Harry Whittington (1915–1989)

You'll Die Next! offers what is best about noir fiction. A fast paced plot, ordinary people in extraordinary situations, beautiful (and often dangerous) dames, lots of thugs, and a tons of gunplay. This thin volume is full of the overblown prose and tough guy parlance that littered the literary landscape of the 1950s.


Pinky sifted his coat up on his heavy shoulders. Henry saw him as a dangerous man gone to lard. Pinky wasn’t much taller than his blind enemy. He was somewhere between forty and fifty. He had black greasy hair. His puffy face would smile at you while he knifed you in the back.

Henry stirred and Pinky’s gun jerked nervously. Pinky said, “Stand still, chump. I got other troubles right now. I’ll get around to you.”



Whittington is no Chandler but his writing is easy and knowledgeable all at the same time. At no point does the prose detract from the plot. And plot is what this is all about. Whittington keeps the reader on the edge of their seat as the action unfolds and twists in ways that most of us haven’t thought of
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Often called the king of the paperbacks, Harry Whittington wrote literally hundreds of books in the fifties and sixties under a variety of pseudonyms. His books are always great to read, pulpy, filled with great characters. A Haven For the Damned follows the tried and true idea of placing a bunch of mismatched characters in an isolated location and see what happens. It's sort of like a mystery weekend in the Poconos without the mysterious murder and without the inspector lining up all the suspects in the drawing room to hear him reveal who-done-it. In this story, Whittington combines a cranky old uranium prospector, the meanest dog north of the Rio Grande, a pair of bank robbers with bags of loot, a local couple with one of them suffering from a nasty bullet wound, a man red-eyed from driving nonstop across state lines, and a speed racing millionaire and his skanky young bride. With thousands of dollars in loot, a town called lust, and half the state's troopers searching, what you get from Whittington is one helluva story.… (meer)