Rabe on (It's a crazy feeling)

I'm about to begin reading Time Enough to Die, which Donald Westlake called the only good novel of the six books by Peter Rabe that featured a tough guy and political fixer named Daniel Port. (Westlake regarded Rabe as a formative influence on his own crime writing. He just didn't like the Port books much.) In the meantime, here's a post from back when I first read Rabe.

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 I'm a book and a half into my career as a Peter Rabe reader, and I've reached two tentative conclusions: 1) Rabe was an heir to early Dashiell Hammett, and 2) He worked psychology into his novels a hell of a lot better than Ross Macdonald did.

Rabe had a master’s and a doctorate in psychology. He incorporated psychology in his crime novels with an expert’s knowledge and an author’s restraint. Macdonald, on the other hand, at least in The Galton Case, was more like a yammering cultist on the subject.

The Hammett connection is more pertinent, though, to a discussion of Rabe’s The Box and Kill the Boss Goodbye. (I’m told that only one or two of Rabe’s novels appeared with a title he suggested. The Box is one of them. I would bet a dozen Montreal bagels that Kill the Boss Goodbye is not.) Each novel reminded me a bit of Hammett’s portrayals of men doing their jobs. More particularly, each portrays with cool detachment, deadly power struggles at the head of a criminal or quasi-criminal enterprise, in the manner of Red Harvest. But they read more like Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, no surprise given that both that book and The Box are set in North Africa.

(A post on the Violent World of Parker Web site discusses Donald Westlake and an essay he wrote about Rabe. Read Westlake on Rabe in the Westlake nonfiction volume The Getaway Car. Read more about Rabe at Mystery File and Stark House Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Paul Hardisty, plus the covers of Crimefest

Paul Hardisty at Crimefest
2015, photo by your
humble blogkeeper

Paul Hardisty's books include The Economics of Groundwater Remediation and Protection, Environmental and Economic Sustainability (Environmental and Ecological Risk Assessment), e-Study Guide for Environmental and Economic Sustainability, and The Abrupt Physics of Dying.

 I don't know about the first three, but ...Abrupt Physics..., Hardisty's first novel, reminds me a bit of Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery or Pater Rabe's The Box.  The book is that good at evoking the sense of being lost in a hot country one is alternately sure one knows well, and despairs of ever knowing.  A bit of Graham Greene in there, too?

The land is Yemen, the protagonist an engineer in country to check water quality for an oil company, and you know what happens next: restive tribesmen, a violent and oppressive central government,  a venal corporation,  a military veteran questioning his own past, a— but I don't want to make the book sound more melodramatic than it is, because Hardisty portrays the milieu (its rugged topography and, in judicious glimpses, its history) so well. Now, let's see how he handles the book's recently introduced potential romantic interest.

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Clash of titles.

I met Hardisty at the recent Crimefest 2015 in Bristol, as I did the authors of the books pictured at left.

Another novel I bought at Crimefest, by another author I had not previously known, is The Human Flies, by Hans Olav Lahlum. Since Lahlum sets the book in Oslo, I feel an urge to call it East Side of Norway Story. I don't know why.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015