| Vintage Pulp | Mar 22 2024 |
This ain't Happy Days and he ain't the Fonz.
Since reading William R. Cox's 1961 thriller Death Comes Early we'd been looking around for more from him and located 1958's Hell To Pay, which you see above with a Robert Schulz cover. Cox writes in that same cool style we noted before, as he combines two crime sub-genres—organized crime, and juvenile delinquency. His main character Tom Kincaid is a successful NYC gambler who gets swept up in a mafia takeover centered around crooked boxing. Kincaid is thought by a kingpin named Mosski to be working for an upstart mob, which essentially makes this a find-the-real-killer novel in the sense that if Kincaid can't prove he isn't setting up Mosski his ass is grass. The book has in abundance generation gap musings, shady mingling between criminals and cops, poker described in hand-by-hand detail, and a lot of shooting and/or brutal beatings. Cox provides several good secondary characters, particularly Kincaid's been-around-the-block girlfriend Jean Harper. She's flawed, but then so is everyone here. There's a sequel to Hell To Pay, and we're onto that already.
