Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake (Lancer Books, 1969; Hard Case Crime, 2006)

Written a few years after Westlake stopped wearing the Alan Marshall mask for Cornith and Midwood, and was establing his career as a crime writer…

This is one of his funny goofy books.  It starts off somewhat serious, with sardonic moments, and eventally takes a turn for the absurd, the way the Lethal Weapon movies got more and more ridiculous.  If you like the humor in Joe Lansdale’s Hap novels, you’ll dig this.

A NY cabbie, 29-year-old Chet, gambler and invisible in the big city,  makes a good bet on a tip from a fare, and is owed $950 from his bookie; but when he goes to see his bookie, his bookie is dead and bloody, murdered.

Two mafia gangs think he did it; the bookie’s sister thinks he did it; the cops suspect he did it; he gets shot at and beaten up and is on the run, having developed a romance with the sister, Abby, a blackjack dealer from Vegas.

Through it all, all he wants is the $950 owed him, dammit.

Flaws and predictable, it’s still a fun read from vintage Westlake, a Lancer orginal recent re-printed by Hard Case.

Sadism by L.T Woodward (FULL TEXT)

In the human soul, cruelty crouches like a beast, chained, but eager to spring.

—WlLHELM STEKEL

WE DO NOT live in a gentle society. The daily newspapers provide a record of atrocity and violence that will someday appall and terrify the historians of the future, if there is any future. Day by day the grim toll mounts: children maimed at the hands of their angry parents, frightened girls raped in dark alleys, helpless victims hideously mutilated by knife-wielding madmen. The impulse toward acts or cruelty runs like a dark ribbon through the shining surface of our affluent society.

We find cruelty everywhere, at the highest levels of society and at the lowest. The conversation at a fashionable dinner table is edged with razor-keen blades, designed to wound deeply; the nation’s sports fans pay millions of dollars a year to watch men batter each other into insensibility in the boxing ring or on the football gridiron; prisoners are interrogated with frightful ferocity in hundreds of police stations. The television screen is bright with the violent doings of detectives and criminals who rival one another in the ability to do damage. Our popular fiction is repetitiously full of scenes of whipping, torture, beating, and the more refined forms of unpleasantness.