41. Benny Muscles in by Peter Rabe

This was a pretty nice find, a Gold Medal original paperback of Peter Rabe's second book.  It's funny how Rabe was almost totally forgotten (by most), then re-illuminated by Donald Westlake (who cited him as a major influence on Parker) to the point that his books became very hard to find and quite high-priced.  Now the flurry seems to have died down and you tend to find his books from time to time.  Also makes you realize he was fairly prolific.

Benny Muscles In is, at least according to the excitable back blurb, Rabe's second book.  I really appreciate the title because it is exactly what the book is about.  Benny is a small-time thug with big ambitions.  He is short and desperately motivated to take over and manage real operations.  At the beginning, he is given an assignment to manage a neighbourhood and do the collections from all the syndicated crimes going on there.  Without being told, he doubles the take.  When his boss, the unflappable Pendleton, demotes him to chauffeur.  I was sort of expecting the more common underdog gangster story here and Benny would make his way to the top because of his ruthlessness.

That is not Rabe's way.  Benny is flawed and the situations all around him do not help him at all.  He ends up siding with Al Alverrato, Pendleton's once colleague and now rival.  A lot of shit goes down, most of it involving kidnapping Pendleton's daughter.  It's quite violent and there are some quite crazy situations that you can feel trace a throughline to the Fargo/Tarantino/90s hot noir wacky setup style of crime movie.  The main narrative, though, is Benny's relationship with Pat, whom he keeps calm with heroine, turning her into a real addict all the while falling in love with her. It's a gross, abusive, twisted relationship on both sides.  I felt the ending was a bit of a cop-out, but the tangled mess leading up to it was an enjoyable exercise in crime and broken characters.  Good fun.