Awake and Die - Robert Ames (Charles L. Clifford)

Will Peters is a Korean War vet with shrapnel in his head and woman trouble. Although he’s an intelligent, reasonably well-educated guy, he ekes out a living as a clam digger along the New Jersey shore. He spends his time with a slatternly tramp who drinks too much and is cheating on her husband. Then two things happen that put Will even farther along the road to ruin: the tramp decides she’s going to leave her husband for good and move in with Will so they’ll have a common-law marriage, and he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde who’s married to a rich, abusive, wealthy businessman. We all know what that’s a perfect set-up for. But don’t assume you know how everything’s going to play out in AWAKE AND DIE, a novel by Robert Ames published originally by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Black Gat Books.

A lot of books with similar plots to this one are slow burns, taking their time to build up the pressure on the protagonist. Not AWAKE AND DIE. The killing starts almost right away, and it doesn’t let up for a while. The slow burn part comes more in the middle, where we wonder if Will is going to get away with what he’s done and watch his maneuvering to protect himself. Then it all kicks into higher gear again as the author throws plot twist after plot twist into the mix and does so with really good control over what he’s doing. Things that seem kind of random and haphazard really aren’t . . . and then something else happens to tighten the screws on Will even more.

“Robert Ames” was really Charles L. Clifford, an author who, like William Chamberlain, combined a military career with that of a pulp writer. While serving in the army for 35 years, Clifford wrote dozens of war and adventure stories under his real name for top pulps such as ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, BLUE BOOK, and SHORT STORIES and even cracked the slicks a number of times, too. He wrote four novels under his own name and three hardboiled crime novels for Gold Medal as Robert Ames. Despite those credits, it’s safe to say he was almost completely forgotten until Black Gat Books reprinted this one.

AWAKE AND DIE is one of the bleakest Gold Medals I’ve read, and Will Peters is one of the most unsympathetic protagonists—and that’s saying a lot, considering what you get in many Gold Medals. And yet Clifford keeps the reader turning the pages to find out what’s going to happen, and there are moments when you want Will to succeed in his various schemes, even though you know you shouldn’t. It’s a good book, well worth reading, and I’m going to have to look for the author’s other two Robert Ames books, as well as some of his pulp stories.