Review: Run, Killer, Run - Lionel White

Before there was Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and his famous protagonist Parker, there was Lionel White, the first real master of the heist novel. White didn’t write about a series character, but many of the protagonists of his novels bear a resemblance to Parker, including Rand Coleman, the lead character in White’s first novel, RUN, KILLER, RUN. The original version of this novel was published as a digest novel by Rainbow Books in 1952 under the title SEVEN HUNGRY MEN. White revised it and Avon published it as a paperback original in 1959 under its current title. Then Black Gat Books reprinted that version in a very nice paperback edition that comes out today. (You can see the covers of the two previous editions below. I don't know who did the art on the Avon edition of RUN, KILLER, RUN, but the cover on the Rainbow Books edition of SEVEN HUNGRY MEN is by the great George Gross.)

Rand Coleman is a professional criminal serving time for robbery when a corrupt lawyer manages to secure his release and recruits him to pull off a big job: an armored car robbery that will net a cool two million dollars. In telling his story, White employs the classic structure of the heist novel. Coleman assembles his team and we get to know them: a couple of veteran mobsters, a hotheaded young punk, a washed-up boat skipper, a sullen first mate. A couple of beautiful girls wind up involved in the proceedings. The plan for the robbery is laid out, and then we get the execution of it.

Do things go wrong? Of course, they do! But Coleman and his team get their hands on the loot, and now all they have to do is make their getaway to Florida, and from there, who knows? Cuba? South America? Unfortunately, treachery, greed, lust, and violence are along for the ride, too.

RUN, KILLER, RUN may not have much in it that we haven’t seen before, but this is a very early example of this sort of noir crime novel. And White spins the yarn with such skill that I was totally caught up in it, eagerly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. The twists and turns that White introduces in his plot never disappointed me, either. RUN, KILLER, RUN is a terrific novel, fast-paced and well-written and very entertaining. If you enjoy heist novels, I give it a very high recommendation.

Movies I've Missed Until Now: Uncertain Glory (1944)

I watched this movie a while back but decided I wanted to wait and let my reaction to it percolate in my brain some before I wrote about it, to see if I felt differently after I thought it over. UNCERTAIN GLORY, made in 1944, stars Errol Flynn, and I usually really enjoy Flynn’s movies. The script was co-authored by Max Brand. And it was directed by Raoul Walsh, one of my all-time favorite directors. So it seemed to be a movie I would really enjoy.

I hated it. And I can’t talk about why I hated it without tons of spoilers, especially about the ending. So if you’ve never seen this movie and think you might watch it someday, you might be well-advised just to move on and not read this post.

For those of you still reading, Flynn plays a somewhat different sort of character for him, a French criminal who’s a professional thief and quite possibly a murder. He’s been convicted of murder, anyway, and is about to taken to the guillotine when an Allied bombing raid wrecks the prison and he escapes. World War II is going on, you see, and of course France is currently occupied by the Nazis.

So far, so good. A French police inspector played by Paul Lukas is on Flynn’s trail, and for a while we get an excellent cat-and-mouse movie with Lukas trying to catch Flynn and Flynn trying to stay ahead of the law. Flynn, of course, makes friends with some villagers, because he’s charming and likable despite being a criminal. How could he be anything else? He’s Errol Flynn! He’s not really a bad guy. He’s just a rogue!

Or maybe not. He probably did all the things he’s accused of, the script deliberately leaves that ambiguous. But Lukas finally catches him and is ready to take him back to Paris for another date with Madame Guillotine.

But wait! The Resistance has blown up a bridge in the area, and the Nazis have taken a hundred of the local men prisoner and the local S.S. commander is threatening to execute them unless the saboteur turns himself in. Flynn hatches the idea of pretending to be the saboteur and turning himself in so that he can save the hostages, but only if Lukas will allow him to have a few more days of freedom. Lukas agrees, reluctantly.

This is all very well-done. The acting is great, the script is nice and crisp, and even though there’s not much action, Walsh keeps things moving along at an entertaining pace. I was enjoying this, waiting for what I figured was the inevitable twist: something would happen that results in a big, action-packed climax in which Flynn reveals he really is a good guy as he rescues the hostages, kills a bunch of Nazis, and redeems himself, after which Lukas lets him go to join a Resistance unit. Or else he rescues the hostages and dies in a blaze of glory with a machine gun chattering in his hands.

BIG SPOILER NOW.

What really happens: Flynn turns himself in to the S.S. and they execute him, I guess. We’re never really told one way or the other.

I was left staring at the screen with the proverbial “Wait . . . What?” look on my face. No bullets flying, no grenades going off, no stirring music? Would the ending I expected have been hokey as all get-out? Well, yeah, but it’s still what I wanted, and what I figured I was sure to get from Errol Flynn, Max Brand, and Raoul Walsh. I didn’t want some artsy “statement.”

I almost just let this one go and didn’t write about it. I’m a firm believer in the idea that you should review a book or a movie or a TV show for what it is, not what you want it to be. And to be fair, UNCERTAIN GLORY is a very well-made, well-acted movie. As a piece of cinema, it’s worth watching. But I was enormously disappointed in it.

Those of you who disagree—or agree, for that matter—feel free to let me know. Won’t bother me a bit either way.

Reviews: Fixed/Beyond the Finish - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

After reading and enjoying the first two Dr. Kildare stories by Frederick Faust writing as Max Brand, I decided to read more of Faust’s contemporary stories. Although most famous, and justly so, as a Western author, Faust wrote all sorts of stories. “Fixed” and “Beyond the Finish” are two with sports backdrops.

“Fixed” appeared in the June 13, 1936 issue of the slick magazine COLLIER’S. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a prize fight yarn about a middleweight title bout between the champ, a young Irishman named Slam Finnegan, and the challenger, a black fighter known as “Little David” Larue. Attending the fight is a gangster Faust refers to only as “Big Bill”. Bill knows something nobody else does: Slam Finnegan is going to take a dive in the ninth round, and Bill is going to clean up on a bet he made at long odds.

Of course, fixed fights never go exactly the way they’re supposed to. We all know that from the movies we’ve seen and the boxing yarns we’ve read. Sometimes the fix works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I won’t say which way it turns out here, but the fun for the reader is in the getting there, and Faust makes it fun, indeed, with lots of great dialogue between Big Bill, his lackey who attends the fight with him, other crooks and gamblers, and a beautiful girl who’s also ringside. You knew there had to be a beautiful girl, right? It’s fast and colorful and with more plot would have made a great movie with, say, Eugene Pallette as Big Bill, Joel McCrea as Slam Finnegan, and maybe Jean Arthur as the girl. I can’t help but see this stuff in my head.

“Beyond the Finish” also appeared in COLLIER’S, in the March 24, 1934 issue. With that title, it’s got to be a horse racing story. The protagonist is a young man who, after being orphaned, goes to live with his cousin, a wealthy horse breeder and trainer in Virginia. He becomes an excellent rider and is picked by his cousin to ride a new horse in the big steeplechase race. But there’s something shady going on, hijinks among horsey high society, if you will, and our hero winds up with quite a conflict going on, complicated (as these things always are) by the involvement of a beautiful young woman. Given all that, it’s not surprising that this story reminded me a little of a Dick Francis yarn, although it’s nowhere nearly as hardboiled and crime-oriented as Francis’s work. But Faust does a great job with the characters and the race itself, and he had me eager to find out what was going to happen next.

I really enjoyed both of these stories and plan to read more of Faust’s contemporary tales, even though I think maybe I’ve shaken out of my funk and am ready to go back to reading novels. We’ll see.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

This issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES has a great zero-g cover by Earle Bergey and a few writers inside you may have heard of: Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, Murray Leinster, and Frank Belknap Long (twice, once as himself and once as Leslie Northern). That's just a spectacular lineup. If you want to read this one, you can find it here, along with a bunch of other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Red Seal Western, August 1937

RED SEAL WESTERN is a little-remembered Western pulp these days, but it had some good covers and good authors, too. I think this cover is by Tom Lovell. The cowboy looks like his work, and so does the redhead. Inside this issue are stories by Harry Sinclair Drago, Claude Rister, Dean Owens (almost certainly a typo for Dean Owen/Dudley Dean McGaughey), Cibolo Ford (with his name misspelled on the table of contents), Mel Pitzer, and Wilfred McCormick, one of my favorite authors as a kid for his juvenile sports novels and dog stories. This certainly looks like an enjoyable Western pulp to me.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: A Soul in a Bottle - Tim Powers

For whatever reason, I’m not a big fan of ghost stories and seldom read them. But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I just read A SOUL IN A BOTTLE, a novella by Tim Powers that was published in a very nice limited edition by Subterranean Press, one of the best of the small-press publishers devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The illustrations are by J.K. Potter and are very, very good.

But what about the story itself? Well, it’s set in Hollywood and concerns a rare book dealer’s encounter with the ghost of a beautiful young poet who committed suicide nearly forty years earlier. Or was she murdered? That question gives this book a bit of a mystery feel, and the literary angle is appealing to me, too. I’d never read anything by Powers before (although I have quite a few of his books on my shelves), but I like his writing here. It’s lean and effective and zips right along. The twist ending isn’t really that much of a surprise, but it works pretty well anyway. Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read something else by Powers.

(Some years, I try to read at least one horror novel or some classic horror short stories for Halloween. Other years, I ignore it entirely. This year I'm rerunning my review of a novella about a ghost, so I guess that's kind of a middle ground. This post originally appeared on March 13, 2017. The book is still available in the same limited edition and doesn't appear to have been published otherwise. Despite my usual good intentions, I haven't read anything else by Tim Powers in the 18+ years since then.)

A Middle of the Night Music Post: Mirage - Steve Cole

I like this song because parts of it sound like it could be the theme song from a 1960s British TV show produced by ITV, full of international intrigue and adventure. When I listen to it, I can see the opening credits quick-cut montage featuring picturesque scenery, beautiful women, and ugly guys with guns.

Reviews: Internes Can't Take Money/Whiskey Sour - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

I often have spells when I can’t summon up the energy and attention span to read novels. One of those spells, combined with the urge to read something by Max Brand (Frederick Faust), one of my favorite authors, served to remind me that I’d never read “Internes Can’t Take Money”, the short story that introduced his famous character Dr. Kildare. It appeared originally in the March 1936 issue of the slick magazine COSMOPOLITAN and was made into a movie starring one of my favorite actors, Joel McCrea.

Dr. Jimmy Kildare is an interne who works at a famous hospital, assigned to the emergency room. As an interne, he receives no salary and actually lives in spartan quarters at the hospital. The only times he gets out are when he occasionally visits a nearby tavern for a couple of quick beers.

However, the tavern is owned by a powerful local politician/criminal, and it’s frequented by gangsters and strongarm men, one of whom shows up one evening with a bad knife wound in his arm that he suffered in a fight with a rival mobster. Kildare happens to be there, so against his better judgment he performs emergency surgery on the yegg and saves the use of his arm, if not his life.

That earns Kildare the respect of these denizens of the underworld, who try to turn him into a mob doctor. This creates quite a conflict for the morally upright but somewhat pragmatic Jimmy Kildare, who’s from a poor farming family and has nothing going for him except his medical talent, which is considerable.

As usual with Faust’s work, the writing in this story is very good. The guy could really turn a phrase. It’s full of colorful characters and the pace barrels along nicely. Jimmy Kildare is an excellent protagonist. I raced through this story and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had such a good time reading it, in fact, that I immediately read “Whiskey Sour”, the second yarn starring Dr. Jimmy Kildare, which was published in the April 1938 issue of COSMOPOLITAN. In this one, Kildare is still mixed up with some of the same shady characters as in the previous story. When a man comes into the emergency room, or the “accident room”, as Faust calls it, with a gunshot wound, Kildare is plunged into another moral dilemma that’s complicated by the involvement of a beautiful redhead who has a secret. This is another really fine, fast-moving tale with a lot of good lines and some genuine suspense. Maybe not quite as good as “Internes Can’t Take Money” but almost.

These are the only two stories to feature this particular version of Dr. Kildare. The movie adaptation of “Internes Can’t Take Money” mentioned above was made by Paramount, but that was the only story to which they had the rights. Faust sold the character to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and MGM wanted some changes. Faust, being the good freelance writer he was, said sure and rebooted the series beginning with the novel YOUNG DR. KILDARE, which was serialized in ARGOSY late in 1938 before being published as a book by Dodd, Mead in 1940. Faust followed that with five more novels and two novellas about Dr. Kildare. I read one of the novels about forty years ago and recall enjoying it quite a bit, but I don’t remember which one it was. Might be time to just start with YOUNG DR. KILDARE and read all of them, since they’re short and move fast.

“Internes Can’t Take Money” was reprinted in THE COLLECTED STORIES OF MAX BRAND from the University of Nebraska Press in 1994. “Whiskey Sour” hasn’t been reprinted, officially. But you can find both of these stories on-line if you know where to look, and I think they’re well worth reading. Faust’s greatest success, by far, was with Westerns, but I think his talents were very well-suited to contemporary yarns as well, and I’m thinking I might just try more of them while I’m stuck in this novel-reading funk. 

Review: Goddess of the Fifth Plane - William P. McGivern

I really enjoyed that William P. McGivern science fiction novella I read a while back, so I tried another novella of his from the pulp FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. This one falls more into the fantasy category, or at least science-fantasy, since it does have a sort of science fictional element to it.

“Goddess of the Fifth Plane” appeared in the September 1942 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and earned the cover painting by Harold W. Macauley. It’s a good cover, too. Not exactly how I pictured the title character but relatively close. And Macauley did a great job on her sidekick.

The protagonist of this yarn is Vance Cameron, a wealthy American explorer and adventurer who is in London as the story opens because he’s volunteered to use his aviator skills as a fighter pilot for the R.A.F. He doesn’t stay in London long, though, because a mysterious painting shows up in his flat, depicting a beautiful young woman and a fierce creature resembling a horned lion. Wouldn’t you know it? The painting is actually an interdimensional gateway, and Vance finds himself in another realm, up to his neck in a civil war between a deposed queen and the bad guy who has seized his throne. There’s a little political intrigue, but mostly two-fisted, swashbuckling adventure ensues as Vance fights to help the beautiful queen reclaim her kingdom. He finds a novel but very effective way to do it, too, as the plot takes a twist or two that are at least slightly surprising.

I really enjoyed this colorful, well-written yarn. It reminded me of some of the science-fantasy stories by Henry Kuttner that I’ve read. The action barrels along in a very pleasing fashion that would have had me enthralled if I’d read it when I was a kid sitting on my parents’ front porch. Reading it now as an old geezer, I was still very much entertained. If there’s still a ten-or-twelve-year-old in you who loves this stuff as much as I do, I highly recommend “Goddess of the Fifth Plane”. It’s been reprinted in the e-book THE WILLIAM P. McGIVERN FANTASY MEGAPACK. I plan to delve into that collection again soon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, August 27, 1938

I'm not a big fan of giant floating head covers, but this one by Emmett Watson isn't bad. Rather atmospheric, in fact. As always with ARGOSY, this issue has some good authors inside: Donald Barr Chidsey, Bennett Foster, Richard Howells Watkins, Howard Rigsby (best remembered for paperbacks written under that name and as by Vechel Howard), and Robert E. Pinkerton, as well as the lesser-known Frances Shelley Wees, C.F. Kearns, and John Randolph Phillips. The stories by Chidsey, Foster, and Wees are serial installments, also common in ARGOSY. "Lost House" by Wees was published in hardcover by Macrae in 1938. "Cut Loose Your Wolf" by Foster was published in hardcover as TURN LOOSE YOUR WOLF by Jefferson House in 1938. I think the original title is better. And Chidsey's "Midas of the Mountains" was only a three-parter, probably closer to a novella than an actual novel, and as far as I know, it's never been reprinted.