The Getaway Car Page 15

  Spinner, wanting to “change sides,” to become an outlaw, tries to model himself on Loma’s emotional emptiness. He has shoulder pains, that increase and become more and more crippling the more he suppresses his emotions. He meets a girl, Ann, the first true pulp non-entity female in Rabe’s work since Lily in Stop This Man, and keeps pushing her away in his efforts to become emotionless.

  Spinner does eventually meet a mob boss, and is given a job . . . to kill Loma. He welcomes this as a chance to show his progress toward coldness, and when Ann arrives just as he’s planning to shoot Loma he feels he has to drive her away to demonstrate to himself his icy proficiency. At first, though she’s hurt by what he says, she won’t leave, and then:

  And then he knew she was crying even though there was no sound, and before it tore him open again—he thought about this very clearly—he lifted his hand and hit her in the face.

  A big star of pain exploded in his shoulder, making him tremble. It kept bursting, next to him, it kept shining all the time he could hear her feet running away and the way she breathed, running away down the road through the trees. He had reached such perfection in this that he walked to her car to make sure where she was.

  “He had reached such perfection in this. . . .” I can’t think of another writer who would have used that phrase. Nor who would have written this of Spinner’s next thoughts, on his way to kill Loma:

  Now for the business. It was a very small, surprisingly small matter to do this job now. That’s the advantage of this new technique. Turn himself off and do a million things. Of course, one at a time, and each one—by comparison—very small, even unimportant. He walked to the cabin.

  But the pain in Spinner’s shoulder keeps him from aiming his gun at Loma; finally he drops it on the floor, makes up with Ann, and they drive off together.

  Loma turns Spinner in to the police for Dixon’s murder. There’s a trial, and Spinner’s about to be convicted when Loma sends to the court his specially made boot for his club foot, which proves he was the murderer. This is all perfunctory, Rabe’s interest clearly having been in the Spinner-Loma relationship. The man who spins all the time, alive but failing, and the man who is a silent cold hill, a mound, a filled-in grave.

  After this semi-return to his powerful best, Rabe dropped right down again, with a third Daniel Port novel, It’s My Funeral. Port seemed to be Rabe’s (unconscious?) vehicle for derivative books imitating famous practitioners in the field. This time it’s Leslie Charteris and the Saint, with Port involved in a tired story about the blackmailing of a movie star with the porno film she did years ago. Partway through, it switches to the equally tired story about the hotel with the hidden camera behind the two-way mirror. (That particular wheeze got another airing in the fine 1986 film Mona Lisa, showing that nothing is ever too old to be used again.)

  Doing a fairly good imitation of Leslie Charteris’s tongue-in-cheek comedy, Rabe has a subplot about a singer named Tess Dolphin that Port’s trying to get into bed with; every time they near the sack, the story starts again, such as it is. The principal trouble here, apart from the slackness of the material, is that Port is not involved. Having no motivation for the central figure robs Rabe of his principal strength, which is the delineation of obsessed characters.

  Rabe left Port again after this but remained in trouble for his next two books, both of which are flat and derivative and sloppily plotted. Journey into Terror combines the artificiality of plot of Cornell Woolrich at his worst with the overwrought emotions of James M. Cain at his worst, plus a dollop of David Goodis when the hero becomes a down-and-out drunk for a while. Mission for Vengeance keeps trying to be a John D. MacDonald novel, keeps almost making it, and keeps falling on its face. The villain, Farret, is rather like the villain in MacDonald’s Cape Fear, except that Farret keeps making threats and not following through. Mission for Vengeance is also odd for its use of first-person narration. It was Rabe’s initial use of the first person, and it appears only sporadically, most of the book being in third person. The jolts back and forth are irritating, and don’t accomplish much because the narrator-hero, John Miner (indeed!), doesn’t have much of a distinctive voice.

  With his twelfth book, Blood on the Desert, Rabe gets his second wind, goes for a complete change of pace, and produces his first fully satisfying work since Kill the Boss Goodbye. It’s a foreign intrigue tale set in the Tunisian desert, spy versus spy in a story filled with psychological nuance. The characters are alive and subtle, the story exciting, the setting very clearly realized.

  And damn me, if it isn’t followed by another Daniel Port! In Rabe’s own words, in a recent letter to me, Bring Me Another Corpse is “a plot without tension and some good writing thrown away in disinterest.” The best writing is at the very beginning:

  When the road flattened out toward Albany, Daniel Port started to drive faster. For a short while this distracted him, but there was an unpleasant stiffness down his back, and his hands were too tight on the wheel. At moments the fast driving was like running away, though Port didn’t know what he was running from.

  When the light was almost gone it started to rain. The rain was thin and cold, but it put a veil over the late-fall landscape.

  Dan Port slowed a little and lit a cigarette. The rain produced a feeling of shelter inside the car. This feeling grew as it got darker, and when he reached the outskirts of Albany Port felt easy enough to think of stopping and stretching his legs. He slowed for the next gas station and rolled up to the pumps. Then he got out.

  The pumps sat in a big orb of light through which the rain showed like driving mist. The rain felt cold and wakeful and Port stood by the hood of the car while the station man let the gas hum into the tank. It was very quiet under the rain. The orb of light over the pumps illuminated a small area only, leaving the highway dark. A few cars passed there, each with two eyes of light and their tires writing signatures on the wet black asphalt.

  The next car was just a murmur and a wet sound, because it went by so slowly. For a moment the gas station man thought the car meant to turn into the station, so he looked up. He saw his customer standing by the hood, smoking, hunching a little because of the rain—and then he saw the cigarette spray up in the air. There was a sound like a whipcrack or a sharp rap with a stick on a wooden box, and the man spun suddenly, trying not to fall.

  But Port began to bleed almost immediately. He dropped on the cement with a hard slam, which he didn’t feel at all.

  I quote so extensively the beginning of an otherwise undistinguished book because Peter Rabe is right; that is awfully good writing to be “thrown away in disinterest.” A physical scene and an emotional ambience are sketched in with very deft strokes.

  And what follows? At the end of Daniel Port’s first novel, he’d protected himself from the mob bosses by leaving evidence to be given the police should he be killed. In Bring Me Another Corpse—what shriveled gnome thought up those titles?—someone who wants to make trouble for those bosses has realized the simplest way to do so is to kill Dan Port. Not a bad idea, but nothing happens in the book; just a lot of backing and filling.

  Rabe followed this with Time Enough to Die, the last of the Daniel Port novels—whew!—and the only good one. The setting is the Mexican Pacific coast, mostly a small fishing village where a colony of immigrant Japanese fishermen live in their own separate neighborhood. There’s a lot of local color, ocean and islands and jungle, all well done and well described. The plot is tricky without being artificial, and for once Rabe has surrounded Port with strong and interesting characters. Time Enough to Die is the last of the Port novels and the first of Rabe’s final cluster of five excellent books.

  The second of these, My Lovely Executioner, is another total change of pace, and a fine absorbing novel. Rabe’s first book told completely in the first person, it is also his first true mystery, a story in which the hero is being manipulated and has no idea why.

  The hero-narrator, Jimmy Gallivan, is a glum fellow in
jail, with three weeks to go on a seven-year term for attempted murder (wife’s boyfriend, shot but didn’t kill) when he’s caught up in a massive jailbreak. He doesn’t want to leave, but another con, a tough professional criminal named Rand, forces him to come along, and then he can’t get back. Gallivan gradually realizes the whole jailbreak was meant to get him out, but he doesn’t know why. Why him? Why couldn’t they wait three weeks until he’d be released anyway? The mystery is a fine one, the explanation is believable and fair, the action along the way is credible and exciting, and the Jim Thompsonesque gloom of the narration is wonderfully maintained.

  And next, published in May of 1960, Rabe’s sixteenth Gold Medal novel in exactly five years, was Murder Me for Nickels, yet another change of pace, absolutely unlike anything that he had done before. Told in first person by Jack St. Louis, right-hand man of Walter Lippit, the local jukebox king, Murder Me for Nickels is as sprightly and glib as My Lovely Executioner was depressed and glum. It has a lovely opening sentence, “Walter Lippit makes music all over town,” and is chipper and funny all the way through. At one point, for instance, St. Louis is drunk when he suddenly has to defend himself in a fight: “I whipped the bottle at him so he stunk from liquor. I kicked out my foot and missed. I swung out with the glass club and missed. I stepped out of the way and missed. When you’re drunk everything is sure and nothing works.”

  Nineteen-sixty was also when a penny-ante outfit called Abelard-Schuman published in hardcover Anatomy of a Killer, a novel Gold Medal had rejected, I can’t think why. It’s third person, as cold and as clean as a knife, and this time the ghostly unemotional killer, Loma and Mound, is brought center stage and made the focus of the story. This time he’s called Jordan (as in the river?) and Rabe stays in very tight on him. The book begins,

  When he was done in the room he stepped away quickly because the other man was falling his way. He moved fast and well and when he was out in the corridor he pulled the door shut behind him. Sam Jordan’s speed had nothing to do with haste but came from perfection.

  The door went so far and then held back with a slight give. It did not close. On the floor, between the door and the frame, was the arm.

  . . . He looked down at the arm, but then did nothing else. He stood with his hand on the door knob and did nothing.

  He stood still and looked down at the fingernails and thought they were changing color. And the sleeve was too long at the wrist. He was not worried about the job being done, because it was done and he knew it. He felt the muscles around the mouth and then the rest of the face, stiff like bone. He did not want to touch the arm.

  . . . After he had not looked at the arm for a while, he kicked at it and it flayed out of the way. He closed the door without slamming it and walked away. A few hours later he got on the night train for the nine-hour trip back to New York.

  . . . But the tedium of the long ride did not come. He felt the thick odor of clothes and felt the dim light in the carriage like a film over everything, but the nine-hour dullness he wanted did not come. I’ve got to unwind, he thought, this is like the shakes. After all this time with all the habits always more sure and perfect, this.

  He sat still, so that nothing showed, but the irritation was eating at him. Everything should get better, doing it time after time, and not worse. Then it struck him that he had never before had to touch a man when the job was done. Naturally. Here was a good reason. He now knew this in his head but nothing else changed. The hook wasn’t out and the night-ride dullness did not come.

  It is from that small beginning, having to touch a victim for the first time, that Rabe methodically and tautly describes the slow unraveling of Jordan. It’s a terrific book.

  There was another novel from this period, a Daniel Port which was rejected by Gold Medal and published as half of an Ace double-book in 1958, under the title The Cut of the Whip. Which brings to eighteen the books published between 1955 and 1960. Eighteen books, five years, and they add up to almost the complete story of Peter Rabe’s career as a fine and innovative writer.

  Almost. There was one more, in December of 1962, called The Box (the only Rabe novel published with a Rabe title). The Box may be Rabe’s finest work, a novel of character and of place, and in it Rabe managed to use and integrate more of his skills and techniques than anywhere else. “This is a pink and gray town,” it begins, “which sits very small on the north edge of Africa. The coast is bone white and the sirocco comes through any time it wants to blow through. The town is dry with heat and sand.”

  A tramp steamer is at the pier. In the hold is a large wooden box, a corner of which was crushed in an accident. A bad smell is coming out. The bill of lading very oddly shows that the box was taken aboard in New York and is to be delivered to New York. Contents: “PERISHABLES. NOTE: imperative, keep ventilated.” The captain asks the English clerk of the company that owns the pier permission to unload and open the box. The box is swung out and onto the pier.

  They stood a moment longer while the captain said again that he had to be out of here by this night, but mostly there was the silence of heat everywhere on the pier. And whatever spoiled in the box spoiled a bit more.

  “Open it!” said the captain.

  They open it, and look in.

  “Shoes?” said the clerk after a moment. “You see the shoes?” as if nothing on earth could be more puzzling.

  “Why shoes on?” said the captain, sounding stupid.

  What was spoiling there spoiled for one moment more, shrunk together in all that rottenness, and then must have hit bottom.

  The box shook with the scramble inside, with the cramp muscled pain, with the white sun like steel hitting into the eyes there so they screwed up like sphincters, and then the man inside screamed himself out of the box.

  The man is Quinn, a smartass New York mob lawyer who is being given a mob punishment: shipped around the world inside a box, with nothing in there but barely enough food and water to let him survive the trip. What happens to him in Okar, and what happens to Okar as a result of Quinn, live up to the promise of that beginning.

  But for Rabe, it was effectively the end. It was another three years before he published another book, and then it was a flippant James Bond imitation called Girl in a Big Brass Bed, introducing Manny deWitt, an arch and cutesy narrator who does arch and cutesy dirty work for an international industrialist named Hans Lobbe. Manny deWitt appeared twice more, in The Spy Who Was 3 Feet Tall (1966) and Code Name Gadget (1967), to no effect, all for Gold Medal. And Gold Medal published Rabe’s last two books as well: War of the Dons (1972) and Black Mafia (1974).

  Except for those who hit it big early, the only writers who tend to stay with writing over the long haul are those who can’t find a viable alternative. Speaking personally, three times in my career the wolf has been so slaveringly at the door that I tried to find an alternative livelihood, but lacking college degrees, craft training or any kind of useful work history I was forced to go on writing instead, hoping the wolf would grow tired and slink away. The livelihood of writing is iffy at best, which is why so many writing careers simply stop when they hit a lean time. Peter Rabe had a doctorate in psychology; when things went to hell on the writing front, it was possible for him to take what he calls a bread-and-butter job teaching undergraduate psychology in the University of California.

  It is never either entirely right or entirely wrong to identify a writer with his or her heroes. The people who carry our stories may be us, or our fears about ourselves, or our dreams about ourselves. The typical Peter Rabe hero is a smart outsider, working out his destiny in a hostile world. Unlike Elmore Leonard’s scruffy heroes, for instance, who are always ironically aware that they’re better than their milieu, Rabe’s heroes are better than their milieu and are never entirely confident of that. They’re as tough and grubby as their circumstances make necessary, but they are also capable from time to time of the grand gesture. Several of Peter Rabe’s novels, despite the ill-fitting wino garb of their
titles, are very grand gestures indeed.

  PLAYING POLITICS WITH A MASTER OF DIALOGUE: ON GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  This review originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on December 2, 1990.—Ed.

  Probably the worst thing that ever happened to George V. Higgins was success. When The Friends of Eddie Coyle was published in 1972, it was that rarest of things under the sun, something new, and readers gobbled it up like the fresh taste it was.

  Unfortunately, however, Higgins wound up praised and remembered for the wrong accomplishment. What people saw was an ex-prosecutor who had listened to and was reporting on criminal speech in an excitingly different and realistic way. This elliptical rump-sprung dialogue, overheard by the reader but not directed at him, full of half-revealed mysteries and unexpected depths of duplicity, seemed like the real thing at last, and catapulted Higgins to fame.

  If that were the whole story, if Higgins were merely another guy with a stylistic stunt, like Jeffrey Farnol or Damon Runyon, there would soon have been little reason left to read him. Once you know the stunt, once you can hear the music in your head even before you open the book, why open the book? And other guys—Elmore Leonard, most noticeably—were using similarly bumpy dialogue rhythms for reasons of their own.

  But that wasn’t the whole story. Higgins was never trying to be merely a hard-boiled crime novelist, one step to the right of the private-eye people; what he was trying to do was write novels. And what linked the characters of his various books was not the world of the criminal but a love of talk.

  Higgins’s characters wallow in narration and description and mere jazzing around. Stuck together in a car on a long drive across New England, they tell one another stories, recounting in detail the dialogue from those previous adventures. Faced with a decision, they talk it out together, reminding one another of possibly useful parallel situations from the past, worrying the issue with a flood of words.