Criss-Cross -- Don Tracy

Bill Crider recommended Don Tracy’s second hardboiled novel CRISS-CROSS to me many years ago, and based on that, I hunted up a copy, put it on my shelves . . . and there it sat until the fire of ’08 got it, along with the rest of my books. Since then, I’ve thought many times about replacing it and, you know, actually reading it, but I hadn’t done so.

Until Staccato Crime, the Jazz Age Noir Classics imprint of Stark House, reprinted it in a double volume along with Tracy’s first novel ROUND TRIP, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I took that as a sign than I should go ahead and read CRISS-CROSS, and I’m glad I did.

Original Hardback Edition

This is probably Tracy’s most famous novel, no doubt because it was adapted into a well-regarded movie starring Burt Lancaster. I’ve never seen the film, but I might watch it sometime. Lancaster seems miscast to me as the novel’s narrator/protagonist Johnny Thompson, a former boxer who works as a guard on an armored car that carries payroll shipments in Baltimore. Johnny is in love with beautiful blonde Anna, who marries local shady character Slim but carries on an affair with Johnny, anyway. As if that’s not enough on Johnny’s plate, he has to take care of his mother and his younger brother, who has a speech impediment and is regarded as pretty dim-witted because of it, even though he’s actually not.

Tracy sets all this up in the same flat, ultra-hardboiled prose he uses in ROUND TRIP, and the style is just as effective here. Things heat up when Slim recruits Johnny to be the inside man on a robbery of the armored car . . . but is Slim actually setting him up to be knocked off because he’s discovered Johnny’s affair with Anna?

Retitled Lion Books Paperback Reprint

Naturally, all kind of complications arise when the stick-up actually takes place, as CRISS-CROSS is very much the model for the sort of noirish crime novel that Gold Medal would publish twenty years later. Nothing is black and white in this novel, it’s all shades of gray, and none of the characters are all that likable, either, although you can’t help but root for Johnny despite the fact that he’s pretty dense. Tracy’s style makes it all work, and the action scenes are really good. I don’t think I’m quite as fond of this novel as most reviewers, but I did like it and consider it well worth reading, both in its own right and as a precursor of so many noir crime novels that came along later. It’s available in both ebook and paperback editions and is a fine addition to the Staccato Crime line.

Round Trip - Don Tracy

Don Tracy had an odd career as a writer. As a young man, he published four well-regarded hardboiled novels during the Thirties while he was still working as a newspaper and radio journalist. Then he became a full-time writer and turned out scores of short stories for various sports and detective pulps, as well as having his work appear frequently in the slicks. He didn’t return to novels until the late Forties with some popular historical sagas, and then he concentrated on those for the next dozen or so years before turning to detective novels with a long-running series about an army investigator named Giff Speer. Also during the Sixties he wrote a number of movie novelizations and TV tie-in novels, as well as a few more historical epics, under the name Roger Fuller. (This is how I first encountered Tracy, with his BURKE’S LAW novels.) He wrote some non-fiction, as well. So he’s really a hard author to pin down and is mostly forgotten now.

Not by the fine folks at Staccato Crime, though, an imprint of Stark House Press that specializes in reprinting what they call Jazz-Age Noir Classics. They’ve recently done a double volume of Tracy’s first two novels, ROUND TRIP and CRISS-CROSS (which was made into a popular 1949 movie that deleted the hyphen and added Burt Lancaster). I just read ROUND TRIP, and it is indeed both hardboiled and noir. Very much so in both categories.

Retitled paperback edition; I don't know the artist

The narrator/protagonist is a young man named Eddie McGruder, who works as a news photographer for a Baltimore newspaper. As the book opens, he and one of the paper’s reporters are sent to a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to get the story on the lynching of a black man who was accused of some crime (and Tracy never really specifies what crime, as if it doesn’t really matter, which adds to the bleakness). The trouble Eddie runs into there is only a small part of the book, however. There are some flashbacks to his checkered past. Then he falls in love. Then there’s a sensational manslaughter trial. Everybody drinks a lot. The book reminds me of some of Elmore Leonard’s novels, in that a lot of stuff happens, but there’s not really much of a linear plot. Things just meander around, kind of like real life. And like real life, there’s a lot that can go wrong . . . and does.

Tracy’s prose in this book is about as lean and tough as you’ll find anywhere, reminiscent of Paul Cain. He can nail a character or a setting in just a few terse lines. ROUND TRIP is a very impressive book, but it’s a tough one to actually like, because of the air of inevitable doom that hangs over it. But then, that’s noir, isn’t it? If you’re a fan, I give it a high recommendation, and I’m glad it’s been reprinted so I had a chance to read it. I’ll be reading CRISS-CROSS, the other novel in this volume, soon, and I’m looking forward to it. The paperback edition of this book is available here, and there's an ebook edition, as well.

And maybe I’ll read some of Tracy’s historical novels, too. I have several of them on my shelves but have never gotten around to them.