Marilyn K - The House Next Door Read online

  LIONEL WHITE BIBLIOGRAPHY (1905-1985)

  The Snatchers (1953)

  To Find a Killer (1954; reprinted as Before I Die, 1964)

  Clean Break (1955; reprinted as The Killing, 1956)

  Flight Into Terror (1955)

  Love Trap (1955)

  The Big Caper (1955) Operation-—Murder (1956) The House Next Door (1956) Right for Murder (1957) Hostage to a Hood (1957) Death Takes the Bus (1957) Invitation to Violence (1958) Too Young to Die (1958) Coffin for a Hood (1958) Rafferty (1959)

  Run, Killer, Run! (1959; orig mag version as Seven Hungry Men, 1952)

  The Merriweather File (1959) Lament for a Virgin (1960) Marilyn K. (1960)

  Steal Big (1960)

  The Time ofTerror (1960)

  A Death at Sea (1961)

  A Grave Undertaking (1961)

  Obsession (1962) [screenplay pub as Pierrot le Fou: A Film, 1969] The Money Trap (1963)

  The Ransomed Madonna (1964) The House on К Street (1965)

  A Party to Murder (1966)

  The Mind Poisoners (1966; as Nick Carter, written with Valerie Moolman)

  The Crimshaw Memorandum (1967)

  The Night of the Rape (1967; reprinted as Death of a City, 1970) Hijack (1969)

  A Rich and Dangerous Game

  (1974)

  Mexico Run (1974)

  Jailbreak (1976; reprinted as TheWalledYard, 1978)

  As L. W. Blanco

  Spykill (1966)

  Non-Fiction

  Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Your Property in an Unsafe World (1974)

  MARILYN К. / THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  Published by Stark House Press

  1315 H Street

  Eureka, CA 95501, USA

  [email protected]

  www. starkhousepress .com

  MARILYN K.

  Originally published by Monarch Books, Derby, CT, and

  copyright© 1960 by Lionel White.

  Copyright © renewed July 29, 1988 by Hedy White.

  THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  Originally published by E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., New York, and copyright© 1956 by Lionel White. A condensed version appeared as “The Picture Window Murder" in the August 1956, issue of Cosmopolitan.

  Copyright © renewed June 5,1984 by Lionel White.

  Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Lionel White. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  “Lionel White at the Movies” copyright ©2015 by Brian Greene.

  ISBN: 1-933586-87-7

  ISBN: 978-1 933586-87-8

  Bk design by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics .com trover illustration by James Heimer, jamesheimer .com

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the p ts о e author s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance WhkU ,?erSOnS’ 1!Vln® or dead'events or Scales, is entirely coincidental, nublirati mitln8 *e nghts under copyright reserved above, no part of this o^smin^ay refPrriduced'stored' «г introduced into a retrieval system oh—m аПУ1ГоППОгЬУ “У means (electronic, mechanical,

  both the coDvrioht° od“radse) without the prior written permission of

  both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  First Stark House Press Edition: November 2015

  Table of Contents

  7

  11

  101I

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Thirteen

  7

  Lionel White and the Movies by Brian Greene

  11

  Marilyn K. by Lionel White

  101

  The House Next Door by Lionel White

  Lionel White and the Movies

  By Brian Greene

  Lionel White (1905-1985) never worked in Hollywood but there are strong ties between White and the movies. Two of the most influential filmmakers of all time - Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Luc Godard - made movies based on novels by White. Kubrick’s film noir classic from 1956, The Killing, works from White’s ’55 heist novel Clean Break, while Godard’s avant-garde 1965 title Pierrot Le Fou is loosely based on White’s book Obsession, from '62. And while these next-named films are not as critically lauded as those two, there’s much to be said for The Big Caper (1957), The Money Trap (1965), and The Night of the Following Day (1968), which are based, respectively, on White’s novels The Big Caper (1955), The Money Trap (1963), and The Snatchers (1953). The list of stars who acted in those various films is staggering: Sterling Hayden, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, Richard Boone, Rita Moreno, Rory Calhoun, Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey, Elke Sommer, Joseph Cotten, et al. If all of that isn’t an impressive enough set of connections between White and the movies, take in the fact that Quentin Tarantino name-checked White as an inspiration on Reservoir Dogs.

  The two White novels in this collection have never been made into movies, but it’s interesting to consider what might be done in adapting them to big screen features. The likely reason that Tarantino cited White in reference to Reservoir Dogs is that White was a master of the heist (gone wrong) novel, as evidenced by Clean Break and The Big Caper, both of which concern, as Tarantino’s film does, criminal outfits who carefully plan large-scale thefts, only to see their schemes go horribly and violently wrong. The House Next Door, one of the two stories you're about to read, is that kind of tale. But what's interesting about this heist novel is that it is mostly concerned with the aftereffects of a robbery, rather than the planning and attempted execution of the crime.

  The heist in The House Next Door occurs right at the opening of the book. A disgraced former cop named Gerald Tomlinson, with the aid of a thug named Danny Arbuckle, has plotted out the following scheme: they are going to head off a private detective who’s about to make a large cash deposit for a horse racing syndicate, before the detective can get the money into a particular New York bank’s overnight depository. The two will then take the money and run to a safe house Tomlinson has established in the suburbs, roughly forty miles away from the city, this home part of a planned community and inhabited by Tomlinson’s widowed sister-in-law and her child.

  Their heist goes wrong after it is carried out, for reasons best discovered by the reader. And what White’s novel really explores is all that goes down as a result of the botched escape plan of the robbers. People who don’t know Tomlinson or Arbuckle, and who have nothing to do with the life of crime, become inadvertently involved in their cycle of mayhem. Some die, one is accused of a murder he didn’t commit, others lose their children and one is threatened with losing her spouse, others’ marriages become strained to the breaking point... and much of this tragedy and chaos comes about simply because of the fact that Tomlinson chose a planned community, with its cookie-cutter houses, as his and Arbuckle’s initial hiding spot after the job. White’s omniscient narrator nicely sums up the domino effect of the aftermath of the initial crime:

  “ It is an established fact that all too frequently violence seems to set off a sort of chain reaction; as though the very fact of an initial act of violence were to spark a veritable epidemic which travels from one person to another, in greater or lesser forms, so that before long people who have had no connection with the first event are involved in all sorts of odd situations which could not be foreseen and to which they react in various fashions.”

  The House Next Door is ripe for
film adaptation. And, if a movie made from it stuck to the sequence of events as depicted in White’s novel, what would make such a film unique from the movies The Killing and The Big Caper is that it would follow the events that are consequences of a crime. If that setup sounds like it might be lacking in the kind of suspense one would hope for in such cinematic fare, that’s misleading; because White’s novel is filled with bracing tension, this effect coming from circumstances such as how the police come to tag a particular, innocent man as being responsible for one of the deaths, and that man’s wife’s efforts to save him from the electric chair. Other facets of the story that bring out excited anticipation in the reader, and that could do the same for a film viewer, include all that goes on in the homes of the handful or so of families who live in the planned community and whose lives are affected, in one way or another, by the madness that erupts after Tomlinson and Arbuckle make their theft and flee to the neighborhood. Just as White s novel does, this hypothetical movie could go into each of those omes and show scenes that make clear how the inhabitants’ lives have been

  shaken up by the pandemonium.

  Vfhile he was a master at the heist novel, that’s not the only type of story cr ted. Using his experience both as a police reporter and an editor crirru»
  around a kidnapping. Marilyn K., the other White novel you’re soon to encounter, is from another classic subgenre of suspense fiction: the femme fatale story. Similar to the superb film noir Detour, Marilyn K. involves a hapless guy who picks up a troublesome dame on the open road. Sam Russell, the fella who narrates the tale, is driving through a part of Maryland, on his way home to New York by way of Florida, after having done a stint working in Havana. He comes across a beautiful young woman who is standing on the road and he can’t help himself but pull over and talk to her. Sam very quickly learns that there is trouble surrounding this woman. She takes him to the car she’d been riding in before their meeting, this vehicle now overturned in a culvert, and shows him the dead man who is in that car. Soon enough it comes out that the deceased is a key player in the syndicate, and that he and the woman had been traveling with a large amount of cash.

  The titular character of Marilyn K., Marilyn Kelley, is pure femme fatale. She’s a desirable young woman who’s part of a popular singing duo with her twin sister. And she’s involved with the mob, by way of her past association with the dead man with whom she’d just been traveling. She wants Sam Russell to help her flee the scene of what she says was a car accident, but what Russell suspects involved some kind of foul play. And Russell knows something is amiss when she insists that they simply leave the scene of the dead man without involving the police in any way. Russell makes the decision to do as the beguiling beauty asks of him, and the story takes off from there.

  Marilyn K. has more in common with the femme fatale movies Gun Crazy or Double Indemnity than with the afore- mentioned Detour, since the guy who is victimized by the toxic lady in Detour meets his femme fatale by chance and gets saddled with her against his will; while in Marilyn К, as in the other two stories just mentioned, the guy knows he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing with the dangerous but irresistible woman with whom he gets involved, but he can't help himself. Russell is like Gun Crazy’s Barton Tare and Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff, in that as he gets more and more entangled in a femme fatale’s web of both passion and peril, he is aware that he is quite possibly sinking into existential quicksand, but all that’s happening to him as he slips into the deathly stuff feels so good that he is powerless to pull himself out. As Russell so neatly states in the early part of Marilyn K.:

  “You think that sort of decision is easy? You think it is simple just to reason it out? To get in a car and forget that a girl like Marilyn K. is waiting for you in a motel bedroom a few miles down the road? That several hundred thousand dollars are waiting in a bedroom a few miles down the road? Would you follow the dictates of your intelligence and drive on back to New York and ignore the fact that you would be passing up something most guys would give their lives to have?

  “And that was the key to the whole thing. I would be very likely giving my own life if I did take a crack at it. I think I am probably as smart as the next cookie, but I will tell you something. As I started to open the door of the convertible, I had already made my decision. I was going back to that motel and I wasn’t going to spare the horses. That’s the kind of idiot I am.”

  Marilyn K. could be the makings of an excellent film, an addition to the long list of worthwhile femme fatale movies. Marilyn’s desirability, combined with the trouble that clearly surrounds her, juxtaposed with Russell’s inability to resist her even when he knows his surrender to her is putting his life on the line, is vintage film fodder. And the story has plenty of other characters and facets that would be easily convertible to the big screen. There’s a sadistic law enforcement official, a "good girl” who becomes another potential love interest of Russell’s and who offsets the “bad girl” qualities of Marilyn K., sinister mob characters who are after Marilyn and the money, Marilyn’s enigmatic twin sister whose presence lurks about the story throughout but who only becomes actively involved in the proceedings near the end, etc. There’s fisticuffs, gun play, and other raw violence, steamy love scenes, police interrogations ... there’s a lot of exhilaration involved in the tale, and all of it is sitting there ready for some filmmaker to adapt it all to a celluloid version.

  In sum, what’s between these covers are two novels by an under-appreciated master of crime fiction. And what’s nice about the pairing is that one of the stories is an example of the kind of tale the author is mostly known for, while the other shows him working in a different vein. Enjoy both, and as you do, imagine what could be done with each if they were made into films that would add to the already impressive legacy of Lionel White’s connection to the cinema.

  —Durham, NC June 2015

  Brian Greene is a writer of short stories, personal essays, and articles and reviews on books, music, and film. His is a regular contributor to the crime fiction web sites Criminal Element and The Life Sentence, and has written about crime fiction for Crime Time, Paperback Parade, Mulholland Books, Noir Originals, and Crimeculture.

  MARILYN К. Lionel White

  For

  Shirley and Dick

  Chapter One

  You’ve heard the story a dozen times; a hundred times. From the lips of a hundred liars.

  This guy is driving down a lonely road, all by himself, bored, indifferent, not really going any place in particular. Nothing to do. Then, suddenly, there at the side of the road is this beautiful, young, helpless girl. No one else in sight, nothing but the girl and the lonesome road and she standing there waiting for a ride.

  So he pulls over to stop and she smiles, beautifully and with that old invitation in her deep, green-blue eyes. She gets into this car, a convertible of course, but with a nice soft six foot wide seat and a top which flips up in a matter of seconds with the push of a button. Of course she takes the cigarette and drink he offers her. And naturally...

  Oh well, who can blame them: Those legions of liars and dreamers. Every man would like it to happen, hopes that some day it will.

  Maybe we can improve on it a little. Let’s say the girl is standing there at the side of this lonely road and she has a small suitcase and inside of this suitcase is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Let’s go on and say that this girl is in need of help and wants nothing better than to check into the nearest motel, along with her money and her fair young body and her gratitude.

  Some dream, eh? And of course it couldn't actually happen. Things like that never really happen. Incredible. Impossible.

  But it isn’t impossible. Incredible yes, but not impossible. Because it did happen. It happened to me!

  And if you think that it’s a lie, another in the endless chain of lies that
men are always telling each other, then just listen to this. Not only did it happen, all of it, the whole bit including the suitcase with the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and the motel and the drink and the cigarette and a hell of a lot more—it not only happened, but I would give ten years off the end of my life if it hadn’t!

  That s right. I would give anything not to have had it happen, anything I own or ever will own, not to have been on U.S. Route 301 on that early uesday morning in late April. Never to have seen the slender, silhouetted igure of Marilyn Kelley, standing there in the false dawn beside the lonely, eserte ghway, infinitely pathetic and helpless and with the suitcase sit

  ting in the dust beside her.

  Route 301 runs on almost endlessly, passing through Georgia, South Car-na, ort arolina, Virginia, a bit of Maryland and Delaware, to end up

  meeting the Jersey Turnpike.

  The part we are interested in is that segment which runs from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, northeast through Maryland until, after some sixty-five or seventy miles, it crosses the state border into Delaware. It is a particularly lonely ribbon of new two-lane highway, passing through neither towns nor hamlets. It is a relatively new road, which accounts for the lack of commercial establishments along its lop-lolly pine length.

  There are few hills and almost no turns. This, combined with a certain lack of vigilance by the local speed cops, makes it possible to rattle along at eighty and ninety miles an hour in comparative safety.

  I was doing just that on Tuesday morning, April twenty-first, and I had passed no car in either direction for more than fifteen minutes, when I first saw her. She was standing there, as I have said, just off the side of the road, a slender, appealing figure in the thin false dawn. The minute I spotted her, my foot instinctively reached for the brake. I knew at once what I would do. I would...

  But let me explain who I am and what I was doing on U.S. Route 301 on that particular morning.

  My name is Russell. Samuel James Russell. Twenty-eight years old, bom in Brooklyn, New York and graduate of P.S. 47, four years at Townsend Harris High School, two years at Columbia University, four years in the United States Marines (still in reserve) and two years as a croupier in a gambling casino in Havana.