Vintage Pulp | Aug 28 2016 |
What a letdown. I assumed captains going down with their ships meant they went down in general, but apparently not.
If you can't count on seamen for a good time, what can you count on? Sailor Town concerns a man who goes ashore in a South American two-mule town with a hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-six hours to kill. To get an idea what the mood of this book is, consider that Paul Fox wrote it in isolation in the Mojave Desert after a friend dumped him there to rescue him from a year of hard drinking. With nothing more than a table, a chair, and a typewriter in the room Fox banged out this novel. Like the author the main character Sweeney has seen some things. He sees even more ashore, and finally returns to his ship flat broke, loved out, and generally exhausted, but wiser for the experience. It was Fox's first novel, originally published in 1935, but the Bantam edition above appeared in 1950 with the capable Robert Skemp on the cover chores.