bicker, police are triggger happy, mobsters are trying to lay low, and none of them knows what to do with the whale 🐳.These two stories are packaged with biographical sketches of the author.
S**N
Beatnick Noir
Stark House Press has once again uncovered an important author who wrote some fantastic fiction for the early Gold Medal Paperbacks. John Trinian wrote several great books back in the sixties. They combined the spirit of The Beat Poets and Writers and the Hard Boiled style of Pulp Detective stories.North Beach Girl is the lead novel written in 1960. it my favorite of the two but other reviewers have preferred the second novel. North Beach Girl opens with a girl "Erin" doing nude modeling and evolves into a murder story. Trinian spends much time exploring the cast of misfits who all lack much ambition to do anything with their lives except abuse large quantities of alcohol and drugs. The only character with much ambition would be Erin's butch lesbian girlfriend Bruno.Trinian who's life closely paralleled his lost, misguided cast writes some of the very best "drunk and loaded" fiction I have ever read. When his characters over abuse I actually felt like I was their beside them living it through their experiences which seemed totally real.The second novel is even more quirky Scandal On The Sand written in 1964 is about a beached live whale and the reactions of a large cast of diverse characters including a young couple after a bad hook up, a hung over life guard, an ex-con tow truck driver, a drug addict former movie star and his wife, a sleazy photographer and a couple of bimbo models. A power hungry ( probably mentally ill) Beach Patrol cop on a horse fills the role of the villain. But he is too pathetic to really hate. Like all characters in both novels, they are flawed and either directionless or misguided.In this novel no character takes the lead and the perspective rotates rapidly including the opening sequence written from the viewpoint of the whale.John Trinian it turns out is an alias for a man who hung out with such writers like Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. He also had a separate career in Hollywood working as hired gun who wrked on movies and TV series. His life was unhappy and a bit of a mystery, but this book goes a long ways to reveal his life with three fascinating accounts of the man. A Introduction by historian Rick Ollerman, a piece by author Ki Longfellow who knew Trinian when she was a teen aged girl and an account from daughter Bell Marko. This is fascinating stuff from a man who lived a very troubled life.While the content of almost all of these tark House Press re-discoveries have been excellent my only disappointment with them has been with the very subdued covers which where often either bland photos or all logo. Compared to the eye catching originals from Gold Medal and their fellow early paperback companies they often came up short. In the last several months the covers have greatly improved and I thought the cover to this volume was excellent.My Highest Recommendation
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