Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press 1972)

 

The lieutenant looked out the side window, though without any hope. They were climbing a hill, and just ahead was the sign for McKay’s Diner. The lieutenant remembered the free cheeseburger he’d been promised, and smiled. He was about to turn his head toward the captain and suggest they stop for a snack when he saw the diner was gone again. ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That diner, sir,’ the lieutenant said as they drove by. ‘They went out of business already.’

‘Is that right.’ The captain didn’t sound interested.

‘Even faster than I thought,’ the lieutenant said, looking back at the space where the diner had been.

‘We’re looking for a bank, Lieutenant, not a diner.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The lieutenant faced front, began again to scan the countryside. ‘I knew they wouldn’t make it,’ he said.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally (Angus & Robertson Publishers 1972)

 

In June of 1900 Jimmie Blacksmith’s maternal uncle Tabidgi – Jackie Smolders to the white world – was disturbed to get news that Jimmie had married a white girl in the Methodist church at Wallah.

Therefore he set out with Jimmie’s initiation tooth to walk a hundred miles to Wallah. The tooth would be a remonstration and lay a tribal claim on Jimmie. For Tabidgi Jackie Smolders was full-blooded and of the Tullam section of the Mungindi tribe. To his mind people should continue to wed according to the tribal pattern.

Which was: that Tullam should marry Mungara, Mungara should wed Garri, Garri should wed Wibbera, Wibbera take Tullam’s women. But here was Jimmie, a Tullam, married in church to a white girl.

Jackie felt distressed, a spiritual unease over Jimmie Blacksmith’s wedding. These tribal arrangements should still be made, Tabidgi Jackie Smolders thought. The elders kept the tribal pattern in their heads and could arrange a tribal wedding even if the Tullam buck was on a mission station eighty miles, two hundred miles, from Mungara woman.

Jackie Smolders was therefore dispirited – so too even his flippant sister, a full-blooded lady called Dulcie Blacksmith. Half-breed Jimmie had resulted from a visit some white man had made to Brentwood blacks’ camp in 1878. The missionaries – who had never been told the higher things of Wibbera – had made it clear that if you had pale children it was because you’d been rolled by white men. They had not been told that it was Emu-Wren, the tribal totem, who quickened the womb.

Mrs Dulcie Blacksmith believed the missionaries more or less. They took such a low view of lying in other people that they were unlikely to lie themselves. And certainly, Mrs Blacksmith had been rolled by white men. For warmth in winter, she once said. For warmth in winter and for comfort in summer. But the deep truth was that Emu-Wren had quickened Jimmie Blacksmith (pale or not) in the womb and that Mungara owed him a woman.

Yet here he was marrying a white girl off a farm.

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press 1972)

 

Joe

The subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.

Most of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the moment was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two, and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it.

Except this one guy. He stood around on the other side of us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a suit, carrying an attaché case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest of the people up out of the manhole.

He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops! Gimmie gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”

Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”

They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”

It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”

I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.

Journey Through a Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Robin Clark Limited 1972)

I drifted into Communism when I was about eleven under the influence of a militant boy called Mickey Lerner. He was thin and undersized, with a chronic cough, and suffered many indignities at the hands of bullying masters and pupils. His father, a presser, also coughed because his lungs had been rotted by the steaming cloth he pressed ten hours a day. In fact, the whole family coughed. They lived in the sooty air of a Brick Lane alley overhung by a railway bridge and had a habit of blinking like troglodytes in full daylight. This made them seem puzzled and defenceless when, in reality, they were tough and stiff-necked tribe. I was led into Communism more by the misery and toughness of the Lerner family than by anything in my own predicament.

Goalkeepers Are Different by Brian Glanville (Crown Publishers 1972)

Now and again he played in the games himself, like Charlie Macintosh, and you couldn't have had two more different players. His control was lovely, Billy's, he could do anything with a soccer ball, juggle it from foot to foot until you got tired of watching him, flick it over his shoulder with his heel, pull it back with the sole of his boot then go on again, in the same movement; he was lovely to watch. "Two stone more," the Boss used to say, "two inches more, and Billy would have been the greatest." One day Billy looked at him, deadpan, and said, "No, I wouldn't. I'd have been a player like you."

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1972)

Anyone who had been in a position to compare the bank robbery squad to the robbers themselves would have found that in many ways they were evenly matched. The squad had enormous technical resources at its disposal, but its opponents possessed a large amount of working capital and also held the initiative.

Very likely Malmström and Mohrén would have made good policemen if anyone could have induced them to devote themselves to so dubious a career. Their physical qualities were formidable, nor was there much wrong with their intelligence.

Neither had ever occupied himself with anything except crime, and now, aged thirty-three and thirty-five respectively, they could rightly be described as able professional criminals. But since only a narrow group of citizens regarded the robbery business as respectable, they had adopted other professions on the side. On passports, driving licences, and other means of identification they described themselves as 'engineer' or 'executive', well-chosen labels in a country that literally swarms with engineers and executives. All their documents were made up in totally different names. The documents were forgeries, but with a particularly convincing appearance, both at first and second sight. Their passports, for example, had already passed a series of tests, both at Swedish and foreign border crossings.

Personally, both Malmström and Mohrén seemed if possible even more trustworthy. They made a pleasant, straightforward impression and seemed healthy and vigorous. Four months of freedom had to some extent modified their appearance; both were now deeply tanned. Malmström had grown a beard, and Mohrén wore not only a moustache but also side-whiskers.

The Glory Game by Hunter Davies (Mainstream Publishing 1972)

Joe Kinnear was first to arrive at Tottenham, looking rather pale and strained, his summer tan long since disappeared, his three-piece suit rather hot for such a bright and sunny August morning. His ear was still heavy from the battering it had taken during the so-called friendly match on Monday with Rangers. He’d been taken off unconscious after a collision and had spent the night in a Glasgow hospital. According to Cyril Knowles, Joe had only come round when he heard them discussing whether to cut his hair off in order to put stitches in his ear. That was a Cyril Knowles joke. All the same, Joe had had two stitches in his ear and was glad that his hair was long enough to cover it and protect his looks. Being the team’s eligible bachelor, he’s very conscious of his appearance.

Mr Alfred M.A. by George Friel (Calder & Boyars 1972)

He saw a new rash break out on the scarred face of the city. Wherever the name of a gang was scribbled the words YA BASS was added. The application of the phrase caused some dispute at first. Nobody doubted YA BASS meant YOU BASTARDS. But the grammarians who discussed it were undecided about its vocative or apostrophic use. Some said COGS YA BASS meant O COGS! YOU ARE BASTARDS! Others said it meant WE ARE THE COGS, O YOU BASTARDS! A fifteen-year-old boy charged with assault and breach of the peace, and also with daubing TONGS YA BASS on a bus-shelter, said in court that YA BASS was an Italian phrase meaning FOR EVER. But the sheriff didn't believe him.

Some of the intelligentsia seemed to believe him.

Following a fashion, as the intelligentsia often do, they wrote the names of miscellaneous culture-heroes in public places and added YA BASS. Thus soon after the original examples of COGS YA BASS, TOI YA BASS, TONGS YA BASS, FLEET YA BASS, and so on, which were plastered all over the districts where those gangs lived, a secondary epidemic occurred on certain sites only. SHELLEY YA BASS suddenly appeared in the basement of the University Union. In a public convenience near the Mitchell Library MARX YA BASS was scrawled in one hand, LENIN YA BASS in another, and TROTSKY YA BASS in a third. When The Caretaker was put on at the King's Theatre PINTER YA BASS was pencilled on a poster in the foyer. BECKETT YA BASS, later and more familiarly SAM YA BASS, was scribbled on the wall of a public-house urinal near the Citizens' Theatre the week Happy Days was on. When the same theatre presented Ghosts somebody managed to write IBSEN YA BASS in large capitals on the staircase to the dress-circle.

Hillbilly Women by Kathy Kahn (Avon Books 1972)

When all this murdering and killing happened over at Evarts, that was when the coal company hired gun thugs and they met up with the miners that was out on strike. Well, Dad took the blame for those killings. Course, he'd been a coal miner all his life and they'd worked him day and night in those mines. And he worked with the union to make things better for the people.

But Dad wasn't at Evarts when the killings happened. He was out robbing the commissary. But Dad's brother, Sam Hicks, was there at Evarts. I think he was the one that had the machine gun. But all this time, Dad was robbing the company store.

I think it was in the spring of the year, long about '31. Dad and the other miners had come out on strike and the gun thugs were after them.

I remember Dad coming to the house and getting the shotgun and a lot of shells. He made us all get under the floor and told Mommy to keep us barricaded under there and not let us out. And I remember Mom a-beggin' him not to go out. But they had been working him hard in those mines, night and day. So he went out and joined the other miners on strike.

So anyway, this night he come in after the shotgun, that was the night before the killings at Evarts started. But Dad, the reason he wanted the gun was some of the miners and their families was starving and they needed some food. He aimed to get it for them.

Dad went up to the commissary and took about five other men with him. He went into the commissary and held his shotgun on the company men. Then he told the miners to fill all these bags full of food. They filled hundred pound bags of beans, sugar, lard, coffee, and taters. While he was holding the gun on the company men, Dad said what time he was around organizing with the union there wasn't going to be no people going hungry . . . The men took the food out and distributed it according to the size of the families that was out on strike.

Wyoming Wilson speaking to Kathy Kahn.