The Best American Noir of the Century

Ed Gorman (1941-) was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from Coe College in Iowa (1963). He worked in advertising as a copywriter and freelance writer for twenty years, then became a full-time writer, mainly of fiction. While most of his work has been in the mystery genre, he has also written many other types of fiction, including horror (he was nominated for Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association for his short story collections Cages [1995] and The Dark Fantastic [2001]) and westerns (he won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Short Fiction, for “The Face” in 1992), under both his own name and the pen names E. J. Gorman and Daniel Ransom. He has been nominated for two Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Short Story, for “Prisoners” (1991), and (with others) Best Biographical/Critical Work, for

The Fine Art of Murder (1994). He was also honored with MWAs Ellery Queen Award in 2003, given primarily for his numerous works of mystery fiction, his long editorship of Mystery Scene Magazine, a fanzine, and his many anthologies.

Among his many novels are the first in the six-volume Jack Dwyer series, Rough Cut

(1985); The Day the Music Died (1999), the first of more than a half-dozen Sam McCain novels; and The Poker Club (1999), which was made into a feature film directed by Tim McCann in 2008.

The Poker Club is an expansion of the short story “Out There in the Darkness,” which was first published in a limited-edition (five hundred copies) chapbook by Subterranean Press, in 1995.

1

The night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game — four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wildcard games. We hate them.

This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.

Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that’s what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.

We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.