I’ll be going through the books again. So far, I’ve only skimmed a bit, to find out if yesterday’s enthusiasm had died (an awful thing that sometimes happens), and was relieved to see it had not. The coolness is there, the smooth surface that never directly refers to the emotions squirming away underneath. Okay. There’s nothing in it for you either, but I’ll do the goddam piece, as a minor payment for having drained so much of your blood in years past. A small article in an obscure volume in an unimportant series from a nothing publisher: hot damn!
Would you help me a bit in this children’s crusade? I can dope out background. Sicily was mentioned, a PhD in psychology. Max Gartenberg (who gave me your address) said you subsequently taught something or other in the California state college system. My wife, who spent a part of her youth in San Francisco when most of her friends were criminally insane, tells me Atascadero was the place they were always either going into or coming out of; am I inventing a pattern? . . .
Obviously, if you felt like helping me on some of all that, it would beat me making it up. Also, there are dumb little questions like: Was “Hard Case Redhead” your only published short story? Have you written non-fiction? Have you written non-crime? Have you written under pen names? Did you come up with all those rotten titles, or did your publisher? (Several of my rotten titles are mine, but some are the publishers’!)
If you don’t want anything done, tell me, and I won’t do anything. If you don’t care what I do, but want no part in it yourself, ignore this letter, and eventually I’ll get the idea. If you’re willing to give me a few minutes of your time—or a lot of minutes of your time, don’t feel constrained here—I will be very grateful.
I’m already very grateful for your books, of course, and that’s the important part.
Donald E. Westlake
Peter Rabe
Rabe did reply to Westlake’s letter, in generous, detailed fashion, and you’ll see that Westlake draws on some of Rabe’s answers in the subsequent essay, which was published in Murder Off the Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters in 1989.—Ed.
Peter Rabe wrote the best books with the worst titles of anybody I can think of. Murder Me for Nickels. Kill the Boss Goodbye. Why would anybody ever want to read a book called Kill the Boss Goodbye? And yet, Kill the Boss Goodbye is one of the most purely interesting crime novels ever written.
Here’s the setup: Tom Fell runs the gambling in San Pietro, a California town of three hundred thousand people. He’s been away on “vacation” for a while, and an assistant, Pander, is scheming to take over. The big bosses in Los Angeles have decided to let nature take its course; if Pander’s good enough to beat Fell, the territory is his. Only Fell’s trusted assistant, Cripp (for “cripple”), knows the truth, that Fell is in a sanitorium recovering from a nervous breakdown. Cripp warns Fell that he must come back or lose everything. The psychiatrist, Dr. Emilson, tells him he isn’t ready to return to his normal life. Fell suffers from a manic neurosis, and if he allows himself to become overly emotional, he could snap into true psychosis. But Fell has no choice; he goes back to San Pietro to fight Pander.
This is a wonderful variant on a story as old as the Bible: Fell gains the world, and loses his mind. And Rabe follows through on his basic idea; the tension in the story just builds and builds, and we’re not even surprised to find ourselves worried about, scared for, empathizing with, a gangster. The story of Fell’s gradually deepening psychosis is beautifully done. The entire book is spare and clean and amazingly unornamented. Here, for instance, is the moment when Pander, having challenged Fell to a fistfight, first senses the true extent of his danger:
Pander leaned up on the balls of his feet, arms swinging free, face mean, but nothing followed. He stared at Fell and all he saw were his eyes, mild lashes and the lids without movement, and what happened to them. He suddenly saw the hardest, craziest eyes he had ever seen.
Pander lost the moment and then Fell smiled. He said so long and walked out the door.
Kill the Boss Goodbye was published by Gold Medal in August of 1956. It was the fifth Peter Rabe novel they’d published, the first having come out in May of 1955, just fifteen months before. That’s a heck of a pace, and Rabe didn’t stop there. In the five years between May 1955 and May 1960, he published sixteen novels with Gold Medal and two elsewhere.
Eighteen novels in five years would be a lot for even a cookie-cutter hack doing essentially the same story and characters over and over again, which was never true of Rabe. He wrote in third person and in first; he wrote emotionless hardboiled prose and tongue-in-cheek comedy, gangster stories, exotic adventure stories set in Europe and Mexico and North Africa, psychological studies. No two consecutive books used the same voice or setting. In fact, the weakest Peter Rabe books are the ones written in his two different attempts to create a series character.
What sustains a writer at the beginning of his career is the enjoyment of the work itself, the fun of putting the words through hoops, inventing the worlds, peopling them with fresh-minted characters. That enjoyment in the doing of the job is very evident in Rabe’s best work. But it can’t sustain a career forever; the writing history of Peter Rabe is a not entirely happy one. He spent his active writing career working for a sausage factory. What he wrote was often pate, but it was packed as sausage—those titles!—and soon, I think, his own attitude toward his work lowered to match that of the people—agent, editors—most closely associated with the reception and publishing of the work. Rabe, whose first work had a quote on the cover from Erskine Caldwell (“I couldn’t put this book down!”), whose fourth book had a quote on the cover from Mickey Spillane (“This guy is good.”), whose books were consistently and lavishly praised by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times (“harsh objectivity” and “powerful understatement” and “tight and nerve-straining”), was soon churning novels out in as little as ten days, writing carelessly and sloppily, mutilating his talent.
The result is, some of Rabe’s books are quite bad, awkwardly plotted and with poorly developed characters. Others are like the curate’s egg: parts of them are wonderful. But when he was on track, with his own distinctive style, his own cold clear eye unblinking, there wasn’t another writer in the world of the paperbacks who could touch him. Of those first eighteen novels, a full seven are first-rate, another three are excellent at least in part, and eight are ordinary mushy paperbacks that could have been turned out by any junky hack with a typewriter.
The first novel, Stop This Man, showed only glimpses of what Rabe would become. It begins as a nice variant on the Typhoid Mary story; the disease carrier who leaves a trail of illness in his wake. The story is that Otto Schumacher learns of an ingot of gold loaned to an atomic research facility at a university in Detroit. He and his slatternly girlfriend, Selma, meet with his old friend Catell, just out of prison, and arrange for Catell to steal the gold. But they don’t know that the gold is irradiated, and will make people sick who are near it. The police nearly catch Catell early on, but he escapes, Schumacher dying. Catell goes to Los Angeles to find Smith, the man who might buy the gold ingot.
Once Catell hides the ingot near Los Angeles, the Typhoid Mary story stops, to be replaced by a variant on High Sierra. Catell now becomes a burglar-for-hire, employed by Smith, beginning with the robbery of a loan office. There’s a double-cross, the police arrive, Catell escapes. The next job is absolutely High Sierra, involving a gambling resort up in the mountains, but just before the job Selma (Schumacher’s girlfriend) reappears and precipitates the finish. With the police hot on his trail, Catell retrieves the gold and drives aimlessly around the Imperial Valley, becoming increasingly sick with radiation disease. Eventually he dies in a ditch, hugging his gold.
The elements of Stop This Man just don’t mesh. There are odd little scenes of attempted humor that don’t really come off and are vaguely reminiscent of Thorne Smith, possibly because one character is called Smith and one Topper. A character called the Turtle does tiresome malap
ropisms. Very pulp-level violence and sex are stuck onto the story like lumps of clay onto an already finished statue. Lily, the girl Catell picks up along the way only to make some pulp sex scenes possible, is no character at all, hasn’t a shred of believability. Selma, the harridan drunk who pesters Catell, is on the other hand real and believable and just about runs away with the book.
An inability to stay with the story he started to tell plagued Rabe from time to time, and showed up again in his second book, Benny Muscles In, which begins as though it’s going to be a rise-of-the-punk history, a Little Caesar, but then becomes a much more narrowly focused story. Benny Tapkow works for a businesslike new-style mob boss named Pendleton. When Pendleton demotes Benny back to chauffeur, Benny switches allegiance to Big Al Alverato, an old-style Capone type, for whom Benny plans to kidnap Pendleton’s college-age daughter, Pat. She knows Benny as her father’s chauffeur, and so will leave school with him unsuspectingly. However, with one of Rabe’s odd bits of off-the-wall humor (this one works), Pat brings along a thirtyish woman named Nancy Driscoll, who works at the college and is a flirty spinster. At the pre-arranged kidnap spot, Pat unexpectedly gets out of the car with Benny, so it’s Nancy who’s spirited away to Alverato’s yacht, where she seduces Alverato, and for much of the book Nancy and Alverato are off cruising the Caribbean together.
The foreground story, however, remains Benny and the problem he has with Pat. Benny doesn’t know Pat well, and doesn’t know she’s experimented with heroin and just recently stopped taking it because she was getting hooked. To keep Pat tractable, Benny feeds her heroin in her drinks. The movement of the story is that Benny gradually falls in love with Pat and gradually (unknowingly) addicts her to heroin. The characters of Benny and Pat are fully developed and very touchingly real. The hopeless love story never becomes mawkish, and the gradual drugged deterioration of Pat is beautifully and tensely handled (as Fell’s deterioration will be in Kill the Boss Goodbye). The leap forward from Stop This Man is doubly astonishing when we consider they were published four months apart.
One month later, A Shroud for Jesso was published, in the second half of which Rabe finally came fully into his own. That book begins in a New York underworld similar to that in Benny Muscles In, with similar characters and relationships and even a similar symbolic job demotion for the title character, but soon the mobster Jesso becomes involved with international intrigue, is nearly murdered on a tramp steamer on the North Atlantic, and eventually makes his way to a strange household in Hannover, Germany, the home of Johannes Kator, an arrogant bastard and spy. In the house also are Kator’s sister, Renette, and her husband, a homosexual baron named Helmut. Helmut provides the social cover, Kator provides the money. Renette has no choice but to live with her overpowering brother and her nominal husband.
Jesso changes all that. He and Renette run off together, and the cold precise Rabe style reaches its maturity:
They had a compartment, and when the chauffeur was gone they locked the door, pushed the suitcases out of the way, and sat down. When the train was moving they looked out of the window. At first the landscape looked flat, industrial; even the small fields had a square mechanical look. Later the fields rolled and there were more trees. Renette sat close, with her legs tucked under her. She had the rest of her twisted around so that she leaned against him. They smoked and didn’t talk. There was nothing to talk about. They looked almost indifferent, but their indifference was the certainty of knowing what they had.
The characters in A Shroud for Jesso are rich and subtle, their relationships ambiguous, their story endlessly fascinating. When Jesso has to return for a while to New York, Renette prefigures the ending in the manner of her refusal to go with him:
Over here, Jesso, I know you, I want you, we are what I know now. You and I. But over there you must be somebody else. I’ve never known you over there and your life is perhaps quite different. Perhaps not, Jesso, but I don’t know. I want you now, here, and not later and somewhere else. You must not start to think of me as something you own, keep around wherever you happen to be. It would not be the same. What we have between us is just the opposite of that. It is the very thing you have given me, Jesso, and it is freedom.
And this opposition between love and freedom is what then goes on to give the novel its fine but bitter finish.
Rabe kept a European setting for his next book, A House in Naples, a story about two American Army deserters who’ve been black market operators in Italy in the ten years since the end of World War II. Charlie, the hero, is a drifter, romantic and adventurous. Joe Lenken, his partner, is a sullen but shrewd pig, and when police trouble looms, Joe’s the one with solid papers and a clear identity, while Charlie’s the one who has to flee to Rome to try (and fail) to find adequate forged papers. In a bar he meets a useless old expatriate American drunk who then wanders off, gets into a brawl, and is knifed to death. Charlie steals the dead man’s ID for himself, puts the body into the Tiber under a bridge, then looks up and sees a girl looking down. How much did she see?
In essence, A House in Naples is a love story in which the love is poisoned at the very beginning by doubt. The girl, Martha, is simple and clear, but her clarity looks like ambiguity to Charlie. Since he can never be sure of her, he can never be sure of himself. Once he brings Martha back to Naples and the vicious Joe is added to the equation, the story can be nothing but a slow and hard unraveling. The writing is cold and limpid and alive with understated emotion, from first sentence (“The warm palm of land cupped the water to make a bay, and that’s where Naples was”) to last (“He went to the place where he had seen her last”).
A House in Naples was followed by Kill the Boss Goodbye, and that was the peak of Rabe’s first period, five books, each one better than the one before. In those books, Rabe combined bits and pieces of his own history and education with the necessary stock elements of the form to make books in which tension and obsession and an inevitable downward slide toward disaster all combine with a style of increasing cold objectivity not only to make the scenes seem brand new but even to make the (rarely stated) emotions glitter with an unfamiliar sheen.
Born in Germany in 1921, Rabe already spoke English when he arrived in America at seventeen. With a PhD in psychology, he taught for a while at Western Reserve University and did research at Jackson Laboratory, where he wrote several papers on frustration. (No surprise.) Becoming a writer, he moved to various parts of America and lived a while in Germany, Sicily and Spain. His first published work he has described as “a funny pregnancy story (with drawings) to McCall’s.” The second was Stop This Man. In the next four books, he made the paperback world his own.
But then he seemed not to know what to do with it. Was it bad advice? Was it living too far away from the publishers and the action? Was it simply the speed at which he worked? For whatever reason, Rabe’s next six books were nearly as bad—except for the middle of one—as the first five had been good.
This began Rabe’s first effort to develop a series character, beginning with a book called Dig My Grave Deep, which is merely a second-rate gloss of Hammett’s The Glass Key, without Hammett’s psychological accuracy and without Rabe’s own precision and clarity. The book flounders and drifts and postures. The writing is tired and portentous, the characters thinner versions of Hammett’s. The Ned Beaumont character is called Daniel Port, and at the end he leaves town in a final paragraph that demonstrates just how sloppy Rabe could get when he wasn’t paying attention: “Port picked up his suitcases and went the other way. By the time it was full dawn he had exchanged his New York ticket for one that went the other way.”
That awkwardly repeated “other way” led directly into Rabe’s next book, The Out Is Death, in which Port is now just a hero with a criminal background. The story is the one about the sick old ex-con forced to pull one last job by the sadistic young punk. Abe Dalton, the excon, is a well-realized character, a better version of Catell from Stop This Man, but Port, as Dalton’s pal t
rying to help the old man out of trouble, is vague and uninteresting and never as tough as Rabe seems to think he is. Port, having started sub-Hammett, now becomes sub–W. R. Burnett.
After this second outing, Rabe left Port alone long enough to write Agreement to Kill, an odd book with a hokey beginning and not much finish at all but a fascinating long middle section. The book begins with Jake Spinner, a dirt farmer near St. Louis, coming out of jail after doing three years for assault. Rabe sets up Spinner as a victim in a land scheme being set up by the town’s most important man, Dixon, but suddenly switches gears. A professional hitman from the St. Louis mob kills Dixon. Spinner is blamed, but escapes and finds the killer stuck in his car, mired in a torn-up section of road. The killer convinces Spinner he’ll never get justice in that town, so Spinner helps him get away and leaves with him. (The killer, with broken leg, can’t drive.)
This killer is named Loma, and comes from Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire; Greene called him Raven. Loma is small, gray, clubfooted, quiet, ghostly, unemotional. A similar character, making a brief appearance in Kill the Boss Goodbye, was called Mound, and of course loma means “hill.” The idea of Loma as a kind of mounded grave himself, silent and dead as a low hill, works well against the idea of Spinner endlessly spinning, flailing around, trying to save himself and always making things worse. Rabe’s names are usually strange and frequently evocative, never more so than here.
The long middle section of Agreement to Kill is Rabe back in form at last, writing material that clearly interests him. Spinner, having decided he’ll never make it in the straight world, has decided his only hope is to convince Loma to introduce him to the mob world, where maybe he’ll be able to survive. Loma has no intention of introducing Spinner to anybody, but needs Spinner’s help and thus strings him along.
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