Pulp Poem of the Week

Out of food,
out of liquor,
even out of coffee.

          Lionel White
          The Snatchers
          1953

Book Review: Lionel White, The Snatchers (1953)

Beware . . . spoilers of the ending ensue. Before I began Lionel White’s debut novel, I had two expectations: I expected a successful kidnapping, and I expected a gratuitous rape. I expected the rape because I once read an interview with Charles Ardai in which he explained that Hard Case Crime has not reprinted any Lionel White because his novels tend to feature rapes that (in Ardai’s estimation) are included to thrill male readers. Does such a rape occur in The Snatchers? Yes. But I was reading the novel for the story of the kidnapping. White is an important figure in the history of noirboiled as a pioneer of the criminal procedural; you can draw a direct line from White’s work to Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels—which brings us to why I was expecting a successful kidnapping. This comes from “True Lies, or True-to-Life?,” an article from the March 24, 1995, Baltimore Sun by Jean Marbella: “[Westlake] had been tickled by a case in which a 1953 mystery novel, The Snatchers by Lionel White, was used as a blueprint for a real-life kidnapping of a baby in France. The kidnapping went exactly as plotted, but the criminals did themselves in, running through the ransom money and blabbing too loudly about their escapade. ‘They ran out of book,’ Mr. Westlake said with a laugh. ‘I always thought they should have taken the money and hired Lionel White to write them a sequel.’” So the kidnappers in The Snatchers must have gotten away with the money too, right? Wrong! The kidnapping in White’s novel goes totally to hell, and the book ends with the criminal gang’s leader dying in a barrage of gunfire. So did Westlake not remember how The Snatchers actually ends? And why would real-life kidnappers use this as their blueprint? I would really love to know! Grade: C

Pulp Poem of the Week

He was in bed

when she came in;

the lights were off

except for the small table lamp

which threw a shaded glow

at one side of the double bed.

Half consciously, she noticed

that George hadn't opened

the window for the night.

Once more she smiled,

this time inwardly.

George was about as subtle

as a fractured pelvis.

Lionel White

Clean Break

1955

Book Review: Lionel White, Clean Break [a.k.a. The Killing] (1955)

Johnny Clay, just paroled, masterminds a complicated racetrack robbery. His inspiration is that he will work with men remarkable only for their desperation, not their criminal backgrounds. Thus, when the job is done, the cops will have no idea whom to suspect. Lionel White's third-person narrative shifts deftly among the parties involved, sometimes making small jumps backward in time as it moves from character to character. The characters are fairly flat, and the prose is there just to get the story told, but these shifts in perspective keep things interesting and keep the pages turning. Grade: A-

Book Review: Lionel White, Flight into Terror (1955)

I liked the first 30 pages of Flight into Terror well enough; I liked the last couple of pages, too. Unfortunately, I came close to hating the hundred or so pages in between. This bulk of the novel fell prey to one of my major noir peeves: plots that are driven by the completely irrational behavior of their protagonists. In this case, Dal Brandon is an ordinary guy who accidentally ends up with $100,000 that does not belong to him, and the people who want their money back kill Dal's wife. For no sane reason, Dal then decides to take the money and run. He does not care about the money, he says; rather, he is intent on finding his wife's killers and avenging her death. Lionel White might have made this believable if he had portrayed Dal as a devoted, loving husband, but the opposite is true. Not only does Dal not love his (late) wife, but at the start of the novel he is planning to abandon her, having already purchased a one-way plane ticket to Chicago. White's portrayal of Brandon in this way wrecks the plot of this book. Grade: D+