REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

   

ALFRED BESTER – Who He? Dial Press, hardcover, 1953. Berkley G-19, paperback, as The Rat Race, February 1956.

   For twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, stars, actors, dancers, and technicians went through the motions of playing “Who He?” under a corpse with staring eyes and swollen tongue… a victim of savage, merciless warfare in our frontier town, murdered by the ferment in a man’s mind… I’ve pieced out all the strands that wove themselves into a rope around a man’s neck. This is the story of what happened…

   
   If you haven’t pieced it together yet, Who He? is a live television show in the Golden Age of Television, and the frontier town in question is New York, “…we fight, love and adventure on all levels and never bother to distinguish reality from illusion because both are equally living and dangerous.”

   Who He? is both a suspense novel, a dark screwball apocalyptic comedy, a detective story, a savage satire, and a noirish psychological novel worthy of Cornell Woolrich or Patrica Highsmith if they wrote Madmen, as taut as a Hitchcock film, cynical tough and clipped as Howard Hawks, and mad as the Marx Brothers. It is also an affecting romance, a profound comment on the war between the sexes, 1950’s style, and has some of the best dialogue since Raymond Chandler collaborated with Billy Wilder.

   It’s the story of Jacob Lennox, writer for Who He?, a game show that morphed into a popular variety show starring a ventriloquist and one week in Lennox life where he rises, plunges, and rises again from the ashes starting with getting black out drunk on Christmas Eve and stumbling into work the next day to find his precious show has been receiving concerning hate male.

   Jake is a tough guy who grew up on the wrong side of the streets. He is handsome, glamorous, elegant, and meaner than a junk yard dog when he needs be; his only soft spot for his two Siamese cats and Sam Cooper, the actor who shares an apartment with him.

   At first Jake doesn’t think much of the letters, just crank male, but then he begins to believe the threat may be real and someone may well be murdered the next performance of Who He?. Delving into that mystery introduces him to Gabby Valentine, the ex-wife of network honcho Roy Audibon as vicious as he is ignorant and crass, who Jake falls hard for, and in due course Inspector Fink who Jake takes the letters to.

   With Gabby and Sam, he starts to try and put together the puzzle eventually recalling from his black out meeting a mysterious Mr. Knott, who he believes wrote the letters leading to a wild riotous night across Manhattan as he retraces his step and a revelation of who the letters are aimed at.

   Alfred Bester was one of the legends of Science Fiction, best known for his novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, both classics of the field that set the genre on its ear and inspired later generations of writers. He also wrote in radio and early television, as well as comic books and two mainstream novels that have both been called Hitchcockian. Judging by Who He? I will have to track the other book down, because this one is a corker.

   Jake Lennox’s week carries him from the pinnacle to the gutter as it spins out of control, Audibon threatening to cancel Who He? to get his wife back, red baiting sponsors boycotting, Jake wheeling and dealing, his whirlwind love affair revealing far more than he or Gabby would like to acknowledge about themselves, and the threat of violence growing ever closer with the most terrible revelation saved for last in a twist worthy of Woolrich, Christie, or Hitchcock.

   I really can’t praise this book enough. It rollicks along at an incredible pace with hardly a pause for a lag. The writing is by turns insightful, savage, biting, gut busting funny, and nerve wracking, while every revelation comes like a cliffhanger in a serial.

   There just isn’t room here to quote enough of the book to give a feel of the experience of reading it.

   “She was lying … You have to be good to make all of you lie at the same time.”

   “You have to be sick to like this rat race. The higher up you rise in the spiral the more precarious your balance becomes…”

   “When network veeps start talking like that the words don’t mean anything because they’re just the sound of a knife being sharpened.”

   “You know how dangerous a drowning man is? He’ll clutch at you and drown you if you don’t hit him. That’s what happened. I was drowning… You hit me… I’m grateful…”

   “Squares think there are Good Guy and Bad Guys. But we all know we’re Good Guys and Bad Guys inside ourselves. Half the time we build ourselves up and the other half we’re knocking ourselves down. When a Square knocks himself down he starts looking for a Bad Guy to blame. That’s what you’ve been doing.”

   The novel may throw you a bit because it is narrated by a writer friend of Lennox who is off stage for much of the book but telling the story he pieced together from all the participants. It’s a little distracting, but it works, and that’s all that matters and by the end of the book you will understand why it was the best way to tell this story. Just trust Bester. You could not be in better hands..

   Sadly the book is long out of print though I found an ebook copy of it on the Luminist Society site. It more than deserves a new edition if only as a brilliant slice of life portrait of early live television easily comparable if not surpassing Max Erlich’s The Glass Web.

   “The weak never weep for the strong; they weep only for themselves.”