Favorite Crime Fiction of 2025, Part II: Steven Nester

(Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.)

The books I’ve read and reviewed this year for my crime-novel podcast, Poets of the Tabloid Murder, have been many and varied. Although I prefer capers, hard-boiled yarns, and tales of the riff-raff living down to their (and my) expectations, this year I rounded things out. I peppered my reading list with a few locked-room mysteries, police procedurals, tea cozies, rom coms with gun-in-hand, and others. Yet however hard I tried to mix things up, my preferences prevailed. Below are the books from this genre that really made an impression on me, and which I would recommend to anyone.

• Everybody Wants to Rule the World, by Ace Atkins (Morrow)
• Crooks, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Karma Doll, by Jonathan Ames (Mullholland)
• The Get Off, by Christa Faust (Hard Case Crime)
• Pro Bono, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press)

These books present much to be admired (as did those that didn’t quite make my final cut), yet each possesses an aspect that stands prominently above their other attributes. The late Thomas Perry’s ability, for instance, to create a complicated plot, yet keep it accessible and still filled with surprises. Christa Faust brings the genuine down-low to life not just because she has lived it, but because during her wild-child youth she also honed her craft as a writer, able to make the transgressive tenable. Jonathan Ames keeps private-eye fiction very much alive, with a breath of fresh cordite and an inventive plot, plus a protagonist, in Hank “Happy” Doll, who refuses to say “uncle!” From the humid swamps of Louisiana to Washington, D.C., Ace Atkins dips his toes in international waters in a homegrown thriller that makes you laugh as well as hang onto your seat; his attention to the details of living in the troubled 21st century is complete and humorous. Finally, Lou Berney channels James Michener to expand his narrative style in a crime family saga that boasts of perfectly presented characterizations and a believable happy ending that won’t have anyone reaching for a Kleenex.

The Book You Have to Read: “Night of Wenceslas,” by Lionel Davidson

(Editor’s note: This is the 190th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Nicolas Whistler is the most improbable spy one could imagine; so improbable, that even he has trouble believing it. Self-reflective enough to at least acknowledge that “I am not qualified to do anything. I am also a coward,” he’s more the type to share a pint with his mates in the local pub, tool around in his beloved MG roadster and, a close third, perhaps, canoodle with his patient girlfriend Maura. The problem is that there never seems to be enough money to keep the good times coming, or even pay the bills. Couple that with fecklessness, immaturity, and a vague sense of direction, and it isn’t difficult to believe that this 24-year-old Londoner was bound to get into serious mischief—even though his path ahead had sounded totally legit. At first. And it’s no wonder that, career-wise, Nicolas Whistler is on the fast track to nowhere in Night of Wenceslas (1960), Lionel Davidson’s witty debut thriller.

Returned home after stints at university and with the military, Nicolas is employed in his uncle Bela Janda’s glass business and has been promised a partnership once he learns the ins-and-outs. However, his uncle now lives in western Canada and is no longer involved with the company. Try as Nicolas might (and it doesn’t seem like he’s trying at all), his climb up the corporate ladder isn’t happening sufficiently fast. This smug, magisterial trainee blames his tight-fisted, uncooperative boss, a Czech émigré named Karel Nimek, for his situation, bestowing upon him the scornful sobriquet “ratface” (one of many sarcastic nicknames he dispenses freely to people). Meanwhile, Nicolas addresses himself as “the young master.” Master, indeed: It’s fate, or dumb luck—yet most likely the careful observation of a third party—that allows easy opportunity to present itself, to Nicolas’ detriment.

Stephan Cunliffe, a lawyer, seems to possess all the answers to Nicolas’ problems. But the impecunious young man is too impatient, arrogant, and naïve to see the trap closing around him.

Cunliffe informs Nicolas that Uncle Bela has died, bequeathing him a bundle. He then loans Nicolas a couple hundred English pounds to tide him over until his big windfall arrives. Wouldn’t you know it, though—Nicolas spends the money in a matter of days. Had he not been so busy practicing at being rich, he might have paid more attention to the troubling clues he has noted in this first-person narrative: that Cunliffe and his secretary (dubbed “Bun-face”) both have slight foreign accents; and, as he says of Cunliffe, “I had the uncanny feeling I was watching a performance by some master ventriloquist who would shortly reveal himself.” Reveal himself, Cunliffe certainly does—but not before a few papers are blithely signed and the bravado and reveries of an anticipated spending spree take hold.

“The young master has come into his own with a vengeance,” a relieved Nicolas says to himself. “I could almost feel the gigantic sack of loot on my shoulder like some unimaginably heavy pile of nuclear material darkly awaiting conversion into other more useful forms.” It’s this type of observation and expression that shapes Night of Wenceslas into a light romp instead of a grim odyssey through a gray and forbidding Stalin-scape. On the other hand, what prevents Davidson’s coming-of-age-saga-wrapped-in-an-espionage-novel from becoming fatuous and farcical is its clever plot (you’ll see), its believable circumstances, and the author’s sharp characterizations.

Nicolas is so disregarding of risk and so desperate to change his situation, that he’s blind to the guile of people bent on using him for their own ends. Cunliffe, for instance. He’s done his homework, and in Nicolas he has found the perfect patsy. When Nicolas, tail between his legs, asks the attorney for another advance, the facts of life are revealed to “the young master” as Cunliffe reels him in.

Cunliffe tells him his uncle isn’t dead after all, so there’s no fat bequest. And he reminds Nicolas that he’s already into him for £200. He warns that unless that “loan” can be repaid, Cunliffe will take away his MG. However, there’s one thing Nicolas could do if he wants the debt forgiven: Travel back to his boyhood home of Prague, Czechoslovakia (remember, this story takes place before that nation’s split), and there drop by a glassworks that has a secret formula for making unbreakable glass. The assignment should take only a few days, Cunliffe assures him—enough time for Nicolas to satisfy his nostalgia for his homeland, and for the author to supply his readers with a bit of a highlights tour. Once in Prague, all Nicolas need do is leave a guidebook casually on the desk of his host, and the formula with be tucked into its binding by the time he returns.

Nicolas agrees to this deal, though he’s pretty much on pins and needles about the trip. Fortunately, “beautiful giantess” Vlasta Simenova, his “moodily magnificent” driver in Prague, helps to make him feel welcome and quite comfortable. Vlasta’s Communist bloc flirtations include such come-hither lines as “One hears stories. They say all westerners are spies for the Americans. Isn’t it so?” Nicolas assures her this is misinformation … after which Vlasta, as voracious for sex as she is for food and drink, has her way with her hapless “little merchant,” as she calls him.

Thinking his mission (and himself) well satisfied, Nicolas returns to London, only to be told there’s a major problem. It appears, says Cunliffe, that the glass formula Nicolas retrieved is incomplete, so he’ll have to go back to Prague. Once there, though, Nicolas discovers the real purpose of these cross-Europe excursions: He’s not smuggling information out of Prague, he’s smuggling information into Prague—sensitive military information. Nicolas Whistler has been magnificently played, and there’s no one to blame but himself.

Alone and stranded in Prague, a stooge for an obvious Cold War espionage ring, Nicolas is unsure of who his friends are on either side of the Iron Curtain. His Irish lover, Maura? The stunning Vlasta? Certainly not Cunliffe! Learning how Cunliffe found Nicolas in the first place and determined he could be so easily manipulated will at some point become a priority—should he ever return safely to the Big Smoke. But other matters are of more immediate priority. Realizing he’s finally the master of his own fate, Nicolas decides to make a dash for the British Embassy, only to be apprehended and beaten by the Czechoslovakian secret police. He escapes them, makes his way through busy Wenceslas Square, and after several changes of disguise and a harrowing journey, reaches the sanctuary of the embassy.

Yet he’s still not out of the woods.

Lionel Davidson (1922-2009) was a journalist both before and after World War II. Reporting duties sent him across Europe, and it was during a visit to Czechoslovakia that he came up with the plot for Night of Wenceslas (often given as The Night of Wenceslas). The novel would go on to win the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award in 1960 and be adapted as a 1964 UK spy comedy retitled Hot Enough for June, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylva Koscina.

After being out of print for many years, Faber & Faber re-released this novel in the UK in 2016. Some aspects of its story are as outdated as the Cold War itself, yet readers surely understand that the world is not a static place. Novels, especially, reflect an era and attitudes that may no longer exist; they sit on a shelf while the world changes around them. Vlasta’s “bomb-like breasts,” while truly appreciated by Nicolas Whistler, wouldn’t play in this day and age except perhaps as farce. But again, readers can recognize the point Davidson seeks to get across—that she is most likely an agent for the opposition, and her sexuality is a weapon to keep Nicolas in line.

Readers lucky enough to find Night of Wenceslas on a bookshelf somewhere are in for an entertaining experience.

The Book You Have to Read: “I Like It Cool,” by Michael Lawrence

(Editor’s note: This is the 187th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
When it comes to hip, beatnik-era private investigators, Korean War veteran Johnny Amsterdam talks the talk and walks the walk. Referred to as “the eye with a beard,” this hirsute leading man in Michael Lawrence’s second Amsterdam outing, I Like it Cool (1962), possesses the street cred and gravitas that get respect and acceptance from the hip as well as the squares, allowing him to navigate between bohemian party pads and the penthouses in the toniest Manhattan neighborhoods with confidence, aplomb—and of course, plenty of cool.

To author Lawrence’s credit (and readers will surely appreciate this) is his ability to describe people, places, and situations with Chandleresque efficiency and wit. It’s difficult to imagine he wasn’t enjoying himself as he came up with I Like It Cool’s cast, hard-boiled descriptions, and tough-guy talk. And like many P.I. novels, this one begins with a damsel in distress.

Sandra Tyson is a hip torch singer with monumental daddy issues; her father is Mark Tyson, the rich and renowned creator of Jeff Noble, a “hard-fisted, steel-jawed adventurer” who started out in comic strips, but eventually became popular (and profitable) on radio and television, as well as in movies. Never much of a father, Tyson abandoned his young family to live a life of “debauchery in the chic, café society bunch who mattress hopped and made the scandal columns.” After years of neglect, Sandra finally wants her piece of the Jeff Noble pie, to which she believes she’s entitled—and says there’s proof.

She’s awaiting the arrival of her friend, successful Los Angeles fashion model Helen Tate, who apparently has a cache of letters written by Mark—letters disputing his long-standing assertion that he was the progenitor of Jeff Noble, and acknowledging Sandra’s mother’s contribution. Quite plainly, Jeff Noble was mom’s idea. This would blow the lid off Tyson’s cartoon empire, as well as the door off his bank vault. Unfortunately, Sandra discloses her plans to Mark, and when Helen’s arrival is overdue, Sandra frets for her safety. With so much at stake, she hires Johnny Amsterdam (her late brother’s old army buddy) to track the model down.

The pair meet at a place called the Purple Pad in Greenwich Village, where Sandra is performing, and she makes quite an impression on the gumshoe: “She had a nice voice, not great, but loaded with enough of the sexual moxie to stop all conversation in the bistro.” It doesn’t take long for her to bed Johnny, on top of buying his help.

The missing Helen, Johnny observes while looking at a photograph of her, was “the sort of doll who could smile you into bankruptcy and make you enjoy it.” But when he does finally locate her, in a Manhattan hotel, she’s been beaten to a pulp, and is almost recognizable and barely hanging onto life. And the letters? Well, they’re nowhere to be found! This gives author Lawrence the opportunity to gather all of his characters on stage in order to judge their level of involvement in these sordid affairs and weigh their motives. One thing seems clear: Everybody has a beef with Mark Tyson, and it doesn’t take long for a missing-person case to become something worse.

(Left) Cartoonist-author Lawrence Lariar.

Drawing Amsterdam’s particular wariness, as well as that of his talented but unremarkable-looking business partner, Dave Gross (who, we’re told, could “tail a man into his own living room without being noticed”), is slinky Sandra. She blames Mark for beating Helen, and then she threatens him—gun in hand—with murder. This does nothing but get her onto the hot seat when Mark is later found dead in his office, killed while dictating into a tape recorder. Next on the list of suspects is Hiram Barrett, owner of Jeff Noble’s syndication company. Barrett is a man “who knew how to throw his weight around. A seasoned top dog.” Barrett’s daughter is Joan, “the gilded gal of madcap headlines,” whose lusty overtures to Mark angered her father, though Mark paid no heed to his warnings to stay away. Another notable player in this consuming drama is Lieutenant McKegnie of the New York Police, who possesses the usual crime-fiction bias toward private dicks and their work. “Ethics are for doctors and lawyers and preachers, not detectives,” he tells Amsterdam. However, it’s the secondary characters, the assistants and the artists, the sycophants and the unrequited admirers, who (you ought to know by now) are the one that readers should really keep an eye on.

As this story is written with focus and concision (it takes place over several days), you might not be shocked to learn that Michael Lawrence was a pen name, that of Lawrence Lariar, who happened to be a cartoonist himself. That art form demands economy, and the author wastes no time driving his narrative to its conclusion, with just the right number of red herrings and clues hidden in plain sight.

Lawrence/Lariar possessed quite the résumé, which should put to rest any pejorative comments concerning cartoonists and their talents. He developed comic strips (among them Barry O’Neill and The Thropp Family), drawing them as well as scripting them. Jewish by heritage, Wikipedia says “he created Yankee Yiddish Cocktail Napkins, which featured cartoons illustrating puns on Yiddish words and expressions.” Lariar served for many years as the cartoon editor for Parade magazine, following his similar role at Liberty. He also edited the annual Best Cartoons of the Year series. The Golden Age of Detection Wiki notes he was a former Disney studio “story man,” and Lariar went on to script several episodes of the 1950s TV show Rocky King, Detective.

Generous with his time and talent, Lariar was a mentor to budding cartoonists and illustrators, teaching and advising them, and fit more into a working day than seems possible. Perhaps those pursuits prevented him from writing further Johnny Amsterdam novels; interested readers will have to be satisfied with only one other entry in the series, Naked and Alone, which dropped in 1953. Yet Lariar did pen additional detective novels, not just as Lawrence, but as “Adam Knight” and “Michael Stark,” too. Homer Bull, Steve Conacher, and Sugar Shannon numbered among his other protagonists.

The author of almost 100 books, this unsung hero of American pulp fiction died in 1981 at the age of 72.

READ MORE: “Whodrewit? I Like It Cool, by Michael Lawrence,”
by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024, Part III: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• Double Barrel Bluff, by Lou Berney (Soho Crime):

Shake Bouchon, a onetime wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, is at it again, and this third (perhaps last?) installment in Lou Berney’s franchise is a doozy. Shake’s former boss and gorgeous ex-lover, Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan—who is now a capo di capo herself—has been kidnapped while enjoying a solo vacation to Cambodia. Shake is blissfully ignorant of this turn until he’s suddenly dragooned from his sedentary life by a mob enforcer, the Freudianly skewed Dikran, who demands his help in rescuing Lexy.

Meanwhile, in the jungles of Cambodia, Lexy is being held captive by a couple of knuckleheads, Ramos and French, who are waiting for their own gangster leader to appear and cut a deal for her release. This happens to be Bjorn, a Cambodian who speaks “flawless hipster American” and who really should’ve been a better planner; Bjorn has no idea who he’s grabbed or the consequences that might follow. Considering what readers learn about Bjorn’s lineage later in this story, he is in the wrong business.

It doesn’t take long for the whole abduction scheme to begin unraveling. Shake’s wife (and erstwhile adversary), Gina, arrives in Cambodia, along with Lexy’s second in command, who circles the circumstances like a shark and spots an opportunity to replace her as number one. Oh, and add to those plot twists an expatriate hippy girl named Mitch, and Ouch, a Cambodian godfather with CIA connections. If the success of this overseas free-for-all doesn’t convince author Berney to keep Shake alive for readers, then nothing will.

• Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips (Soho Crime):

It’s the long, hot summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, and Harry Ingram is in it up to his neck. This Black crime photographer and part-time process server happens upon a traffic stop in the city’s racially charged Watts neighborhood that quickly turns fatal. Cops beat the motorist, and when a young Black activist confronts them, he’s shot dead—and Harry documents the entire scene. The police then proceed to pound on Harry and take away his camera, a Korean War-era Speed Graphic. But while he recuperates in a hospital bed, his lover, Anita Claire, finds that camera, and the photos he snapped with it are published, putting Harry squarely in the unwelcome sights of the LAPD.

Once released back onto the street, Harry achieves plenty of notoriety and exposure (a bad thing for a man whose avocation is playing gumshoe), but that doesn’t stop him. An invitation to find the missing partner of a local businesswoman takes Harry on an odyssey through the underbelly of Los Angeles, where it comes as no surprise that even the police are corrupt—and they aren’t the only ones.

As this story progresses, Phillips adds complication upon complication. He eventually has Harry walking a fine line between crime and retribution, after he discovers that Anita, who also happens to be an associate of L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, has a sideline as a Robin Hood-like bank robber, assisted by her interracial parents.

Phillips, probably best known for creating private eye Ivan Monk (Violent Spring), recounts actual events—racial tensions and violence—that are a tragic part of this country’s history, and still haunt us today. However, a significant appeal of this novel and its predecessor, 2022’s One-Shot Harry, comes from how the author re-creates the past, dusting off a Los Angeles that no longer exists. Mid-20th-century demands for racial equality are brought more to the fore in this second Ingram novel, and it will be interesting to see in future installments of this series how Phillips’ intrepid lensman makes it past the age of Motown and Stax, and documents the country’s social/cultural evolution into the era of Superfly and Shaft.

• The Devil Raises His Own, by Scott Phillips (Soho Crime):

Novelist and screenwriter Scott Phillips has concocted The Devil Raises His Own with a touch of film director Robert Altman’s historical irreverence, choice of ensemble cast and meandering plot line, giving readers not just a slice of life, but a slab of life looked at from many angles. “The good old days,” Phillips tells us, is bunk.

It’s the year 1916, and Hollywood is just in its formative stages. After being found innocent of murdering her abusive husband back in Wichita, Kansas, Flavia Purcell flees to Los Angeles, where her grandfather Bill Odgen (the main character from Cottonwood, Phillips’ 2004 novel) now owns a photography studio. There she learns the business, but this being Hollywood—where dreams die and reality sets in hard and fast—Flavia and Bill soon find themselves in the nascent pornography business. (A warning for readers: this book features sex, but when it does [people must make a living somehow], it’s not even close to the full-frontal nuts-and-bolts, lascivious variety that’s so prevalent today.) As the city endures a succession of murders, Bill and his resourceful granddaughter find themselves mixed up in events as complicated and ominous as any found in old black-and-white pictures.

While The Devil Raises His Own is classified as “noir,” that’s true only in the way Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (a very dark take on the same town) is noir: the people in its pages make choices, sometimes bad ones, and must live with the consequences, dealing with what life has arbitrarily dished out. Vaudevillian losers of high birth; a washed-up actor getting a second chance as a child star’s punching bag; cinematic performers on the way up and on the way down—they all find roles here. Phillips offers a cross-section of pre-World War I America through his focus on early Hollywood, for it was there to which so many people with big dreams went to see them thrive … or die.

• The Last King of California, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):

As wildfires consume Southern California’s long, flat Central Valley, and war erupts among the area’s white-trash dope purveyors, Luke Crosswhite—heir-apparent to the throne of the criminal Combine gang—returns to the fold. Unsure whether to prepare to be groomed for the crown (the king, his father, has been incarcerated for a slaying Luke witnessed, yet he still calls the shots), Luke needs time to sort things out. Meanwhile, prospects are looking up for the gang’s crank-dealing business—that is until the vicious Aryan Steel gang rolls in. Its leaders demand not only a 10-percent payoff from the Combine for doing business in the neighborhood, but want Luke’s family’s gang to purchase their product, as well. The Combine’s de facto boss, Luke’s uncle Del, nixes any such deal, which is understood clearly as throwing down the gauntlet.

Amid all of this, young lovers Pretty Baby and Callie (the latter being an old friend to Luke) hope to escape the Combine’s hold over them at last. Their scheme involves ripping off an associate in a drug deal, and then handing him over to police. Unfortunately, that associate owes money to Aryan Steel honcho Beast Daniels. An all-out war ensues and the death toll mounts. As an initiated gang member, Luke must obey orders even though his future holds much brighter—or in the world of gangbangers, much darker—promise. When Del orders him to kill Callie in retribution for her actions, Luke realizes that the gang’s motto, Blood Is Love, cannot be taken lightly. Traveling to visit his father in prison, Luke is left to wonder, Just who is the last king of California?

Like Harper’s 2023 thriller, Everybody Knows, The Last King of California (published originally in Great Britain two years ago) is a most discomfiting tale of the American West.

Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...

• Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward (Grove Press):

Speaking of the American West, that expansive region has provided so many things: tall tales, legends, and more than a few rich myths. But its 19th- and early 20th-century history also contains a goodly number of real men and woman who lived large in spirit, bravery, and what might be called spunk. Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Belle Starr—they all made their marks on the growing country. This list wouldn’t be complete, though, without Charlie Siringo, a cowboy, bounty hunter, sleuth, and eventual silent-movie extra who has often been  overlooked by writers and filmmakers focused mostly on the Old West’s lawless particulars. Nathan Ward (previously the author of The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett) seeks to correct that slight with this non-fiction work—first published in late 2023, but released in paperback last fall—that supplies a deeply researched account of Siringo’s adventures and accomplishments.

Born in Texas in 1855 to an Irish mother and an Italian father, Siringo participated in his first cattle drive at age 12. He went on to survive a fusillade of beer glasses flung in a Dodge City saloon by the aforementioned Sheriff Masterson; chase after cattle rustled by Billy the Kid; witness Chicago’s deadly Haymarket massacre of 1886; and join the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for which he investigated mining corruption and pursued outlaws, among them Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also penned a variety of books, including A Texas Cow Boy: Or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), which readers ate up—and which helped mold the public’s image of the leathery range rider. After leaving the Pinkertons in the early 1900s. he engaged in a lengthy dispute with that agency, claiming it had sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs.

Without a doubt, Charlie Siringo was an American original, and Ward does him justice here. Son of the Old West gives a generous accounting of this cowboy-detective’s long life (he died in 1928, just short of his 74th birthday), at the same time providing a history of the West from the post-Civil War era through the age of steam to the wonderment of the motion-picture industry.

Other 2024 Favorites: The Queen City Detective Agency, by Snowdon Wright (Morrow); and The Arizona Triangle, by “Sydney Graves,” aka Kate Christianen (Harper Paperbacks).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Digger’s Game,” by George V. Higgins

(Editor’s note: This is the 186th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Jerry “Digger” Doherty, a degenerate Boston gambler with a drinking problem, is once again in a jam. This time a Las Vegas junket run by the mob has left him in the hole for six figures, and he’s got no plan for paying it back. His usual go-to guy is his brother the Catholic Bishop, but his eminence has had enough of his wayward sibling. Lucky for the Digger there are others to do the thinking for him; and since his skill set is breaking and entering, that’s what the loan sharks have in mind, whether this ex-con likes it or not.

Hot on the heels of 1970’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (“the best crime novel ever written,” according to Elmore Leonard), and resembling Coyle in style and execution, George V. Higgins’ The Digger’s Game (1973) offers fly-on-the-wall observations of how the other half makes money, loses money—and attempts to make good on it. Considering the alternative, anyone who finds themselves behind the eight ball with the mob will do just about any type of dirty work to get themselves in the clear. In gangster logic (and anyone’s) it’s very simple. The Digger’s counselor-in-crime lays out the law of supply and demand for him just before a heist, in his estimation of a pep talk.

“Some guys,” the driver said, starting the Jaguar, “some guys need more’n they have, some guys have more’n they need. It’s just a matter of getting us together.”

Because the Digger can’t be trusted to raise the cash on his own, “the Greek” is brought in to help. An old-school mob enforcer, the Greek also happens to be regent for the enterprises of an imprisoned crime boss. Among the diverse holdings the Greek oversees on his behalf is a partnership with two young cologne-soaked sharpies who run the junket operation that allowed the penniless Digger to gamble on their dime. A source of irritation for the Greek, who’s ever mindful of money, is that those two hotshots rolled the dice on Digger just to fill an airplane seat, only to came up snake eyes.

“We hadda fill the plane,” Torry said. “We had fourteen beds at the hotel, we’re gonna have to pay for, at least one night, we don’t use them, the whole three nights, they don’t rent them to somebody else. Miller told me he was coming up empty, his other prospects. I said I’d see what I could do. So I tried the Digger.”

Richie the Greek said, “You hang around the wrong guys. You know them guys?”

And it doesn’t stop there. The trio butt heads once again when the youthful sharpies explain how they want to turn their junket operation into a legit business: a travel agency. As far as the Green is concerned, this would present problems. A paid secretary, expense accounts, and an office worthy of looking mainstream are components of their vision, but the Greek is from another generation. More comfortable with back-room dice games than welcoming newly flush marks to the jet set, he owes fealty to working-class characters from gritty places like Worcester and Providence; he’s only babysitting these two upstarts because he’s obligated to.

So this book is about two underworld figures, the Digger and the Greek, both with big problems. But as with any Higgins novel, there are more attractions here than simply the plot.

As a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts (and an ex-crime reporter), this author had experience with the criminal world, and anyone who’s read his work before can expect a signal strength of The Digger’s Game to be in how it captures the cadence and idioms of his characters’ dialogue. The son of exacting schoolteachers who read aloud to him, it was perhaps that which helped Higgins develop an ear later in life for the ways in which people—especially crooks, cops, lowlifes, and politicians—spoke. Capturing those peculiarities on the page helped put his readers into the thick of things. Yet, because Higgins’ books are driven by soliloquies in the patois and rhythm of Boston hard guys—“patterns of elision and compression that people use,” as he put it—stage direction and sense of location are nowhere to be seen. The reader must pay special attention to nuance. Some may balk at the challenge Higgins presents, but he had a careful, straightforward plan for his writing style. As he said, “Dialogue is character and character is plot.”

By following that maxim, Higgins made his stories ready for cinematic interpretation. Eddie Coyle made it to the big screen in 1973, starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. Cogan’s Trade (1974), repackaged for moviehouses as Killing Them Softly, with Brad Pitt playing a hit man, never achieved the same renown.

The author of more than 30 books, most of them novels, Higgins also published on a variety of other subjects, including baseball, politics, and naturally, the art of writing. On Writing: Advice for Those Who Write to Publish (or Would Like To) reached print in 1990. In it, Higgins gives credit to his characters for the strength of his storytelling, and not to himself as their creator. It’s advice that any budding fictionist should heed. “I’m not writing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling the story.”

The Book You Have to Read: “Dr. Nyet,” by Ted Mark

(Editor’s note: This is the 184th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
The James Bond franchise—the film adaptations, especially—have spawned a plethora of spin-offs, rip-offs, spoofs, and goofs. Books, comics, films, television shows (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart), video games, and more have proliferated over the years, mocking Agent 007 all the way to the bank. There’s really no secret to their success: the spies depicted in those parodic homages are invincible (despite their Austin Powers ineptitude), and they are legion. Seemingly bullet-proof, they also possess an unflappable nonchalance, a wry wit undamped by danger, and the ability to improvise their way out of a bad situation or into the bed of almost any woman they desire.

Which begs the question: Who wouldn’t want to be a superspy? Who wouldn’t want to be Steve Victor, the leading man in Ted Mark’s “The Man from O.R.G.Y.” series? Yet Dr. Nyet (Lancer, 1966), the fourth of those 15 paperback adventures, shows that while life is a bowl of cherries for a superspy, one must be wary of bullets in the mix.

(Right) Dr. Nyet (1966), with cover art by Stanley Borack.

Victor is a freelance sex researcher from the States, who occasionally undertakes odd jobs for an unnamed U.S. espionage organization. His one-man company is called O.R.G.Y., an acronym for the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth, and his reputation is well-established. In Dr. Nyet, he’s recruited in flagrante delicto by the British Secret Service for a top-secret mission. An anti-sex organization known as S.M.U.T. (Society of Moral Uplift Today) is determined to stamp out “illegal sexuality” in everything from “bra ads to ballet costumes.” Although its imputed puritanism makes Hugh Hefner resemble Jerry Falwell, S.M.U.T.’s real intention (no spoiler alert needed here) is to take over the world. And it plans to accomplish that through sex.

It seems the eponymous Dr. Nyet, a comely Russian scientist, has invented a drug that counteracts birth-control pills, while at the same time acting as an aphrodisiac. Now she’s defecting to S.M.U.T. and taking her secret formula with her. The short-term goal of their alliance? To create a “catastrophic population increase.” Their long game? Well, you’ll just have to take this ride with Victor to find out.

The Russians and the Chinese are already in hot pursuit of Dr. Nyet, but Victor hopes to get out in front of them, mustering his best 007 bravado to infiltrate S.M.U.T. Posing as a sympathetic researcher, he decides to snoop around the organization’s New York headquarters, but gets off to a bad start. He’s interviewed by S.M.U.T. executive Prudence Highman, “a dried fig labeled female by the clothing she wore,” as the cruel and captious Victor observes, with plenty of Swingin’ ’60s chauvinism. As far as salacious double entendres go, author Mark is just getting warmed up. Horace Crampdick, Jock O’Steele, and brothel madam Mrs. Vendergash all have walk-ons in this then racy (but by today’s standards, squeaky clean) parody. Highman is at the top of the organizational chart, and Victor scoring an audience with her should’ve tipped him off that his cover has been blown. When Prudence is subsequently murdered by her husband, Peter, who attempts to frame Victor for the crime, it’s game on. Fortunately, Victor finds an ally in his efforts to bring S.M.U.T. down: Singh Huy-eva, a Nepalese Gurkha, who, like our randy hero, is on a mission.

Victor is looking to save the world; Singh is looking to save his national heritage. He brings O.R.G.Y.’s man up to speed by explaining how S.M.U.T. finances its operations, in part by looting ancient erotic religious art from around the world and then fencing it on the black market. Singh’s current quest is to recover a piece of sculpture: a four-foot-long, solid-gold, jewel-encrusted phallus wrested from a sacred statue. Readers can’t avoid the low Freudian humor provided at the expense of Singh, who tells Victor he was emasculated in battle. In short order, Victor and Singh bond and begin a global journey that allows author Mark to school his readers on geopolitical issues, starting with a discourse on Ghurkas, going on from there to recall the colonialism and racism inflicted on Rhodesia by nefarious folks in pursuit of its gold reserves (S.M.U.T. has its grubby fingers in that pie, too), and offering a diatribe on African pygmy tribes, besides. All of that background seeks to establish the humanitarianism behind Victor’s quest. A quest that here includes his introducing oral sex to Eskimos, once he’s made his way to the Arctic lair of S.M.U.T.

That’s where the not-so-pure driven snow finally hits the fan.

Author Ted Mark, who also hid behind other pen names during his career, was born Theodore Mark Gottfried in 1928. He is credited with turning out more than 100 books, many of them non-fiction titles for young readers. In addition, of course, he wrote literate smut with a light and fatuous touch that alternately danced just above the belt (“her oven of love was starting to rekindle itself”) and went full-throttle adolescent braggadocio (“She had both fists around me like a sports car enthusiast going gaga over a new stick shift. And I was strumming her little passion switch like a banjo player mad with palsy.”).

(Left) Dr. Nyet’s back cover.

How anybody thought such mischevious “sexploits” might be translated to film is anybody’s guess. But there was indeed one movie made from Mark/Gottfried’s books: 1970’s The Man from O.R.G.Y. It starred Robert Walker Jr., along with comics Steve Rossi and Slappy White. Walker Jr. was a bargain-basement Jack Lemmon, who was lucky enough to have entrée into the American film community. The son of performers Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo) and Jennifer Jones (The Song of Bernadette, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing), he boasted a lengthy movie and television résumé (including roles in 1969’s Easy Rider, an episode of the original Star Trek, and Columbo). Possessing an affable and bungling comedic style, Walker Jr. could turn on the intensity for psychological dramas when needed, but didn’t possess the gravitas needed to make the A-list. As for The Man from O.R.G.Y., the production company and director James Hill did what they could by meeting the sexual revolution head on. The picture was marketed with this tagline: “Meet Steve Victor, a new breed of agent. He stands up for what he believes in ... SEX!” Yet at the time, Hollywood was bursting at the seams with sex, and perhaps that was part of the problem. The movie bombed, and aside from its presumed lack of quality (has anyone out there actually viewed it?), it got lost in the mosh pit of carnal frivolity surrounding the sexual revolution.

Steve Victor may have faded into cinematic history, but he does complete his mission in Dr. Nyet. The story’s evildoers get their come-uppance and Victor, who was unceremoniously wrested from the bed of a willing lass in Chapter One, is lucky enough to meet her again on his return to London. This time, though, it’s truly a happy ending for our man Steve. And, in a way, for readers as well.

Should you prefer to ignore parodies such as this one, and stick with the real thing instead, it’s fortunate that James Bond lives on. As, in a sense, does Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. A newly published biography of the spy/author/bon vivant, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harper), by Nicholas Shakespeare, reached U.S. bookstore shelves earlier this spring. At 800-plus pages in length, it should satisfy any spy-fiction lover, because in many respects, Fleming resembled Bond, or vice-versa—confirming that there’s plenty of truth in the fiction. Shakespeare demonstrates his insight when he calls Agent 007 “Peter Pan with a gun.” One wonders why Bond never starred in a novel, or at least a film, titled The Spy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Not unlike Steve Victor, he’s the stuff of fantasy, at least partly.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part V: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• Too Many Bullets, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime):

The beauty of conspiracy theories is that they can’t be proved or disproved. They live forever in a kind of limbo, like those surrounding the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman—or, in this instance, the 1968 assassination of Democratic U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was then running for president. In his 19th well-researched novel starring Chicago-based private eye Nathan Heller, acclaimed author Max Allan Collins takes the RFK tragedy in an interesting direction, combining Manchurian Candidate paranoia with Rat Pack hip.

Heller is brought on to enhance security for his old friend Bob Kennedy during the candidate’s fateful, June ’68 campaign stop at downtown Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. After that assignment goes horrifically wrong, and RFK is shot (which history tells us was the work of a Palestinian-Jordanian ex-stablehand named Sirhan Sirhan), the P.I. is approached by none other than syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson (who had previously been “unduly harsh” on the senator) to probe what he contends has been a cover-up by L.A. police of the true circumstances behind Kennedy’s killing. “[I]t would appear there are too many bullets,” Pearson tells Heller. “The assassin’s gun only held eight rounds, but many of the witnesses report substantially more shots.”

This is a star-studded outing for Collins’ hard-boiled shamus, rich in dialogue (the most economical method by which to deliver information in this sprawling story); and Heller overlooks nothing, starting with a mystery woman in a polka-dot dress and traveling all the way up the food chain to the CIA and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. The journey is the point of this book, and there is an unexpected payoff for Heller: he may not get his man, but he does get the girl.

• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow):

“I’m lost, wandering, and somewhat stoned,” says Hardy “Hardly” Reed as he introduces himself in Berney’s fifth novel, following the award-winning November Road (2018). The 23-year-old Hardly is a low-paid slacker employed as a scare-worker at a decrepit amusement park in some unnamed Midwestern city. He exhibits no more ambition than to take another toke and play with his Xbox.

But Hardly (think “hardly ever tries”) is thrust into responsibility when he figures out that two seemingly abandoned young siblings, dotted with cigarette burns, are in the custody of a mother who lives in fear of her abusive, drug-dealing lawyer spouse. That’s the real scare show, and it turns worse (and also better) when Hardly decides he finally wants to matter. Child Protective Services offers no help to those children, and while their schoolteacher sees signs of their mistreatment, she does nothing, prompting Hardly to play amateur sleuth in an effort to render the lost siblings aid.

For a young man who likes “being ordinary,” it comes as no surprise that he was reared in a foster home and possesses empathy he can rouse to action. With the help of a renegade Goth DMV worker, who supplies information about the abusive couple’s identities, and an older, very helpful woman who is conversant in private investigation techniques and takes the learning-curve-challenged Hardly under her wing (and then some), Hardly finds that he really does matter after all.

• Bloody Martini, by William Kotzwinkle (Blackstone):

Brother Thomas “Tommy” Martini has yet to solve his anger-management problem, and in this sequel to Kotzwinkle’s Felonious Monk (2021), it serves him well. With a hair-trigger temper and the heft to back it up, why would he want to change? He’s a knight errant (but still a Benedictine monk), and a fist often comes in handy. The “grenade of anger I carried inside me was armed once again and ready to blow,” is how he puts it. The pin is pulled in Bloody Martini when he’s faced with both human trafficking in his small hometown of Coalville, Pennsylvania, and the murder of old friend.

Tommy has returned to Coalville—a (fictional) place manifestly bursting with mine fires, as if hell was breaking through—at the request of Finn Sweeney, a crusading TV journalist who might be onto something, and who has asked Tommy to look after his wife, Bridget Breen, an old flame of Tommy’s who has gone missing. Few people are happy to see the prodigal son return; eight years ago, he killed a Coalville man by accident, forcing his exile and unlikely move into the monastic life, and nobody has forgotten about that. His nemesis, a local district attorney aptly named Brian Fury, tried to lock up Tommy for that slaying, and he’s ready to move against our hero again, only this time with brutality and thuggery. It helps that the Martini family business is organized crime; that levels the playing field, letting Tommy fight fire with fire in a novel that’s as humorous as it is violent.

• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):

Life is precarious in the Hollywood Hills, where “houses that hung from cliffs like suicides” are no refuge for even the biggest of stars. The cannon fodder of the show business world live there as if self-destruction was part of the job description—and that’s where Mae Pruett comes in. She’s a “black-bag publicist” for a Los Angeles public relations firm, specializing in disaster control. Truth and lies play hide and seek in Mae’s world, and some clients and associates are “so up front with bullshit it almost counts as honesty.”

When Mae’s boss, Dan Hennigan, is gunned down during what looks like a carjacking, she is convinced there’s more to the story. Mae begins to investigate with valuable assistance from Chris Tamburro, ex-cop, ex-lover, and freelance muscle. They soon find themselves embroiled in a case that blooms like blood in the water, attracting the attention of lawyers, renegade police, sleazy industry insiders, politicians, and the incredibly wealthy—call them, collectively, “the Beast”— because if one isn’t careful, you’ll be lunch.

After all the dirty chores Mae has had to undertake over the years, she yearns “to do one good thing.” She finally gets that chance—but even it is tainted with cynicism and deceptions. Everybody Knows is eminently quotable; author Harper’s sentences are short, pointed, and ironic. Anyone searching for a killer mash-up of Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler should look no further.

Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves …

• While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, by J. Reuben Appelman (Harper):

It was just over a year ago that Americans were shocked to hear about the random fatal stabbings of four University of Idaho students living off-campus in the small college town of Moscow (pronounced MOS-koh). In While Idaho Slept, private investigator and crime journalist J. Reuben Appelman dives deep into the story by taking over where Truman Capote left off in his groundbreaking work, In Cold Blood. But instead of trying to create empathy for the murderers, as Capote did, Appelman puts his focus on those who perished. He re-creates their lives, with dialogue and character movement, and with just enough detail to build a bond between reader and victims.

The accused perpetrator, 28-year-old Bryan Christopher Kohberger, was a Ph.D. criminology student and teaching assistant at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, located less than eight miles west of Moscow. Police linked him to the November 13, 2022, carnage through DNA evidence found on a leather knife sheath discovered at the crime scene. He was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania in late December of that year, and formally charged on January 5, 2023. Kohberger has said since that he expects to ultimately be exonerated in court. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, but the case has yet to go to trial. Meanwhile, new facets of the killings and of Kohberger’s defense continue to emerge. His lawyers will likely insist the house where the victims lived was a “party house,” and say he very well have attended one of these parties. Further, they’ll argue he was not at the scene when the crimes were committed, but instead out on a routine drive, alone.

An interesting element of Appelman’s account is his description of how the execution of crimes and their subsequent investigation has changed with the advent of social media. It would be a distinction of some sort if, during jury selection in Kohberger’s trial, one or more of the prospective jurors were disqualified because they’d read this book.

Other 2023 Favorites: The Lost Americans, by Christopher Bollen (Harper); Hard Country, by Reavis Z. Wortham (Poisoned Pen Press); Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley); Device Free Weekend, by Sean Doolittle (Grand Central); and The Gentlemen's Hour (Simon & Schuster, from 2011).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Looters,” by John Reese

(Editor’s note: This is the 182nd installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
The Looters (published originally by Random House in 1968) is not so much a crime novel as it is an examination of human behavior, the American banking system, economics, gambling, government, racism, organized crime, state’s rights, and a few of the Seven Deadly Sins. That’s a lot to pour into a scant 205 pages (and too much to cover here), especially when there’s a bank job to pull. Author John Reese accomplishes the task—but to the detriment of the action in this novel. His well-conceived caper didn’t live up to its potential as a pure heist yarn until it was filmed in 1973 as Charlie Varick, starring Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, and John Vernon as opposing heavies. That doesn’t mean, though, that readers should ignore this book. Reese had a plan and stuck to it; and his character studies of criminals, and how the local citizenry is affected by their crime, comprise an interesting—if not crucial—element of the narrative.

Charlie Varick is an ex-con, crop duster, and former stunt pilot who thinks robbing the Tres Cruces National Bank in a sleepy California town will be an easy score. Aided by his common-law wife and two henchmen, he pulls the job. The bad news is that it doesn’t go as planned; the good news is it doesn’t go as planned. A bank guard and a cop are killed and another one shot up, and Varick loses a couple of accomplices (including his missus). Oh, and about that bank? Varick had no idea its vault would be filled with six figures worth of cash, or that the small institution was being used as a repository in a Mafia money-laundering operation.

But things are about to get even knottier.

Reese turns up the suspense by making Varick hide in plain sight after the rip-off. He can’t skip town because he’s on the radar of the local constabulary and must play it cool; he can’t cut loose his surviving partner, Harman Sullivan, because Sullivan is the linchpin in their crop-duster cover story and could easily be turned by police interrogation. (Once readers get to know Varick, they see he’d never split the take with Sullivan and send him on his way; he just can’t be trusted.) Making matters still worse, bank thefts automatically get the FBI involved, and once the feds begin sniffing around it doesn’t take long for them to figure out what’s really going on. From their viewpoint, the money—where it came from and where it’s going—is more important than solving a petty hold-up. While Varick is left to cool his heels, readers learn plenty about everyone involved in this tale.

With the Mafia out almost half a million bucks from this heist, J.J. Schirmer, a heavy-hitting, self-hating Semite who runs the bank for the mob, is ordered to put a lid on the situation. An amoral war-profiteer and homophobe, among other things, Schirmer is tough enough to butt heads with the FBI, which is closing in fast. “Well,” he fumes, “give it your best shot, you smart little City College dill-pickle G-man!” This is one of his more PG-rated rants, and he has plenty to say about plenty, from the banking system (he schools “Possum Trot,” a corrupt U.S. senator from Nevada on the subject, and predicts electronic bank transactions) to the inferiority of his fellow man based merely on gender, skin color, religion, or country of origin.

Meanwhile, we find that Varick is a cold-hearted misogynist who rues the deaths of no one, not even the woman in his life, whom he remembers as a “pig.” To avoid being implicated in the mess around the robbery, he actually sets her corpse on fire, hoping to inhibit its identification. But he can’t stay under the radar forever.

An enforcer named Molly Edwards is soon hired to recover the missing dough and keep any further damage to a minimum. His best route to doing that may be locating Sybil Fort, Schirmer’s secretary and doormat of a lover. Schirmer has sent Sybil into the wind with incriminating evidence that could bring down every mafioso and crooked politician from coast to coast. A “perverted cottonmouth,” Molly is named after a family friend. He must have endured as much ignominy as the boy named Sue, because he’s now a sadist of the first order, sparing no one as he takes out his revenge on others for the wrongs done him in life. The last thing Sybil Fort wants is Molly dogging her tail. But as readers discover, she’s a woman willing to put up with only so much before striking back.

There’s a Peyton Place-like undertone of drama coursing through the small town where this story’s action takes place. In the wake of the stick-up, police chief Bob Horton is aroused by Mildred, the widow of his newly dead officer, who wastes no time in letting him know she’s available—even though her hubby hasn’t yet been buried.


(Above) The poster promoting 1973’s Charley Varick. Click here to watch the official trailer for that picture.

Of greater interest is policeman Kenneth “Stainless” Steele, who was injured less seriously during the robbery, and who spends most of this book in a hospital bed. Since he interacted briefly with the thieves after they pulled their car up to the bank, Steele is assigned a sketch artist named Joyce (who frets that she’s bound headlong for spinsterhood at the ripe old age of 26). With Steele’s help, she arrives at a workable representation of Varick. In a desperate and awkward encounter, she also deflowers the young officer, after which he remarks: “By golly, that’s one thing you can learn in a hurry.” Bolstered by newfound manliness, Steele antes-up for greater glory. He abandons his hospital bed, straps on his pistol, pins on his badge, and re-enters the world as a man, prepared to make his bet amid the high-stake chips that might be stacked against him.

Such High Noon heroism is not reflected in the big-screen adaptation of this yarn, yet the production’s cast couldn’t have been better selected. Directed by Don Siegal (remembered for such other features as Crime in the Streets, Madigan, and Dirty Harry), the movie focuses more on Varick covering his tracks and the race to find him and recover the ill-gotten gains.

Varick is played on-screen by Walter Matthau (whose performance won him the 1974 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards for Best Actor). While audiences know Matthau best as a shambling and grumpy comic actor, here he possesses an off-hand determination paired with a hard-guy insouciance that can stand up to the best in the business. (His flinty performances in the original The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 and Billy Wilder’s dark The Fortune Cookie are, likewise, masterpieces.) Joe Don Baker, as the methodical and mean Molly, specialized in tough-guy roles, among them Buford Pusser in Walking Tall. As Schirmer, John Vernon (who later gained renown as Dean Wormer in National Lampoon’s Animal House) enjoyed a lengthy career playing hard-nosed torpedoes, including in such other Siegel films as Dirty Harry and Point Blank. I wonder how Charley Varick would have fared had its director stayed true to author Reese’s subplots.

I think Siegel and screenwriter Howard Rodman (who’d devised scripts for the TV series Naked City and Route 66, and later created the private-eye drama Harry O), saw the skeleton beneath the skin in Reese’s novel and made a wise decision to swap character development for action. In their hands, the tale becomes a race-to-the-finish-line caper; the book is more cat-and-mouse, with coincidences and chance encounters keeping the wandering plot moving, prompting thoughts that the ancient deus ex machina might be the oldest (and most hackneyed) literary device still being used. At several points in the book, it provides a quick paring-down of the plot and brings the conclusion into focus; but why did Reese employ it when it seems so artificial and impossible to overlook? Perhaps as a seasoned pulp-fictionist, he understood the need for literary expediency.

(Right) Author John H. Reese

John Henry Reese’s history in pulp fiction, in fact, offers a key to appreciating him as a writer. Born in Nebraska in 1910 to a former cavalryman and horse breaker, his mother being the daughter of a blacksmith, it’s no surprise he leaned towards penning westerns. His first major success, though, was a children’s novel, Big Mutt, which came out in 1953. Reese had started his prolific writing career in the 1930s, publishing extensively in men’s adventure magazines under various pseudonyms, before moving up to “the slicks.” He wrote fast in hopes of creating fast reads, and in the days before mass-media entertainment, brevity was essential; churning out novels and short stories that a voracious audience disposed of as soon as the next ones appeared also kept the paychecks coming.

In Charley Varick, Matthau’s protagonist is called “the last of the independent” bank robbers; Reese himself belonged to the last generation of pulp writers lucky enough to survive and make the switch to new media. He always had plenty of irons in the fire, his books and stories being adapted into movies and radio dramas. But how many of the works credited to him can still be recalled? At least two: The Looters and Charlie Varick. Take your pick, both are worth enjoying.

The Book You Have to Read: “White Rabbit,” by David Daniel

(Editor’s note: This is the 180th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
David Daniel’s White Rabbit (2003) is a 1960s blast from the past, but in this psychedelic police procedural flower power is more of a fashion statement and mindset than a weapon. A few people (all the wrong ones, you dig?) recognize that pie-in-the-sky optimism is useless to foment change, and there are always a few bad apples that are tolerated (until they become really bad), but what else could you expect? It’s 1967 in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the epicenter of the counterculture, and the “Summer of Love” is well and truly underway.

The flower children in their eye-grabbing garb (yet anonymous with their noms de paix—Toad, Jester, Circe, among many others) believed they could change the world, force forth utopia with a kind word and a peace sign. A few were adamant that violent revolution was the legit answer (does 1776 ring a bell?), but it appeared to many on either side that beneath the surface this ’hood was a powder keg of antagonism with more us-against-them sentiment than any quantity of love beads or patchouli oil could hide. And as the Establishment and its heirs were busy circling each other with suspicion, into this Garden of Eden slithers real evil.

White Rabbit finds a serial killer at work in the Haight, and no one wants a role in identifying the murderer; that would involve talking to the cops, and cooperating with those “pigs” is not cool, according to Seth, an activist and editor of Rag, an underground newspaper. Seth is the pampered son of Bay Area limousine liberals. He supplies a handy subplot to Daniel’s yarn, as does his counterpoint, former firebrand and University of California, Berkeley professor Terry Gordon, who has literally “bought the farm” and now rusticates as he preaches non-violence. Impetuous Seth can’t see that violence will only hurt his cause and sour his romance with fellow journalist Amy Cole. But enough about him; the real story here is about Amy and San Francisco Police investigating detective John Sparrow. Too busy spitting vitriol and mixing Molotov cocktails, Seth doesn’t notice that Amy and John Sparrow are investigating each other.

Cole’s relationship with Sparrow begins simply enough: she wants a scoop, he wants the killer, pretty much the same thing. Not exactly a “meet cute,” they cross paths at the Hall of Justice during a press conference addressing the murders. A mutual trust begins when Amy becomes the straight-laced Sparrow’s Haight-Ashbury tour guide and apologist for the counterculture. He gets an eyeful of the tramps and prophets, the artists and charlatans, teen runaways, draft dodgers, drug dealers, rockers on the make, and the deeply disturbed. It should come as no surprise that the legendary activist Emmett Grogan has a walk-on role in this very busy and character-laden novel.

All is not groovy with Sparrow, however. Still grieving the death of his wife, transferred from homicide to the repugnant vice squad then back to homicide to work the serial-killer case, Sparrow must also maneuver around SFPD Captain George Moon, an archenemy who knows Sparrow quite well. Once Sparrow’s wingman, professional equal, and long-ago romantic rival (he blames the death of Sparrow’s spouse from cancer on him), Moon is now champing at the bit to unleash his riot squad on an upcoming anti-war rally in Golden Gate Park. His goal is to cleanse his beloved San Francisco of the unwashed hippie scourge, and the hippies know this, deepening their mistrust of law enforcement.

Sparrow at first resists the counterculture community that Amy Cole embraces, but to get anywhere with the investigation he realizes he must make the scene and extend an olive branch as best he can. He doesn’t trade his badge and .38 Police Special for flowers in his hair, but later a fistfight and worse involving fellow officers gets this complicated man relieved of both, allowing him to operate outside department rules. With Sparrow finally sidelined, Moon also hopes to trump him by finding the killer. Sparrow needs to move fast to make an arrest, before City Hall gives Moon the go-ahead to move in and most likely incite the riot he’s supposed to subdue.

Sparrow reminds Cole of her role as a responsible reporter and persuades her to print an appeal for local cooperation in finding the killer. However, the editorial Cole pens also places her on the killer’s radar, turning her into irresistible bait that leads to a showdown where everyone gets what they’ve asked for or deserve—to a point. Lovers for a heartbeat, it almost seemed as if a white picket fence and 2.5 children were in Amy and John’s future, and they still might be. But Daniels wields irony—the whimsical force of surprise—with discretion and tact as this story rolls along. And history seems to deliver its own irony, as if 1967 was the swan song of the Age of Aquarius.

What author Thomas McGuane (himself no stranger to San Franciso during that era) called the “hideous sixties” is often looked upon with awe, disgust, puzzlement, or all three. But what was it really like to be there from, say, 1965 to 1969, when the pot smoke really hit the fan? It’s said that if you can remember the ’60s you “weren’t really there.” That might be true of the participants who had sandals on the ground and a head full of LSD, but the writers who experienced counterculture life during its heyday possessed reliable memories, overflowing notebooks, and rich imaginations to fill in the blanks. Others, intellectuals such as Theodore Roszak, were able to observe the counterculture phenomenon with scientific detachment.

(Right) Author David Daniel.

To some observers, though, the American counterculture of the 1960s was nothing more than the spoiled children of the “greatest generation” disturbing mom and dad’s well-deserved nap after they’d survived the Great Depression, World War II, and threats of nuclear annihilation. But tune in and turn on to Roszak: he gives explanations from technological, spiritual, sociological, and drug-oriented analysis, among several others, in The Making of a Counterculture (1969). Those who immersed themselves into the culture, such as Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, used different techniques: she the cool eye of a journalist, he with an over-the-top-exuberance that attempts to convey the experience of an acid trip. Ringolevio, the above-mentioned Emmett Grogan’s 1972 memoir, is the story of a feral vagabond youth who alit for a while in the Haight where he and others founded the community-action group the Diggers, who were in the thick of things back then.

As for David Daniels, solid plot and character development in White Rabbit are not sacrificed to give the readers a feel for Haight-Ashbury in this solid crime novel. It’s not clear whether he was present during the Summer of Love, but it sure sounds like it.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Dark Corners of the Night,” by Lionel Olay

(Editor’s note: This is the 179th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Jerry Bishop is a talent scout and booker for Such Interesting People, a popular television show that promotes the careers of entertainers who are on the fast-track to nowhere, in Lionel Olay’s The Dark Corners of the Night (Signet, 1960). A psychological novel wedded to a caper, this is the story of basic human nature, about how those who refuse to be constrained by society (such as criminals) make their own rules for living (by committing crime); and how those who are unable to choose their fate (patsies) are ruled by the strong.

Jerry has pretty much had it with the program’s guests, with its hosts, and with his inability to stand tall and choose a suitable path through life. The second-rate talents who parade their wares “proclaim their existence with shy hysteria,” and the show’s hosts, the husband and wife team of Bill and Peg, are “a freak act that only television could be capable of supporting.” That may be so, but their wealth says otherwise, and is a source of frustration for young Jerry. Home for them is the tony Sutton Place neighborhood in Manhattan’s Upper East Side; Jerry lives his “aimless existence” paycheck to paycheck, in Chelsea. He has a girlfriend, but he can’t commit to her or to a plan to escape his “inability to control my own destiny.” As far as professional growth goes, Bill and Peg had high hopes for Jerry, but all three realize now that he might not possess the ability or aptitude to provide the support the couple need to maintain their position on the fringes of big-time showbiz, or to augment Peg’s ever-growing jewelry collection, which she loves to flaunt. These doubts are reinforced—and everything changes—when Jerry meets Kayo Morrison. The “big score” Jerry has been hoping for is finally within reach.

Kayo is a knock-around guy with nice clothes, a big cigar, and the rough delivery of a man who grew up on the streets. After spending time in the finishing school for criminals—the state penitentiary—Jerry realizes that this is the type of rough-around-the edges authenticity he’d like to bring to Such Interesting People. As Jerry procures guests for Bill and Peg, so does Kayo find and groom the weakest sheep in the fold—and that would be Jerry. But what would Kayo want of him? Kayo befriends Jerry and pitches himself as a guest on the show. His feral youth, his time in prison, and his graduation to a (mostly) less-violent form of crime would all make for good viewing, he reasons. Alcohol and the company of a woman, compliments of Kayo, soften Jerry to Kayo’s idea. And as Kayo probes, Jerry opens up and reveals his unhappiness. Now that the hook has been set, it’s time to bring in the closer.

Jerry moves up the food chain when Kayo introduces him to Vincent, a gentleman thug and his mentor-in-crime. The two met in prison, where they educated themselves by reading, thinking, and trading ideas. It turns out, Vincent is a bit of a philosopher who excels at the art of persuasion, and he’s all for Kayo’s television debut. However, things go a bit sideways when everyone learns that, while you can take the criminal from the street, you can’t take the street from the criminal. Kayo’s performance is a complete failure, and Bill and Peg are furious, afraid the incident will tarnish their reputations and damage their lifestyle. With a bridge about to burn, Jerry’s misstep further imperils his job, and he begins to pay attention to the criminals, who appear to want to help him by dragging him down into lawlessness. Vincent has a well-thought-out rationale for the life he has pursued, and here is where his and author Lionel Olay’s powers of persuasion bloom to their fullest. Vincent makes his pitch and cuts a deal.

Vincent knows Jerry is floundering in life, and he says it’s time for him to “get real.” “You’re either a victim or you’re not,” Vincent says. Crime, he continues, is “the alternative to despair”; it’s about “making your own rules for existence.” Those rules include earning enough money to live the lifestyle one chooses with a minimum of risk, and, most importantly, to protect oneself. As ex-felons, Vincent and Kayo have to be careful. Vincent punctuates this with the ominous “I’m never going back to prison.” To give Jerry a little hint of what could be in store for him, they take a street-level tour of their illicit endeavors, during which Jerry witnesses the murder of a man attempting to intrude on Vincent’s turf. Vincent glosses this over as the price of protecting one’s assets. Jerry should have taken more care before accepting Vincent’s proposition to steal Peg’s jewelry collection, because when one is all in, for good or bad, there’s no going back.

Author Lionel Olay might not be known to the general readership (he died in 1966), or even to those who avail themselves of a deep dive into the world of ’60s freelance writers and the period’s many left-leaning publications (Ramparts) and skin magazines attempting to show some class (Cavalier) that purchased their writing. I first became aware of this legendary author after reading Hunter S. Thompson’s eulogy to him, “The Ultimate Freelancer,” which was published in the now-defunct Distant Drummer in 1967, and then collected in 1979’s The Great Shark Hunt Gonzo Papers, Volume 1. Thompson called Olay “a freelance writer hustler, grass-runner and general free spirit.” Thompson also gave Olay a shout-out in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).

Olay’s first novel, The Heart of a Stranger (Signet, 1959), which takes place in the under-belly of Hollywood, is certainly on my reading list, and a subject he would again cover for a major slick. On location in England to report on a movie producer for Life magazine, Olay turned in a hit piece; he called the Hollywood bigshot a “pompous toad” among other things, and he was back on the street hustling gigs. His two novels are scarce on Internet book sites, but but Munsey’s Library & People Search will allegedly allow readers to download both. I was unable to navigate the site, or even to open an account, but will return to try again. It would be a boon to readers if Olay’s journalism was available there, or anywhere, for that matter. While a few articles can be found online, what a triumph of sorts it would be for them to be anthologized; the works of other lesser-known but prolific writers such as Isaac Rosenfield and Seymour Klonsky have been collected, so why not Olay’s? Thus far, credit is due to Hunter S. Thompson (and perhaps to me) for keeping his name alive.