Vintage Pulp | Dec 2 2017 |
![ROOM WITH A VIEWER](/images/headline/4296.png)
Basic human psychology. When you deliberately hurt someone you may hate yourself but if they get over it you usually do too. When you deliberately hurt someone and they never get over it you stop hating youself and learn to hate them. This is the basic idea behind Clifton Adams' 1953 thriller Whom Gods Destroy. The main character Roy Foley learns this lesson early by kicking a defenseless crippled dog, which he sees every day afterward and therefore keeps kicking it until it goes away. But the lesson really sinks in when his unrequited high school crush kicks him. She's from a wealthy family and he's from the wrong side of the tracks. When he confesses his love for her she laughs in his face. The next day he drops out of high school, flees town, and throws away his bright future. That's backstory. The book opens when he returns fifteen years later. He inevitably sees her again and, as the abused, hates her with a murderous intensity. And as the abuser she hates him right back. It's clear these two are going to mangle each other. Whom Gods Destroy is recommendable stuff.
Vintage Pulp | Nov 10 2017 |
![COUNTER INTELLIGENCE](/images/headline/4260.png)
Since the story is told from first person point-of-view you have no evidence he's a blowhard, but for a guy who's allegedly so much smarter than everyone else plenty of things go wrong with his schemes, and the corpses he generates don't inspire confidence in his self assessment. And indeed, later you discover definitively that he isn't bright at all—he just has an enormous ego, one that allows him to bluster his way through problems, but which keeps him from spotting obvious dangers and prevents him from understanding it's he who's being played.
He believes beautiful women are his reward for being so much better than everyone else, which makes it especially satisfying when these women begin giving him trouble. If he were really a genius he'd have known that you never cross a femme fatale. Never Say No to a Killer is not an especially well written book, but the story is great and the lead character of Roy Surratt is rare. Well, rare in fiction. In real life people like him are everywhere. Overall this is decent-but-not-great stuff from Ace Double Novels, circa 1956, with uncredited cover art, and Louis Trimble's Stab in the Dark on the flipside.