To Find a Killer by Lionel White

This can happen. There is a writer you like, you admire his style, his plotting, everything about his work, you really love his books. Then you get your hands on one of his titles and it just falls short.

This happened to me with Lionel White’s 1954 crime novel To Find a Killer. But, being a fan of White, I hung in there. The guy was a craftsman who knew how to tell a complex crime story in a blunt, hard-boiled style. So, I figured there was something good ahead. 

After a slow start, it picked up momentum. The book never reached greatness, but it was not too bad. 

The problem with To Find a Killer is its main character. Marty Ferris is a New York police detective with a good track record and a reputation as a tough guy not shy about applying physical pressure to a suspect in need of encouragement to confess.

Marty has a problem. He suspects his good-looking wife is an unfaithful liar with a criminal past. A friend in the FBI found her real name and her prison record, both of which she kept from Marty.

While working a new homicide case of a beautiful night club singer who was found murdered in her apartment, Marty gets an idea that will solve his personal problem. He will pressure a suspect in the murder case into murdering his wife. Marty’s plan is complex, but perfect, he thinks.

Many a character in a Lionel White novel thinks his detailed plan is perfect only to have the whole thing unravel. 

To Find a Killer does not come up to level of The Snatchers (1953), the book White published the year before, or to the level of the book he published the following year, Clean Break (1955), which might be his most famous novel thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s film based on it called, “The Killing.” 

Lionel White (1905-1985), a former reporter who turned novelist when he was in his late 40s, wrote more than 35 books.

Invitation to Violence by Lionel White

The 1958 heist novel, Invitation to Violence, is different from other Lionel White crime stories I’ve read.

Usually a caper is carefully planned by one man who, step by step, figures out how to pull it off, then recruits a crew, and assigns them each a task. But bad luck and the personalities of the team cause the whole thing to go wrong. This is what happens in White's famous story, Clean Break. That book was later reissued as The Killing and made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick.

In Invitation to Violence, White places the heist at the beginning of the book. Three men execute a carefully devised plan. They drive to an upscale suburban Long Island neighborhood and break into a jewelry store. Before they can get away, two police cars roll up and a gun battle ensues. Two of the cops and two of the crooks get killed, but the third thief gets away. 

While the thieves are working, Gerald Hanna, an ordinary guy with an ordinary job is playing poker. A usually cautious guy, Hanna takes a big chance and winds up winning a sizable pot.

Driving home to Long Island, he is thinking about his luck and the buzz he got out of taking that chance on his final hand. His car door is suddenly yanked open and the third thief jumps in with a satchel full of jewels and a gun.

From this early point in the story, Gerald Hanna’s life gets turned upside down. After winning at poker and believing luck is still with him, he decides to take a series of chances that put the local police and the boss behind the heist on his trail. But this nine-to-five office worker has no experience dealing with detectives or gangsters.

Invitation to Violence is another smart, suspenseful crime story from one of my favorite writers.

Lionel White (1905-1985) was newspaper reporter who started writing crime novels in the early 1950s, sometimes writing three or four in one year. He published about 35 books.

To read a review of White’s The Killing, click here, and to read a review of his book, The Snatchers, click here.

(And, if you enjoy crime novels with lots of action, please check out my book, Lyme Depot. Thanks.)

(For more posts on books, head over to Todd Mason’s blog.)

FFB: The Money Trap by Lionel White

Lionel White is known for his heist novels in which tough, confident criminals make intricate plans, hire the guys they need to pull off the caper, and then ruthlessly execute the plan, only to have their heads handed to them.

Unlike White’s famous book, The Killing, his 1963 novel, The Money Trap, does not follow a criminal gang but two New York City police detectives. The book is also unusual because their plans are not thought out in precise detail.

Detective Joe Baron and his friend and partner, Detective Pete Delanos, are assigned a simple case of attempted robbery of a doctor’s office which ended in the death of a junkie burglar at the hands of the medical man who came home early and shot him.

But before he kicks off, the junkie tells Pete the doc is dirty, is selling drugs, and has about a million bucks in cash in his safe. He dies and Pete finds the combination to the safe in his pocket.

Pete takes his partner aside and tells him what he discovered and how easy it would be for them to break in and steal the dough.

Joe is intrigued. He is an honest cop, but he could use the cash. He is married to a young woman raised around money. She is not only used to having things, but also has a trust fund providing her with a larger annual income than Joe makes on the force. Joe resents his wife’s money. His pride will not let him take anything from her. He is in debt after buying a house in an upscale neighborhood to please her, and every day he sinks deeper into a financial hole. He also feels he is the butt of jokes among his wealthy neighbors.

All this drives him to go along with Pete. Together they make some sketchy plans, Pete insisting it will be easy.

But this is a Lionel White novel, and in White’s world nothing is easy and little goes as planned.

The Money Trap is written in White’s blunt, forceful, straight forward style. It is a style he mostly likely developed during his years as a newspaper reporter and editor and later as an editor of detective magazines. The book is a quick read with nicely developed characters – except for the doctor who is a bit of a throwback to the days of the evil criminal genius. The other characters, the cops, the mugs, a chorus girl, and some snotty neighbors, are well done.

(To read my review of Lionel White’s The Killing, click here. To read my review of his novel The Snatchers, click here.)

(To read more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog, here.)

FFB: The Killing by Lionel White

Johnny Clay plans the perfect caper, a racetrack heist, worked out and timed to the split second in Lionel White’s 1955 novel, The Killing. Clay had four years to figure out the details while serving time in Sing Sing. Once out, he puts his plan into play.

He recruits four men, all in need of money – big money – and all clean. They have no police records. Each also has something Clay requires for his scheme to work.

Marvin Unger, a sour little man needs to make up his heavy losses in the stock market. Big Mike Henty, a racetrack bartender with a weakness for the horses, needs money to move his wife and daughter out of the slums. Randy Keenan, a police officer, owes big dough to a loan shark. And George Peaty, a race track cashier, needs lots of money to please his hot, young, high-maintenance wife, Sherry.

Sherry, who is seeing a smooth gangster on the side, poses an early complication in the story. To impress her and assure her he is going to come into money, Peaty tells her the set up. He does this against Clay’s strict orders for everyone involved to keep his mouth shut.

Johnny is the only cool pro among his gang of amateurs. Each of the others has his doubts and fears. And, as often happens in a Lionel White novel, the carefully planned robbery has too many ways of going wrong. If any one of his men screws up, they could all wind up in jail – or dead.

Lionel White's writing has the clean snap of someone who spent many years knocking out newspaper copy and editing crime stories. He started his writing career as a reporter in the 1920s. He later became a newspaper editor and went on to edit detective magazines. The Killing (originally published as Clean Break) is probably his best known novel. He wrote 38 books between the early 1950s and the 1970s, including The Snatchers (which I wrote about here).

White's characters all ring true. He does not do lengthy descriptions of people or places, but gives the reader enough to form vivid mental pictures.

This is a second reading of The Killing. The first was more than 20 years ago when I picked up a 1988 Black Lizard paperback reprint of the novel. Even though I knew the story – as well as the Stanley Kubrick film version – The Killing still delivered a punch.

(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)

FFB: The Snatchers by Lionel White

Lionel White’s crime novels of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were the next generation of lean, tight stories told in the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett. He was a master at devising well-planned heists that sound great, but when executed go wrong.

The Snatchers is one of those stories, only this time the caper is the kidnapping of a little girl, the child of a wealthy Connecticut family.

Cal Dent, a hard, 33-year-old ex con, works out every detail of the kidnapping. His problems come when the team he assembles, Red, a dim ex-boxer, Pearl, a boozy tough cookie, Gino, a violent gangster, and Fats, a conniving trigger man, do not follow Dent’s plans to the letter. Their petty jealousies, hates and lusts lead them astray and put the plan in jeopardy.

Much of the book takes place in a beach cottage where the gang hides out while waiting for ransom money to be delivered. The close living gets on everyone’s nerves. To make matters worse, a small town cop seeing people come and go from the cottage begins to snoop around, heightening the tension. White keeps the whole thing moving at a terrific clip with twits and dangers in every chapter.

Lionel White was a newspaper reporter in the 1920s and 30s, became and editor and went on to edit detective magazines in the 1940s and 50s. He published his first novel in 1952, when he was pushing 50 years old. He went on to write 38 novels. His most well known book is probably Clean Break, later re-titled The Killing. The Snatchers, from 1953, is his second novel.

In his book about director Stanley Kubrick, The Wolf at the Door, Geoffrey Cocks said Kubrick, in the mid-1950s, tried to make a film of The Snatchers, but the Hollywood production code rejected the script he prepared with Jim Thompson. In 1956, Kubrick released one of his best films, “The Killing,” based on Clean Break, from a script written by Thompson. The Snatchers was later filmed in 1968 as “The Night of the Following Day,” starring Marlon Brando.

Now, a few notes on my copy of The Snatchers. Last month, in a little shop of used books I get to a couple times a year, there was a thin, tattered edition of this book squeezed onto a shelf of far newer books. The spine was broken, the pages, and even whole sections were falling out. The lady at the counter looked it over and said she could only charge me 25 cents for an old book in such bad shape.

The cover of this copy is the one pictured and was probably done in the late 1950s, judging by the fins and tail lights on that car. Reading the text, I came to believe the book was edited for British readers. The clues were spellings like programme when describing a radio broadcast, and colour for color, and a word like windscreen during a tense scene involving a windshield wiper that would not function in a rainstorm.

And for the critics who jump on errors in new novels and digital texts, I will just point that this decades-old Avon edition of The Snatchers had several goofs. One of them was a doozy. The name of a character not in a scene was assigned to a line of dialogue.

But The Snatchers is such a tight, well paced novel that a few glitches in its roughly 60,000 words can be forgiven.

This book is a must read for fans of hard boiled crime stories.

(For more forgotten books, please see Patti Abbott’s blog.)