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.

 

Check out Vintage Mania in New York City 8/31/13!

This Saturday in New York City, very close to the southern end of Central Park, it’s Vintage Mania, a fantastic memorabilia show offering all the delights listed on this flyer:

Admission is FREE on 8/31/13 for the first show at the new location!

Here are some of the things you’ll find there:

Vintage VHS and DVDs!

There will be THOUSANDS of classic movies, obscure and well-known!

Girlie mags and movie memorabilia!

These mags are like little time machines!!

Wild sleaze paperbacks from the 1950s!

That’s a Gene Bilbrew cover on the left, Paul Rader cover in the middle!

Maybe you like Sherlock Holmes…or 1950s pinup digests?

You never know what you’ll find at this great monthly memorabilia show!

Or maybe you’d like to pick up those convenient Taschen Icon editions of John Willie’s Bizarre or the works of Eric Stanton?

No sophisticated library should be without these volumes! 😉

And you can catch up on the amazing story about Zena, the girl with the world’s most gigantic breasts, in a perfectly preserved sex tabloid from 1991!

You’ll want to browse for hours in this paradise of vintage collectibles!

So look for me and a great assortment of dealers this Saturday, August 31, 2013, at VINTAGE MANIA, at the Holiday Inn at 440 West 57th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues! 10 a.m to 5:00 p.m. FREE ADMISSION! See you there!

Love old paperbacks with all those shady ladies! How about you?

POSTSCRIPT: Well, it’s 6:30 p.m. on 8/31/13 as I write this postscript, and the Vintage Mania show is over now. If you missed this fun show, don’t worry–you can check out the next one at the same location on September 28th, only four weeks away; the flyer above lists the upcoming dates of all future 2013 shows!

 

The eroticism in great books and films…

I’ve felt a little at loose ends this week, partly because I was completely blown away by a novel I finished reading called Contempt, by Albert Moravia. It was made into the movie of that name by Jean-Luc Godard, but the original title of the book was A Ghost At Noon.

A young screenwriter is baffled as to why his wife's love has suddenly turned to contempt.

The book encompasses questions like the nature of love, the absurdities of the mid-20th century movie business, but most of all it takes us into the head of a young screenwriter who is devastated when his wife decides, after two years of seeming devotion, that he is despicable. At first he thinks it’s due to a misunderstanding, but as the story proceeds it seems clear that the problem is far deeper and more complex.

Some of the book is quite funny, as when a German film director expounds on a psychological angle on The Odyssey, the story of the Greek hero Ulysses. Funny, but provocative and profound too.

Amazing descriptions of the Italian landscape and the screenwriter’s enigmatic wife make this book a sensual experience as well.

This is the edition of the novel that I read:

But it leaves out some of the sensual sights, like that of his wife, which fuel his introspection...

As if reading this book wasn’t enough to knock my socks off, I watched the movie He Ran All The Way, with John Garfield.

This taut drama gets more impressive each time I see it.

It was the last film that Garfield made, and although I’ve seen it before, I think the combination of finishing Contempt and seeing this movie on the same day made me more aware of its many nuances. Garfield plays a cop killer on the run who forcefully holes up in the apartment of a family. In ninety minutes it suggests a novel’s worth of tragedy–and indeed it was based on a novel of the same name by writer Sam Ross.

What made the movie so powerful was how Garfield’s unstinting characterization shows a criminal life brutalized by parental abuse, emotional immaturity, poverty, lack of education, and an absence of intelligent introspection. You feel pity for his character, even empathy (Garfield’s performance is mesmerizing) but you understand why he must be stopped before he strikes again.

His scenes with Shelley Winters, as a love-starved girl who works in a bakery, are tinged with forlorn and desperate sexual hunger. What she is willing to do to feel wanted is one of the most shocking elements of this film.

I recommend both Contempt and He Ran All The Way.

But what do these things have to do with my trade being erotica? Simply, that great works like this are the fuel and inspiration that make me want to write the best stories I can, stories that perhaps go beyond being stimulating into something deeper, something haunting.

Like this European poster for He Ran All The Way, which has an atmosphere of danger and eroticism…

I would not classify this poster as erotica, but it is surely sexually suggestive.

The colors of the European poster remind me of those of a pulp magazine from the 40s. And when I edited adult magazines such as Leg World or Cheeks, I always worked with my art director and photographers to get the most vivid colors in the images and typography.

Main covergirl Sandra Scarlett, now working under the name Sandra Sanchez, is a popular European model.