Tag Archives: Fredric Brown

Forgotten Book: Stop This Man! by Peter Rabe (1955)

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The lurid-looking core of Peter Rabe’s Stop This Man!

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 195th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Recently I ordered some paperbacks from a Facebook acquaintance. I got 11 books, which included four Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, two Fredric Brown novels (one science fiction, one mystery and both great!), and five novels by Peter Rabe.

Peter Rabe is one of those forgotten mystery writers of the ’50’s and ’60s. He’s not quite in the John D. MacDonald, Ross McDonald, Jim Thompson, Charles Williams or Donald Hamilton class, but he is not far behind them. When the box with the books arrived, I was immediately drawn to Stop This Man! because I loved the cover, the blurb from Erskine Caldwell, and because I had not previously read it.

So, it found its way into my hands and my recliner.

Stop This Man! Is an odd novel. It deals with the theft of a 36-pound gold bar and the cross country chase to recover it. Tony Catell is a three-time loser who has just gotten out of prison. He is acquainted with Otto Schumacher, a quiet man who has a gift for planning robberies. Tony has stolen the gold bar based on Otto’s plan. Otto and his girlfriend Selma are waiting for Tony when he arrives with the bar. But, of course, there’s a problem. None of them knew the bar was radioactive. People who get near it suddenly don’t so hot. While the bar doesn’t seem to be affecting Tony, others are dying.

Otto wants to wait but Catell doesn’t. Selma is attracted to Tony’s style and decides to hang with Tony. The FBI have fingered Schumacher as a possible accessory in the crime, but when they confront him, they find only a corpse. Radiation has done its job.

With the heat turned up, Tony decides to by-pass an intermediary and go straight to the buyer, Mr. Smith, in Los Angeles himself. He dumps Selma and tells her to meet him in LA, though he has no intention of keeping that date.

Along the way he tries to keep a low profile, stealing and changing cars frequently. In Arizona, he meets a small town bully with a badge who hates him at first sight. Tony is beaten and jailed and the prospects don’t look good, but he is an experienced felon and soon has the drop on the sheriff.

In LA, Tony meets up with an old friend, the Turtle, at just the right time. He’s got less than a dollar and looks like hell, so the Turtle spots him some money and helps him find the way to Mr. Smith. On his way, Tony makes some enemies – Mr. Smith’s right hand man Topper being the worst of them. He makes a good friend in Topper’s young girlfriend Lily. He makes some corpses. And he meets Selma again. Need I mention the Feds are now breathing down his neck?

Of course, things get worse from there.

Stop This Man! is a good, short read that was reprinted in 2011 by Hard Case Crime. Thank you Charles Ardai for all that you’ve done there!

While it’s enjoyable, the book is odd. Most of the real action takes place off stage. Both the robbery and the initial meeting between Schumacher and Tony have happened before the book starts. Even so, there’s a lot of action in the 160 pages in this novel.

I’ve not read a ton of Rabe. Not like those other writers I listed earlier. What I have read, though, I really enjoyed. I know Ed Gorman was a big fan of Rabe’s work and we discussed it once on the phone for quite a while. While reading this, I thought of Ed a lot. Gone, but not forgotten.

Rabe wrote quite a few books but they are a little hard to find. If you find one, read it. Then look for more. You’ll find some of the oddest tiles on his books. Titles like Benny Muscles In, Murder Me for Nickels, Dig My Grave Deep, A Shroud for Jesso and Kill the Boss Goodbye make his books memorable.

Check him out. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.  This week, however, Patti is, hopefully, accepting an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best paperback novel and the beautiful and talented Todd Mason is hosting for her.

Forgotten Book: The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch (1954)

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Robert Bloch's The Will to Kill is full of twists and turns.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 172nd in my series of Forgotten Books.

After enjoying a Fredric Brown book last week, I thought it might be nice to try a novel from another classic writer. So I pulled my copy of Screams by Robert Bloch off the shelf. That volume contains three early suspense novels by the Psycho master, so I decided to go with the earliest novel, The Will to Kill.

I had read a lot of Bloch over the years, mostly his short fiction. His horror for Weird Tales was spectacular and he was an early acolyte/friend of H. P. Lovecraft. In fact, the two writers each did a story where they killed the other off by horrific means. Such a fun group.

The Will to Kill was, for many years, a legendary Bloch novel, available only as an Ace paperback original that was very hard to come by. Over the years, I searched for copies of this novel in many states. I did eventually find one in the late 90’s in Springfield, Missouri, at a small paperback house. I locates a lot of great titles that day, including the first five 84th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. I was about to check out when I saw this one behind the counter. The clerk said they were holding it for some customer but he had never come in. I asked when he was going to pick it up and the clerk said if it was still available on Friday, I could have it for $2. Come Friday I picked it up.

Screams collects three early Robert Bloch novels, including The Will to Kill.

I never got around to reading it before my Big Book Sale of 2007, when it went away to land on someone else’s shelves. So this last week, I decided to remedy that situation.

Tom Keller is a Korean War veteran suffering from PTSD, even though that phrase did not exist at the time. He has come home from the war to a loving wife. Sometimes Keller suffers from blackouts, fugue states where he wanders and does things that he does not remember. Following one of those episodes, he wakes up with scissors in his hand and a dead wife at his feet. Her throat had been cut … by scissors. He is jailed but eventually released when forensics prove he could not have performed the murder.

Now in another town, he runs a stamp, coin and book store where he works with his new girlfriend. He wants to be with her, but he still has his own doubts about the murder of his first wife. As the novel opens, Keller is recovering from a blackout and has no idea what he has done. He soon finds that he has told his girlfriend Kit about his fears and this drives her away.

While Kit is gone, Keller deals with a fat man with an obviously stolen stamp collection. He chooses the high road and does not buy the material, even though he could turn it into a quick profit. The seller is upset and leaves.

Soon, Keller encounters the fat man again at a bar, where he is abusing a woman and making threats. When Keller steps in, a knife comes out. But Keller is a veteran and disarms the man, ejecting him from the bar.

The girl he has saved, Trixie, invites him over and frantic sex happens at her place. Keller falls asleep, and when he wakes up, Trixie is dead. In circumstances similar to the previous murder he was involved with.

Keller is, of course, arrested and the earlier case is brought up. A blind man identifies Keller by his walk and the taps on his shoes as the killer. The murder weapon is identified as a poniard, a French style stiletto. And, of course, Tom has one in a case at his store. Or, had one, since the store has been broken into and the knife taken. The only possible lead is Trixie’s roommate. When the police go to ask her questions, she is found dead also. But, Tom was in police custody when the roommate was killed. And, of course, the same knife was used.

Kit shows up with a lawyer, Anthony Mingo, for whom she used to work and had been romantically involved. Tom, already unsure of himself, takes this new twist poorly and begins to doubt Kit’s affection for him.

The story takes several good turns and eventually resolves itself, but not before several unusual items from Tom’s and Kit’s past are revealed.

I really enjoyed this novel and read it in one sitting. And, with Screams, I still have two more early Bloch novels waiting for my attention, specifically Firebug and The Star Stalker. Bloch was really crafting his style at this point, leading up to his 1959 novel Psycho.

So, if you can find the Ace paperback, buy it. If not, get Screams and have three fun books. And, as with all such titles, your mileage may vary, but I doubt it. Bloch is fabulous.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs. This week Todd Mason is hosting the listing.

 

Forgotten Book: Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown (1950)

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Nick of the Jabberwok is fast, fun and full of surprises.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 171st in my series of Forgotten Books.

As I mentioned in the last Forgotten Book column, I recently discovered a cache of old Unicorn Mystery Book Club books at the local Half Price. I bought six volumes while I was there. The Memoirs of Solar Pons was in one of the volumes. But the one that really pushed me over the edge was Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown — not that it took much of a push.

There was a time when I had a very nice collection of Fredric Brown’s work. I had hardback firsts of all his science fiction, including a nice, signed Space on My Hands and much of his mystery work. I believe I had all the mystery novels and most of the short stories. I did not have The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, but I did have the original pulp that the story had appeared in. And I had read most of his work. Somewhere along the way, I did an article about Ed and Am Hunter that appeared in a non-fiction work about 100 great detectives, and I had read all those novels.

At his worst, Brown was always worth reading. And at his best, he was fantastic. Here, in Night of the Jabberwock, he was at the top of his form.

It’s a novel with a lot of stuff going on. The hero is Doc Stoeger, the editor and publisher of a small town weekly newspaper. He has a PhD and his dissertation was on Lewis Carroll. He is nuts for Lewis Carroll. But no one in the town really cares. He has one or two friends he can play chess with, but no one to really discuss the things he loves most. And after 23 years running the paper, he is down. Just once, he would love something to happen on Thursday night so that when the paper came out on Friday morning it would have real news.

Well, Doc soon discovers you should be careful what you wish for. In the course of one night, he has many adventures. There’s a messy divorce case, the bank is broken into, several men are murdered, Doc and his friend Smiley are kidnapped by gangsters, there’s an explosion in the Roman candle department of the local fireworks factory, there’s an escapee from the local loony bin. Oh, and Doc is the prime suspect in two of the murders and is involved in a manhunt in his small town. Doc sees and witnesses all of these and yet, he cannot write about them.

The series of events begins with a man named Yehudi Smith who asks about the Vorpal Blades, a Lewis Carroll appreciation society. That society wants Doc to meet them at a nearby haunted house to discuss the possibility that Lewis Carroll was writing about real worlds in the Alice books.

This is fast paced like a Cornell Woolrich novel and, at times, just as unbelievable. But the prose is lean and clean, and the reader has the adventure of a lifetime.

I read this book many years ago and had forgotten most of it, so it was wonderful to sit back in my reading chair and renew my friendship. I ran across a passage that I loved on the original reading and again last night:

“Two walls of my living room are lined with them (books) and they overflow the bookcases in my bedroom and I even have a shelf of them in the bathroom. What do I mean, even? I think a bathroom without a bookshelf is as incomplete as would be one without a toilet.”

Can I get an “Amen”?

It’s a quick and wonderful read and, while it used to be impossible to find when I first started looking, there are plenty of editions and copies around online or in eBooks now. You have no excuse. Go forth and slay the jubjub bird and have some fun.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.