Charles Bukowski’s "Pulp" Summary

This work is a caustic parody of the mid-twentieth-century American hard-boiled detective story, dedicated to bad literature and written shortly before the author’s death. The text satirizes the clichés of pulp fiction. The book was written in 1993.

Orders at the office on the boulevard

Nick Beilein whiled away the sweltering days in a run-down Hollywood office, sipping cheap sake and idly swatting away pesky flies while waiting for the rare clients willing to pay six dollars for an hour of pointless detective work. There was no money left for rent. Enraged, his landlord, McKelvey, had already initiated formal eviction proceedings for debt.

A phone call saved the situation. A glamorous visitor identified herself as Lady Death, showed up in a provocative outfit, and offered a substantial advance to find the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The detective was taken aback. The elderly client denied the classic author’s death in 1961, sending the detective to Red Koldowski’s bookstore.

John Barton called next. The printing house owner charged them with finding the mythical Red Sparrow, promising to pay them a hundred dollars a month for the rest of their lives. There were no leads.

McKelvey soon showed up with a thick-headed thug named Tommy, intending to collect the debt by force. The detective drew his Luger. At gunpoint, Tommy dropped to all fours and carried his boss on his back straight to the elevator.

The rent was resolved miraculously. An unknown benefactor paid for the office for a year in advance, sparing the detective from immediate eviction. The bouncers, Dante and Fante, arrived. Lady Death incinerated the bandits with an icy glare, sending them fleeing for the exit in panic.

Family Suspicions and the Morgue

Clients kept coming. Wealthy entrepreneur Jack Bass, with an ugly wart on his forehead, hired a detective to spy on his young wife, Cindy.

Next came Hal Grovers, the owner of the Silver Dock Funeral Home, begging for protection from the persistent alien Jeannie Nitro, who was floating through the ceilings.

Belain surveyed the morgue. Among the corpses, their cheeks stuffed with cotton wool, the detective briefly imagined his own corpse in a velvet-lined coffin.

A drunken postman demanded money. After a brief scuffle, the detective knocked the brazen neighbor down with brass knuckles and stuffed shards of broken glass into his mouth.

Jeannie Nitro appeared at home. The alien visitor cast off a human mirage, revealing herself as a hideous, hairy snake with a wet eye on her hump, and announced her imminent takeover of Earth.

Tracking down Selin

The search for the writer continued. An old man in a raincoat stood in Red’s bookstore, enthusiastically criticizing Thomas Mann’s novel "The Magic Mountain" for its unbearable boredom.

The suspect fled in a taxi. A couple of days later, a detective tracked him down and followed his car straight to the mansion of Bass’s jealous client.

The break-in ended in embarrassment. Celine was simply selling Cindy her husband’s life insurance policy. Brewster, the security guard who arrived, was hit in the groin with a heavy camera and lost consciousness.

The detective locked up the witnesses. The final confrontation took place at a table in a legendary Hollywood restaurant, where the supposedly dead man produced a genuine driver’s license in the name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, confirming his incredible survival just before being fatally struck by a speeding car.

The writer died instantly.

Honey Dunes Hotel and the Alien Exodus

The surveillance of Cindy resumed. The unfaithful woman’s red Mercedes drove along the highway to the secluded roadside motel, Honey Dunes, where her young lover, Billy, was waiting for her.

The detective rented the room next door. He placed his glass against the thin partition, listened to the woman’s outpourings of love, and then burst into the stranger’s bedroom with his video camera rolling.

The weapon was of no use. The lover turned out to be an invulnerable alien from the planet Zaros and calmly pulled the lead bullet out of his exposed navel.

A crimson light flashed. Jeannie Nitro incinerated the culprit for violating the ban on intimate relations with earthlings, after which Cindy meekly agreed to return to her lawful husband.

The Zarosians abandoned the planet. At the bar, the alien confessed to the detective that colonization had been completely abandoned due to humanity’s hopeless ecological and moral degradation.

Phantom chase and gunshots in the park

The search for Sparrow continued. The ragamuffin Amos Krasnodol charged sixty dollars for the address of a mysterious woman named Deja Fountain.

The meeting turned out to be a trap. The beauty treated her guest to whiskey while Bernie’s accomplice aimed two loaded pistols at the detective’s back.

Belayn disarmed the enemy. The next day, the tenants had disappeared. Manager Tohil, who had attacked him in the empty corridor, collapsed dead from a sudden heart attack upon the appearance of the invisible Lady Death.

Extortionists from the company showed up.

Given twenty-four hours to accept the enslaving terms of the fake loan, the detective signed a promissory note to the extortionists, hoping to finally get to the elusive bird and close the last unresolved task in his convoluted detective practice.

The scammers slipped me a dyed canary.

Penny’s alcoholic ex-wife showed up at the apartment, begged for forty dollars for a drink, and left the detective alone with the planted inflatable doll.

The payment deadline expired. Liquidator Johnny Temple took the unarmed debtor into the Griffith Park wilderness and cold-bloodedly fired four bullets into his stomach.

The wounded detective fell to the grass. Lady Death appeared, confirming the reality of the feathered symbol, explaining the events as a shameless swindler’s pursuit of the old Hollywood detective’s money.

Red Sparrow materialized.

A huge, shining bird opened its gigantic beak over the detective lying in the grass, revealing a raging yellow whirlwind of blinding sunlight that instantly sucked him in and dissolved him into the absolute emptiness of space.