After
reading my first Clifton Adams novels, the mighty fine The Desperado (HERE) and A Noose for
the Desperado (HERE), I was sure I’d grok on this one, too. And I was
right. This guy sure knew how to write.
This one was
first published in 1956 under the pen name Jonathan Grant. At the time, he had
already published two crime novels and six westerns as Clifton Adams, so I don’t
know why the pen name was needed. Anyway, I'm glad to say it’s now back in print thanks to Stark
House’s line of Black Gat paperbacks.
The story
starts with a brutal prison break by our narrator, Roy Surratt. The woman meeting him afterwards asks if he
had any trouble. “No trouble at all,” he tells her, followed by this exchange:
Doris Venci said, “It doesn’t seem
possible than an escape could be brought off with no trouble at all.”
“Well,
there were two guards. I had to kill them.”
She looked at me. “That’s nice,” she said.
“I’m glad there wasn’t any trouble.”
Surratt’s
inspiration—sort of his mentor—is a criminal named John Venci, who is dead before
the story begins. In a flashback, Venci asks him, with “no more expression than
a razor gash in a piece of leather”:
“Suppose
that a very religious man feels an overpowering need for meditation, for
reconsecration of his flagging spirit, where does he go?”
I said, “A monastery, I suppose.
“Exactly,” he had answered. “Well, I came
to prison.”
Like Venci,
Surratt sees himself as a philosopher of crime, a man so much smarter than
everyone else that he can (and should) do whatever he likes and get away with
it.
Employing a
treasure trove of dirt Venci had collected on the pillars of local society,
Surratt embarks on a new crusade of blackmail, and (when the opportunity presents
itself) more murder. And after that?
“Tell me, Mr. Surratt, if you had all the
money you could ever want, how would you live out your later years?”
“Probably I would retire and concentrate on
killing all the people I didn’t like.”
Unfortunately
for Surratt, he meets and falls big time for a good girl named Pat Kelso. “Pat
Kelso was no dummy,” he tells us. “She wasn’t just another piece of gorgeous
sex machinery; she had a brain.” Should he steer clear of her? You bet. But
does he? What do you think?
The pace is
fast, the dialogue are tough, the characters are unpleasant and there’s a cloud
of doom hanging over the protagonist’s head. Just what you want from a Gold Medal style
crime novel. The eminent critic Prof. Bill Crider calls it, “The
real thing. Uncluttered prose, smooth and assured, with just the right amount
of description to make things real and immediate.”
Following Never Say No, Adams wrote only two more
crime novels, concentrating on westerns instead. There were about forty of
those, some under the names Matt Kinkaid and some as Clay Randall.