Review: "To Florida" by Robert Sampson

 

“To Florida” by Robert Sampson from Hard-Boiled ed. by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian Oxford, 1997   Robert Sampson is a name I’m unfamiliar with, but if his story, “To Florida”—originally published in 1987—is representative of his body of work, it’s a serious deficiency in my reading. “To Florida” is a marvelous piece of noir about a low-life named Jerry Teller. When Teller’s girlfriend, Sue Ann, walks into the couple’s apartment with an armload of groceries, Teller is counting a stack of cash and watching cartoons. Sue Ann asks him where the money came from and if they could pay Mr. Davidson, the landlord, since their rent is late again. Teller responds, “He gave me this.” Sue Ann is confused, a condition that’s natural for her, and her confusion only increases when she stumbles across Mr. Davidson’s corpse on the kitchen linoleum. Her confusion turns to excitement when Teller asks if she wants go to Florida with him, in their former landlord’s car (of course). Thus their journey begins with a dazzle of Bonnie and Clyde and a shiver of Natural Born Killers—but very much its own self from beginning to end. “To Florida” is a ride on a dark street with a single, and obvious, destination. Teller is a straight-up crazy f*ck and Sue Ann is—while not truly bad—a lost girl from a bad home with no possibilities and nowhere else to go. Sampson’s narrative is linear perfection with a tight, laconic prose, and a measured, suspense building, pace. While the plot goes where it’s expected, there are surprises along the way and even better, the open ending leaves a little something for the reader’s imagination. “To Florida” is the best short I’ve read so far this year and honestly, it will take something special to overtake it.

There’s not much about Robert Sampson on the internet. The introduction to the story in Hard-Boiled, written by Jack Adrian, tells us he was “fascinated by pulp magazines” and wrote seven books and “countless” articles about the pulps. Several of his articles were published by The Armchair Detective. Sampson wrote for radio and placed shorts with Planet Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Weird Tales revival from the 1990s, and his story, “Rain in Pinton County”—published in New Black Mask—won the 1986 Edgar for best short story. Robert Sampson was born in 1927 and died in 1992.