by Lionel White
It is often that White’s men can be made by a woman or broken by one. There is often a contest going on between which man gets a particular woman, or how a woman can reverse their role and bring down a man. What we don’t see are women who are ineffective or casual observers. Women are often critical to the success or failure of any given caper and they’re just as often the impetus when the perfect crime begins to unravel.
Critics of White’s work often point to what they see as misogynistic tendencies or too many times invoking rape, or the threat of rape in his books. White treats rape as an awful, unforgivable act—it may be fair to say he treats it as the worst thing that can happen to a woman; it certainly carries more weight than even a casual murder—and he never uses it as titillation for the reader, ever.
What he does do is show is the act as a characteristic, the worst sort of characteristic, of some of most despicable characters he’s created. He writes it as a horror, as a terrible threat or even experience, and in some ways it makes his stories more starkly realistic, at least in his eyes. Women who live among criminals, who take their money and their booze, can find themselves misused in the worst of ways. A virtuous woman can experience the threat of rape as the ultimate demise, even worse than death.
To White there was no such thing as a casual rape. The fact that he wrote about it as often as he did can, I think, be seen as repugnant to White, a consequence to and for the sort of people he wrote about. These were bad people. To him, rape was the ultimate ravage, the one thing he couldn’t condone, so he used it in the books where he wrote about
his most hard-core and depraved criminals.
While it can make for uncomfortable reading, it is also an effective though politically incorrect (by today’s standards, at the very least) device. One has to wonder if he would be “allowed” to write those scenes today. Likewise, would a major publishing house like Dutton put out a hardcover titled The Night of the Rape in 1967? Certainly not. (Though its effects are devastating, which is a theme of the novel, the event itself takes place well offscreen.)
In White’s best known work, Clean Break (aka The Killing), he reverses the role and effects of rape when an unfaithful and unhappily married wife “consents” to sex with her husband. She does this only after toying with him to the point that when the act is finally consummated, the husband feels wracked with guilt: his wife has maneuvered him to feel as though he has just committed rape. This shame makes the husband give her anything she wants.
White not only reverses the typical scenario but also shows how the woman gains power over the man, a more powerful statement than he ever made with an instigating male character. The act as described is a trait of the evil woman (instead of the evil man), the portrayal is disgustingly abhorrent (indeed, there’s nothing arousing about any of it), and it displays a characteristic this particular female embodies. She's the one using her sexuality to dominate her man.
As for the act of sex itself, White writes from the same male-dominated perspective of others of his time. Earlier in the century, fiction writers shied away from depictions of the act itself and to do otherwise brought you to a different sort of book entirely, one often sold from beneath the counter with their covers tom off. When hard-boiled fiction featuring tough guys and dangerous broads came into vogue during the thirties, so did all the things they did together, though without the pornographic detail we’re liable to get in contemporary fiction. White’s men can rip or tear clothes, they can stare at parts of the female anatomy with obvious intention, but he refrains from going much beyond that, although much more may be implied.
Ultimately, no matter how we break down or analyze an author’s body of work, especially in fiction, the thing most of us want to know more than anything else is simply, “Is this writer any good?” Lionel White’s books are very good, some rather excellent, and like Hammett’s or Chandler’s and countless others, are very much of the times in which they were written.
His three dozen or so books are all meticulously plotted and planned, with nary a scene out of place. White never gives us the sense that he is winging it or lost or putting words on paper just to put words on paper. He is not an improviser. Every chapter or page marks a cog in the larger machine of his story. His characters have depth though they often give a sense of being trapped in their own bodies, as if their lives have a fey quality and their failures preordained. Success (usually in the form of money) is the butterfly they will never stop chasing even as it flies further and farther from their grasp, sometimes by mere inches.
White’s work has inspired other crime writers, most notably Donald Westlake, and given inspiration to a dozen screen works, of both the large and small variety. He has sold millions of books, starting with the digests and moving to mass market paperbacks with Gold Medal, Avon and others. When Dutton started publishing hardcover crime fiction, White published with them, a hallmark many other PBO authors never achieved. Indeed, in all his career, Peter Rabe only managed to published one hardover, 1960’s Anatomy of a Killer from Abelard-Schuman.
There are only so many place to rob or steal from and indeed some of White’s settings sometimes seem to overlap. He uses a few of the same techniques in a few books, including methods of laundering bills with noted serial numbers into more anonymous lots of cash. Undeniably clever stuff but like with many if not most writers of non-series books at the time, it’s probably a better idea not to read too many of one author’s books in a row. Styles become too familiar, for one thing, and a unique stylist like White or the aforementioned Rabe are best appreciated with a little space left between.
The certainty here is that what White did best, no one else did better. The plots for his crime fiction could be used as blueprints for actual crimes as well as scene layouts for feature films. He did this with characters who if sometimes not quite inspired were at least easily understood, their weighty motives giving them more heft than they’d have in lesser hands.
The quality of his prose grew with each book, and it is pleasantly surprising when he turns his considerable skills to a new voice or style. He was that rare writer that could offset any weakness with even greater strengths.
And it bears repeating that no one could plot a crime novel like Lionel White. If you don’t know what this means, just pick up one of his books and you’ll see it from the first page. Perhaps the rough portrayals of some of his female characters holds him back in the eyes of today’s literary climate, but perhaps not. It could be that the dearth of information about Lionel White the man makes it easier for the work to simmer just below the public eye and is keeping him from being rediscovered as handily as his work deserves. This certainly wasn’t the case while he was alive and at his peak, and for fans of hard-boiled writing, of true noir writing, White should not be missed.
If you happen to be a crook looking for a better way to pull a heist without getting caught, well, I’m sure you could do worse, though with tools like DNA testing and ever increasing video surveillance, you’d be better off just reading a book. Remember, these books are prime examples of noir.
Better to pick up The Snatchers or The Merriweather File and see how someone else did it, or how they failed to do it, at least in the imagination of one of the all time PBO greats. The more attention you pay to what he’s doing the more it can only add to your pleasure and appreciation of the magic behind the curtain.
Just do yourself a favor and don’t get any ideas. Banks and race tracks aren’t what they once were, you know.
January, 2017 Littleton, NH
Sources:
Crider, Bill, entry from Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 2nd Ed., ed. by John Reilly, St. Martin’s Press, 1985 Haut, Woody, Heartbreak and Vine, Serpent’s Tail, 2002
THE
SNATCHERS Lionel White
Chapter One
Slowly turning from the narrow, dirt-encrusted window that faced the sandy road leading over the dunes and down to the main highway, the girl had a worried, petulant
look about her mouth. Oddly enough, it seemed to emphasize the peculiarly harsh beauty of her Slavic face.
“They’re late,” she said.
Dent flicked a glance at his watch and went on oiling the .38 police positive. His wide, flat shoulders hunched in a shrug.
“They should be here by now,” the girl said.
She turned back once more, pulled the stringy curtain to one side, and peered again through the mist across the dunes.
The man Dent laid the revolver on the oilcloth-covered table.
“Get away from the window, Pearl,” he said, his voice a soft drawl, but still with that peculiar tight hardness which always seemed to lend to his words the shadow of a subtle threat. “Stop worrying. They’re not too late. A lot of things could have happened. Puncture—anything. And I told Red to drive slow. They’ll be here, so stop worrying. You get some coffee going.”
“I’d like a drink,” Pearl said.
“You’d like a slap in the kisser,” Dent said. “You’re not going to take a drink. I told you before, you can’t drink on this job. Nobody’s going to drink. After they get here, and we get things settled down, then you can have a drink. Not until.”
The girl turned toward Dent and this time her husky voice had a note of pleading in it.
“Aw, Dent,” she said. “You know I’m no lush. You know you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I know,” Dent said. “I also know Red don’t like you to drink when he’s not around. Not that I give a goddamn for Red or what he likes. Only thing is, we can’t have any trouble—any trouble at all. I’ve spent too much time setting this caper up to have the slightest thing go wrong.”
Pearl shrugged; then she smiled widely. Her blonde head lifted and she stretched her shoulders back, making Dent aware of her sensuous, long-limbed body. She sucked in her flat stomach so that her full bosom would stand out invitingly. It was the sort of idle, lazy gesture that almost any woman might make. In Pearl, it seemed somehow obscene.
“Coffee it is,” she said. “Only I wish to God that they’d get here. I don’t like this waiting one little bit.”
Once more Cal Dent looked at his watch. He shrugged and reached for the Sunday supplement lying on the table. He was beginning to worry, but no one, watching him, could possibly have detected it. That was a significant quality of the man’s character—this capacity for complete self-control. It was his essential strength; the amazing coolness was ever a part of him.
There was that business of the abortive break out in Colorado, some four years back, when he and three other lifers had held a cell block for sixty-four hours with prison-made weapons against a hundred officers equipped with machine guns and gas bombs. He hadn’t cracked then.
There had been other times, too, plenty of them, during those thirteen years he’d spent behind bars. The remaining twenty years of his life, when he had been free, had been tense with his unconventional struggle against a society that had never been able to understand him.
At thirty-three, Cal Dent rarely thought back. No, he thought ahead. Even now, as he and Pearl waited in the summer cottage in the desolate reaches of Long Island’s South Shore, waited for Red and the others, he was thinking ahead. Thinking and making his plans.
He was working it on a precision timetable. Red should be here no later than one-thirty. It was almost that now. Dent knew exactly what he would do in case the car failed to show on schedule. He would stick to his timetable. There would be the fifteen-minute leeway period; then he and Pearl would climb into the Packard sedan and blow. They’d wait for a half hour at the diner, where the road intersected the Montauk Pike. Wait and see.
The coffeepot started to boil and Pearl juggled a pair of heavy porcelain cups with all the careless dexterity of a graduate hash-slinger. She’d done it often enough in those last three days to know that Dent took his straight, without sugar. She pulled a chair up to the kitchen table and sat sideways, crossing her long bare legs at the knees. Her short, tailored skirt fell carelessly, exposing the soft white flesh of her thigh. It would have driven Red crazy.
Red had the strange, simple morality of the typical criminal—in relation to his own woman.
Pearl lifted the cup to lips that were a crimson gash in her white face. She blew across the top to cool the hot brown liquid. Her eyes were blue smudges as she half closed them and watched Dent over the rim.
“Think everything went O.K.?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t suppose maybe the cops at the toll gate...”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Dent said. “Don’t borrow trouble.
Talk about something else.”
“All right,” Pearl said, the husky quality of her voice strong with emphasis. “I’ll talk about us. Do you like me, Dent?”
“I like you.
“Well, you don’t seem...”
Dent swung to look the girl full in the face. He leaned forward, hands holding the table’s edge.
Pearl thought, God, he isn’t really human. He’s like a lean, tawny cat, crouched and waiting.
His leathery, spare face was ascetic in its immobility, and the prematurely white hair, with its cowlick over one eye, lent him the contradictory look of a little boy who had suddenly grown too old. He had charm, but it was a dangerous sort of charm. The mediocrity of his lean, average-sized body was belied by the dynamic quality of his astringent personality.
“Listen, kid,” he said, his voice a low monotone, “get something straight. You’re a damned good-looking dame. If I went for dames I’d go for you. You’ve got a lot of things I want.” His eyes took in several of the things. “But let’s get one matter settled. You are, or at least Red thinks you are, his dame. That, alone, don’t mean a damn thing. That wouldn’t hold me.”
He stopped to let it sink in.
“But right now Red is working with me on a job. I need him and I need him happy. The job comes first. Pm not horsing around with five hundred grand. It isn’t every day I dream up a caper like this; it isn’t every day I get something this well organized. Until we finish this deal, I ain’t thinking of you, or any other girl, or anything at all. Except doing the job.
“When it’s all over, when the dust has settled down—well, that’s something else again. Then, if you still feel the way you seem to feel now, I’ll...”
The girl’s face flushed and her eyes narrowed in quick anger.
“Who said anything about my wanting you,” she said, the husky voice suddenly glassy.
“You don’t have to say it. I know.”
Her breath came out hard and short and Dent could feel the fury mount in her. And then suddenly she made one of those quick switches that Cal Dent had noticed were so characteristic of her.
The wide Slavic mouth opened and even handsome teeth were twin rows of white beads. The blue smudges lost their sultriness and she was laughing. Her hand reached out and it was with almost a gesture of camaraderie that she rubbed Dent’s arm.
“O.K., Cal. You’re pretty smart. I’ll wait around and behave, and maybe I’ll take you up on that Mex border deal one of these days.”
She stood up and walked once more to the window. Dent was glancing at his watch when she again spoke.
“Car coming,” she said.
Even as the girl turned, Cal Dent was on his feet. One hand stretched to cut off the muted radio. His other reached for the submachine gun lying on the shelf over the brick fireplace. With two strides he was across the room and at Pearl’s side. He had swept up a pair of field glasses-from the table and he tucked the Tommy gun under his right arm as he raised the glasses.
He traced the silhouette of the large black sedan as the heavy car pulled through the loose sand of the dunes a thousand yards from the house. The whisper of a sigh escaped his lips and his mouth twisted in a tight smile.
“It’s them,” he said. “Stand by the door.”
Dent himself went back to his chair at the table. He dropped the glasses
gently and placed the machine gun next to the glasses. He faced the weathered pine door as Pearl opened it to a quick double knock.
Red entered first.
Six foot four inches tall, shoulders almost as wide as the jamb of the doorway he entered, he stooped to come into the room. He held the child in his arms, carrying her sixty-two pounds as though she were a loosely stuffed doll. Long, straw-colored hair was flung across his shoulder and her tear-stained face was half concealed by the adhesive tape locking her mouth. Her eyes were huge and round in their blueness and it was obvious at once that she was frightened into a state of semihysteria.
Red stood the child on her feet and his broken prize fighter’s face smiled crookedly. He flung off his chauffeur’s cap to expose flaming hair, cut crew fashion. A discolored cigarette hung from the corner of his full mouth.
“Here’s Tootsie,” he said.
But neither Dent nor Pearl was watching him. They were watching the girl who had followed him in, prodded by Gino’s closed fist.
Terry Ballin was something to look at. Even with the thin trickle of blood that had dried at the corner of her mouth and the right eye rapidly turning a nasty purple, she was still something. The collar of her turtle-neck sweater was smothered by her auburn hair; her face was like that of a very, very beautiful sixteen-year-old child. Her body was that of a woman, a very desirable woman.
Gino, a thin sparrow in his tight pin-striped suit, his soft gray Hom-burg slanting over one eye, pushed her again, well into the room, and closed the door. He stood just a trifle over five feet and couldn’t have weighed a hundred and ten pounds dripping wet. His eyes were black pebbles in a dead, sickly face; his mouth was hard and cruel under an overly large nose.
“This one,” he said, nudging the girl, “she wants to give me an argument.” He pushed her into a chair, and as Terry Ballin fell back her eyes were dark with loathing.
