by Lionel White
CRIME A LA WHITE
by Rick Ollerman
Chapter One
Chapter Four
Chapter Eight
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty-three
Lionel White was one of the most prolific and consistent writers of noir (French for “black” as most crime fiction readers are no doubt aware— ironically the opposite of his own surname). His characters were not always the most original but he imbued every one of them with the sort of depth usually found in works by authors working the literary genre. Only in White’s case he needed to use only a tiny fraction of the words to do it. And his plots....
I have to say this: no one has ever been better at plotting a crime story than Lionel White. Either before him or after him. Almost every book reads like a master class in how to craft a story, be they written in first person or third.
Even better known and less forgotten names like Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer couldn’t match the meticulousness of the straight-ahead, relentless style of storytelling in which White excelled. He was equally adept at writing from the first person perspective as he was in the third. He could deliver a linear, sequential narrative, or carefully interlace his complex stories by alternating the close third party points of view of his myriad characters.
Considered from a structural standpoint, his books cut like a sharpened scalpel with their precise details; not a hair is out of place. Even when he came close to something resembling a “happy” ending, the stones still ended up on a noirish note—it was not a happy time for everyone, especially the main character (with just a few exceptions).
There’s always been that endless conversation of what kind of work constitutes the genre of “noir,” what that word really means to the literary world. If readers want to figure it out for themselves, I tell people to read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Not only is that book a classic in its own right, it masterfully gives the reader all the elements most people think of when they consider noir. There’s the femme fatale, the first-person protagonist who makes one bad choice followed by others as he tries to shortcut his way to a better life, the eventual betrayal, dirty deeds compounded with crime, and ultimately, the punishment, once so avoidable yet at the same time always so inevitable.
But still, they think, if things had just broken a different way, if only one lucky break could have come their way in this miserable life....
The shorter definition I like to use is much less prone to debate and I think crystallizes the noir concept more succinctly than analyzing a particular book: a noir story is one where the protagonist starts out screwed—and ends up screweder.
The question of femme fatales or bad choices or anything other element always leads us to the inescapable fact that in noir, the protagonist has to be in worse shape at the end of the book than he was at the beginning. This is one of the reasons noir sequels are so rare and difficult to pull off—the protagonist has most likely already taken his last seat in an electric chair. Dan Marlowe pulled it off with The Name of the Game Is Death (1962) and its sequel, One Endless Hour (1969) by effectively rejuvenating his lost protagonist. In the first book “Earl Drake” is critically injured and left for dead after but he actually recovers at the start of the second book—and promptly does it all again.
In any case, this is why books like Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) or Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) aren’t noir. Physically, at least, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe actually end up in pretty good shape when all is said and done. Where Postman is about as good an example of noir that’s ever been written, most of Hammett’s and Chandler’s novels are examplesof hard-boiled writing. Tough, unforgiving lean prose that hits hard and doesn’t waste time on a lot of the touchy-feely things that might be missing on the underside of life.
As for White, he usually wrote in the same sort of pared down, simple sentence structure designed more to stab a point home rather than paint a pretty word picture in the reader’s mind. Indeed, his deceptively simplistic style belies the intricate plotting as well as the emotional feel he has for each of his characters. Not only was White unquestionably an author of noir, his prose itself was mostly in the hard-boiled vein, especially when he approached such distasteful subjects as dangerous lust and even—in Death of a City (1970), where a racially split town is carefully engineered to implode thus clearing the way for the actual caper—the taboo of cannabalism (I). When it came to the actions of the criminal world, White’s depictions were raw and cut as deep as he needed them to.
Much of this may have come from his time as an editor and publisher
of “true confession” and “true detective” type magazines with names like World Detective and Homicide Detective. Born in Buffalo, New York on July 9th, 1905, White later died in Asheville, North Carolina, on the day after Christmas in 1985. In between he served in World War II, married twice, had a son, became a police reporter in in Ohio, and moved up the magazine publishing chain in New York City.
What we know him for today is, of course, his fiction, nearly forty novels of some of the hardest-boiled noir stories from the PBO, or paperback original, era. Starting in 1952 with a book in digest format from Rainbow Books (Seven Hungry Men!; it would see a somewhat altered version in paperback a few years later as Run, Killer, Run!), White’s “first” book was a mass market paperback called The Snatchers for Gold Medal. He stamped out the model he would stay close to for most of his literary career. As the title boldly announces, The Snatchers is a book about a kidnapping. More importantly, though, it announces White to the world as a plotter second to no one—yes, even in that first book.
While the prose itself lacks all self-consciousness—a great trick for a beginning novelist, one that usually takes many, many words to achieve and was likely aided by his time with the newspapers—it may best be described as a reporting style applied to creative fiction.
Over time and more books, White’s prose improves in style and quality but it never becomes his focus as a writer. For White, the stories always come first, with the characters coming in a close second. The writing was always up to the job but it was delivered with the blunt side of the blade, hard hitting and clear. Rainbows, sunsets and flower scents could only be distractions—there was no purple prose here.
All this is particularly clear in The Snatchers. Here the characters give the first impression as coming straight out of central casting and yet in very few pages each one of them has been granted much deeper emotional depth and a sort of life than their initial appearances suggest.
This book is told from the third person with White jumping around in the minds of the various gang members as they each play their parts in the kidnapping caper. It’s nearly impossible to read a Lionel White book and not be struck by the detailed planning of the capers, heists and kidnapping. They can read like blueprints for committing various crimes, and indeed, at least one of them was.
In 1960, a convicted car thief and small-time smuggler was hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere near the village of Grisy-les-Platres in the north of France. His name was Jean-Marie Larcher and he had come across a copy of a book called Rapt, the French word for “kidnapping.” This was the name of the French translation of The Snatchers.
Shortly thereafter, convinced that the Americans, White in particular, had perfected a foolproof method of kidnapping, he shared the book with another hood, a man named Raymond Rolland. They put together a small gang and assiduously followed the plot laid out by Lionel White in his book. On April 12,1960, the gang took four-year-old Eric Peugeot, the grandson of the huge automaker’s founder, from a sand box where he had been playing with his brother.
Just as in White’s book, Roland Peugeot, Eric’s father, received several letters and phone calls and, also as in the book, he agreed to follow the kidnappers’ instructions without involving the authorities. All he wanted was the safe return of his son.
The crime was a success. Larcher and Rolland had pulled it off, and though the Surete Nationale was brought in after young Eric’s return and a massive worldwide manhunt was on for the gang, the kidnappers remained unknown and at large. Massive press and publicity, also elements in White’s book, did nothing.
It wasn’t until six months later, when an anonymous caller tipped the authorities to two men who were described as not having jobs and living way beyond their means, that the police had their first solid lead. They got to Raymond first, apprehending him in an eleven-room suite at a resort in the village of Megeve, near the Swiss border. Oddly enough, the Peugeot family had also been staying at the chalet and Raymond and little Eric often passed each other in the hallways, feeding Raymond’s massive ego.
It took forty-five hours of non-stop interrogation of the sort no longer practiced in most first world countries before Raymond finally broke and confessed. Roland Peugeot had already identified him as the man he had paid the ransom money to, and later the typewriter borrowed from Raymond’s ex-wife and used to write the ransom letters was found at the bottom of the Seine. Raymond no longer had any chance.
Sadly for the gang of kidnappers, White’s book may have showed them how to commit the perfect crime but it didn’t show them how to actually get away—or stay away—with it. Their ending was somewhat different from the one in The Snatchers but certainly Raymond and Larcher would have preferred another alternative.
Other than the Peugeot family who had successfully reclaimed their son, the man who may have come out best in the case would have been the chief of the Surete, a man called Jean Verdier: he was able to collect on a bet with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover that the case would never be solved.
As in the case of the Peugeot kidnapping, noir stories are ultimately stories of failure. What else could they be? There may be a failure of circumstance or of character but noir stories always end up with the main character in a far worse place than where they started. So what keeps reading them from being an exercise in depression and pity? If the characters are truly bad people, why is there such an audience for noir in both literature and in film?
It is far easier for an author to give his or her readers characters that are likeable, people that can be thought about in a good, positive way. But how to do that n the case of noir, where the characters are criminals, often living on the edge of society and picking at the scabs of the social underclass?
They may not start out as such but there’s always that first step, that first wrong step, taken by someone who knows it’s a bad move but takes it anyway, either through diffidence or a criminal nature. Or it could be greed. Lust for the wrong woman. A desire for the better life they never earned on their own.
On the other hand, sometimes the characters can be good people who have made so many wrong tuns it seems as though fate has turned them into criminals or immoral degenerates because nature, in a way, has turned its back on them. It’s not really their fault. Destiny has tagged them and it won’t let go, at least not without the kind of fight the characters aren’t willing or aren’t able to win.
The key is that the reader doesn’t necessarily have to care about the characters—after all, they’re engaged in reprehensible things like murder and kidnapping—but readers do have to care what happens to them. We want their crimes to fail and for them to get the punishment they deserve, but we have to be engaged in the manner in which they fail and in which they are punished.
Otherwise we may as well be reading police reports while our stomachs are turning. Just as well we may be hoping against hope that they can rise above their circumstances and somewhere along the line finally make a right choice—it really doesn’t matter. Everyone who commits a crime or is led astray in not always a bad guy.
This is a very narrow path for the author to walk but it is precisely that quality of making us care about characters we may despise that is the true magic and appeal of noir. It is what makes a compulsively readable book out of what otherwise would likely be a throw-it-across-the-room experience for the non-depraved. Without this quality the book could still be noir but would likely fail to garner much of an audience let alone become such an important and pervasive popular culture genre.
Very little of White’s characters is described through dialogue, a departure not only from his PBO contemporaries but also from much of the crime fiction being produced today, where the name of the game is often a speedy yet engaging read through extensive use of dialogue. A thick book with lots of white space often fits the needs of the busy commuter.
White defines his characters mostly through exposition. He relates their back stories, their dreams, their past failures, almost solely through his succinct yet detailed and poignant portraits and description. It’s this style or technique from White that allows us to get to know his characters and subtly obscure the lack of perceived lyricism or grace in his work. His stories are a series of gut punches, starting at the beginning where the crimes or capers are already laid out all the way through until the end, the often very bitter end. In a very short period of time, we know what White is delivering and most importantly, it works.
Unfortunately, White’s style doesn’t always translate as well to readers used to smoother more polished writers. His background as a crime reporter and in true crime magazines seems to inform his fiction writing, where the words themselves are short, sharp jabs to the stomach.
As a master of the caper novel—or better, the failed caper novel—this served White’s unsurpassed plotting powers well. No one better detailed not only what happens to his characters at the same time as what goes wrong with their schemes. It isn’t just The Snatchers that reads like a step by step primer for committing a heist of some sort. With White that includes kidnapping, bank robberies, airplanes, buses, cars, boats....
Another writer who mined the same territory was Donald Westlake, namely through his Parker series written under the pseudonym of “Richard Stark.” When Westlake published The Hunter in 1962, he’d originally meant the book to be a one-off with his bad guy protagonist dying at the conclusion of the story. This was his homage to Lionel White.
Much to his surprise, however, the publisher asked if it would be possible for Westlake to keep Parker alive at the end and give the publisher three more books with Parker as the starring character. Westlake did so, going well beyond the three additional books, retiring Parker in 1974 only to bring him back more than twenty years later for another eight books. All in all, the Parker character appeared as the main character in two dozen books and guest-starred in a few more.
As yet another nod to White, in Westlake’s novel Jimmy the Kid (1970), the first of his series of “comic” caper novels featuring a thief name John Dortmunder, the gang uses a fictional book called Child Heist to plan a kidnapping along the lines of White’s The Snatchers. Originally intended to be another Parker novel, Westlake couldn’t keep himself from writing the book “funny,” and thus the Dortmunder series of “comic” capers was born.
(Incidentally, the author of the novel referred to in the book is Westlake’s own pseudonym, Richard Stark, who actually makes an appearance as a character at the end—bizarre stuff.)
Other than a smoother presentation Westlake’s books differ from White’s mostly in that while they are hard-boiled and clever, they are not noir. Parker himself survives each book and actually supports himself with the proceeds of his capers, whatever they may be. White’s characters are never so lucky.
If we name “literary fiction” merely another genre like “romance fiction” or “crime fiction,” it’s probably fair to say that character is more often paramount while plot itself is downplayed. It’s like the silly question of asking which is more importa
nt, characterization or plot. That’s really more of a reader’s question—most established authors probably feel it takes strong usage of both elements to make a really good book. If an author gives you characters you don’t like, you may not care what they do. On the other hand, if the plot is one that keeps you glued to your chair reading pages, you may be more inclined to forgive a somewhat dull or unoriginal character.
White strikes an elusive balance in his novels, giving us characters with enough emotional depth that readers can find ways to empathize with them, which is more than good enough to entrance us with his dazzling ability to chart a course through a story, even with a prose style that is other than pyrotechnic. His plot pulls us in but his characters make it matter and this is what makes White such a deceptively good writer.
In Death Rides the Bus (1957), he gives us a story that is made up of a string of interconnected character backgrounds, where almost no one is “good” though there is a wide variance of “bad.” Though it has a far subtler plot than a book like The Snatchers, the hard-boiled prose carries us through to the end where the reader doesn’t know until the very final sentences if the book is simply callow and sharp or if it’s a true noir. Even up to the last paragraph, White reserves the ability to turn the book on its head by his character’s actions and yet still manages to remain a noir novel without cheating anyone.
With 1970’s Death of a City, White again uses the third person technique where he jumps from character to character but also from situation to situation. What stands out in this book is how White gives us a bleak and narrow social commentary, namely race relations in a small city and how easily they can be manipulated by an outside agency for their own purposes (in other words, a really big series of crimes). In many ways it is a daring if unflattering book and in this day and age of political correctness where it’s all too important not to risk offending anyone of any ethnic stripe, White is unsparing in his portrayal of income inequality in a city that boils over with the just right combination of violence and rumor. It is an absolutely unsparing picture of mob mentality at its most dangerous. If White’s books are blueprints, this is one we don’t want the bad guys to read....