I had a much easier time finding a book from the fifties to
read than I did finding one from an earlier decade. With
pulps dying and paperbacks exploding, there's a lot more work
from that time that's easy to find in new and used
bookstores.
Frederic Brown's HIS NAME WAS DEATH (1951 or 1954?) was one
of the early Vintage/Black Lizard reprints, done in 1991,
which is the edition I've got. (The cover's got a great
photo, of a tough-looking hombre in a fedora, almost all his
face hidden in shadow, climbing some stairs.)
The title comes from Revelations 6:8, which in the King James
Version says, "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his
name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
(Other books and Eastwood's PALE RIDER (1985) have drawn from
the same verse.)
The gimmick to the book is that each of the six or seven
sections starts with "His name was" or "Her name was." The
book begins, "Her name was Joyce Dugan, and at four o'clock
on this February afternoon she had no remote thought that
within the hour before closing time she was about to commit
an act that would instigate a chain of murders." The last
section, just a couple of pages long, begins, "His name was
Death, and he waited for ____."
The book starts off with Joyce Dugan, and then the focus
moves around a few other people, mostly on her boss, Darius
Conn, who runs a print shop. The year before he'd killed his
wife and gotten away with it, and now he's feeling bold and
very confident. He's got a plan, and no-one's going to get in
his way. Brown spends a fair bit of time in people's heads,
and I wasn't particularly in the mood to read page after page
of a man wondering if marriage was right and whether he'd
settle down or his fiancee wondering if she'd wake up in time
to get to the early shift at the cafe. There are some
tortured conversations where the killer tries to worm
information out of people, but Brown's a fine writer and the
book moves quickly. I wouldn't rank it as top-notch,
though.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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