Little Tramp is a terrific noir-era pulp story, although it is not one of Brewer's best known works. The story involves, Gary Dunn, a man who runs into trouble wherever he goes and there's generally, as in many of Brewer's books, a woman behind the trouble.

Dunn is on the right track now. He has a job at a lumber yard. He is engaged to Doll (short for Dolores), who works at a strip club at the edge of town, and they are making plans to do everything right. Gary wants it now "after all the hell-for-leather-bottle-and-a-babe years, an after what Jane Matthias had done to him up in Alexandria." Only there wouldn't be a story if there wasn't a monkey wrench in his plans and here the monkey wrench is in the form of the Boss's daughter, who asks for him by name to come out to the house and build some shelves. Only he had met this one before: "He had seen her twice and she'd come damn close to being a problem." She flagged him down when she had a flat tire. "Anybody would have stopped for a looker like that one, though she was damned young." While he changed the tire, "she leaned against the side of the car, watching, the long tanned legs disturbingly near his arms." This one was trouble with a capital T. When he gets to the mansion where the boss lived, he saw her bare feet with neat crimson toenails, "silver shorts, high and snug around warm brown thighs." He wanted out. He didn't know what was going on, but "she was scheming and he couldn't take being played like a fish." "He knew the way he felt, he had to get away from her. From the moment he'd seen this girl standing at that intersection, calling to him about a flat tire, he'd been suspicious. Now he had every reason to hate her, and just looking at her told him there was nothing he'd be able to do about it." But this one is hell on wheels, and when he doesn't go for her proposition and her father is pulling up in the driveway, she tore her jersey, exposing herself, scratching at him with her nails. "She mussed her hair, and he heard the zing of the zipper on her shorts." Franklin Harper walks in, his face beet-red, and Gary is now out of a job and his life is falling apart. All because of Arlene Harper, the manipulative little ---. Brewer paint a guy into a corner and a no-win situation.

This one is a terrific fast-reading pulp piece. Best thing about it is as a reader you can feel Gary's anger and frustration as he backed into one corner after another with no way out by Arlene, this crazy girl. "That wild, crazy, scheming little bitch." "She was either crazy as hell, or the deadliest schemer he'd ever met up with." Nobody would ever believe this was my plan, she tells Gary. "He'd been too close to hell too many times not to recognize the furnace when he was inside walking on the burning grate." "He did not move. He was sick, and it was like a dream." "Her body moved close and he heard her tight breathing. She slid onto his lap, holding the drink in one hand, circling his neck with the other arm."

Brewer takes the reader into a journey that is the hell Gary's world has become with this she-devil, one second manipulating him and one second seducing him and all the world thinks he kidnapped her. One terrific pulp story. Highly recommended. ( )