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.

Round Two for a Bellicose Benedictine

By Steven Nester
American writer William Kotzwinkle won plentiful praise for his wryly humorous 2021 crime novel, Felonious Monk, which introduced readers to mafioso scion Tommy Martini, an ex-bouncer with an anger-management problem, who was exiled by the family to a Benedictine monastery in Mexico after he accidentally killed a man. Brother Tommy, as he’s now known, makes his reappearance in Bloody Martini (Blackstone), which finds him being lured away from his contemplative seclusion by a friend’s plea to look after his wife—a tough favor to fulfill, since that friend, crusading TV station owner Finn Sweeney, is now dead, and the spouse, Bridget Breen, has disappeared. Although he’s determined to track down Sweeney’s killer, Tommy must first locate Bridget, a former high-school flame, who—very much like Tommy—has in her own fashion hidden herself away from the world.

To get that job done, Tommy must return to his hometown of Coalville, Pennsylvania, a (fictional) place manifestly bursting with mine fires, as if hell was breaking through—which it appears to have done already. Drugs, alcoholism, and crime pervade the once sleepy streets. In Coalville, Tommy reacquaints himself with old friends, but he must also remain wary: the Muldoon brothers, whose sibling was the guy Tommy did in eight years ago during a bar confrontation, are still looking for payback. Most significant among those with whom he reunites is Queenie O’Malley. She’d been fond of Tommy in high school, when he was a football star, but she had made much less of an impression on him.

“He doesn’t recognize her at first … the transition she’s made,” Kotzwinkle said during an interview I did with him last month for my radio show, Poets of the Tabloid Murder (the second time he’s been my guest on that program). “She’s learned the arts of seduction, very subtly. And when he does recognize her, it’s a tidal wave of emotion. … Here is this beauty who he overlooked. He doesn’t even recognize her ... She was introverted [in high school], and the obvious beauties—the cheerleaders, the majorettes—they were the ones who grabbed his eye. ... And then she appears in this miracle of transformation.”

Queenie is a handful, and she’s a temptress, but she is not tempting Tommy overtly. She’s slated to wed the local produce seller, but has doubts about that, and the bond between her and Tommy is strengthened when they are slightly complicit in the deaths of the Muldoon brothers. Yet Tommy remains on his guard. “If I moved in on Queenie it would break the closeness we already felt,” he tells himself. More important than romance, he has a mission to fulfill.

It works to Brother Tommy’s advantage that he’s quite comfortable resorting to violence (“I’m always angry. It saves time,” as his grandfather Primo advised him). He had started with the assumption that Sweeney’s demise was related simply to that muckraking journalist nosing around plans to construct a casino in the area. But when goons, cops on the take, and shifty politicians begin exerting pressure upon him, Tommy realizes there’s more at stake. That becomes acutely clear when he suffers a pummeling by Brian Fury, the aptly named, axe-grinding local district attorney who failed to convict him of murder eight years before. To do harm and retaliate, or not; to enjoy the sensuality of the corporeal world, or remain true to his vows—these are choices Kotzwinkle’s Benedictine bruiser must weigh as this tale progresses, bearing in mind along the way that there’s more to accomplish in lowly Coalville than solve crimes.

An inveterate do-gooder, Tommy invests in human lives in the wheezing burg of his childhood. He hires a young Hispanic boy to wash his car; he turns an old pal from a hopeless drunk into a sober, productive citizen; and he manages to clean up the act of a heroin-addicted hooker he knows from his high school days. Sending her off then to Las Vegas might sound like a big step backwards, but Tommy Martini, while sometimes too quick with his fists, never seems to make an incorrect call when it comes to human behavior.

“I might be done with Coalville,” Tommy says at one point, “but it would never be done with me.” Fortunately, William Kotzwinkle isn’t done with his pugnacious protagonist, either: there’s a third Felonious Monk novel already in the works. Of its plot, the author told me: “Tommy goes to Las Vegas, drawn into the life of a professional wrestler. His cousin reaches out to him in a moment of desperation, like with Finn Sweeney in Bloody Martini … The last thing Tommy wants in the world is to be a professional wrestler. He understands how brutal it is—I know a professional wrestler, and when they hit the mat it’s like hitting concrete, every bone in their body shakes. And that’s where [Tommy’s] headed for. So I will keep the secular world active in his life, and he’ll be longing for the peace and quiet of the monastery.”

Fans of this series will be praying that next chapter arrives soon.

The Book You Have to Read: “Beat the Devil,” by James Helvick

(Editor’s note: This is the 178th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Beat the Devil (1951) is the type of book (and movie) around which a sort of legendary status has gathered, but that few people have actually read (or viewed). Written by the highly regarded and much-lived British journalist Claud Cockburn, under the nom de plume James Helvick, Beat the Devil starts out as a post-World War II thriller but quickly evolves into a locked-room melodrama with an ensemble cast. Picture Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (kind of), only here it's more the deaths of a country, tradition, the stiff upper lip—and most of all, the global arrogance that aimed to civilize the non-English speaking world and exploit its natural resources.

A group of adventurers and opportunists is stranded on France’s Cote d’Azur, awaiting a laid-up ship. In flight from a British Empire that’s “on the skids,” they plan to repair to Africa to find, or for some, to remake their riches in a shady uranium deal. Acting on a plan concocted by an international wheeler-dealer in Brussels who’s murdered as the undertaking begins, this one last stab at a payoff is under the leadership of Billy Dannreuther, a mercenary character well-versed in international business of the most predatorial sort. The kind of man who “knows a man who knows a man,” it’s into his hands that this consortium of dreamers and ne’er-do-wells have placed their not-so-complete trust.

While Cockburn’s motley crew members await the repair of the tramp steamer that’s been booked to carry them all off to the Belgian Congo (one of the most brutally operated European colonies on record), those players have the opportunity to become acquainted—and it’s more like a pack of hyenas circling each other. As Dannreuther slowly discloses parts of his curriculum vitae, we learn he’s not so much an international man of mystery as he is a loser attempting to finally make good. Among his charges are the lusty Gwendolen Chelm and her cuckold husband, Harry. She lets it slip that her spouse is a landed gent (and perhaps also a secret agent) on his way to take over a relative’s coffee plantation, which just happens to be situated in uranium country. Gwendolen is about as free with misinformation as she is with her body, much to Dannreuther’s advantage. It turns out that she’s not the only liar here: fellow traveler Wagwood is not a diamond merchant, and Harry Chelm is no country squire at all. Says Gwen, it’s “easier to be a vagabond than a landed gent with no land.” There’s also the murderous Peterson, Mr. Victor Conquest, and Major Jack Ross, among others who backbite and double deal.

Impotence and inertia pervade Beat the Devil’s pages; the only real action is on board ship when several characters lose their lives. The cruise is short-lived, as it makes an unscheduled stop in Spain. And as the authorities become involved, Africa seems to slip further and further away, the cast relying more on fate (rather than Dannreuther) to deliver them their fortunes. Beat the Devil finds Cockburn throwing a shovelful of dirt on the British Empire, something it seems he’d been working towards all his life. A lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he fought in the Spanish Civil War (George Orwell called him a stooge of Stalin), and published The Week, his own news round-up. Behind the fact that his novel won Hollywood’s attention are several stories, the most plausible being the one director John Huston attests to in his memoir, An Open Book (1980). While attending a weekend party at a country house in Ireland, Huston recalled finding a copy of Beat the Devil on his nightstand, left there, according to Huston, by none other than Claud Cockburn himself.


(Above) The trailer for the 1953 movie Beat the Devil.

However talent-laden the 1953 movie adaptation was, Huston admitted, “We kind of lost Helvick’s novel along the way. But we had a helluva lot more fun making the new version.” Leading man Humphrey Bogart thought it was going to be another Maltese Falcon. Studio executive David O. Selznick, the then-husband of co-star Jennifer Jones, fretted for her career amid production chaos. Cockburn’s first draft of the script was rewritten by Huston and Truman Capote. Although it now boasts the dubious label of “cult classic,” critic Pauline Kael called Beat the Devil “a mess, but it’s probably the funniest mess—the screwball classic of all time.”

Readers whose curiosity is piqued by the legacy of Claud Cockburn will be glad to learn that his many works survive. The memoir I, Claud is a good place to start (it seems he knew everyone), and he left behind a coterie of noteworthy children, among them detective story writer Sarah Caudwell, and three journalist sons, Alexander (longtime columnist for The Nation), Andrew (onetime editor of Harper’s Magazine), and Patrick (Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times and The Independent). A Cockburn heir who found more success in Hollywood is actress granddaughter Olivia Wilde (House). However, one must ask: Is this enough glamorous stardust to keep a work of art alive? Why would anyone read Beat the Devil or view its big-screen version? Is it worth spending the time to see if the bedraggled travelers of Cockburn’s 1951 novel ever make it to Africa? Why not—readers are still waiting for Godot, after all.

The Book You Have to Read: “Dancing Bear,” by James Crumley

(Editor’s note: This is the 176th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
If the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson needed the services of a private investigator, or the company of a steady-handed drinking/coke-snorting buddy who also happened to be proficient with firearms and could handle himself in a tight spot (preferably a guy who could satisfy all four of those qualifications at once), the fictional Milton Chester “Milo” Milodragovitch III would probably be his first choice. Violent only if provoked and hard-partying under any pretense, Milo might in fact be anyone’s first choice.

There are many authors in one’s reading life whose writing style influences their tastes in hard-boiled fiction (Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and Ross Macdonald, for instance), but fewer who have also created a series protagonist with an assured fidelity to his job and a heart that is genuine and believable. For me, James Crumley is such a writer, and Milo—his first Meriweather, Montana, P.I—is just such a character. For readers new to Milo, Crumley’s second book about him, Dancing Bear (1983), should convince them to make this guy part of their team.

As the novel begins, Milo is in a holding pattern until he reaches the age of 52, when he is set to receive an enormous family inheritance. A self-pitying Korean War vet and sometime gumshoe (though he’s currently employed as a security guard), he has five ex-wives and possesses his “father’s taste for aimless sloth,” which means he likes to drink, fly-fish, and chase women. Things are upended, though, when Sarah Weddington, an elderly former flame of his father’s, contacts him with a new case. It seems silly, she admits, nothing more than “satisfying an old woman’s curiosity,” but the money she hands him—to identify the man and woman who meet every week at a park in sight of her mansion—is considerable.

Soon afterward, Milo is introduced to Carolyn Fitzgerald, who queries him about a land-swap arrangement involving the several thousand acres he owns in Montana. The relevance of that approach, however, is only made evident later in this yarn.

First and foremost on Milo’s mind are the motives of Cassandra Bogardus, the female of the pair Weddington has asked him to observe. Why did Bogardus give him the slip when he was trying to tail her? And what of the gent in the other car, who was meeting her at that park? Milo winds up following him across America’s northern plains … until a car bomb suddenly takes the man out! Luckily for our hero, in the wreckage of that vehicle he finds guns, ammo, plenty of dope, and enough cash to further finance his latest adventure. Maybe enough to protect his life, as well, for it doesn’t take long before Milo recognizes that he’s on to something much bigger than a nosey old lady with money to burn. The pursuer has become the prey.

There’s sometimes an interminable section in noir novels (and in whodunits, police procedurals, and the rest), where the author struggles to balance as many subplots or red herrings on the head of a pin (or the nib of a pen) as he or she can. To some extent, that happens in Dancing Bear. But when the distractions are finally dispersed, Milo finds himself facing down a avaricious multinational corporation that has its fingers in every dirty pie it can find, from dope smuggling to disposing of hazardous waste. And wouldn’t you know it? Some of Seattle, Washington’s finest citizens are involved in those shenanigans. After Milo’s house is torched, and he has nowhere to go, he spreads the word that he perished in the blaze, which allows him again to work unimpeded.

(Left) Dancing Bear’s back cover.

Our man Milo may have skin tougher than shoe leather, but he also boasts a heart of gold and a distinct predilection for strays. As this story winds along, he brings into the case a randy retiree called Abner and another guy by the name of Simmons, the latter being a security guard who survived an armored car robbery that Milo helped break up early in the book. Too many good guys die in Dancing Bear, some with families, and Milo ultimately arranges for the criminals to make amends to the survivors of people who perished helping him solve this case.

James Crumley died in 2008 at age 68, with eight crime novels to his credit. One of those, The Wrong Case (which introduced Milo Milodragovitch in 1975), won a Falcon Award from Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society, while another, The Mexican Tree Duck, picked up the 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. In addition to his three Milo tales (the last of which was 2001’s The Final Country, recipient of the British Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger commendation), Crumley penned a second, parallel series featuring C.W. Sughrue, who The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes as a “redneck good ol’ boy demon-child private eye,” and who debuted in 1978’s regularly heralded The Last Good Kiss. Other authors of no minor prominence have praised Crumley’s fiction, among them George Pelecanos and Ray Bradbury (who named a detective in three of his novels Crumley).

Like Milo, he was wed five times and lived a knock-around life. Novelist, fisherman, and Montana cowboy Thomas McGuane is quoted as saying, in Men’s Journal magazine, that James Crumley “did cocaine six days a week. Ate five times a day. Drank a bottle of whiskey every day. He said, ‘This is how I like to live. If I live 10 years less, so what?’” Although he’s now long gone, Crumley lives on through his stories. The writer’s influence has outlasted his bones. There is even a watering hole in Missoula, Montana, where Crumley’s favorite barstool was “set aside” in his honor.

The Book You Have to Read: “In the Heat of the Night,” by John Ball

(Editor’s note: This is the 175th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Things were beginning to look up for the town of Wells, South Carolina. A music festival was in the works and sentiment held it could rejuvenate the sleepy whistle-stop; but murder can halt just about anything dead in its tracks. As this story opens, the festival’s conductor is found bludgeoned to death, and the town’s untrained police department has no clue as to how to investigate the crime. A seasoned homicide detective happens to be passing through and his superiors in Pasadena, California, give Wells Police Chief Bill Gillespie the OK for him to assist. The only problem is that the investigator, Virgil Tibbs, is Black; and in 1965, in the Deep South, that’s trouble. So much so, that Tibbs’ first contact with the Wells Police Department is when he’s arrested as the prime suspect.

In the Heat of the Night (1965), the first book in Ball’s Inspector Tibbs series, is a hard look at racism in the modern era, in a not-so-modern South, in the country that many believed to be the most just, fair, and principled in the world (a belief that has lately been questioned), and author John Ball pulls no punches. With its ample use of the N-word, its catalogue of racial stereotypes passed off as casual character observations, and its piles of indignity heaped upon African Americans (in addition to slights against Italian Americans and Chinese Americans), just as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining traction, In the Heat of the Night presents something that is the hopeless opposite of the American Dream. However, the book also demonstrates faith that things might change—and it’s up to Virgil Tibbs to set the example.

Tibbs is the first Black man Wells residents have seen who goes against stereotypes. He also gracefully exceeds the behavior that southern whites expect of him (and exceeds their behavior as well), prompting this backhanded compliment from a cop:

“Smartest black I ever saw,” Pete concluded; then he added a remarkable tribute. “He oughta been a white man.”

No one appreciates that type of behavior at all in the South in the ’60s. And there are plenty of other attributes for the residents of Wells to dislike about Tibbs, too. He knows French and martial arts, he “dresses like a white man,” and he has a large vocabulary. But Tibbs doesn’t flaunt his accomplishments; he’s an educated African-American man who defers to his inferiors in the name of professionalism, and with respect and tact, schools an ignorant populace and hapless constabulary on professional crime solving and how to treat one’s fellow man in the face of humiliation and threats of violence. However, Tibbs does bring a bit of fight to the Wells cops, as in this famous exchange most people recognize from the movie version of Ball’s yarn, but which (slightly modified) is also in the book:

“You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you Virgil.” Gillespie retorted. “Incidentally, Virgil is a pretty fancy name for a black boy like you. What do they call you around home where you come from?”

“They call me Mr. Tibbs,” Virgil answered.

Sam Wood is the officer who both discovered the body of festival conductor Enrico Mantoli and arrested Tibbs. He has no formal police training, only a badge and a gun, and less juice than Chief Gillespie, whose previous experience in law enforcement was as a jail guard strong-arming drunks. Wood and Gillespie hide their ineptitude behind condescension toward others who seek to give advice and guidance. The two don’t get along, and Sam hopes Gillespie “makes a public fool of himself and bungles the [Mantoli] case.” He’s also amused to watch Tibbs stand up to Gillespie’s bullying and bluster during the initial interrogation, when no one yet knows Tibbs is a cop. (It seems the contents of Tibbs’ wallet were never checked.) His composure under pressure and lack of deference infuriates Gillespie, who can only intimidate, his “voice trying to pick a fight, and daring anyone to defy it.” Over the course of this novel, Tibbs inspires Wood to start thinking a bit for himself and to rebel against Gillespie in subtle ways. But even though Wood is “beginning to like Tibbs as a person,” he’s not compelled to abandon the department’s party line.

When Tibbs joins the Wells investigative team, Gillespie knows the clock is ticking and his career in law enforcement is in jeopardy. Even worse, Newsweek magazine starts sniffing around the town, and Gillespie gets the sense that the entire country is breathing down his neck—as do men higher up in the pecking order than the chief. There’s no way they’re going to let things get screwed up by an unqualified sheriff, whether his incompetence is revealed by a Black man or not. The good-ol’-boy system, it seems, is against the ropes. Gillespie is in a tight spot, but he’s cagey enough about self-preservation. Virgil Tibbs, he comes to realize, is a convenient “whipping boy.” Gillespie will win if the murderer is found, and Tibbs will receive no credit; on the other hand, if Tibbs can’t find a killer, he’ll take the blame himself for botching the case. Tibbs, however, has already deduced all of this. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

What Virgil Tibbs does, in the hands of author Ball, is bring up white people’s fears, shortcomings, and insecurities about themselves. For instance, Ball writes that Sam Wood “wanted the crime solved, but he wanted it solved by someone he could look up to and respect. The only trouble was he couldn’t think who it might be.” Sam further exhibits his insecurities when he wishes he’d never become a police officer; he pines for his old job as a grease monkey. Meanwhile, Bill Gillespie, too, wants Mantoli’s slaying solved quickly—and he’s willing to leap to conclusions if necessary to bring that about. After Tibbs proves the innocence of the department’s initial prime suspect, and with the clock ticking, Gillespie learns that Officer Wood had paid off his mortgage in cash, roughly the same amount that was taken from Mantoli’s billfold. That’s all the chief needs to arrest his colleague for the murder. But Tibbs figures the answer lies elsewhere, and through his diligent efforts he eventually makes everyone look good.

The majority of Americans are probably more familiar with the 1967 movie version of In the Heat of the Night than they are with John Ball’s original novel. Both are engaging works. The film starred Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, and Warren Oates, and was directed by Norman Jewison. Poitier (who passed away earlier this month) refused to shoot the movie in the South, due to threats he and singer-actor Harry Belafonte had received from the Ku Klux Klan. The movie turned out to be a hit, winning five Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Steiger and Best Picture. A TV crime drama, inspired by the 1965 novel and 1967 film, ran from 1988 to 1995. It starred Carroll O’Connor as Chief Bill Gillespie and Howard Rollins as Detective Virgil Tibbs.

There is no happy ending in Ball’s slender book, other than in the fact that justice is done, and that a tenuous truce has been achieved, in a very small way, between Blacks and whites in the South. There’s nothing in-your-face about the conclusion, just the quiet and individual rectitude of two men who are worlds apart. However, there is one other thing worth noting. Gillespie sees Tibbs off at a train station in the middle of the night, and gives Tibbs permission—which the Pasadena detective had requested—to sit on a whites-only bench. The chief then thanks Tibbs, and Tibbs says it was a pleasure helping out. Goodbyes are said, but then Gillespie declines to offer his hand for shaking. Virgil Tibbs is left to sit alone in silence, on the whites-only bench. Metaphorically speaking, he has been left to carry on the fight for racial justice by himself, with no assistance from Gillespie or his ilk, yet he has already won approval of a sort.

READ MORE: “Remembering John Ball, the Writer Who Gave Us Virgil Tibbs,” by Kevin Mims (Quillette).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2021, Part I: 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.

• Smoke, by Joe Ide (Mulholland):

This fifth book starring Isaiah “IQ” Quintable finds the Los Angeles troubleshooter having just about had it, after sleuthing his way through four previous outings. With a price on his head, chased from L.A. by gangs, and exhibiting signs resembling PTSD, IQ decides to hit the road (“He didn’t want to be IQ anymore”), and who can blame the guy. His sidekick, sometime-dealer Juanell Dodson, whose comic-relief escapades are an important ingredient in the recipe that makes this series hum, feels left in the lurch by IQ’s departure, and a bit disgruntled. It gets worse for him (or perhaps more interesting) when Gloria, the mother of Dodson’s baby mama, puts her foot down hard on the shiftless lover: get a straight job or get gone. Meanwhile, an escapee from a mental hospital breaks into IQ’s retreat in a small Northern California town, searching for a serial killer, and a hit man IQ once sent away to prison is released—and sets his malevolent sights on Grace, IQ’s one-time girlfriend in Long Beach, California. IQ’s “experiment with this relaxation thing” is a complete failure, as he is once again dragged into a cesspool of someone else’s making. For his part, Dodson (“Some people think outside the box. Dodson had no box”) will have to “learn how to be white,” as he lands a job with an advertising agency, the perfect spot for a hustler with a sense of humor. The only question that remains is, when will IQ and Dodson, the creations of former screenwriter Joe Ide, become characters in a movie of their own? There’s no doubt we haven’t seen the last of IQ, though Ide’s next novel will be The Goodbye Coast (Mulholland), a Philip Marlowe yarn due in February 2022.

• Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron):

This is one odd couple who ought to be taken seriously. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins are aging ex-cons who have managed to stay out of trouble for many years. Ike, who’s Black and long-married, has made a good go of it as a landscaper; Buddy Lee, who’s white and divorced, “a lean and weathered piece of work,” lives hand to mouth in a decrepit trailer. When their respective gay sons became an interracial couple, they didn’t consider it any cause for celebration; life just went on. But then those two young men—intelligent and accomplished, with a small adopted daughter—are murdered in what appears to be an execution. Ike and Buddy Lee find themselves flooded with remorse for not having accepted their sons’ life choices. Their rage can barely be controlled: Buddy Lee threatens to gut his landlord over a late rent dispute, and Ike’s blood chills when the preacher speaking at the funeral refers to the dead boys’ “abominable sins.” This gray-haired pair eventually decide that the best response to their loss is to combine forces and seek frontier-style retribution. “Ike wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty,” Cosby writes. “He wasn’t afraid to spill blood. He was afraid he wasn’t able to stop.” As the fathers focus their fury on tracking down their sons’ slayers, they are pursued by gang bangers as well as by a pack of white-supremacist motorcycle punks. Slowly but surely, Ike and Buddy Lee work their way up the food chain to the person who really called the shots in their sons’ killing. Set in rural Virginia, just like Cosby’s debut novel, Blacktop Wasteland (2020), Razorblade Tears is filled with pain and regret, violence and a remarkable humanity.

• Felonious Monk, by William Kotzwinkle (Blackstone):

The perfect place to take it on the lam, or to atone for killing another man in a bar fight, would have to be a Mexican monastery—which is exactly where renowned novelist-screenwriter William Kotzwinkle (Doctor Rat, The Game of Thirty) sends former bouncer Tommy Martini, now known as Brother Tommy, the scion of an American crime family. Twenty-six years old, with an anger-management problem, Tommy has spent half a decade sequestered in that monastery, trying to live a life of peace and chastity. But he gets into trouble when he intercedes between a cartel enforcer and a young boy that enforcer is trying to recruit. Then his retired (and crooked) parish priest uncle, Vittorio—who always understood that while money may be the root of all evil, it’s a necessary commodity to have in quantity—passes away in Phoenix, Arizona. Tommy decides to attend the funeral, which leads to more problems. He is named as the sole beneficiary of his uncle’s sizable estate, and Tommy’s Mafia-connected relatives take that fact pretty hard, all except for his philosophical cousin Dominic. Part comedian, part devil’s advocate, Dominic tosses away Tommy’s anger-management medication (“Rage. It’s good for you,” he asserts), and wants nothing more than to help his brawny cousin … and perhaps turn Tommy into a mixed martial arts fighter in Las Vegas. When a gangster demands million of dollars from Tommy—a debt he says Vittorio owed him, as the result of a shady real-estate deal—it’s finally time to crack some skulls. And plenty of those soon come Tommy’s way, along with assorted mob assassins, Chinese goons, and a sexy new-age cult leader who is intrigued by Tommy’s chastity vows and believes aliens are actively invading human bodies. Tommy reasons that Vittorio has sent him on a quest, and though he can’t figure out the goal, he’s sure he will recognize it when he sees it. Filled with wit, satire, double-crosses, and corpses in need of disposal, Felonious Monk is the first book in a planned series.

• Double Solitaire, by Craig Nova (Arcade Crimewise):

Quinn Farrell is a man with a good head on his shoulders. He’s also a fixer: he makes trouble go away, trouble plaguing wealthy and powerful people. For his endeavors, he is remunerated handsomely. It’s lucky that he lives in Los Angeles, where noir rules and where the peccadilloes and stupidity of deep-pocketed Hollywood players are fodder for tabloids and wagging tongues—precisely the sorts of things Quinn tries to eliminate. Terry Peregrine is handsome and vain, an actor who craves underage girls … until one comes around who knows how to put the shake in shakedown. After another of Peregrine’s pick-ups goes missing, Quinn takes it upon himself to figure out what happened. Meanwhile, he grows close to a new neighbor, Rose Marie, who works with terminally ill teenagers. Quinn long ago constructed an ethical frame within which he can live with his actions. However, his exposure to Rose and her youthful charges, whose health difficulties make the self-inflicted problems of famous rich people seem trifling, forces him to reassess his moral choices. Think Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) in the Coen brothers’ 2016 comedy, Hail, Caesar! (a character also profiled in 2004’s The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, by E.J. Fleming.) Double Solitaire is the opening installment of a projected series.

Finally, one work from the non-fiction stacks …

• True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant, by Brad Ricca (St. Martin’s Press):

Indiana Jones (or someone very much like him) lives on in this tale of early 20th-century treasure hunters seeking that holiest of all holy relics, the Ark of the Covenant. In 1909, a Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius, who supposedly possesses a secret code he discovered in the Old Testament, approaches a British nobleman by the name of Montague “Monty” Parker. Together with American heiress-socialite Ava Astor (touted at the time as the “most beautiful woman in the world”), Juvelius convinces Parker to gather up a contingent of colorful adventurers, and undertake a clandestine excavation among the caves and tunnels located outside Jerusalem’s ancient city walls, in search of the artifact. That enterprise ultimately ended in controversy and outrage, and left Parker and company empty-handed. It wasn’t until 1922, and the unearthing of Egyptian pharaoh King Tut’s tomb, that archaeologists basked in a discovery of historical magnitude on the order of what Juvelius and Parker had promised. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, the Ark seems ever to fly beyond the range of big-dreamers who pursue it. Ricca, who previously wrote Olive the Lionhearted (2020) and Mrs. Sherlock Holmes (2017), employed recently uncovered and newly translated documents to help him reconstruct Parker’s forgotten exploits.

Other 2021 Favorites: Pickard County Atlas, by Chris Harding Thornton (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux); A Blizzard of Polar Bears, by Alice Henderson (Morrow); Blood Grove, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown); City on the Edge, by David Swinson (Mulholland); and Relentless, by Mark Greaney (Berkley).