A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Ed Gorman

   

MALCOLM BRALY – Shake Him Till He Rattles. Gold Medal k1311, paperback original; 1st printing, 1963. Pocket, paperback, 1976. Stark House Press, trade paperback 2006 (a two-in-one edition with It’s Cold Out There).

   When On the Yard, the novel Malcolm Braly based on his ears in prison, appeared in 1967, everyone said he was major. But for a major writer, Braly, who was killed in an automobile accident at age fifty-five, is virtually forgotten today.

   By any standard, however, Yard and the three novels he wrote for Gold Medal in the early Sixties are books worth reading, books in many respects as frenetic and confessional ional as the more literary novels of the era.

    Shake Him Till He Rattles concerns Lee Cabiness, a sax player whose only goal is to stay out of prison. Lieutenant Carver of the San Francisco narc squad has other ideas. Braly obviously based Carver on both personal experience and his reading of Dostoevski, for the cop here is almost mythic in his malice and darkness, his repudiation of all human values.

   Braly posits the jazz musicians of his book, however, as magic revelers in the human song: “Furg was a child, a vagabond child, a fey and travel-torn minstrel barely suffered in the halls of the minor barons. But, whether they knew it or not, Furg was necessary to them, to breathe into their lives the vital stuff of myth.”

   Later Braly describes the same world Jack Kerouac earlier set down as “beat.” Only Braly saw it differently: “People were coming in. Pink, clean examples of college and social Bohemia, mostly young, roughly thirty per cent gay. He saw Clair moving around. In her white dress with her pale hair she looked chilly. He caught her smile coming and going, like distant sunlight on ice.”

   The conflict between Cabiness and Carver grows, of course, as the narc makes frustrated moves on his prey, trying to demean and unman him as he closes in. The battle, again, is out of Dostoevski — the perversion of a legal system and its victim. The details, interestingly, remain “beat.”

   Braly’s fiction testifies to the indomitable human spirit of the intelligent loser. There is a wealth of sadness and humor alike in his pages and a kind of quirky defiance. His was the ultimate loneliness, it seemed, belonging as he did to neither world, criminal nor straight. He charted a type of experience seldom seen in crime fiction –the real world of the criminal.

   A rediscovery of this and Braly’s other fine novels Felony Tank (1961), It’s Cold Out There (1966), and The Protector (1979) — is long past due.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

UPDATE:   The good news is that of the books Ed Gorman mentioned in this review, I believe that all but The Protector is currently in print. Stark House Press has reprinted this, It’s Cold Out There and in a separate edition, Felony Tank, while The New York Review of Books has recently published On the Yard.