FORGIVE ME, KILLER

FORGIVE ME, KILLER (1956) is the first crime novel I've read by Harry Whittington. It won't be the last.

Whittington carved out a solid and respectable career as a writer of paperback originals in the 1950s and '60s. He wrote countless westerns, mysteries, romances, "back woods" yarns and many, many more. In the '60s, he wrote one of the original novels in THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series published by Ace. Whittington could do it all and he did it all extremely well. 

Case in point, FORGIVE ME, KILLER. Bent vice cop Mike Ballard is on the take and as crooked as they come. He entertains a plea from Earl Walker,  a man on death row for the murder of  a B girl. Walker swears he's innocent but Ballard doesn't give a damn. As far as he's concerned, the case is closed. 

But when Ballard meets Peggy, Walker's demure, subdued wife, he changes his mind. He sees the hunger in her soul, her burning desire for a real relationship with a man who truly loves her. Ballard decides he wants Peggy more than anything and sets out to clear her husband.

But there are powerful operators in the underworld who don't want the case reopened. Ballard butts heads with police officials and a vicious crime boss before things come to an explosive conclusion. Walker is ultimately cleared but where does that leave Ballard and Peggy? In his last, desperate bid for atonement and redemption, Ballard makes a difficult choice.

Whittington packs a solid punch in the novel's lean 123 pages. It's hard to root for Ballard at any time during the course of the novel. He's not a nice guy and although he's trying to do the right thing, his ulterior motives call all of his actions into question. 

Tough, brutal and uncompromising, FORGIVE ME, KILLER is a first rate piece of hard-boiled crime fiction. 

Thumbs up.

RIFIFI

Shot on location in Paris on a very low budget, RIFIFI (1955) ranks as one of the greatest caper/heist films ever made. When American director Jules Dassin was blacklisted in the 1950s, he went to France to make movies. His first production was RIFIFI, a wire taut masterpiece of French film noir. 

RIFIFI follows all of the tropes of the caper/heist film. A ex-con plans a major score, the robbery of a Parisian jewelry store. He recruits a team of three men to assist him. His plan is elaborate, ingenious and meticulously executed. The men get and getaway with a fortune in diamonds and other jewels but, as they must, things go wrong in the third act when a murderous gangster and his men decide to steal the ice for themselves. The result is a high body count and an utterly bleak ending. 

Any and all of these elements would make RIFIFI worth watching. But Dassin ups the ante to 11 by filming a thirty-minute robbery sequence with no dialogue or musical score. The result is an incredibly suspenseful sequence that serves as a textbook exercise in pure cinema. It's brilliant, audacious and unforgettable. Director John Sturges did much the same thing with his cross cutting between escape sequences (all without dialogue) during the thrilling third act of THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has no dialogue for more than twenty-minutes at the beginning of the film.

Dassin made a string of first rate noirs in the United States beginning with 1947's BRUTE FORCE (for my money the best escape from prison movie ever made, so take that SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), THE NAKED CITY (1948), THIEVES' HIGHWAY (1949), and NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950). In 1964, Dassin made TOPKAPI, another first rate caper film. 

Brilliantly conceived and executed, RIFIFI stands as an incredibly influential work in the history of crime films, both American and foreign. Imitated and homaged but never equaled or surpassed, RIFIFI towers over the genre. 

Highly recommenced. 

THE KILLING

Believe it or not, I've never seen Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film noir masterpiece THE KILLING. It's one of those films that I've heard nothing but good things about but somehow, I've managed to miss it for all of these years. The film stars noir icons Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Timothy Carey. It's part of the Criterion Collection and I just might have to treat myself to a Blu Ray copy sometime in the near future. 

Until then, I'll have to make do with the source material. I've had a copy of the Black Lizard paperback edition of THE KILLING on my shelf for years. I ran across it the other day and decided to give it a try. Lionel White's 1955 novel, originally published under the title CLEAN BREAK is an astonishingly accomplished caper novel that moves faster than a thoroughbred coming into the home stretch. 

Ex con Johnny Clay is the mastermind behind a brilliant and daring race track robbery. He assembles a team of non-professionals to aid in his scheme. The group includes a bent cop, a track cashier, a bartender and a policy writer. The plan is foolproof but, as always, things go wrong. 

A mobster gets wind of the job through one of the gang member's cheating tramp of a wife and decides to go after Johnny and his men after they've executed the heist. There's a violent showdown at the end of the book between the two gangs and a stinger of an ending on the last page. 

White tells his story using multiple points of view, getting inside the heads of various characters. And he brilliantly fractures space and time in the last third of the novel, bouncing back and forth in time as various events play out at the race track. 

Lean, tough, swift and brutal, THE KILLING is exactly the kind of crime novel I dig. Loved this book! Can't wait to see the movie.