PETER RABE – Stop This Man! Gold Medal #506, paperback original, 1955. Reprinted by Gold Medal at least twice. Hard Case Crime #58, paperback, 2009.

   For reasons best known to themselves, Gold Medal packaged Peter Rabe’s Stop This Man! to look like one of their rustic melodramas — “I couldn’t put this book down!” says Erskine Caldwell, author of God’s Little Acre — 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 racehorse.

   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.