Review: The Tuesday Blade (1976) by Bob Ottum

This is a nasty piece of noir that I will give a qualified recommendation. My recommendation depends on your tolerance for violence and general ickyness and if you are interested in a story as an historical artifact. More on this below. I learned about The Tuesday Blade from A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir edited by Megan Abbott. It has an appendix titled Women in the Dark where noir afectionados identify noir writers, characters, and performers they appreciate. The anthology is great, by the way, and I've used it to add to my reading and watching list.  Follow the link above and get a copy. Wallace Stroby picked Gloria-Ann Cooper, protagonist of The Tuesday Blade, as a notable femme fatale. The premise of the story was interesting enough for me to get a copy. I'd say it is solidly noir.

There may be spoilers below but most details come from the first 30 pages and I honestly don't think it makes a difference.

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Gloria-Ann Cooper, known a as Glory, grew up in Greer, Oklahoma. At twenty years old she defies her parent's expectations and heads to New York City to stay with her older cousin Nancy who has found her a job with Time Magazine. Glory is no hayseed and when she arrives at the Port Authority terminal she readily dismisses the pimps who target the beautiful blond. Unfortunately, cousin Nancy isn't there to meet her having been mugged and being laid up in the hospital. While figuring out what to do next, she is smoothly picked up by a suave young man (unnamed) dressed like Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair and with eyes bluer than Paul Newman's. He is so different from the pimps that Glory lets her guard down. Drugged, she awakens in the wealthy young man's playboy pad but is kept sedated and barely conscious. The young man intends to turn Glory into a high-class prostitute. In her drugged state she is raped and the young man makes her available to men at the parties he hosts. Glory is able to get herself together enough to make it to the bathroom on her own where she finds a box with seven razors, one for each day of the week. She palms the Tuesday blade and goes back to bed. Later, with the young man naked and about to get into bed with her, Glory brutally and graphically dispatches him with the razor. Ottum goes into loving detail how Glory wields the blade. Making her way to cousin Nancy's apartment, she come up with a lame an excuse for having disappeared for several days. Det. Sgt Antonio (Tony) DeMario gets the case and Tony is a sharp detective whose skills might mean trouble for Glory. Meanwhile, Glory has launched a war against pimps because someone has to do something.

The book reminds me of female revenge/vengence movies and I'm surprised it hasn't been turned into a film already. It might make a better movie than book. It certainly has enough sex and gore.

Early on, the author establishes that Glory has always been  an assertive girl. Her father says about her

Glory's got a nifty go-to-hell quality, that one...You know, the kid's attitude is strictly kiss-my-ass. And I don't know but what that's not real good with things the way they are these days.

We see where Glory's core of steel comes from when we learn that she was tied up and gang-raped at ten years old. She only tells her brother who is too scared to act and she seemingly is able to put the act aside. It seemed unlikely that someone that age could compartmentalize such a traumatic event but, jarring as it may be for the reader, it is necessary for later developments.We also see that Glory is able to act decisively, coldly, and violently when she takes revenge against the instigator of the rape.  In high school she finds that while she wants sex, she isn't able to go all the way. She has all the makings of a noir psychopath. I'd love to see what Jim Thompson would have done with a character like this.

In New York, the author adds an element of feminism/women's liberation but not as a motivator for Glory. Cousin Nancy is part of NOW but for Glory the women's movement is all talk and not doing enough, quickly enough. She wants to se something done now to protect women. The way she wasn't? Ironically, the longest discussion about women't liberation comes from a scumbag business executive whose motives are anything but pure. I don't know if this is a reflection of Ottum's own views on feminism but in Glory he has a protagonist who hates to see women abused and is impatient with organization playing lip service to women's issues. She is willing and capable of turning her hatred into action. Glory's biggest flaw, other than being a psychopath that is, is overconfidence. She is unable to resist an opportunity to slice and dice a pimp. She's actually pretty good at it.

The investigation led by Detective DeMario is the fun part of the book. You get good bantering and black cop humor

Sometimes, the sergeant said, you forget just how much stuff is crammed inside your body until you see one all laid open like that. You know, you would think you can't get that many guts in there and just hold them all in place with a layer of skin across the front. The blood, well you kind of expect that because blood goes everyplace.

[about oversleeping] I do that a lot since the divorce. There's not a hell of a lot else you can do in one room.
But you get laid a lot, Olsen said.
That's just the rumour around here. What I really do is think about getting laid a lot.

Once DeMario gets Glory in his sights through some clever detecting, he and Olsen go to extraordinary lengths to try to trip her up making for fun, if unlikely, scenarios. I would have liked more of this.

I've already mentioned Glory's sexual frustration and how she will go until just short of the sex act itself. But the author gets really creepy when he shows how Glory sexualizes the razor. She frequently thinks about how the sits in her pocket and its proximity to her inner thigh and edge of her panties. I don't know if his intention was to make the reader squirm but he does. The razor is a sex object that fulfills her like the real thing doesn't. It also takes care of the real thing.

The Tuesday Blade is interesting as an historical artifact. It came out around the same time as the Death Wish and Dirty Harry films both of which have vengeance themes and protagonists willing to take extra-legal action to see justice done. The 70s was also a time of the second-wave feminists with their push for equal pay for equal work, access to jobs traditionally held by men and other issues. And it was a time when women became liberated in their sexual identities. CNN has a timeline of feminism in the 70s. All of this plays into The Tuesday Blade to some extent though I think more could have been done with feminism. It also made the NY Times bestseller list.

Having been in my 20s in the 70s, one thing that made me smile is the gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burundy that Glory and Nancy keep in the apartment. I remember Hearty Burgundy well and fondly. I still think Hearty Burgundy is underrated but then I haven't had it for over 30 years. Oh, and we would add some 7Up for a nice wine spritzer. Ah, good times.

I looked at what others wrote about The Tuesday Blade and several complained about the ending. One person said that she and her husband both threw the book against the wall. I didn't have that reaction. I might have liked it to have gone a bit further but it is a pretty good noir ending. Like all noir protagonists, Glory was doomed, and in her case from when she was ten. It was just a matter of how her doom would be played out.

You want to know how it ends, read on. Stop now if you don't.

I warned you.

Here it is.

DeMario has strong feelings for Glory and he was one of the men she almost had sex with. But he is still a cop and has a team staking out the street in front of Glory's apartment. Glory is about to leave town for good but sees a pimp dragging a girl into the sleazy hotel across the street. She can't resist and heads across the street with razor in hand. DeMario sends the team into the hotel  but can't bring himself to follow and sits on the steps.

...He hung his head down, looking at his feet. 

Too late, he said. Christ, we were too late the day she came to town. 

And then he raised his head again and squinted out into the street, at the awning across the way. With the rain this way, pounding in so cold and thick, it was hard to see. Of course the tears didn't help any.