Live At The Heartbreak Lounge-Peter Rabe-Richard Stark

Ed here: I'm not only a fan of Wallace Stroby's fiction I'm a fan of his blog writing as well--Live At The Heartbreak Lounge. Here he notes some similarities between a Richard Stark and a Peter Rabe. But make this blog a regular stop because he reviews not only other Rabes but many other noirs as well. http://wallacestrobycom.blogspot.com/2009/08/black-lizard-lounge-4-out-is-death.html

BTW This is my favorite Daniel Port novel. I told Peter that it had several elements of a western in it. He seemed to like that.

Wallace Stroby:


In THE OUT IS DEATH, Port tries to rescue an old and infirm safecracker named Dalton from the clutches of a brutal young thug named Corday, who wants Dalton to go on one last job for him. It's a generational thing, as it turns out, with old school gangster Port going up against the '50s-style juvenile delinquents of Corday's gang. Doesn't take much to figure out who comes out on top. Suffice it to say that there were five Port novels in all, the last being 1959's TIME ENOUGH TO DIE. Black Lizard reprinted three and most have remained out of print since, though some are now showing up on Kindle.

TOID does bear similarities to Westlake's 1965 Stark novel THE JUGGER, the sixth book in the series, in which Parker travels to Omaha to find out what happened to his contact and go-between, an aging safecracker named Joe Sheer, who's fallen prey to corrupt small-town cops (in that sense, THE JUGGER also owes a debt to Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH). In THE JUGGER, though, Sheer is dead before Parker arrives (and Parker was prepared to kill him as a security measure anyway). In TOID, Port comes to Dalton's aid in time to save him from that fate, though he also has selfish reasons for getting involved, including Corday's va-va-voom girlfriend.