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)

Forgotten Book Friday Vol. 2 ...

... continuing Patti Abbott's tag-team effort of assembling a list of books which, in her words, "we love but might have forgotten over the years."

My previous Forgotten Book Friday choice was Donald E. Westlake's THE RARE COIN SCORE, written under the pen name "Richard Stark" and featuring Parker, the solo-named professional thief and protagonist of (so far) 24 lean and mean crime novels.

When I first discovered the Stark books in the late '70s, they were like nothing I'd ever read before. There was a certain terseness to them I recognized from Hammett and Cain, and a laconic coolness reminiscent of the quirkier '50s film noirs, but they seemed like a totally new animal. I was amazed by their compactness, their narrative drive, their swift declarative sentences and their objective amorality. They were something no one had ever done before, I assumed. They had sprung into the world fully formed, unique creations owing nothing to anything that went before them.

And then I discovered Peter Rabe.

Between 1955 and 1974, Rabe wrote more than two dozen novels, many for Fawcett Gold Medal. Five of these, beginning with 1956's DIG MY GRAVE DEEP, were the adventures of an ex-gangster named Daniel Port, who leaves "The Stoker Mob" to strike out on his own. The cold-coffee-swilling Port is tough, agile and intelligent, but unlike Parker, he's one of the more compassionate animals in his particular jungle. In 1957's THE OUT IS DEATH, the second book in the series, Port comes to the aid of an ill and aging safecracker named Dalton, who's being strong-armed into doing one more job for a brutal young gang leader named Corday (shades of Westlake/Stark's THE JUGGER eight years later, although in that case the safecracker is dead before Parker can get there).

I came to Rabe's novels late, when Black Lizard Books reprinted a handful of them in the late '80s and early '90s. I had burned through all the Starks by then, and the Rabe books were more fuel for the fire. They were clearly the direct forerunners of the Stark novels, and shared a lot of the virtues I'd found so startling - their brevity (they almost all ran under 150 pages), the precision and clarity of the descriptive passages and the refusal to engage in simplistic genre stereotyping of good and evil. THE OUT IS DEATH, while not the best of his novels, is a quintessential slice of Rabesian pulp, hard-boiled in an understated way that Westlake would polish to perfection just a few years later. Here's Port trying to make his escape out the side door of a nightclub, with a menacing group of thugs at his heels and a lone obstacle at the door:

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.

Some of Rabe's novels were recently reprinted as double editions by Stark House Press (though, so far, not the Port novels). When the bottom of the paperback original market fell out in the early '70s, Rabe went back to his other profession, teaching psychology, a subject in which he had a Ph.D. Two of his final novels were the Fawcett GODFATHER cash-ins WAR OF THE DONS (1972) and BLACK MAFIA (1974). He died in 1990 at age 68.

There were other antecedents to the Westlake/Stark books, of course, notably Lionel White's CLEAN BREAK (aka THE KILLING) and W.L. Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY, both of which were also reprinted by Black Lizard and are terrific novels in their own right. More on them at some point in the future.