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Too Young to Die / The Time of Terror
TOO YOUNG TO DIE
When Quent gets out of prison, all he wants is to put together another heist. This time it’ll be perfect. He certainly doesn’t want to have anything to do with women. His ex-wife Pearl cured him of that. But as he puts together a team to pull off a Manhattan diamond job, he meets his driver’s girlfriend, Cindy. Cindy is young, not quite 18, but she’s streetwise and knows the score. But she’s too young for Quent. So it comes as a big surprise to him when he finds himself falling for the girl, even caring what happens to her. It’s one of his no women involved in a heist. But for Cindy, he might have to make an exception.
THE TIME OF TERROR
He’s lost his job. His wife left him, and she took the two kids. He barely has enough money to put gas in his car. Frank Mace is desperate. He decides to stick up a grocery store. But when he sees the young boy alone in the next car, on impulse he takes him instead and leaves a ransom note. Now Frank is wracked with guilt, and afraid to follow through. He’s almost too terrified to pick up the ransom money. That’s when Barney—bullying old friend, as opportunistic as they come—enters the picture. When Barney finds out what Frank has done, he takes over the situation. And that’s when the real trouble begins….
When Quent gets out of prison, all he wants is to put together another heist. This time it’ll be perfect. He certainly doesn’t want to have anything to do with women. His ex-wife Pearl cured him of that. But as he puts together a team to pull off a Manhattan diamond job, he meets his driver’s girlfriend, Cindy. Cindy is young, not quite 18, but she’s streetwise and knows the score. But she’s too young for Quent. So it comes as a big surprise to him when he finds himself falling for the girl, even caring what happens to her. It’s one of his no women involved in a heist. But for Cindy, he might have to make an exception.
THE TIME OF TERROR
He’s lost his job. His wife left him, and she took the two kids. He barely has enough money to put gas in his car. Frank Mace is desperate. He decides to stick up a grocery store. But when he sees the young boy alone in the next car, on impulse he takes him instead and leaves a ransom note. Now Frank is wracked with guilt, and afraid to follow through. He’s almost too terrified to pick up the ransom money. That’s when Barney—bullying old friend, as opportunistic as they come—enters the picture. When Barney finds out what Frank has done, he takes over the situation. And that’s when the real trouble begins….
356 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2023
2 people want to read
About the author
Lionel White
93 books37 followersLionel White was a crime reporter who wrote around 38 suspenseful thrillers beginning with The Snatchers in 1953 and ending with The Walled Yard in 1978.
Most of his books were translated into a number of different languages and his earlier novels were published as Gold Medal pulp hard-boiled crime fiction, but when Duttons began a line of mystery and suspense books, he also wrote for them.
He was most well known for what a New York Times review described as "the master of the big caper."
A number of his books were made into movies and Stanley Kubrick liked his book 'Clean Break' (1955) so much that he licensed the rights for his film "The Killing" in 1956.
In Quentin Tarantino's film "Reservoir Dogs", Lionel White is listed as an inspiration for the film in the credits.
Gerry Wolstenholme
May 2011
Most of his books were translated into a number of different languages and his earlier novels were published as Gold Medal pulp hard-boiled crime fiction, but when Duttons began a line of mystery and suspense books, he also wrote for them.
He was most well known for what a New York Times review described as "the master of the big caper."
A number of his books were made into movies and Stanley Kubrick liked his book 'Clean Break' (1955) so much that he licensed the rights for his film "The Killing" in 1956.
In Quentin Tarantino's film "Reservoir Dogs", Lionel White is listed as an inspiration for the film in the credits.
Gerry Wolstenholme
May 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 3, 2025
White originally published “Too Young to Die” in 1956 as Gold Medal # 786 and Stark House Press republished the novel more recently -2023, pairing it with White’s “The Time of Terror.” “Too Young to Die” is one of White’s signature caper novels, tracing the caper from inception through planning and to the actual execution of the caper and the getaway. Because it is a caper novel, you know before you open it, that the caper will have gone sideways somewhere along the way and our lead characters will be hunted down to the ends of the earth. White did not specialize in fairy tale happily-ever-after endings. His novels often feel like the characters are riding an overloaded freight train with no brakes – often on the highway to hell.
White opens this one with the ending and then spins us back to the start of the story. In the opening pages, Quent Price (we learn his name later) is exhausted in mind and body and the girl is lying stretched out on the bed with “great azure eyes no longer filled with pain, but blank and expressionless and unblinking.” She has on a diamond and platinum ring too large for her slender finger. She had too much lipstick, too much rouge, too much eyebrow pencil, looking like “a little girl who had used her big sister’s makeup with neither taste nor frugality. But to him there was nothing cheap about her, nothing shoddy.” She is surrounded by raw uncut diamonds and finished stones in gold platinum settings, hundreds of them.
Price muses that he knew the rules and that he violated every single one of them with Cindy and Tammie paying the ultimate prices. The rules he is thinking of are not the rules of society, but the rules of professional criminals, including not to do a job in broad daylight, always have a second route of escape, and “never, never under any conditions, get mixed up with a woman when you are pulling a job.”
The bulk of the novel is about the set up for the jewel heist and all the planning that went into it. Price has just been paroled from the Big House, similar to other heist chiefs that are found in White’s novels, namely Rand Coleman in White’s “Run, Killer, Run.” Most of the crew that Price puts together to pull off the heist that he stumbled onto when Tammie O’Neill, an accountant friend of Price’s, blabbed about when he let out that he was going to inventory a fortune in stones at Levinson and Son.
But White introduces two female characters, each representing an archetype of the women you find in heist novels. Pearl was Price’s ex-wife, ” a tall, slender girl, ash blonde, with a short lovely skin, large china-blue eyes and beautifully formed lips. She had a body that drove men crazy and she knew it.” We are told that Pearl was a “first-class bitch.” She divorced Price the minute he was sent up the river and she moved on and never looked back. What was she supposed to do, she asks rhetorically, “Spend the next fifteen years sitting around twiddling my thumbs?” Tammie blamed her for getting Price in trouble and did not like it that Price protected her and took the rap himself. Tammie tells Pearl that “the trouble with Quent Price is that unfortunately you were the first broad he really went for, so he ended up marrying you and getting a real screwing.” Pearl tells Tammie that he is not tough and hard at all, but soft and weak like a sentimental baby. She says, “when the cards are really down, you’re a bunch of jelly. Well, I’m not. This is a tough, hard world and I didn’t ask to get into it, but as long as I’m in it, I’m doing anything I can to get by.” Pearl is a wonderful character, all hard points, selfish, worldly, unsentimental. It is a pity that White did not feature her more in this novel or that he did not reprise her in another novel.
Cindy is the polar opposite of hard Pearl. Not quite even eighteen and hanging around one of Price’s associates in his garage, she is the little teenager who dreams of having a grown-up man to marry and take her away from her life. She at first seems like another hard case, but despite her tough exterior, she falls for first Price’s associate (even planning to elope with him after the heist) and then for Price himself. She becomes that woman who takes the wheel when you are seeing double or rides in the getaway from a heist without questioning it. Her heart is filled with loyalty and she will do what it takes to stand by Price, who at first wants nothing to do with her, thinking she is too young to be involved, and then falls for her, although they are fated to be led down into the depths of hell.
The heart and soul of this caper novel is, of course, the heist, and, as always happens in these stories, things do not go off as neatly as planned. Bullets fly. Witnesses are present. Our fearless team is on the run, leaving a loud and bloody trail up to the very bitter end. White focuses the most on the planning and it is a slow and certain burn until the explosive end when every possible thing goes wrong.
“Time of Terror” was originally published in 1960 by E.P. Dutton and reprinted in 1961 by Ace Books together with White’s “A Death at Sea” as the companion novel. Stark House Press in 2023 republished “Time of Terror,” but paired it with “Too Young to Die” and offered “A Death at Sea” as a separate two-fer volume.
In “Time of Terror,” White takes a slightly different tack than he takes in his caper novels. The voice is different. He seems to use a voice that would perhaps appeal to a wider audience, not necessarily a noir crime fiction audience. And, instead of getting right into the caper – usually with a master thief just paroled from the state penitentiary – White slowly gives us two glimpses of the American dream. One glimpse is of “the couple who seem to have everything, as the saying goes.” Elizabeth and Christian Dobie had love, good looks, intelligence, health, lots of material wealth, and two beautiful and charming young children. Theirs is the picture perfect life.
White, in chapter two, offers a sharp contrast with the life of Frank Macek, who lived exactly and quite precisely three-quarters of a mile southeast of the Dobie estate. They lived in the quintessential middle-class suburb of Shadydell Estates, which consisted of hundreds of houses, but only two different models. White shows us how misleading the sales pitches were and that the potential buyers were not told about taxes -especially taxes for new schools -which were to go up a hundredfold. They were not told of the commuting costs, the lawn costs, and all the other things which added double to the carrying costs. And the reality was that many buyers were one missed paycheck away from bankruptcy.
We are told: “Frank Mace was in trouble—serious, desperate trouble. For what had happened, the thing which he had done, he had only himself to blame. But behind the deed itself was a long series of events, series of personal disasters. These he laid to circumstances, to life itself, and for these he accepted no blame. It had started with the money trap. Had Frank Mace been a different sort of man . . . but that, of course, is irrelevant. He was what he was. And he lived in the time in which he lived, the era of installment buying, easy credit, the fast, hard sell. An era of luxury and prosperity—and temporary recessions.” In short, Frank Mace was – as so many middle class people often are – living on borrowed time and one layoff, one medical bill, one broken down car away from bankruptcy.
Now, “Frank Mace wanted to die.” When the job went away, his prospects dried up, he got drunk with his buddy Barney whose wife ran a call-girl racket, and ended up spending the drunken night with one of the girls from the racket, only to return home with lipstick on his face and collar, and an outraged wife who would not stand for his excuses. So, poor Frank Mace, broke, suddenly was all alone without his dear wife or his two beautiful children and desperate.
Now, since it is a Lionel White novel, we get to the crime. But unlike his other novels, White does not offer us readers a well-planned, nearly flawlessly executed caper. Rather, goofy Frank makes up on the fly and does not quite know what he is doing. Desperate for money, he finds his old souvenir revolver from the War, and plans to hold up a cashier at the local grocery, not really knowing which one to hold up or what to say or do. If it sounds like a portending disaster, it probably would have been.
But here fate intervenes in the way of the Dobies who park next to Frank at the shopping center and leave two and a half year old Chris Dobie in the car to play with the mail. And suddenly desperate Frank Mace decides to lure Chris into his car and leave a note demanding $5,000. He does not quite know how to pull this off or what to do with the boy while waiting and, in fact, wants quickly to call the caper off.
Except that he can’t – once one of his more street-savvy buddies realizes the kid in the back bedroom is the stolen kid in the newspaper and Frank doesn’t have any idea of the jackpot he stumbled into.
Frank Mace is not the consummate professional criminal Lionel White generally wrote about. He is a fool, a desperate fool, who doesn’t know what he is doing and is way out of his element and, indeed, so far out of his element that it is farcical.
White opens this one with the ending and then spins us back to the start of the story. In the opening pages, Quent Price (we learn his name later) is exhausted in mind and body and the girl is lying stretched out on the bed with “great azure eyes no longer filled with pain, but blank and expressionless and unblinking.” She has on a diamond and platinum ring too large for her slender finger. She had too much lipstick, too much rouge, too much eyebrow pencil, looking like “a little girl who had used her big sister’s makeup with neither taste nor frugality. But to him there was nothing cheap about her, nothing shoddy.” She is surrounded by raw uncut diamonds and finished stones in gold platinum settings, hundreds of them.
Price muses that he knew the rules and that he violated every single one of them with Cindy and Tammie paying the ultimate prices. The rules he is thinking of are not the rules of society, but the rules of professional criminals, including not to do a job in broad daylight, always have a second route of escape, and “never, never under any conditions, get mixed up with a woman when you are pulling a job.”
The bulk of the novel is about the set up for the jewel heist and all the planning that went into it. Price has just been paroled from the Big House, similar to other heist chiefs that are found in White’s novels, namely Rand Coleman in White’s “Run, Killer, Run.” Most of the crew that Price puts together to pull off the heist that he stumbled onto when Tammie O’Neill, an accountant friend of Price’s, blabbed about when he let out that he was going to inventory a fortune in stones at Levinson and Son.
But White introduces two female characters, each representing an archetype of the women you find in heist novels. Pearl was Price’s ex-wife, ” a tall, slender girl, ash blonde, with a short lovely skin, large china-blue eyes and beautifully formed lips. She had a body that drove men crazy and she knew it.” We are told that Pearl was a “first-class bitch.” She divorced Price the minute he was sent up the river and she moved on and never looked back. What was she supposed to do, she asks rhetorically, “Spend the next fifteen years sitting around twiddling my thumbs?” Tammie blamed her for getting Price in trouble and did not like it that Price protected her and took the rap himself. Tammie tells Pearl that “the trouble with Quent Price is that unfortunately you were the first broad he really went for, so he ended up marrying you and getting a real screwing.” Pearl tells Tammie that he is not tough and hard at all, but soft and weak like a sentimental baby. She says, “when the cards are really down, you’re a bunch of jelly. Well, I’m not. This is a tough, hard world and I didn’t ask to get into it, but as long as I’m in it, I’m doing anything I can to get by.” Pearl is a wonderful character, all hard points, selfish, worldly, unsentimental. It is a pity that White did not feature her more in this novel or that he did not reprise her in another novel.
Cindy is the polar opposite of hard Pearl. Not quite even eighteen and hanging around one of Price’s associates in his garage, she is the little teenager who dreams of having a grown-up man to marry and take her away from her life. She at first seems like another hard case, but despite her tough exterior, she falls for first Price’s associate (even planning to elope with him after the heist) and then for Price himself. She becomes that woman who takes the wheel when you are seeing double or rides in the getaway from a heist without questioning it. Her heart is filled with loyalty and she will do what it takes to stand by Price, who at first wants nothing to do with her, thinking she is too young to be involved, and then falls for her, although they are fated to be led down into the depths of hell.
The heart and soul of this caper novel is, of course, the heist, and, as always happens in these stories, things do not go off as neatly as planned. Bullets fly. Witnesses are present. Our fearless team is on the run, leaving a loud and bloody trail up to the very bitter end. White focuses the most on the planning and it is a slow and certain burn until the explosive end when every possible thing goes wrong.
“Time of Terror” was originally published in 1960 by E.P. Dutton and reprinted in 1961 by Ace Books together with White’s “A Death at Sea” as the companion novel. Stark House Press in 2023 republished “Time of Terror,” but paired it with “Too Young to Die” and offered “A Death at Sea” as a separate two-fer volume.
In “Time of Terror,” White takes a slightly different tack than he takes in his caper novels. The voice is different. He seems to use a voice that would perhaps appeal to a wider audience, not necessarily a noir crime fiction audience. And, instead of getting right into the caper – usually with a master thief just paroled from the state penitentiary – White slowly gives us two glimpses of the American dream. One glimpse is of “the couple who seem to have everything, as the saying goes.” Elizabeth and Christian Dobie had love, good looks, intelligence, health, lots of material wealth, and two beautiful and charming young children. Theirs is the picture perfect life.
White, in chapter two, offers a sharp contrast with the life of Frank Macek, who lived exactly and quite precisely three-quarters of a mile southeast of the Dobie estate. They lived in the quintessential middle-class suburb of Shadydell Estates, which consisted of hundreds of houses, but only two different models. White shows us how misleading the sales pitches were and that the potential buyers were not told about taxes -especially taxes for new schools -which were to go up a hundredfold. They were not told of the commuting costs, the lawn costs, and all the other things which added double to the carrying costs. And the reality was that many buyers were one missed paycheck away from bankruptcy.
We are told: “Frank Mace was in trouble—serious, desperate trouble. For what had happened, the thing which he had done, he had only himself to blame. But behind the deed itself was a long series of events, series of personal disasters. These he laid to circumstances, to life itself, and for these he accepted no blame. It had started with the money trap. Had Frank Mace been a different sort of man . . . but that, of course, is irrelevant. He was what he was. And he lived in the time in which he lived, the era of installment buying, easy credit, the fast, hard sell. An era of luxury and prosperity—and temporary recessions.” In short, Frank Mace was – as so many middle class people often are – living on borrowed time and one layoff, one medical bill, one broken down car away from bankruptcy.
Now, “Frank Mace wanted to die.” When the job went away, his prospects dried up, he got drunk with his buddy Barney whose wife ran a call-girl racket, and ended up spending the drunken night with one of the girls from the racket, only to return home with lipstick on his face and collar, and an outraged wife who would not stand for his excuses. So, poor Frank Mace, broke, suddenly was all alone without his dear wife or his two beautiful children and desperate.
Now, since it is a Lionel White novel, we get to the crime. But unlike his other novels, White does not offer us readers a well-planned, nearly flawlessly executed caper. Rather, goofy Frank makes up on the fly and does not quite know what he is doing. Desperate for money, he finds his old souvenir revolver from the War, and plans to hold up a cashier at the local grocery, not really knowing which one to hold up or what to say or do. If it sounds like a portending disaster, it probably would have been.
But here fate intervenes in the way of the Dobies who park next to Frank at the shopping center and leave two and a half year old Chris Dobie in the car to play with the mail. And suddenly desperate Frank Mace decides to lure Chris into his car and leave a note demanding $5,000. He does not quite know how to pull this off or what to do with the boy while waiting and, in fact, wants quickly to call the caper off.
Except that he can’t – once one of his more street-savvy buddies realizes the kid in the back bedroom is the stolen kid in the newspaper and Frank doesn’t have any idea of the jackpot he stumbled into.
Frank Mace is not the consummate professional criminal Lionel White generally wrote about. He is a fool, a desperate fool, who doesn’t know what he is doing and is way out of his element and, indeed, so far out of his element that it is farcical.
August 1, 2024
Two lean, expertly paced crime novels—in other words, Lionel White at his usual perfection. Too Young to Die is especially breathless.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews