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.

 

Entrancing women, exciting stories!

These are some of the books I’ve read in the last few weeks.

The Only Girl in the Game is a terrific novel of late ’50s, early ’60s Las Vegas, with an intriguing heroine in nightclub singer Betty Dawson. The book has a shocking twist in her adventures about two thirds of the way in that shows the honest commitment to the darkness of his story that John D. MacDonald fearlessly pursues. A really fine novel all around, like so many of MacDonald’s. You can get an inexpensive copy of this on Kindle.

Rebel Wench is a very entertaining novel of the American Revolution, and not only does Gardner Fox pack his book with realistic detail that well evoke the 1700s, but he provides us with two memorable female characters, the feisty but good-hearted “wench” of the title, Deborah Treat, and Laura Lee, the treacherous wife of the hero and a heartless femme fatale. This too can be found affordably on Amazon.

Chinese Lover by Charles Pettit is one of the funniest, bawdiest, sexiest novels I’ve ever read. Madame Li Pei Fou, the sexually unsatisfied wife of a persnickety, egotistic, aristocratic scholar, finds herself a kitchen worker named “Grain of Rice” for a lover–how’s that for the name of a man she basically enslaves!–but when he finally asserts himself and finds another lover, the wise widow Mrs. Tchang Hi, it’s both titillating and hilarious in the resulting complications. The cover of Chinese Lover is by the great artist Rudy Nappi and depicts Mrs. Tchang Hi enticing Grain of Rice when he’s on the run from Madame Li Pei Fou. I liked this book so much that when I learned about an earlier paperback edition with a different cover and title, The Unfaithful Lady, I ordered that just for the gorgeous art. (Actually, though, this earlier edition retained the original witty chapter sub-headings that Chinese Lover cut out). This too can be found on Amazon, though not as inexpensively as the first two books I mentioned above.

And Of Course, There Was The Girl is an intriguing new (2024) private eye novel by Brandon Barrows that has a femme fatale with her own unique twist. She scams men around the country into falling in love with her, proposing marriage, and giving her gifts, and then disappearing. That’s not such an uncommon con game, but her marriage scam turns out to have a far more complex backstory than it seems at first, as detective Sam Harrigan finds out through a twisting trail in a desert gambling town…you can find this absorbing novel readily and inexpensively on Amazon in ebooks or paperbacks.

Finally I want to mention my own literary contributions of memorable ladies. Fate of a Stripper is my noir psychological suspense novel about a lovely but disturbed dancer named Valerie Vickers who gets involved with a lonely older man. It captures Times Square as it transformed itself from the old sleazy “Deuce” days into something more “family-friendly” but still throbbing with darkness underneath the superficial glitter. You can find it as an ebook on Amazon.

And last but not least (as it is one of my favorite stories of the hundreds I’ve had published over the last almost fifty years), there is Spoilt Princess Grace Meets Blackbeard the Pirate, my historical  erotic novella about a lovely Irish buccaneer and her adventures sexually dominating the men whom she so effortlessly entrances on “Lamarr Island” in the Caribbean in 1718. Published in November 2023, it’s available now as a Kindle ebook with a gorgeous cover by the master British painter of female domination fantasy, Sardax.

I guess for me a major highlight of any engaging piece of fiction is one or more exciting and memorable female characters. I like to read about other people’s femme creations as well as devise my own. So I hope you’ll take my suggestions and check out some of these entertaining books!