The Uninformed Man

It’s been several months since I’ve posted here, but I hope to be posting more soon. Over the summer I did a lot of reading, especially of 1950s noir paperback fiction, one of my favorite genres. So I guess that put me in a certain writing mood for this piece of flash fiction…

He was spellbound by how pretty she looked on the park bench, painting her lips…

THE UNINFORMED MAN 

Flash fiction by Irv O. Neil

Oren Kimble Dunne should have known it was too good to be true. He’d been reading a feature in the newspaper about how President Truman had beaten Thomas Dewey last year in the ‘48 election when a blonde, whom he’d never seen before, sat down on his bench in Bryant Park and they started talking, striking up a friendship, and soon going to a coffee pot across Sixth Avenue. Oren quickly felt there really could be something between them. Her name was Gina.

The afternoons they spent together at his place over the next few weeks made it seem even more real despite the fact that she was beautiful and he was ordinary, just a mug who edited detective pulp magazines near Times Square. He took long lunch hours to see her, even at the risk of losing his job.

Oren so wanted to believe it was real that he took her at face value. Hardly asked any questions. She didn’t seem to invite many questions either and, well, that was okay. Wasn’t it? She seemed to just really like him. They listened to his classical records and looked at his collection of books and drank wine and made love. How could he distrust all that? Well, maybe if he had asked more questions, he would’ve found out some things he could only guess at when he left his Riverside Drive apartment one Monday morning to go to work, and two men in dark gray overcoats and snap-brim black fedoras came toward him with blazing .38s.

Who sent them?! Oren’s mind screamed silently in a weird whirl as he lay throbbing and bleeding on the ground moments later. Crazily he thought: maybe a mob boss who didn’t like being cuckolded by an innocent-looking nympho tramp wife??? Not that Oren himself had ever thought of Gina as a tramp or nympho or even a wife. She’d been an angel to him. Pure angel, out of nowhere, just for him. Putting on her lipstick that afternoon in Bryant Park and looking so, so sweet…Right? But maybe some husband somewhere knew things Oren didn’t. What a story, Dunne! Moral: Oh the illusions we keep!! He’d always wished he could publish stories with morals. A message novel with a firm moral, complete in one issue, with big splashy headlines and Rafael DeSoto cover art!

Yes, that could be the ticket, Oren hallucinated, as light faded. But the manuscript had never arrived…

Then Oren Kimble Dunne, editor of Furious Detective Monthly, gasped as the thugs closed in for one final shot.

Who was Gina, really? He would never know…

———————

The Uninformed Man ©2025 Irv O. Neil

Photos ©nejron/Depositphotos.com. Posed by a professional model.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events and locations are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character, living or dead, to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

11/5/25 Postscript:

At the end of the story above, you’ll notice I refer to the pulp artist Rafael DeSoto. Here is a link to a short bio and samples of his amazing art!

Over forty years ago, when I first began working on staff in the adult magazine business, one of my employers was a collector of pulp art, and he had an original Rafael DeSoto painting of a giant hand clutching a writhing woman. I had the privilege of writing a story inspired by this art for one of the magazines I worked for, a tale I entitled “Brides for Satan’s Stomach!” in the old “shudder pulp” tradition of the 1930s. The magazine didn’t end up using the actual painting itself for publication, but instead a preliminary study that the artist made for it: but it was a damn good painting too and I was honored that it graced my homage to the good old days of horror pulps!  Someday I’ll have to find my copy of that story and the illustration, I’ve lost track of it for now.