After the controversy stirred up by The City and the Pillar (reviewed below) Gore Vidal tried his hand at pseudonymous genre fiction - the Edgar Box novels (murder mysteries including Death Likes It Hot, also reviewed below) and the single, hard-boiled noir crime thriller Thieves Fall Out (1953), written as Cameron Kay.
What we have is a blend of American action man abroad and The Maltese Falcon. The latter is especially noticeable. The Claude Rains character is Inspector Mohammed Ali of the Cairo police, the Peter Lorre character is Le Mouche, pianist at Le Couteau Rouge, who has fingers in every pie, and the equivalent of Sydney Greenstreet (which Greenstreet could never play) is a wall-eyed collector-cum-smuggler called Said. I suppose the Ingrid Bergman character is the mysterious German Anna Mueller. The Maltese Falcon is definitely the necklace of Queen Tiy which Peter Wells, our hero, is hired to smuggle out of Egypt.
Just as The Maltese Falcon gains extra frisson from the background of the war and potential invasion, Vidal exploits the tensions in Egypt under the appalling King Farouk and sets his climax against the Black Saturday uprising of January 1952.
Is Peter Wells Humphrey Bogart? No, he's more John Garfield - a working class bruiser, former oil wildcatter and wartime soldier. He is relatively dumb, easily seduced, and happy to operate on the fringes of legality. He is good fun.
Vidal in the Box books was bright and amusing. On the evidence of Thieves Fall Out he could have given Mickey Spillane and Donald Westlake a run for their money in noirish thrillers. It goes without saying that he is a marvellous writer, probably the best American novelist of his era, his only real rival being Norman Mailer. An excellent read, another great from the Hard Case Crime series.
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