Fri 2 Feb 2024
PETER RABE – The Box. Gold Medal 632, paperback original, 1956 (cover by Barye Phillips). Stark House Noir Classics, softcover, 2003 (published in a 2-for-1 edition with Journey Into Terror).
Quinn is a mafia lawyer who screws up. Not quite big enough for the long ride, so he’s given an all expenses paid trip around the globe instead.
The way it works is this: They knock you out and stick you in a box, about the size of a coffin. They fill it with plenty of food and water and put holes in it for air. Then they nail it shut and stick you on a freighter from NY Harbor to NY Harbor, by way of the world entire.
Somewhere about halfway thru the voyage, the box top breaks and it starts to smell of human filth. A smell the sailors can’t handle — so they dump the box out at tiny harbor port in Northern Africa.
Quinn’s got amnesia and doesn’t know what the hell is going on. The locals clean him up and go about trying to get some papers from the consulate on him so they can send him on his merry way.
But soon enough he gets the lay of the land and his gangland persona kicks in. He decides to take things over in this island town and make his own gangland kingdom by the sea.
The local corruptor in chief (the mayor) doesn’t take too kindly to this outsider coming in and threatening his take. And so the matter comes to a head: the NY gangster enlists some of the local oppressed Arabs against the African mayor and his cronies. And comes the showdown.
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I enjoyed it but it was a bit on the light side in the end. I also didn’t like how hard Rabe tried to push the metaphor of “The Box.” The idea is that humans have “boxes” that they create for themselves. Even with the “benefit” of amnesia, a NY gangster has habits of character created by “The Box” he has caged himself within that will inevitably cause him to become a gangster in whatever environment he finds himself in.
Not sure I buy it myself. On the other hand, Rabe was a practicing psychologist so he probably knows better than I do. Still, overwrought metaphors are annoying to this boy in the box. I preferred Anatomy of a Killer and Kill the Boss Goodbye.
[EDITORIAL NOTE]: This is the second of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.
February 2nd, 2024 at 4:43 am
Rabe was an underrated — or perhaps just undernoticed — writer, and this at least sound imaginative.
February 2nd, 2024 at 12:04 pm
Rabe never got the star recognition that a Gil Brewer or Day Keene received back then or even now. but he sold a lot of books back in his heyday, say 1955 to 1975. He also has a lengthy Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabe, in which it is said that THE BOX was “one of his best books.” From Tony’s review, it sounds as though it’s well outside any box I can think of.
February 2nd, 2024 at 12:33 pm
Rabe himself was a fan of the book, as he states here:
“Looking back on your career, of all the books you have written, which is your favorite?
I don’t know. I tend to be critical of myself in regards to things that I wrote in such haste, that I loathe to say, “This is best,” since I see so many things I wish I had done differently. I think the Fell book, Kill the Boss Goodbye, is certainly one of my favorites and the one that came out in hardcover, Anatomy of a Killer, was another, and another one I also liked was The Box. So I’d say those three were the ones I liked best.”
https://mysteryfile.com/Rabe/Tuttle.html
February 2nd, 2024 at 2:51 pm
That’s one gem of an interview. Thanks for finding it, Tony. I’d forgotten all about it. I don’t even remember how it same about, but I’m sure glad to have had a hand in getting it online.
February 3rd, 2024 at 10:41 pm
I generally like Rabe when he played a bit outside his usual milieu.