Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2022 January 19 • Wednesday

John Trininan's The Big Grab (1960) was a pleasant surprise, an unusual addition to the heist novel category that in some ways anticipates the Donald Westlake/Richard Stark Parker series.

Karl Heisler has just got out of prison after serving five years for a payroll robbery. Those who know him have nothing but respect and admiration for him. He's a true professional and that last job should have gone just fine but he got caught just because of some glitch that was a matter of seconds. Not his fault.

Two notable things happened in his last stretch. First was his cellmate, who was dying and therefore had no reason not to tell Heisler all about the layour and security of the casino where he used to work; how to get in and take at least a quarter of a million dollars from a safe that should be impenetrable but has exactly one exploitable vulnerability.

The second thing was also Heisler's cellmate, the second cellmate, who replaces the first, who died. Frank Toschi is about twenty years younger than Karl Heisler and Heisler sees something impressive in him, a solidity, reliable qualities, trustworthiness, a kindred spirit.

Heisler has always worked alone but this casino raid requires two people assisting him, one on the inside and one on the outside, with a car.

Oh, and one more thing. This is an illegal gambling house, run by the mob. The good thing about that is it means no police. The bad thing is it means that getting caught is getting killed.

The writing elevates The Big Grab to a level above the standard. (And the standard is pretty good.) There are nice touches throughout. When Heisler and Toschi first meet on the outside, for example, Toschi stirs his coffee, "adding cream until it was the color of autumn" and then, one page later, Heisler thinks that his plan for the robbery will "fall like a leaf, crackling, gold-colored from the sky", answering the earlier suggesstion of autumn.

About halfway through the book, the narrative unepectedly jumps to another character's perspective, a structural device that Westlake/Stark used frequently and virtuosically. In this case it's the syndicate man who runs the gambling operation.

He's an interesting mirror image of Heisler, the same but opposite. They're the same age and are both suffering growing older. They both need dental plates. But one is hard, the other soft. One is happily married, the other unhappily. One has a child, the other has none. One has money, the other doesn't.

An actual mirror dominates the vivid scene that introduces this character to the reader.

Leon Bertuzzi awoke, after a long and troubled night, and saw himself on the ceiling, reflected there in the six-foot mirror that had been fixed over his bed. He saw himself lying on the rumpled sky blue sheets and blue electric blanket. He moaned and narrowed his sleep-filled eyes. He hated to wake in the mornings and see himself reflected on the ceiling. It was the first thing he saw every morning, and he always felt a bit startled at first, then uneasy, as if the suspended Bertuzzi might suddenly peel away from the silver and glass and fall on the reclining Bertuzzi. He always closed his eyes and experienced a slight wave of nausea and vertigo. Then, by turning to one side, he managed to ignore his reflection and crawl quickly out of bed.

Bertuzzi, trapped in his miserable life, recovering from a heart attack that he's trying to keep a secret as there's already a young, new-breed hood angling to take his job, having already taken Bertuzzi's much younger wife, is a character who could have stepped out of a Peter Rabe novel.

And it's all this this messiness that's going to cause problems later.

The heist is meticulously planned but of course you know something is going to go wrong, because that's what always happens.

It hardly seems fair. If Heisler's crew had picked any other night, everything would have gone like clockwork. But the one night they choose happens to be the one night when some of the humans on the syndicate side of things deviate from their routine.

And at some point you'll be wondering how this all ends.

Dramatic conventions of the time pretty much demanded that the criminals can't get away with their crimes. Even the original manuscript of the first Parker book had Parker getting killed or captured at the end and it was thanks only to Westlake/Stark's editor at the publisher that he was allowed to become a series character. Parker's victories were something of a revolution in the genre.

Of course, Heisler is a little bit different in that he's stealing from the mafia, who are very much not good guys. It's illegal money made by criminals. Who cares if it gets stolen?

Well, without ruining anything, I'll just say that the ending is kind of brilliant, and the groundwork for it laid much earlier in the book.

Apparently this book was the basis for the movie Melodie en Sous-Sol (1963, a.k.a. Any Number Can Win), which I've seen a couple of times. It doesn't follow the book closely, as I recall.

Apparently John Trinian is a pen name for Zekial Marko, whose birth name was Marvin Leroy Schmoker.

The first line of The Big Grab is "It was a cold day".