Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd

Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this gritty noir satire demonstrates Charles Bukowski's own brand of humor and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

Bukowski’s final novel is a surreal pastiche of the classic Mickey Spillane, Chandleresque private dick novel. The anti-hero protagonist, Nick Belane, is a lonely, middle-aged, egotistical, alcoholic private detective who is badly in need of some lucrative work, but what he gets is a series of increasingly strange assignments from a bizarre collection of clients.

He is asked to track down the long-dead French classical author Celine and an elusive red sparrow in a surreal mystery that has him crossing paths with aliens, heavies and even Lady Death herself. All the while, Belane is convincing himself that he’s still a white-hot detective and that nobody can take him for a ride, or indeed make him feel he’s losing his mind.

Pulp is essential fiction from Buk himself.

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.