The Devil Drives

by Robert Ames, Barye Phillips (Illustrator)

She carried more poison than a black widow spider.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

Reviews

[B.G. Watson]

I started reading this years ago but didn't finish it, and now I can remember why. Past a certain point, possibly somewhere past the halfway mark, this became such a laborious read that I knew anything character or plot-wise redeeming it was highly unlikely. It's a shame because it picks up steam right out of the gate. If Robert Ames hadn't introduced so many vagaries into the plot this could have been a solid crime novel. Besides the plot going off the rails, the idiomatic dialouge of the southern characters was, to my mind, not very convincing. There was also the fact that Ames, as far as I can recall, doesn't give the precise location of the story's events, which somehow annoyed me even further. A place called Marlboro is mentioned three or four times, which is the name of a jail in South Carolina, but it isn't even clear it's a fuckin jail that's being referred to. It's as though Ames were trying to protect the residents of what might be a real town from, what?, shame or Ill repute?

Kim Bissell and her husband Charlie are "river rats" living off the river (which isn't mentioned by name either) as the book opens. Kim has fallen in stature from her ownership of a casino/bar which she couldn't manage to keep open once buisness was down. A Mr. Parady offers to buy the place from under Kim, with the catch that Kim basically becomes part of the bargain, so Charlie punches him out, effectively relegating him and his wife to a life scavanging on the river.

In the first chapter an armored car heist takes place on a bridge in which the thieves escape with several bags of loot in a boat. The getaway isn't exactly a clean one, and as Kim and her husband watch from their boat, Kim springs into action in an attempt to redirect the money right into her greedy hands. Once Kim gets ahold of the stolen loot she becomes a woman possessed for the entirety of the book, quickly eliminating anyone standing in the way of her plans to buy back her status.

So the first few chapters set this novel up in such a way that I thought it couldn't fail, but it did. And perhaps the most annoying and unnecessary feature of this novel was a character named Hi Ho Harry, a Bible thumping hick local with a martyr complex much like Hazel Motes in Flannery o' Conners Wiseblood. If Ames had left this character out entirely and just stuck to a plot primarily involving Kim and the heistmen, this book could have gone over nicely, without the fifty or so excess pages I found myself bogged down in.

I can at least say that Kim, as the evil antagonist, helped keep my interest by way of her die-hard scheming, using sex as a barganing chip where violence fails. Unfortunately, even she was eventually eclipsed by all the other bullshit this story had to offer. Give this one a go if you want, but I wish I hadn't.