I picked up this book a few weeks ago in Half Price’s nostalgia section for four bucks. I’d never heard of it or the author, but hey, it was a Gold Medal and it was in good shape, so I bought it anyway. So later I looked it up on ABE to see if I could find out if Cameron Kay is a pseudonym. Turns out that THIEVES FALL OUT is a rare book. Only two copies are listed on ABE, and the cheaper one is $135.00. Suddenly that $4.00 I risked is looking pretty good. The reason the book commands prices like that is because Cameron Kay is indeed a pseudonym. The real author is Gore Vidal.Now, I’ve never read anything by Gore Vidal except this book, so I can’t really compare it to the rest of his work. As a Gold Medal, though, it’s pretty good. The plot finds a tough, young, down on his luck American, Pete Wells, in Cairo, where he winds up broke after being drugged and robbed in a whorehouse. He falls in with some shady characters, including a beautiful woman, who hire him to help them with some mysterious and no doubt illegal scheme. It’s not long before various people are trying to kill him, a crooked police inspector (named Mohammed Ali) is after him, and Pete realizes he can’t trust anybody, even the girl he’s fallen in love with. Ceiling fans revolve slowly. A hunchbacked dwarf plays the piano in a Cairo dive. A smuggler talks like Peter Lorre. In other words, a fine example of a Gold Medal of the international intrigue variety.
As for the writing itself, it’s very smooth, almost elegant. And that’s where the only real problem lies in this book. A Gold Medal needs to have some raw passion to the prose. Gore Vidal is no Day Keene or Harry Whittington when it comes to putting some real heart and soul into a book. There’s not quite enough of the pure yarn-spinner in him. Still, there are some nice characters in THIEVES FALL OUT, especially the villains (and this is one of those books where nearly everybody is a villain to some degree, even the hero), and Vidal comes up with some good lines of dialogue and numerous striking images. As a reading experience instead of a collector’s item, I don’t think the book is worth $135.00, but I enjoyed it and I’m glad I spent the four bucks for it. If you ever come across a copy like that, grab it, because even a book that’s not in the top rank of Gold Medals is still usually well worth reading. I’d say THIEVES FALL OUT certainly is.
17 comments:
So, let me get this right... you are going to tease us with a book that we very well might not have any chance of getting a reading copy of??
Good catch, Mr R!
I think Hard Case Crime might be interested in reissuing this... it's a Gore Vidal after all and he's still alive, so negotiations could be made.
Didn't Vidal also wrote some other crime novels as Edgar Box? Or was it someone else?
Yeah, as I was reading this I was thinking it would be a prime candidate for a Hard Case Crime edition. Vidal wrote three mystery novels as Edgar Box, that's right. Now that I think about it, I may have read one of them, years ago, but I don't remember anything about it. He also wrote a romance novel under a pseudonym, but I don't recall the title.
If I only had gotten to Half Price a few minutes earlier! Sounds like a good read, and I also have never read Vidal.
Gore Vidal! I guess every major writer put their hand to pulp at some point. I did read one of the Box books, I think.
I've read quite a few of Gore Vidal's historicals and liked them but it's been a few years sinc then. His American history books are pretty interesting but tend to push the same ideological buttons. Burr and Lincoln or good but you could skip the rest. Creation was fascinating since, as he points out, three of the world's greatest religious thinkers -- Buddha, Confucis and Zoraster (sp?) lived during the span of one man's life. How rare is that?
It's hard to imagine Gore Vidal as the author of a Gold Seal novel. As for getting him to authorize a reprint of it.... As with the Edgar Box stories, if it has happened before now -- it ain't going to happen.
I've never had a chance to read this one, but Vidal's first novel Willowaw was a great thriller that has stayed with me for over 40 years.
Vidal, shmidal! It's a great book cover. I'd buy it just for that.
Yeah, the cover is probably the main reason I decided to buy it, since I had no idea who the real author was.
I've had this on my shelves for probably 35 years but never read it. I've even known that Vidal wrote it for many of those years. Maybe this is the impetus I need to take it down. Or maybe not.
I haven't read any of Vidal's mysteries, but I recommend his one science fiction novel, Messiah. It's probably 30 years since I read it but I remember it quite well. It's about the start of a new religion with the principal tenet, "It is good to die".
I knew if anybody else was going to have a copy of this book, it would be you, Bill.
And thanks to those who recommended other books by Vidal. I do plan to try some of his other work.
Here's a nice little article on Vidal's different pseudonyms, including the Gold Medal and the romance.
http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/pseudo.html
The three Box novels were published as one book and it's fairly cheap. The romance and the Gold medal, not so much.
The three Box books were in a large lot of old PBs that I bought yesterday at an estate sale. If I didn't read your blog on a regular basis, I never would have known about Vidal.
FYI, I've been in touch with Vidal several times over the years about this book and he has repeatedly declined to have it reprinted. It's a shame, because it is a good book.
Charles: you might want to try this which I came across in the article the link to which Gonzalo posted:
"Vidal's unpublished pulp novel Some Desperate Adventure..."
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