Port Wine Stain

Port Wine Stain, by Jerry Oster

August, 1980  Signet Books

Jerry Oster is a prolific crime writer whose work I have only recently discovered; it appears he has reprinted most of his novels as eBooks. Port Wine Stain, a Signet Books paperback original, was his first novel, and it appears to be relatively unknown. It’s never been reprinted and isn’t available as an eBook, possibly indicating that Oster would prefer it to remain unknown. 

But man, once again kudos to the Signet copywriter(s) who handled these early ‘80s crime PBOs. As with Phone Call and The Ripper, the back cover copy goes out of its way to imply that Port Wine Stain is naughtiness of the first order, filled with willing women and graphic sex. Heck, the book’s even sluglined “A thriller for the adult ‘80s” on the back cover, and the copy lends the impression that it’s about a guy with “too many women in his life” who falls in love with an actres he sees in a porno flick. All of which is sort of what happens in Port Wine Stain, with the additional note that there is zero in the way of explicit sex in the novel, and even the exploitation of the female characters is nonexistent. Once again I am impressed with the copywriters of these ‘70s and ‘80s paperback houses and their ability to make any book come off like a sleazefest. They’d probably describe Gone With The Wind as “An untamed woman’s sexual odyssey in the passionate, lust-fueled world of the Antebellum South!” 

Rather, Port Wine Stain is a darkly humorous crime thriller with hardboiled tones, mostly due to the witty rapport Jerry Oster skillfully gives his characters. Indeed the final quarter of the novel seems to be a Thin Man riff, with narrator Charles Ives trading witty banter with his lovely female acquaintance as they try to solve a murder mystery. Dialog appears to be Oster’s strong suit, judging from this novel, with a lot of memorable exchanges between Ives and the people he encounters…most of whom do happen to be women, but again the kinky and naughty stuff is more a product of the Signet copywriter’s imagination. 

Charles Ives is somewhere in his 40s, a newspaper reporter in Manhattan, and he covered the war in Saigon before being pulled from the job because his editor said readers weren’t interested in stuff about far-off places. This Vietnam stuff still serves as a thorn in Ives’s side, and given that he still works for the same editor there’s occasional bantering about it between the two. But here’s the curious stuff. We know the war has ended, as Ives at one point mentions it…but I almost get the impression that Port Wine Stain occurs in the past – meaning, not in ‘80s. If so, then the “thriller for the adult ‘80s” tag on the back cover is also misleading. I say this given that Ives often begins his sentences with “In those days,” or “Something I remember even unto today,” as he recounts to us the story that is Port Wine Stain, clearly giving the impression that our narrator is telling us of events that happened long ago. Or maybe this is a novelistic conceit and the story does occur in 1980, but narrator Ives is writing in some distant future (let’s say 1994 and he’s a big NIN fan!) 

Jerry Oster went on to focus on crime and mystery thrillers, and Port Wine Stain is no different. Ives when we meet him is working night shift and his editor gives him a job to look into a recent murder “downtown.” Ultimately Ives will become entangled with the widow of the man who was killed, a lovely young woman who sports a nevus flammeus mark on her right cheek – the “port wine stain” of the title, as it’s a crimson mark that looks as if the lady has spilled wine on her cheek. Ives will become infatuated with this woman, Pamela Yost, to the extent that he is constantly putting off the advances of his latest casual bedmate, a teacher named Kate. And also to the extent that he’s putting off the advances of the new girl on the paper, a pretty young thing named Ann Roth. 

Yes, Charles Ives spends the entire first quarter of the novel turning down offers of sex, which must have given those Signet editors apoplexy. So much for that “liberated sex” promised on the cover! Kate in particular hounds Ives, at one point even trying her damnest to convince him to invite her up to his apartment for the night. But our narrator is unmoved; he’s too smitten with the “idea” of Pamela Yost, a woman he has only briefly met. But he felt a spark and now is obsessed with her, the fantasy of her that exists in his mind. And this is weird, too, ‘cause when Ives meets Pamela her husband has literally just been killed and he’s feeling the “sparking” between the two of them as they exchange glances and Ives sees that port wine stain and just wants to run his hand over it. This is like an hour or two after Mr. Yost has been shot to death by someone who broke into the Yost’s apartment. 

This obviously makes our narrator seem a bit “sus,” as the kids of today might say, but what’s even more curious is that the other characters don’t make too big a deal out of the fact that he’s smitten with a fresh widow. That is Pamela Yost on the cover, by the way; the uncredited cover artist got fairly good direction, as she is described as lovely and patrician, and the next time Ives sees her is at her husband’s funeral, where she’s dressed in black mourning clothes, as also depicted on the cover. But it appears the artist missed the “port wine stain” bit, unless you really stare at the picture…I mean the cheek is kind of crimson, but it also looks like makeup. There is no mistaking Pamela’s port wine stain for makeup in the novel, and in fact, she unsuccessfully tries to cover it up with makeup in the porno flick she appears in, so as to disguise herself. 

Ives learns of this “adult movie” (which would appear to be a relatively new term, given how Ives is unfamiliar with it) from Ann Roth, the “new girl” on the paper (in a sign of the changing times, Ives informs us that newspapers are “a man’s world” which made me laugh out loud when thinking of the papers of today), as Ann has been given the story of Mr. Yost’s murder. Even though it began as Ives’s story, his wily editor has changed course and given it to Ann (it’s revealed in an unexplored subplot that he’s been courting her, but hasn’t made the sale – meaning even other guys aren’t getting laid in this novel). It’s Ann who discovers that Pamela Yost features in a new porno flick that happens to be playing in the city. This she reveals to Ives by taking him to the movie, and Ives’s realization that the pretty woman with the heavy makeup engaging in onscreen sex is indeed Pamela is so blasé that Ives comes off like a robot. But then, he reacts with a similar blasé attitude to major deaths in the course of the novel. 

This I felt was the biggest failing of Port Wine Stain. Jerry Oster wants his cake and to eat it, too, to borrow a lame cliché. He wants the novel to be acerbic and arch-hardboiled, yet at the same time he strives for an “emotional connection” with Ives slowly coming to terms with the fact that he’s in love with a “fantasy.” This makes for a very self-absorbed narrator/protagonist. To his credit, though, Ives does manage to bed three women in the short, 216-page course of the novel, though as mentioned it is all entirely off-page. Even the “adult film” Pamela stars in is so vaguely described that I had a hard time understanding it even was an adult film, as Ives gives zero details about the movie, or what – or perhaps that should be who – Pamela does in it. But the fact that he beds both Pamela and Ann is almost a passing thought, particularly given the developments of the plot – it makes Ives come off like quite a cad, as he seems quite unconcerned over what has happened to both women. 

Rather, it’s Kate, the schoolteacher who realizes she wants kids, who factors the most in the final quarter of Port Wine Stain, and for those keeping score, Ives, uh, scores with her, too. She is the Myrna Loy to Ives’s William Powell in the Thin Man-esque vibe of these final pages, as the two banter while solving a murder mystery. I should mention that a lot of the dialog is about novels and literary works and characters in novels; in some way the dialog throughout almost reminds me of early Don DeLillo, in how the characters are so insular, talking avidly about subjects the author is clearly interested in. Speaking of “interesting,” there’s a nice bit where Ives and Kate discuss how The Magus has recently received a revised edition, and Ives sniffs that he thinks it’s a bad idea, because “authors should only get one shot.” Perhaps this explains why Port Wine Stain has never been reprinted. 

Because honestly, the finale of the novel is a hot mess, and no doubt it would benefit from some revising. Basically the novel ends, with Ives uncovering who was behind the murder and why it happened – a very hardboiled bit of Ives strapped to a chair and bullshitting his way out of it while trading witty rapport with the bad guy – and then Port Wine Stain goes into freefall for several pages. Because…for some reason, we are treated to a letter Kate has written Ives after leaving him, with her thoughts on their relationship and where she’s going on her trip, and all this stuff that makes the reader scratch his head, because he thought he was reading a mystery-thriller, not a rom-com. 

Overall Port Wine Stain is mostly a success in its witty dialog, some of which made me chuckle. I also enjoyed the topical details, like Ives and Pamela having lunch at Windows On The World, in the World Trade Center, and also there was a super-random Neil Young reference; Ives tells us a jukebox is playing a song with the lines “Love is a rose/but you better not pick it,” and that’s a Neil Young song – actually Linda Ronstadt had the hit with it, and that’s probably the version Ives is hearing on the jukebox, but Young wrote it and recorded it first, even though he released it after Ronstadt. Well, I sort of lost the thread here, so I should wrap it up now.