Customer Reviews

The Dead Beat

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Robert Bloch can really write, but he can't always hit the high notes. In his novella "The Dead Beat" Bloch holds our attention for the first hundred pages with a hardboiled noir tale of Larry the Fox. The moniker is a tip-off that Bloch penned this on his lunch hour, yet, because he's Robert Bloch, even a mediocre effort from him is a cut above most other crime fiction.

Larry Fox is as amoral as they come: a poseur pianist and callow youth with a decidedly checkered past who blames his life on the orphanage he grew up in as a "bastard." Bloch paces the story well for the first 100 pp. which drip with authentic 50s ambience, loose women, gangsters and junkies. Larry is a guy you love to hate and anticipate his comeuppance, sort of. The hesitation rests on the fact that there are no angels in this story, everyone's a little tainted or so gullible ("square") they deserve what's coming to them.

The ending is predictable and does not live up to the camp paperback cover's hype about a "suspense shocker" which surpasses Bloch's bestseller, "Psycho."

As the pace slackens somewhat, the author tries to enliven the dialogue by peppering it with a 39¢ rap by a professor-type who discourses on the profundities of youthful angst and the generational divide.

At p. 113 an intriguing speculation about American youth rendered into psychological mutants by the haunting spectre of the H-bomb is a potentially interesting bit of James Shelby Downardian contemplation that Bloch should have developed into a theme of post-modern youth not as Beatnik but Deadbeat. He doesn't go there however, and the book ends with a comically reactionary rant against the Beat movement itself, hence the title, even though Larry Fox is no kind of Beat.

This is entertaining, mid-20th century schlock, suitable for airplanes, buses and late-night reading when concentration on deeper material would be difficult to muster.

Although destined to be remembered as the author of Psycho (the novel upon which Hitchcock's classic thriller was based), author Robert Bloch wrote many fine tales of horror and suspense. The Dead Beat is one of them. Larry Fox is a jazz pianist just filling in at a local nightclub when the singer, who is a woman from his criminal past, steps onto the stage. Larry decides to extort money from her, but only gets roughed up for his trouble and his unconscious body is discovered by Elinor and Walter Harris, a soon to be middle aged couple out celebrating their wedding anniversary. The kindly couple nursemaid Larry and invite him to stay with them until he recovers. Larry, sensing that he's found the perfect hideaway from which to attack his former partner, accepts and begins formulting an intricate plan for revenge. Bloch keeps the pace quick and even tosses in some social commentary that remains relevant to this day and age, despite the book being well over forty years old. Anything Bloch wrote should be considered required reading for suspense fans. Recommended.