“It was the final degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with.” — The Collector Comes After Payday

Originally appearing in the August issue of Manhunt in 1953, this early noir novelette from the great Fletcher Flora is a perfect example of taking an unpleasant scenario and making it so compelling, that despite your better judgement you continue to turn pages, simply because you have to know…

In its own way, this is a brutal little noir, but it is so classily executed that you don’t realize how brutal it is until reflecting on the ending. The reason for this is Fletcher Flora intentionally turned the brutality inside out, so it is emotional, rather than physical — despite the two murders which occur within the narrative. This story, in a lazy writer’s hand, would have come out raw and graphic and distasteful, but Flora’s literary sensibilities and diligence to his craft turned this into a little gem of sorts.

Right off the bat, Flora builds sympathy for the messed-up adult version of Frankie, who was once a kid with a crumb of a father prone to brutal violence and mistreatment of Frankie’s mother and himself. The adult Frankie tries to give the old man his comeuppance but ends up on the short end:

“Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man — a bas#*rd with a memory like an elephant and a perverted sense of values.”

Adult Frankie encounters the old man again later, but this time he’s drunk enough that Frankie can take him. But all those petty adolescent transgressions of Frankie’s that his old man held on to until the boy had something good within his grasp, only to be reminded he couldn’t, because it was time to pay for this or that youthful error, takes Frankie down a dark path that leads nowhere but prison. Then suddenly, through fate or chance or cockeyed circumstance, Frankie is in the clear.

Having luck and good fortune fall his way for the first time in his life, Frankie feels intoxicated. He rides his newfound luck as far as he can go, gambling, and comes up a big winner. But he also rides it with Taffy and Linda Lee along the way, and in his callous treatment of one, the reader suddenly senses that Frankie, like a lot of kids, has actually become like his father, and sooner rather than later, the collector is coming for what’s due.

Not my favorite story-line thematically, but a tough little noir gem told with more restraint than most other writers possess — or rather, are willing to bring to bear. Another great story from Fletcher Flora. ( )