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Whom Gods Destroy
He trafficked in rum and women, this modern-day Al Capone. Clifton Adam's famous tale of bootlegging in Oklahoma, 20 years after Prohibition's repeal in 47 other states. Legendary to this day for its dark account of a man on the wrong side of the tracks out to get what's his, any way he can. Originally published in 1953.
192 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1953
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 12, 2019
From 1953
Interspersed in the great lengths of this book are some terrific action scenes. I completely loved this writer's Death's Sweet Song.
Interspersed in the great lengths of this book are some terrific action scenes. I completely loved this writer's Death's Sweet Song.
November 16, 2022
Clifton Adams is best known as a writer of Westerns. He wrote 51 novels, almost all of them Westerns. Nevertheless, he wrote several crime fiction novels, mostly under the Fawcett Gold Medal publishing name. His crime novels as well as his Westerns often took place in Oklahoma where Adams was born and raised and was most familiar with. More recently, Stark House has republished two of his crime classics, Whom Gods Destroy and Death’s Sweet Song in a two-fer set.
Whom Gods Destroy, which is the subject of this post, is a novel published in 1953 and many blurbs about the book purport to find it unusual that Adams would publish a book about bootlegging and prohibition twenty years after prohibition ended in 1933. However, it turns out that Oklahoma was a dry state under its Constitution until the mid-1950’s and, throughout the Fifties, there were at least three statewide elections to repeal prohibition. In each of these elections, powerful bootleggers apparently fought tooth and nail to keep the state dry so that they would have a monopoly on booze and make lots of dough. This is the background of Whom Gods Destroy set apparently in 1953 when the book was published.
Whom Gods Destroy is a novel about a man who makes the wrong decisions and slowly but surely descends level by level into Dante’s hell. In that way, it is similar to Thompson’s The Getaway, published five years later in 1958.
The essential story here is a guy (Roy Foley), a high school football hero who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in a shantytown left behind when the oil boom petered out, is humiliated when he confesses his undying love for the most beautiful girl in town (Lola) and she laughs at him. How dare he presuppose she would even look at someone impoverished as he was. He leaves town because he could not bear the humiliation and apparently nothing happens for fifteen years when the story opens with Foley working as a fry cook in a Bakersfield hash house.
After having virtually no contact with the old hometown of Prairie City, Oklahoma, for fifteen years, he receives a telegram and takes his last few dollars to ride a Greyhound bus home and bury his father. Once there, he decides to join the bootleggers who are apparently everywhere and run everything, including all the crooked politicians. Lola, of course, married the biggest politician of all and she still enjoys rubbing Foley’s nose in his shantytown loser background. From there, you have Foley working his way (often by backstabbing and murdering) to become a player in the bootlegging scene even to the point of taking over his buddy’s franchise and his buddy’s wife (Vida). From a guy minding his own business in Bakersfield or wherever for fifteen years, Foley breaks all the rules, murders, blackmails, pimps, and just goes about being a really bad guy. Nevertheless to hear him tell it, he is the one who was given the raw deal all along and no one is treating him fair, least of all Lola who he still has a thing for all these years (hate or love no one knows) although he professes to be madly bewitchingly in love with Vida.
Adams is a top-notch writer and it is easy to read his writing and to follow along his storytelling. It is almost a top-notch novel, but just misses that mark, primarily because Adams does not focus on just one theme, but follows a number of different stories from the femme fatale angle, but is it Lola or Vida who is the real femme fatale? To the guy rising in the crime syndicate (although Foley was never really accepted into the society of bootleggers). Was he the tough hombre or a weakling who fled at the first humiliating laugh or got beat to a pulp and run out of town over and over again? The story seems to go back and forth as to who Foley really is. Perhaps there is the Foley who is narrating and then there is the one everyone else sees.
Whom Gods Destroy, which is the subject of this post, is a novel published in 1953 and many blurbs about the book purport to find it unusual that Adams would publish a book about bootlegging and prohibition twenty years after prohibition ended in 1933. However, it turns out that Oklahoma was a dry state under its Constitution until the mid-1950’s and, throughout the Fifties, there were at least three statewide elections to repeal prohibition. In each of these elections, powerful bootleggers apparently fought tooth and nail to keep the state dry so that they would have a monopoly on booze and make lots of dough. This is the background of Whom Gods Destroy set apparently in 1953 when the book was published.
Whom Gods Destroy is a novel about a man who makes the wrong decisions and slowly but surely descends level by level into Dante’s hell. In that way, it is similar to Thompson’s The Getaway, published five years later in 1958.
The essential story here is a guy (Roy Foley), a high school football hero who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in a shantytown left behind when the oil boom petered out, is humiliated when he confesses his undying love for the most beautiful girl in town (Lola) and she laughs at him. How dare he presuppose she would even look at someone impoverished as he was. He leaves town because he could not bear the humiliation and apparently nothing happens for fifteen years when the story opens with Foley working as a fry cook in a Bakersfield hash house.
After having virtually no contact with the old hometown of Prairie City, Oklahoma, for fifteen years, he receives a telegram and takes his last few dollars to ride a Greyhound bus home and bury his father. Once there, he decides to join the bootleggers who are apparently everywhere and run everything, including all the crooked politicians. Lola, of course, married the biggest politician of all and she still enjoys rubbing Foley’s nose in his shantytown loser background. From there, you have Foley working his way (often by backstabbing and murdering) to become a player in the bootlegging scene even to the point of taking over his buddy’s franchise and his buddy’s wife (Vida). From a guy minding his own business in Bakersfield or wherever for fifteen years, Foley breaks all the rules, murders, blackmails, pimps, and just goes about being a really bad guy. Nevertheless to hear him tell it, he is the one who was given the raw deal all along and no one is treating him fair, least of all Lola who he still has a thing for all these years (hate or love no one knows) although he professes to be madly bewitchingly in love with Vida.
Adams is a top-notch writer and it is easy to read his writing and to follow along his storytelling. It is almost a top-notch novel, but just misses that mark, primarily because Adams does not focus on just one theme, but follows a number of different stories from the femme fatale angle, but is it Lola or Vida who is the real femme fatale? To the guy rising in the crime syndicate (although Foley was never really accepted into the society of bootleggers). Was he the tough hombre or a weakling who fled at the first humiliating laugh or got beat to a pulp and run out of town over and over again? The story seems to go back and forth as to who Foley really is. Perhaps there is the Foley who is narrating and then there is the one everyone else sees.
November 9, 2012
This is the first title I've read by Clifton Adams, and I was entertained and impressed enough to award him the whole monte of 5 (count 'em) stars. The PBO is a Gold Medal Books entry from 1953, and that grabs my attention right off. I knew Adams wrote some first rate Westerns, but I didn't know he also worked in the hardboiled/noir genre.
As you can well-imagine from the title, the protagonist, one Roy Foley from Big Prarie, Oklahoma, is headed for a bad place with a lot of mean road before he arrives there. The novel's set up works nicely: Roy working as a fry cook in a distant city gets the telegram to return home for his dead father's funeral.
Once Roy gets back to Big Prarie, he finds out his old flame Lola buried his dad as a charity case. Lola the Ice Princess is Roy's flashpoint. She laughed him out of town some years before, and he's grown to despise her. Vengeance is his prime motivator to plot and then make a power grab for the local bootleggers'(Oklahoma is a dry state) empire, partly run by Lola's husband, Paul Keating, the corrupt, weakling county attorney.
The big Roy, a former high school football standout, isn't the brightest guy and suffers a few setbacks. I can easily envision Sterling Hayden playing Roy Foley in a film noir. I didn't find Roy a sympathetic character, but I was intrigued to follow his schemes to become the top dog. Roy's beleaguered wife Vida suffers along with him. This is a very satisfying noir done in the typical 1950s style with fast action, bleak vision, and lots of double-crosses and tricks.
As you can well-imagine from the title, the protagonist, one Roy Foley from Big Prarie, Oklahoma, is headed for a bad place with a lot of mean road before he arrives there. The novel's set up works nicely: Roy working as a fry cook in a distant city gets the telegram to return home for his dead father's funeral.
Once Roy gets back to Big Prarie, he finds out his old flame Lola buried his dad as a charity case. Lola the Ice Princess is Roy's flashpoint. She laughed him out of town some years before, and he's grown to despise her. Vengeance is his prime motivator to plot and then make a power grab for the local bootleggers'(Oklahoma is a dry state) empire, partly run by Lola's husband, Paul Keating, the corrupt, weakling county attorney.
The big Roy, a former high school football standout, isn't the brightest guy and suffers a few setbacks. I can easily envision Sterling Hayden playing Roy Foley in a film noir. I didn't find Roy a sympathetic character, but I was intrigued to follow his schemes to become the top dog. Roy's beleaguered wife Vida suffers along with him. This is a very satisfying noir done in the typical 1950s style with fast action, bleak vision, and lots of double-crosses and tricks.
February 19, 2025
Whom? Who? Whom cares? I didn't see Gods destroy anyone in this book.
Another Bait & Switch [B&S], but ... it kills time and it kills it dead.
Another Bait & Switch [B&S], but ... it kills time and it kills it dead.
July 27, 2020
Several deux ex machina moments ruin this Okie bootlegger narrative.
August 19, 2019
A slow start but it finishes... as you would expect it too...
There's a quote from the book - ambition is like climbing a ladder where the rungs disappear as you go up... and that's probably the theme to hang your hat on... this story is a cautionary tale of hate and rage and the good things, and ultimately bad things that it leads too... oh judgement thou aret fled to brutish beasts... aye, brutish beasts I deed
There's a quote from the book - ambition is like climbing a ladder where the rungs disappear as you go up... and that's probably the theme to hang your hat on... this story is a cautionary tale of hate and rage and the good things, and ultimately bad things that it leads too... oh judgement thou aret fled to brutish beasts... aye, brutish beasts I deed
July 10, 2025
I greatly preferred Adams's "Death's Sweet Song". This one is a prohibition-era Breaking Bad kind of thing, and the protagonist is petty and unlikeable. He's also ultimately a pimp and a rapist. So, yeah, not a lot of fun in the final analysis.
February 15, 2022
"Well, it's a story about love, deception, greed, lust, and unbridled enthusiasm." This quote from Cosmo Kramer seems to sum this book up pretty good.
May 17, 2012
A Gold Medal from 1953, this is the story of the rise and fall of Roy Foley, born on the wrong side of the tracks in Big Prairie, Oklahoma and forever trying to cross them. He could outfight those boys, was smarter than all of them. It didn't matter. He was still less than nothing.
It was football that gave him a chance. In high school, he became the celebrated quarterback, the one colleges were scouting. He had his life planned. College, then law school.
And there was Lola, the beautiful girl he'd secretly worshiped since both were nine years old. Roy invited her to a dance, she declines, saying she'd already been asked. But come, we'll dance a lot.
He did and they did and on the patio over cokes, Roy told Lola how he felt about her, his plans for them.
And she laughed at him!
He fled, leaving town, The end of high school, college, law school, the wedding.
Fourteen years later, he's a fry cook in a small joint, all of that forgotten, until the telegram arrived from his aunt telling him his father has died. He grabs a bus with a small bag and four hundred dollars, everything he owned, arriving just after the funeral and burial, learning it had been paid for by the Christian Ladies Aid, a local charity.
Vowing to pay it all back, however long it might take, Roy calls the charity and asks about it. The chairman is the wife of the county attorney, Mrs. Lola Keating.
Ready to flee again, he bumps into an old friend from Burk Street, that wrong side of town, Sid. Big dumb Sid. Driving a fancy red convertible, an expensive suit, living in a big house, he had a blond wife that went with all that.
An idea is born. Sid is a bootlegger. Though prohibition had ended twenty years before, a couple of states, Oklahoma one of them, had retained it. Sid was a retailer and Roy wangles his way in as a deliveryman, maintaining he wants to get his feet wet, that he can get his hands on a large sum of money(he can't).
The hatred he had thought buried had re-emerged and was stronger than ever, was growing. His long range plans was to get big in the game in order to punish Lola.
Crooked politicians, cops everywhere. Roy intended to bring them down and take over the town. He's constantly reaching for more with every victory or setback.
And as the title implies...
Pretty good crime novel from the fifties.
It was football that gave him a chance. In high school, he became the celebrated quarterback, the one colleges were scouting. He had his life planned. College, then law school.
And there was Lola, the beautiful girl he'd secretly worshiped since both were nine years old. Roy invited her to a dance, she declines, saying she'd already been asked. But come, we'll dance a lot.
He did and they did and on the patio over cokes, Roy told Lola how he felt about her, his plans for them.
And she laughed at him!
He fled, leaving town, The end of high school, college, law school, the wedding.
Fourteen years later, he's a fry cook in a small joint, all of that forgotten, until the telegram arrived from his aunt telling him his father has died. He grabs a bus with a small bag and four hundred dollars, everything he owned, arriving just after the funeral and burial, learning it had been paid for by the Christian Ladies Aid, a local charity.
Vowing to pay it all back, however long it might take, Roy calls the charity and asks about it. The chairman is the wife of the county attorney, Mrs. Lola Keating.
Ready to flee again, he bumps into an old friend from Burk Street, that wrong side of town, Sid. Big dumb Sid. Driving a fancy red convertible, an expensive suit, living in a big house, he had a blond wife that went with all that.
An idea is born. Sid is a bootlegger. Though prohibition had ended twenty years before, a couple of states, Oklahoma one of them, had retained it. Sid was a retailer and Roy wangles his way in as a deliveryman, maintaining he wants to get his feet wet, that he can get his hands on a large sum of money(he can't).
The hatred he had thought buried had re-emerged and was stronger than ever, was growing. His long range plans was to get big in the game in order to punish Lola.
Crooked politicians, cops everywhere. Roy intended to bring them down and take over the town. He's constantly reaching for more with every victory or setback.
And as the title implies...
Pretty good crime novel from the fifties.
June 16, 2013
Roy Foley ran away from poverty in Big Prairie, Oklahoma, to make something of himself. Years later, he's slinging hash and burgers as a short order cook in a highway diner. His father's death leads to his return to Big Prairie, where he tries to pass himself off as a big shot, but he can keep the act going for so long. He lands a job as a bootlegger for his friend, Sid, but Roy's ambitions are much greater. He wants to take over the liquor racket in Big Prairie, ruin the girl who laughed at him, and prove to everyone that he is a somebody. But for a person like Roy, who is all anger all the time, getting what he wants is never going to be enough.
I was already familiar with Clifton Adams's western books. This is the first noir novel I read by him, and I was thoroughly impressed. His writing was a bit rougher than David Goodis or James M. Cain, but his story was full of dark shadows and impending doom. Adams was from Oklahoma but this story could have been set in any big city or small town. I was hoping for a more Okie feel that you get in a Jim Thompson book. What you get here is mean grittiness, and it's a real treat.
I was already familiar with Clifton Adams's western books. This is the first noir novel I read by him, and I was thoroughly impressed. His writing was a bit rougher than David Goodis or James M. Cain, but his story was full of dark shadows and impending doom. Adams was from Oklahoma but this story could have been set in any big city or small town. I was hoping for a more Okie feel that you get in a Jim Thompson book. What you get here is mean grittiness, and it's a real treat.
June 8, 2012
Epic.
December 9, 2013
Hated it. Probably the last book by Clifton Adams I read. Enough pulp fiction for a while.
Read
April 11, 2016Great read
My first pulp novel. Pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author and reading more pulp fiction.
My first pulp novel. Pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author and reading more pulp fiction.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews