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.

Review: Hell Range in Texas - J.E. Grinstead

Recently I read some pulp stories by J.E. Grinstead that I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up a novel by him and give it a try. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is a 1958 paperback from Avon that was published originally under the title LAW OF THE TRAIL as a 1940 hardback by Dodge Publishing, one of the lending library publishers. This is probably an expansion of Grinstead’s novella “The Law of the Trail Herd”, which appeared in the September 1926 issue of the pulp THE FRONTIER. The Avon paperback I read (that’s my copy in the scan) says that it’s revised, but I don’t know what that revision consisted of. It’s possible Grinstead just went back to the pulp version after adding material to make it longer for the hardback edition. That’s pure speculation on my part, however, just the sort of thing that makes sense to me.

This story takes place in Texas (of course) in the days following the Civil War when the cattle industry is just getting started in the state and herds have started being driven up the trails through Indian Territory to the railhead in Kansas. The setting is a little unusual, though, in that the action takes place along the Little River in central Texas, rather than in West or South Texas like most Westerns. I’ve driven across the bridge over the Little River just south of Cameron, Texas, many times, and I’ve always thought it was a scenic stream and would make a good setting for a Western. That’s what Grinstead has done.

Most trail bosses in Western fiction are the protagonists, or at least sympathetic characters, but not Shag Sanders in this novel. He’s the bad guy in the first half of the book, stealing cattle from local ranchers as he heads north and buying rustled stock cheaply from outlaws. Old cattleman Montgomery Jackson (who, just as you suspect, has a beautiful daughter) is determined to put a stop to this, leading to a gun battle with Sanders and his crew shooting it out with the cowboys from Jackson’s spread.

However, one of Sanders’ men, young and gun-handy Frank Carleton, goes over to the other side and throws in with Jackson and his bunch, becoming a staunch ally in Jackson’s clash with a rival rancher who works with the crooked trail drivers. Matters are complicated by the fact that Jackson’s beautiful daughter is supposed to marry the rival rancher’s son.

You might also suspect that all this is going to lead up to a big showdown, and you’d be right. Along the way, Grinstead gives us plenty of colorful characters and Old West dialogue without getting too heavy-handed about it.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, but my memory was playing tricks on me and I was absolutely wrong about that. However, he was a newspaperman in Texas in the early 20th Century, owning and publishing the newspaper in Kerrville, Texas, a hundred miles or so southwest of where this novel is set, and he was also involved in politics. No doubt he knew quite a few old cattlemen who had been around during the era about which he wrote in his fiction. Because of that, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Grinstead’s work that I enjoy.

However, based on this novel, he may be one of those writers who’s better at shorter lengths. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is pretty slowly paced, and there’s not as much action as there might have been. The action that’s there is sometimes not very well-written, either. Late in the book, there’s a long chase scene/gun battle that really drags and is hard to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s always a possibility.

I give this novel thumbs-up on the setting, characters, and dialogue but found it disappointing because it didn’t capture my interest and drag me along in the story the way I like for fiction to do. I’ll certainly continue to read Grinstead’s stories when I come across one in a Western pulp, and I’ll probably enjoy them. I’ll even check my paperback shelves sometime and see if I have any more of his novels. But I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.

Blonde Bait - Stephen Marlowe

Stephen Marlowe is best remembered for his long-running series of paperback originals about private detective/international troubleshooter Chester Drum. But he also wrote science fiction under his birth name, Milton Lesser, and various pseudonyms, big historical novels late in his career as Stephen Marlowe, and numerous non-series noir and suspense novels, also as Marlowe. One of those stand-alones is BLONDE BAIT, originally published by Avon in 1959 with cover art by Ernest Chiriacka under his pseudonym Darcy. Stark House has just reprinted it under the great Black Gat Books imprint.

There’s at least one other noir novel entitled BLONDE BAIT, this one by Ed Lacy (Leonard Zinberg). I reviewed it more than ten years ago and had some reservations about it. But if ever there was a title that fit a genre, BLONDE BAIT is it. It goes together perfectly with noir. The blonde in this case is Bunny Kemp, a beautiful, unhappily married woman who pays a visit to a ski resort in upstate New York where our narrator, Chuck Odlum, is also unhappily married (to the resort’s owner) and runs the ski school there. Bunny and her husband have a secret, though, and once Chuck gets involved with her, things quickly spiral out of control and more than one brutal murder occurs. You know how it goes in noir novels.

I really enjoyed this BLONDE BAIT. Marlowe was a top-notch writer, skillfully mixing character, setting, and plot to create a fast-paced novel that careens along from one complication to another in a series of harrowing scenes. As Gil Brewer did in SATAN WAS A WOMAN, which I read recently, Marlowe uses nature to great effect, making the snowy setting almost a character in itself.

I’m glad Black Gat Books has reprinted this novel. It’s one I never came across, never even heard of as far as I recall. It’s an excellent yarn, and if you’re a fan of Fifties hardboiled noir, you shouldn’t hesitate to snap up this BLONDE BAIT. It's available in paperback and e-book editions.

Gang Rumble - Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons)

Despite the title and cover painting, GANG RUMBLE by Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons) isn’t really a juvenile delinquent novel as we usually think of them. One of the main characters is the warlord of a gang, and there’s a rumble at a bowling alley (although it takes place mostly off-screen), but this is actually a tidy little crime/suspense novel that takes place in about twelve hours, one hot Saturday night in a bad neighborhood in Philadelphia known as the Jungle.

There isn’t really a protagonist in this novel. Instead we have a large cast of characters weaving in and out of the story, including the above-mentioned gang warlord, his toadying sidekick, a hanger-on from a rich family who’s really a brutal sociopath, an old cop with a drinking problem, his beautiful daughter, the old cop’s idealistic rookie partner, a wealthy reformer who wants to clean up the city’s youth gangs, and a scheming underworld boss. Mix them all together and you come up with murder and a desperate hunt for a killer, with some torture and rape thrown in for good measure. GANG RUMBLE, as you might expect, is a pretty lurid book.

It’s also very well-written, and old paperback pro Aarons keeps the pace rocketing along. I had no idea what was going to happen next and kept flipping the pages to find out. If there’s one flaw in this book, it’s that the ending isn’t quite as dramatic as it could have been, which actually is pretty common in Aarons’ books, as if he can’t quite bring himself to go all the way over the top.

Despite that, I really enjoyed GANG RUMBLE and give it a high recommendation. As far as I know, it hasn’t been reprinted since being published by Avon in 1958, but Black Gat Books has a new edition coming out soon. It’s an excellent suspense novel and is well worth reading.