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.
