Customer Reviews

Kill the Boss Good-by

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This crime novel has quite a reputation among hardboiled aficianados, but I'm not sure I see why. We follow Fell, a gambling boss, as he checks himself out of a mental sanitarium, regains the power he was in danger of losing, and then goes over the top into manic psychosis. Kill is well-written and believable, but it's not very entertaining, or even very interesting. Part of the problem, I think, is the cold, clinical tone -- it feels more like a psychiatric case study than a novel. The other part of the problem is that there's no one to root for in the book: we never care about Fell, so ultimately we don't care what happens to him. That could have been dealt with if the book was more racy/lurid -- one would read on just to have one's sensibilities shocked -- but this is so quiet, it only manages to inspire indifference. Don't bother hunting this one down, and don't believe the hype.

Imagine a crime book without any compelling characters, snappy dialogue, or surprising plot twists and you should get a pretty good picture of 'Kill the Boss'. Dry, detached, and plodding, this 125-page novel drags on in a monotonous tone that really got on my nerves. I ended up forcing myself to finish the book.

I read this in one night, while home sick with a cold. It is the story of Thomas Fell, a SoCal crime boss recently released from a sanitarium, who returns to his turf to find his reign threatened by Pander, an ambitious, up and coming hood who wants to take over the action. The story centers around a horse race that Fell fixes to leave Pander owing a lot of money to bad people. Fell, meanwhile, is seeming to act erratically, but yet doing the right things to oust Pander and reclaim his ground. As manic as he's become, the head bosses decide to give him one more chance, but the hit has been put in. Will he make it out in time?

I enjoyed it. A different kind of crime book, but with the usual tough guy posturing, fights, chest thumping and stacked dames. Took me about two hours to read. KInd of a milder Jim Thompson style, and it's interesting to see Fell seemingly manic and out of control, but still manipulating events to his advantage. I think it's worth a read if you like the genre.

I beg to differ with the other reviewers. The book is clinical, that part is true, but I definitely wouldn't call it cold, or monotonous for that matter. More like minimalist.

The novel is intelligent, poignant and, in it's own way, moving. What Rabe does is to acknowledge the hard-boiled cliches that are expected of him, strip most of them away, as they would have otherwise stood in the way of him telling the story, and then use what is left of the gangster novel/roman noir vernacular to communicate directly with the reader in the clearest and most succint way imaginable. That way lies transcendence.

I'm glad that at least one reader was able to find transcendence in reading this. Perhaps a bottle of some strong liquor might have helped me achieve a similar nirvana. I am much more of a mind with the reviewer who had to force himself to finish it. This novel has the forward momentum of a really slow snail, and absolutely no characters you care about. Nothing that anyone does makes much sense at all, and the climactic ending is just a nihilistic joke.