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The Killing
by
Lionel White
Johnny Clay, an ex-con determined to strike it rich, has worked out a fool-proof scheme to knock off a racetrack payroll.
The two million bucks should be enough to last him a lifetime or two. But a two-faced dame has another idea: Let Johnny do the work, then she'll grab the swag for herself and her boyfriend.
The two million bucks should be enough to last him a lifetime or two. But a two-faced dame has another idea: Let Johnny do the work, then she'll grab the swag for herself and her boyfriend.
Paperback, 180 pages
Published
August 2nd 2008
by Blackmask.com
(first published 1955)
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Johnny Clay, just paroled, masterminds a complicated racetrack robbery. His inspiration is that he will work with men remarkable only for their desperation, not their criminal backgrounds. Thus, when the job is done, the cops will have no idea whom to suspect. Lionel White's third-person narrative shifts deftly among the parties involved, sometimes making small jumps backward in time. The characters are fairly flat, and the prose is there just to get the story told, but these shifts in persp...more
A con gets out of prison with a perfect plan. He's been working on it for years. He's not going to use cons or ex-cons, but normal folk. That's the beauty of it - they won't make the mistake a con would make. The plan is perfectly laid out. Everyone has their role. Everyone knows what to do.
The fun in this type of noir is how things will fall apart. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we hope that everything will go right, but we know that's not going to happen. What gets our pulse q...more
The fun in this type of noir is how things will fall apart. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we hope that everything will go right, but we know that's not going to happen. What gets our pulse q...more
It's easy to see why this was bought by Hollywood, it reads like it was written for the movies ... in a good way, i.e. streamlined and not much padding.
The women characters all take some pretty serious bruising in the book. Jim Thompson's screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of this turgid little thriller eased up on the violence against women. Thompson must have been half-sober when he wrote it.
I love Lionel White's quote about being a professional writer, but I...more
The women characters all take some pretty serious bruising in the book. Jim Thompson's screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of this turgid little thriller eased up on the violence against women. Thompson must have been half-sober when he wrote it.
I love Lionel White's quote about being a professional writer, but I...more
another great pulp, better than the movie.
absolutely fantastic bit describing how to use a tommy gun in a heist.
absolutely fantastic bit describing how to use a tommy gun in a heist.
An attempt at a page turner, this book definitely has a high pace and it's definitely a genre that suits me.
However, it somewhat fails at being mysterious and instead of using the opportunity and the plot to dwell into some characters, they remain quite one-dimensional and not particularly interesting.
This means that it ultimately is nothing but a fairly standard read, which will be sufficiently entertaining for people who like the genre, but presumably terribly unfruitful f...more
However, it somewhat fails at being mysterious and instead of using the opportunity and the plot to dwell into some characters, they remain quite one-dimensional and not particularly interesting.
This means that it ultimately is nothing but a fairly standard read, which will be sufficiently entertaining for people who like the genre, but presumably terribly unfruitful f...more
Hardboiled, pulpy noir caper novel from 1955. Fast, fun read - nothing subtle about this one. Maybe not as artfully constructed as say, a Raymond Chandler novel, but glorious in its trashiness. Stanley Kubrick made the film, which is also good, but significantly different plot-wise if I recall.
Like the film version by Kubrick of this novel this is a very taunt suspenseful novel about a racetrack heist. Books like this should not go out of print!
One of the rare cases where the movie was better than the book. Hard to beat out a Jim Thompson screenplay with a Stanley Kubrik movie.
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Lionel White was a crime reporter who wrote around 38 suspenseful thrillers beginning with 'The Snatchers' in 1953 and ending with 'The Walled Yard' in 1978.
Most of his books were translated into a number of different languages and his earlier novels were published as Gold Medal pulp hard-boiled crime fiction, but when Duttons began a line of mystery and suspense books, he also wrote ...more
More about Lionel White...
Most of his books were translated into a number of different languages and his earlier novels were published as Gold Medal pulp hard-boiled crime fiction, but when Duttons began a line of mystery and suspense books, he also wrote ...more
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