Black Lizard Lounge #5: THE KILLING

The fifth installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperback reprints from the late 1980s and early '90s (for the others, just click on "Black Lizard Books" in the labels at bottom).

THE KILLING by Lionel White

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Dutton, 1955

THE STORY: A group of criminals band together to pull off a $2 million racetrack robbery.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A seminal heist novel from one of its greatest practitioners.

"That's why this thing is going to work. We don't want a lot of hoodlums in on it. ... It's what I've been telling you guys since the beginning. We aren't a bunch of dumb stick-up artists. We aren't tough guys. We're supposed to have brains."

So says ex-con Johnny Clay to the crew he's put together for a racetrack robbery in Lionel White's 1955 novel THE KILLING. And he's right, his co-conspirators are pretty much a bunch of Average Joes in need of money, albeit with unique skills and special access. One is a track cashier, trying to support a high-living wife. Another is an aging bartender plagued with gambling debts. A third is an otherwise good cop in deep with a loanshark. Bringing them all together is veteran criminal Johnny Clay, fresh from a four-year stint in prison and now imbued with "a sort of grim purposefulness which he had always lacked."

Johnny's purpose is to rob the racetrack during the "Canarsie Stakes," gaining entrance to the money room while a sharpshooter picks off one of the horses to create a diversion. It's an operation that should work like clockwork - and does until that trouble-making wife entices her petty criminal boyfriend into robbing the robbers.

THE KILLING is probably best remembered for its 1956 film adaptation, written and directed by then-neophyte Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialogue by novelist (and Black Lizard favorite) Jim Thompson. It was originally published under the title CLEAN BREAK, as part of Dutton's "Guilt-Edged Mystery" line, though all of the post-1956 editions - and there were many - retitled it as per Kubrick's film. For the prolific White, a former crime reporter, it was the first of his novels to make it to the screen, though others would follow, notably Jean-Luc Goddard's 1965 PIERROT LE FOU, based on White's 1962 book OBSESSION. Aside from the ending, the film of THE KILLING is amazingly faithful to the book, with much of White's dialogue intact.

As the novel begins, the planning of the robbery is already under way, with an address scrawled on the back of a winning ticket leading to a late-night meeting in a furnished room on New York's East 31st Street (in the film, the racetrack is located in California, in the novel it's on Long Island). It's not until Chapter Two that we meet Johnny, just out of jail and reunited with his faithful - and patient - girlfriend, Fay. In some ways, the characters are archetypes, but they're sharply drawn. White has only to sketch them quickly and, for the purposes of the plot, they're good to go. All the backstory is conveyed through dialogue, or brief interior thoughts.

THE KILLING is a lightning-fast read, only 155 pages in the Black Lizard edition, and as lean and mean as they come. One can see the influence it had on Donald E. Westlake's "Richard Stark" novels, which were to begin seven years later. Reading it in 2009, it doesn't seem dated at all.

The book's manipulation of time - with multiple versions of the same events told from different viewpoints - is retained in the film, though its best-known homage would come almost forty years later, in the fractured chronologies of Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION. The novel is crafted as carefully and painstakingly as the robbery itself - though much more successfully, of course. It seems effortless, the work of a total pro, and it ends, as does the movie, with a nerve-wracking near getaway at an airport (LaGuardia in the book), though the finale lacks the ironic twist - and classic last line - of Kubrick's film.

Even more than W.R. Burnett's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE KILLING is the granddaddy of modern heist stories, and the blueprint for dozens of novels and films that came after it. Fifty-four years after its publication, it remains a cornerstone of American crime fiction.

Black Lizard Lounge #4: THE OUT IS DEATH

The fourth installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s (for the others, just click on "Black Lizard Books" in the labels at bottom).

THE OUT IS DEATH by Peter Rabe

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: December 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957

THE STORY: Ex-mobster comes to the aid of an aging safecracker being manipulated by a gang of young thugs.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Classic hard-boiled pulp from one of the masters.

I've written about Peter Rabe before, most recently for one of Patti Abbott's Forgotten Book Fridays. THE OUT IS DEATH was Rabe's third novel featuring masterless hood Daniel Port (I think it's the third, they were written and published in such a short period of time that it's hard to tell). A sort of American ronin, Port first appeared in 1956's DIG MY GRAVE DEEP, and TOID continues his adventures after leaving "The Stoker Mob" in some unnamed major American city. An amoral gangster battling even worse bad guys, Port is one of the predecessors of Donald E. Westlake's Parker, who would come along six years later, in 1962's THE HUNTER. Westlake often sang Rabe's praises in interviews, and rightly so. Along with Dan J. Marlowe, Rabe was one of the architects and greatest practitioners of post-war hard-boiled paperback-original noir.

In THE OUT IS DEATH, Port tries to rescue an old and infirm safecracker named Dalton from the clutches of a brutal young thug named Corday, who wants Dalton to go on one last job for him. It's a generational thing, as it turns out, with old school gangster Port going up against the '50s-style juvenile delinquents of Corday's gang. Doesn't take much to figure out who comes out on top. Suffice it to say that there were five Port novels in all, the last being 1959's TIME ENOUGH TO DIE. Black Lizard reprinted three and most have remained out of print since, though some are now showing up on Kindle.

TOID does bear similarities to Westlake's 1965 Stark novel THE JUGGER, the sixth book in the series, in which Parker travels to Nebraska to find out what happened to his contact and go-between, an aging safecracker named Joe Sheer, who's fallen prey to a corrupt small-town cop (in that sense, THE JUGGER also owes a debt to Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH). In THE JUGGER, though, Sheer is dead before Parker arrives (and Parker was prepared to kill him as a security measure anyway). In TOID, Port comes to Dalton's aid in time to save him from that fate, though he also has selfish reasons for getting involved, including Corday's va-va-voom girlfriend.

Here's a slice of classic Rabe understatement, as Port barrels his way through some thugs blocking his exit from a nightclub:

Port headed for the nearest exit guarded by only one man. The band stopped before he made it, and the sudden quiet was unearthly. After the silence there was bedlam again; chairs scraped, people laughed, and a buzz of voices rose from the tables.

The kid at the door saw Port coming, but he didn't expect much from a man running away.

Then the kid's arm was suddenly bent double. The pain grew like a fire running up his arm and bursting hot and big in his shoulder.

"It hurts less if you walk," said Port's voice close beside him, and they moved out of the door and into the alley.

If, like me, you've read and reread all the Stark books many times over (and sadly, there will be no more), be on the lookout for Rabe's Daniel Port novels. They're worth the effort.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: Lionel White's THE KILLING (aka CLEAN BREAK)

Black Lizard Lounge #3: VIOLENT SATURDAY

The third installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s:

VIOLENT SATURDAY by W.L. Heath

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1985

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Harper, 1955

THE STORY: A bank robbery throws a small Alabama town into chaos.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A major Southern novel disguised as a crime thriller. Or maybe the other way around.


"The three men arrived in Morgan Friday afternoon on the two-thirty train from Memphis. They were the only strangers to get off the train that day, and several people noticed them but didn't pay them much attention. They might have been salesmen or minor businessmen of some sort. They only reason they were noticed at all was because there were three of them."

So begins W. L. Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY. The three aren't salesmen, of course, or minor businessmen. They're big city bank robbers who descend on the small town of Morgan, Ala., to plunder the local Savings and Loan. As their plans proceed and the titular day looms closer, the town itself seems to tremble with anticipation, as if a storm were gathering on the horizon. But before that happens, Heath delves "Peyton Place"-like into the passions and private dramas of Morgan's citizens, none of whom are very innocent themselves. When the run-up to the robbery leads to the kidnapping of the book's ostensible hero, an "expediter" for the Fairchild Chenille Company, things start to go badly wrong. And the book earns its title in a climactic shoot-out that's startling in its realism, especially by 1955 standards.

One of the great things Black Lizard did during its original run was bring near-forgotten novels like this back into print (even if they promptly fell out again), and VIOLENT SATURDAY is maybe the best of the bunch. Unlike most of their reissues, it wasn't first published as a paperback original. Though it was Heath's debut novel, it was bought and published in hardcover by Harper, and the film rights sold almost immediately. It was filmed later that year at 20th Century Fox, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Victor Mature, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin in an early role. The story was transplanted to Arizona, with Borgnine as an Amish farmer (!) who helps foil the robbery. The film isn't available on DVD, but can be seen in its entirety on Hulu.

VIOLENT SATURDAY is very much a novel of its time, and the casual racial epithets can be a little jarring, even in context. But the finely nuanced social observations and expert build-up of suspense put it right in the forefront of American crime novels of the 1950s.

William Ledbetter Heath has become something of an enigma in the decades since the book was published. He wrote at least eight novels, three of those for younger readers, but all remain out of print. The Black Lizard edition of VIOLENT SATURDAY also contains a great introduction by Ed Gorman, with plenty of biographical details about Heath, who was still alive at the time (he died in 2007). Black Lizard also reprinted Heath's follow-up, the excellent ILL WIND, which again takes place in the fictional town of Morgan, though it's only marginally a crime novel. Last year, browsing in a used book store, I found a British edition of Heath's third novel BLOOD ON THE RIVER, which, as far as I can tell, has never have been published in the U.S. at all. Like those two earlier books, it's an almost flawless merging of character and action, deeply evocative of small-town communities in the rural South.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: Peter Rabe's THE OUT IS DEATH

Black Lizard Lounge #2: THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH

The second installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s:

THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan J. Marlowe

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1962

THE STORY: Amoral professional criminal infiltrates small-town America, finds it rotten to the core.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The good stuff, 100 proof

I first read this novel about ten years ago and enjoyed it. Reading it again, I think it's some sort of twisted masterpiece. Written in first person, it's the story of a ruthless professional heister who travels cross-country to a rural Florida town to investigate the disappearance of a former partner, who was holding the mutual proceeds from a Phoenix bank robbery. Once there, he runs afoul of a crooked cop, a larcenous postal employee and other out-of-town criminals on the trail of the money.

The book begins in media res during that bank job, with bullets flying. The getaway driver is killed and the nameless narrator - who uses the aliases of "Chet Arnold" and "Roy Martin" in the course of the book - dispassionately guns down two bank guards before taking a bullet himself. He and the surviving bandit split up, the partner taking the money to squirrel away while the narrator hides out and recovers from his injuries. When the partner drops off the radar - and the monthly packages of cash stop arriving - the narrator heads east to find out what happened and try to recover what's left of the money.

A lot has been written about Dan J. Marlowe, so I won't go into much of it here. Suffice it to say that TNOTGID is about as hard-boiled as they come. While on his trek east, the narrator reflects on his past life and abusive childhood, the injustices done to him by bullies and brutal cops, and how it all forged a bitter rage and alienation that can't help but explode when triggered. But he loves animals, if not people, and even adopts an injured dog after he sees it intentionally run over on a Florida street. He also has a casual relationship with a big-framed barmaid, and forges a friendship with a local real estate salesman, all in hopes of getting to the bottom of what happened to the partner and the cash.

TNOTGID does bear similarities to Donald E. Westlake's THE HUNTER, the first of the "Richard Stark"/Parker books, published that same year, though it lacks the forceful focus of that novel. Instead, it gives us an almost textbook study of an anti-social, misanthropic outlaw who kills without compunction and has a mean-on for the world that can't be slaked. It does meander a bit midway, with passages devoted to horse racing discussions, the specifics and tools of tree surgery and the narrator's fondness for women with large bottoms. But the ending is a genuine surprise, with the narrator's anger and determination only fueled by the catastrophic events that overtake him.

Marlowe's nameless narrator returned in 1969's ONE ENDLESS HOUR, in which he was rechristened Earl Drake "The Man With Nobody's Face." In this new incarnation, he became an international adventurer and secret agent and the hero of 11 more Fawcett Gold Medal titles. These new books (and slightly revised versions of the first two) were reconfigured to fit in with the mens adventure series boom of the '70s. Although one of them, 1970's FLASHPOINT (later reprinted as OPERATION FLASHPOINT) won an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, most were far removed in tone and content from TNOTGID, and the books were clearly running out of steam by the time of the last one, 1976's OPERATION COUNTERPUNCH. Marlowe died in 1986. One of his final novels was 1982's GUERILLA GAMES - an installment in the Executioner spin-off series PHOENIX FORCE - written under the house name "Gar Wilson."

Though Marlowe did water down his signature character to make him more palatable (and marketable) in later books, Arnold/Martin/Drake is at his full sociopathic glory in THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH. In contrast to the barking dogs of most pulp paperback crime fiction of its era, this book is a wolf howl in the night.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: W.L. Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY

Black Lizard Lounge #1: SWAMP SISTER

As per last week's post, this is the first entry in my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early 90s:

SWAMP SISTER by Robert Edmond Alter

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1986
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1966 (according to the Black Lizard copyright page, other sources have it as 1961)
THE STORY: The crash of a plane carrying $80,000 in cash leads to murder and more in a rural swamp community.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Compulsively readable but somewhat tongue-in-cheek potboiler. Li'l Abner noir.

Satire alert: One of two novels Robert Edmond Alter wrote for Fawcett Gold Medal (CARNY KILL is the other, which I'll revisit in the future), SWAMP SISTER presents itself as a pulp thriller ripe with greed, lust and murder. Its hero, a strapping and virile swamp youth named Shad Hark, finally discovers the wreckage of the "Money Plane" four years after it crashes and helps himself to some of the cash, eventually drawing the attention of greedy and dangerous neighbors, swamp tramps and an insurance investigator with the unlikely name of Tarleton Ferris. Though it purports to be a down-and-dirty saga of the lives and loves of poor white trash on the bayou, it's actually a parody of the genre. Shad services unhappy housewife Iris Culver as well as Dorry Mears, the town slut, battle gators and human swamp rats, all the time conversing in local dialect that sometimes needs multiple readings to parse ("You can cold toot that again.")


It's never really clear where all this is taking place, though it might be Florida, since there are multiple references made to Jacksonville, and the swamp folk speak disparagingly of Louisiana Cajuns as if they were a different race. Alter seems to know his way around though, because the book is steeped in details about different types of swamp vegetation and the habits of bull alligators. However, there are some jarring and abrupt perspective shifts, including one when we're suddenly seeing things from the point of view of an angry gator. It seems unlikely SWAMP SISTER was the original title either. There's no major female character at all for the first 30 or so pages, and Dorry disappears midway through the book.

But Alter's satiric intentions become clearest near the end, when Iris Culver's husband - a pulp novelist - catches her half-naked in the arms of investigator Ferris, who excuses himself with a casual "Pardon me" and goes out to renew his search for the Money Plane. Rather than sheepishly apologizing, Iris takes the offensive:

"Do you think you could satisfy a woman? Any woman? ... Do you have any idea what your lovemaking is like? It's like that watered-down slop you write!...

Suddenly she spoke with cold sarcasm. "Do you know what your work reminds me of? It's like the trash those hack writers used to potboil for the pulp adventure magazines back in the '20s and '30s. They always called their dashing Nordic heroes names like McCoy or McKay or McCloud or Quincannon - names which automatically had a connotation suggestive of rough, manly derring-do. Invariably they had sandy thatches of hair, frequently red, and always a scattering of freckles on the backs of their tanned square wrists. But best of all was the manner in which these literary giants would introduce those girl-killing, booze-drinking, saloon-brawling, quick shooting, Scotch-Irish supermen. They would write. 'No plaster saint - comma - McKay'."

"Now you're not being fair, Iris. You know I don't use that archaic kind of sentence structure."

Devastated by his wife's infidelity and spot-on literary criticism, the husband retreats to his study with a .22 target pistol, intent on taking his own life. But he's distracted by the nautical scene he's left half-written on the page, and soon he's typing away, all thoughts of suicide forgotten:

He squared himself in his chair facing the typewriter and typed, "Marlinspike?" Reb cried. "I thought it was a blunt ice pick! -"

And after that - somehow - he just kept on writing.

**** UPDATE: And for those looking for more Swamp Girl cover art, look no further. Who knew?


Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: Dan J. Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH.

Black Lizard lounging

A few years back, I used to occasionally browse at a now-defunct Coles bookstore at a slowly dying Jersey Shore mall (since passed on). In the weeks before the store closed for good, odd things began showing up - dusty boxes of paperbacks that had been unavailable for years, British edition PBs in plastic-sealed three-packs, entire lots of books from individual publishers. All these, I guessed, had been recently liberated after being left to yellow in a warehouse somewhere (on one visit I found Gerald Petievich's first two novels, the long out-of-print MONEY MEN and ONE-SHOT DEAL, unread, for 69 cents each). All were mint condition, uncirculated books that for some reason had been stored instead of pulped.

One day, not long before the end, they set out a table with, I believe, almost the entire run of original Black Lizard mass market paperbacks published between 1984 and 1990. Founded by publisher Donald Ellis and edited by novelist Barry Gifford (right), Black Lizard had quite a run in the late 1980s, publishing more than 90 titles before selling its name and catalogue to Random House in 1990 (the label lives on as an imprint of Random's Vintage line).

The titles on display were like-new books, with glossy covers (most featuring original illustrations by Jim Kirwan) and bright white pages. They were a mixture of classic noir (Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, David Goodis), paperback originals from the 1960s and '70s (Charles Willeford, Dan J. Marlowe, Peter Rabe) and the works of some prolific but all-but-forgotten pulp masters (W.L. Heath, Harry Whittington, Steve Fisher), as well as a handful of new titles by contemporary authors (Jim Nisbet, Murray Sinclair, Sin Soracco). Though they'd originally been priced at anywhere from $3.99 to $7.99, the books had been marked down to 50 cents each. I bought them all.

I read some of the classics right away, books I'd heard of but never been able to locate - Lionel White's THE KILLING (aka CLEAN BREAK), Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY, Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH. Some I gradually got to later. I good amount of them I never got to at all - until now.

So beginning next Sunday - and continuing occasionally - I'll take a fresh look at some of those pulp gems, either reading them for the first time or revisiting them anew. First up: Robert Edmond Alter's SWAMP SISTER.

(BTW: the photo at top is a generic one, it doesn't reflect the actual books I bought that day, though I did get most of those pictured.

Click HERE for the reviews.