Peter Rabe (1921–1990)

A numbers racket gets raided, and Fell, the top boss, is missing! What to do, what to do…

Well, other guys want to be on top, so… when the cat’s away, the mice will play. This started out pretty good, with guys muscling up to try to take over the local bookie business. But it started to unravel for me with the horse racing sub plot and then I got totally lost when Fell started buying up properties and building on them. I understood the ending though, and it ended as it probably should have.… (mer)

Agreement to Kill is Peter Rabe's take on the theme of an innocent man on the run. It takes an ordinary guy with all the evidence in his he world pointing toward his guilt and throws in a deadly Assassin, a femme fatale, and mob connections. It also includes a jury trial, Perry Mason style. However, like other Peter Rabe books, there's a certain oddness and awkwardness to the main characters and the story. Even the romantic entanglements are odd, awkward, & don't make perfect sense. But that's okay - in real life, things don't always fit together neatly and people are odd, awkward, and uncomfortable.… (mer)

My Lovely Executioner is a noir novel taking place during the winter snows of Christmastime. It features a convict who is three weeks of completing his seven years and, when a riot and jailbreak is staged, is reluctant to go along. Once out, he remains a prisoner in some sense by the criminal organization that engineered the escape and wants him to do something.

Rabe does an excellent job of portraying the monotony of prison life and Gallivan's uncomfortableness with his unplanned escape and uneasiness with what they want from him. He's sort of a misfit in this role and it shows in his constant sparring with the femme fatale of the piece, Jessie.

Although I really enjoyed this novel, it was at times a little light on the action and sometimes left the reader as confused and misled as Gallivan himself as to what was really going on. There's also a lot in the middle of the book that just shows how uneasy and untrusting Gallivan was.

Overall, this is a good noir selection from Rabe, just not one of his better known works.… (mer)