Wed 25 Nov 2009
PETER RABE – Stop This Man! Gold Medal #506, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1955. Reprint editions: Gold Medal #763, circa 1957; Hard Case Crime, July 2009.
For reasons best known to themselves, Gold Medal packaged Peter Rabe’s Stop This Man! to look like one of their rustic melodramas (Hill Girl, Swamp Hoyden) when in fact it’s a savvy, mostly urban tale of a robbery and its aftermath that prefigures the best of Westlake/Stark’s “Parker” novels.
Catell, the more-or-less hero of the piece, is a career criminal very much in the tough, calculating Parker mold, before there was a Parker mold to fit into, and Stop This Man! deals with his efforts to get away with a brick of radioactive gold and somehow dispose of it at a profit.
Rabe knows how to do this thing right: straight-up and savage, with that paperback toughness that typifies the best of the hard-boiled writers.
The action scenes are fast and inventive, the characters engagingly seedy, and the plot controlled and energetic as a race-horse.
If there’s any problem at all, it lies in the mood of the times, when an informal censorship mandated that Justice Must Triumph in this sort of thing, and Rabe is clearly more interested in his small-time hoods, strippers, lushes and oily promoters than in the lawmen who put in token appearances like time-out-for-a-word-from-our-sponsor.
The result is a rather contrived ending, but it comes late in a book that is mostly pretty enjoyable.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:39 am
I wonder if the rustic thing was as a result of that quote from Erskine Caldwell? Maybe they hoped to capitalize on his considerable audience for his Signet paperbacks (with the great Avati covers). If so you have to wonder how they would have packaged it if they’d gotten a rave from Emile Loring.
Rabe was at his best in this kind of tale. He wrote it with a conviction that even surpassed W.R. Burnett or Donald Westlake’s Stark books, and never seemed to either judge or romanticize his criminals. Rabe’s criminals seemed somehow closer to reality.
November 25th, 2009 at 6:20 am
Around this time(Mid 1950’s), Erskine Caldwell was selling extremly well with the Signet paperbacks and James Avati covers. Gold Medal probably figured they could cash in on this with their own line of hillbilly and rural Tobacco Road type novels.
I know I was snared as a young teenager by the Caldwell novels with the sexy bad girls. My 9th grade teacher asked the class if anyone was reading a novel on their own and of course they were not except for me. She was so happy to see that someone was reading. I can still remember her shocked 1955 expression when I told her I was reading the novels of Caldwell. Back then he was consider very controversal because of the sex angle.
November 25th, 2009 at 7:19 am
Ahh, the repressed 1950s! I think what I miss most in sexy books these days is the guilt!
November 25th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Dan, you are so right about the guilt being missing nowadays. We are so jaded what with the online pornography being readily available, etc. Back then many people did feel the old saying “a glimpse of stocking was considered shocking…” Now the lingerie ads in the newspapers show more than such 1950’s men’s magazines as Nugget or Rogue.
In 1954 I had a job on a weekend night of cleaning Jerry’s Barbershop in Trenton,NJ. He had a stash of Nuggets, Sirs, Man this and that, hidden away in the back room where the cleaning supplies were. The girls in these magazines would be considered the girl next door nowadays, they were so wholesome. Many magazine collectors dig up old issues because of nostalgia and that’s one of the big reasons I still keep an eye out for them. They certainly are tame by today’s standards but back then they were risque.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I also thought that quote from Erskine Caldwell was something. I wonder how it came about? I don’t remember seeing many blurbs like this from him on other paperbacks, especially a non-Signet, and doubly so for a paperback original by a first time author:
STOP THIS MAN! (August 1955)
BENNY MUSCLES IN (September 1955)
A SHROUD FOR JESSO (October 1955)
How’s that for a 1-2-3 punch, three months a row, three books like these?
November 25th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I’ve waiting till now to see if anyone else caught one slight error in Dan’s review. SWAMP HOYDEN (by Jack Woodford & John B. Thompson) was not a Gold Medal paperback, but one published by Uni-Book (#71) in 1951. It was reprinted by Beacon (#125) in 1956, and this is the one whose cover you see below:
Definition: Hoyden. A high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl. (The kind you saw in Nugget, Sir, or Rogue, I’m sure.)
November 25th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
In the words of the immortal Groucho, “I never hoyden such a thing!”
November 25th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
The thing that amazes me about so many of todays best sellers and thrillers is how little sexual content they have. Granted the romantic suspense genre is pretty explicit in its own euphemistic way, but compared to the sixties, seventies, and eighties there is little more than flirtation going on in a lot of popular literature. Granted all the vampire novels are — pardon the phrase — sucking around the sex question, but most of them are only a bit more graphic than Bram Stoker in the original.
Of course there is all sorts of porn and soft porn and near porn available at the touch of a few keys, but in general I’d say genre fiction is much tamer than it was when Mickey Spillane wrote Erection Set or Last Cop Out trying to compete with Harold Robbins and others. Even Junius Podrug’s continuation of Harold Robbins books are only a pale shadow of the original in terms of explicit sex. For all the ‘freedom’ out there in many ways writers are more circumspect today than in the repressed fifties.
Can you imagine the uproar today if a writer tried to publish something like Robert Kyle’s Ben Gates is Hot, where the hero spends the entire novel fighting not to be seduced by a sexy fourteen year old girl he is trying to protect by hiding out in motels with her? Oprah, the Today Show, Inside Edition would all spend half their programs on the subject while the religious right and politically correct left both tried to lynch the writer — never mind that the fourteen year old turns out to be in her twenties ala Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor. But then imagine trying to make that one in today’s market.
One day they will be talking about the repressed first years of the 21rst Century.