You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up

by Eric Knight

Black Lizard Books, 134 pages, $3.95

THE COVER OF THIS BOOK CALLS IT A "classic of the hard-boiled crime genre," but I can't believe anyone takes it so seriously.

Maybe the book was written before plots like this had been beaten to death by poor imitators of Chandler and Hammet, but today it reads more like a parody of snide tough-guy novels than a true milestone of the genre. Anybody who's read an old mystery novel or seen a few gangster movies will feel he's seen it all before.

The plot moves very quickly through countless twists and turns involving movie stars, bums, religious fanatics, murderers, and naked women, but none of it really comes as a surprise, You know immediately it's a set-up when a stranger offers the narrator ten dollars to do a simple favor, and you know the evidence he hides will eventually turn up again.

A book like this succeeds only when it moves in unexpected directions or consciously parodies itself and its genre. Unfortunately, this book walks a middle ground which leaves it flat and predictable.

The narrator, known only as Dick, speaks with he typical voice of a jaded, street-smart gangster from the 1930's. This is how the book begins: "When I came down off the midnight shift I saw there wasn't any light in the restaurant window, and that was how I knew Lois had left me. I knew it sure, just like I knew there'd be that note in the pillow."

He's clever enough to be an asshole but not strange or different enough to be interesting. He comes across just like hundreds of similar street thugs in hundreds of similiar books and movies. Like the book itself, he's not weird or eccentric enough to hold your attention for long.

A strength of this book is its short length. It may not be a riveting novel, but it does move fast enough to keep you interested for the few hours it takes to read 134 pages. You'll find yourself at the end without too much difficulty.

This is the only crime novel written by Eric Knight, an Englishman who worked in Hollywood during the Depression, and it brought him only moderate success when first published in 1938. Knight's only real literary achievement was Lassie. Come Home, a book which inspired the television series.

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is part of a series of celebrated crime novels being reprinted for the first time by a small publishing house in California. This book might not be a classic, but most of the others in the series certainly are. The writers of the thirties captured the mood of hostility and hardship prevalent in that decade in ways that have been only weakly copied since then.

If you want to read a truly classic crime novel, buy W. R. Burnett's Asphalt Jungle or Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. This book is worth the effort only if you have a few hours to waste on a quick light book and don't care too much about being surprised or challenged.