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Beat the Devil
This is the classic '50s noir novel that brought John Huston and Humphrey Bogart together for the last time in film. Published under the pseudonym James Helvick, this sophisticated comedy-thriller was in fact the work of Claud Cockburn, whose early career as a Communist agitator prompted his publisher to demand a pseudonym in the McCarthy years. Beat the Devil shows how effortlessly Cockburn moved from agitprop to elegant and witty fiction. Alexander Cockburn's introduction delves into the long-simmering debate over the real source of the movie's most famous lines. Was it Truman Capote, Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertel, Robert Morley, or Claud Cockburn himself?
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 6 reviews
June 19, 2017
Having viewed and reviewed Beat the Devil I was gifted this copy of a used edition of the book Beat the Devil. Thank you to my friend.
Bottom Line:
Claud Cockburn's Beat the Devil is something of a comedic noir novel, a dramedy from before the term was invented. It is neither that dark nor that funny but it is a pleasant read. This is a slightly padded out adventure story of a group of petty crooks hoping to make a big score in Africa minerals. They are stuck in a small French town as their ship undergoes emergency repairs. Here they meet up a British couple with their own plans to make money in Africa. Everyone, the adventurers, the ship's crew, and the various lessor supporting characters is at some level not up to their respective positions. The humor arises from our expectation that someone in this motley crew will get it together long enough to pull off a caper. The punch line is in how many ways they are not up to their own self-image.
Reading the Introduction by the author's son, one gets the impression that a biography of Claud Cockburn would make for a superior read. The author had been a dedicated communist for much of his life, not abandoning his radical politics until after WWII. As such he had written under at least 5 names and brought up his family on the edges of poverty. A family joke was that they were so poor because of the 5 different writers they were supporting. This book would give them a taste of the benefits of capitalism one wonders how the family reacted to the gradual improvements in their condition.
Beat the Devil is one of Cockburn's early fiction novels from after he gave up his communist passion. It is relatively free from politics and mostly focuses on human frailties absent any real rancor over them.
One of the best and most illustrative moments of his gentle humor is early in the book. One of "the Committee" of crooks is attempting to get a secret telegram to friends who will get background info on the British Couple. The telegraph operator, a man of no official standing shifts into stereotypical French Bureaucratic mode and begins to question the would-be crook. He is a German, with the name O'Hara, traveling under an Argentine passport (This is just after WWII) attempting to send a telegraph in code. O'Hara falls into stereotypical German Imperial hauteur only to collapse into equally stereotypical submission to authority. Very nicely done and absent any heavy handed editorial or invocation of economics, class, or the rest of the possible propaganda.
Hired as the go-been, the man with the connections and the ability to get past officials is Billy Dannreuther. Think Rick, from Casablanca, only the war is over and Billy is never able to pull of the big score or attach himself to a cause that is both righteous and successful. He is the center of the novel and we, the readers and the adventures and his various friends from the past, look to him to keep everyone moving forward, alive and closer to their respective fortunes.
Bottom Line:
Claud Cockburn's Beat the Devil is something of a comedic noir novel, a dramedy from before the term was invented. It is neither that dark nor that funny but it is a pleasant read. This is a slightly padded out adventure story of a group of petty crooks hoping to make a big score in Africa minerals. They are stuck in a small French town as their ship undergoes emergency repairs. Here they meet up a British couple with their own plans to make money in Africa. Everyone, the adventurers, the ship's crew, and the various lessor supporting characters is at some level not up to their respective positions. The humor arises from our expectation that someone in this motley crew will get it together long enough to pull off a caper. The punch line is in how many ways they are not up to their own self-image.
Reading the Introduction by the author's son, one gets the impression that a biography of Claud Cockburn would make for a superior read. The author had been a dedicated communist for much of his life, not abandoning his radical politics until after WWII. As such he had written under at least 5 names and brought up his family on the edges of poverty. A family joke was that they were so poor because of the 5 different writers they were supporting. This book would give them a taste of the benefits of capitalism one wonders how the family reacted to the gradual improvements in their condition.
Beat the Devil is one of Cockburn's early fiction novels from after he gave up his communist passion. It is relatively free from politics and mostly focuses on human frailties absent any real rancor over them.
One of the best and most illustrative moments of his gentle humor is early in the book. One of "the Committee" of crooks is attempting to get a secret telegram to friends who will get background info on the British Couple. The telegraph operator, a man of no official standing shifts into stereotypical French Bureaucratic mode and begins to question the would-be crook. He is a German, with the name O'Hara, traveling under an Argentine passport (This is just after WWII) attempting to send a telegraph in code. O'Hara falls into stereotypical German Imperial hauteur only to collapse into equally stereotypical submission to authority. Very nicely done and absent any heavy handed editorial or invocation of economics, class, or the rest of the possible propaganda.
Hired as the go-been, the man with the connections and the ability to get past officials is Billy Dannreuther. Think Rick, from Casablanca, only the war is over and Billy is never able to pull of the big score or attach himself to a cause that is both righteous and successful. He is the center of the novel and we, the readers and the adventures and his various friends from the past, look to him to keep everyone moving forward, alive and closer to their respective fortunes.
November 14, 2014
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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August 3, 2011The first of four novels by the legendary left-wing journalist (and father of the writers Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick Cockburn) deals with a group of shady characters stranded in the South of France, trying to get to Africa to make their fortunes--if the ship is ever ready to sail, that is. Memorable characters and funny dialogue, but lacking in the political punch that marked Cockburn's journalistic and historical work, though the distrust of police and other authority figures evinced throughout does have Cockburn's stamp on it. (His later and even better novel BALLANTYNE'S FOLLY was more overtly political, including a sleazy character based on Prime Minister Harold Wilson.) John Huston made a somewhat confusing film of this novel which was neither commercially nor artistically successful, though it's achieved a certain latter-day cult status. Humphrey Bogart starred in the film (and invested in it, losing lots of money) but later said "only the phonies" found it appealing. However, that definitely isn't true of the novel....
July 8, 2025
Beat the Devil by Claud Cockburn, publishing under the pseudonym James Helvick, because in the McCarthy years publishers avoided writers with previous communist activity, and Claud Cockburn had been an agitator
8 out of 10
Under normal circumstances, I would avoid at all costs a communist agitator, and since the writer had been one, Beat the Devil would be on the black list – anathema, just as it happens in America now, the red states, such as Florida, which has a mini-Trump at the helm, who wants to be president and thus he attacks Disney, woke culture and offers red meat to the crowd of cult members that want MAGA forever, with all the scandal involving porn stars, cheating charities, using extortion on Zelenski, starting the attack on the Capitol hill, and singing with the felons that participated in the insurrection, to name just a few – but I only found about his history after watching the John Huston and Humphrey Bogart film, which also stars Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Jennifer Jones
However, we are living in interesting times – on CNN, they used to have a China correspondent that quoted in their promos the proverb ‘may you live in interesting times’, only our greatest philosopher, Constantin Noica has taken down proverbs, which could proffer so much nonsense, or get the falsehoods established as wisdom…’appearances deceive’ goes one and that is so far from the truth, since when you see someone begging on the street, you must not think Prince and Pauper, fairy tales and a tycoon hiding in rags, it is someone with issues and problems http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/01/b... and the list is long, continuing with ‘opposites attract’ which is false per se, and if taken as an incentive, it means so many broken marriages
Think of Blink – the Power of Thinking Without Thinking http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/b... by luminary Malcolm Gladwell, explaining how The Thin Slicing theory works, with the background of millennia of ‘fight or flight’, and how it operates in fields like medicine, where it saves lives, war, where it wins battles, if not wars, in art, where you could read about the Getty museum and the ‘ancient Greek statues’, or the proportion of very tall CEOs at the top of business and the Harding Effect, which goes back to a lousy president, nonetheless dozens of times better than Trump
Speaking of that, Beat the Devil is about scoundrels, that have nothing to show when placed against the biggest fraud in the world, the one who climbed to the top, to become the most powerful creature, and the most astounding crook in history…the characters of Beat The Devil want to get to Africa and take possession of the uranium deposits that had been so valuable – they still are, one habit of the candidate for the top job on the planet in 2024 is to keep saying ‘he does not use the N word, there are two N words one must not use, and one is nuclear’ and he keeps talking about it, proving continuously how dangerous he is…
Writers can be awesome as creators and terrible as human beings – the fact that Claud Cockburn had been a commie agitator is loathsome, and here is a joke to make it not more palatable, but more jestful –‘who is not a commie when young, has no heart, who is still a commie when old has no brain’ only heart has nothing to do it, it is true in both cases, young, old and all ages that to be a commie is gruesome, and I know it, we lived through it and I risked my life to try and change it in 1989, as this page from the Newsweek covering the events proves it http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson details how great writers have been marvelous when thinking of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen, and we could name Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Jacques Rousseau…the latter has abandoned his (were they more than eight, I wonder) children at the door of the orphanage, in an age when nine out of ten died in the situation (come to think of it, in his defense, maybe seven out of eight dies anyway, orphanage or not) http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/i...
Beat The Devil has some wonderful quotes, gems – as in The Third Man by Graham Greene ‘In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce…The cuckoo clock” http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/09/t... - one musing on time ‘the Swiss manufacture it, the French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money, Hindus say it is nothing, and I say it is a crook’ “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour…Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute…That's relativity’ says Albert Einstein
What is more, time is an essential component in reaching Peak Experience, Being in The Zone, as it is detailed, explained in the life-changing Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f... by the co-founder of Positive Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – time is relative when you reach zenith, as examples – a ballerina that reaches Flow, when on stage, feels her minute there is like a week or more, whereas the brain surgeon who had been operating asks for lunch and is told this is already evening now, he has had such an intense experience in the operating room, ten hours felt like one
Seneca, one of the greatest thinkers of humanity, a wondrous Stoic, analyzed the life span, said that we have enough time in our lives, even if most or all complain, it is just that we treat as an insignificant commodity, we behave as if it is endless http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/o... and this is the problem, when we say we ‘have some time to kill’, we should instead use the memento mori aka remember you are mortal, the words whispered in the ear of a Roman dignitary, so that he could keep a sense of proportion, but useful in trying to use life and have as much flow as possible
Beat the Devil made me think of The Screwtape Letters http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/11/t... by CS Lewis, albeit there is nothing – or so little I did not notice it – about the ‘real’ devil, the one that the Bible or other holy books present…it I a metaphor maybe, the notion that crooks are inspired by the devil, and their victims should try and Beat the Devil…I recommend this special technique and if you want the secret, call me http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
8 out of 10
Under normal circumstances, I would avoid at all costs a communist agitator, and since the writer had been one, Beat the Devil would be on the black list – anathema, just as it happens in America now, the red states, such as Florida, which has a mini-Trump at the helm, who wants to be president and thus he attacks Disney, woke culture and offers red meat to the crowd of cult members that want MAGA forever, with all the scandal involving porn stars, cheating charities, using extortion on Zelenski, starting the attack on the Capitol hill, and singing with the felons that participated in the insurrection, to name just a few – but I only found about his history after watching the John Huston and Humphrey Bogart film, which also stars Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Jennifer Jones
However, we are living in interesting times – on CNN, they used to have a China correspondent that quoted in their promos the proverb ‘may you live in interesting times’, only our greatest philosopher, Constantin Noica has taken down proverbs, which could proffer so much nonsense, or get the falsehoods established as wisdom…’appearances deceive’ goes one and that is so far from the truth, since when you see someone begging on the street, you must not think Prince and Pauper, fairy tales and a tycoon hiding in rags, it is someone with issues and problems http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/01/b... and the list is long, continuing with ‘opposites attract’ which is false per se, and if taken as an incentive, it means so many broken marriages
Think of Blink – the Power of Thinking Without Thinking http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/b... by luminary Malcolm Gladwell, explaining how The Thin Slicing theory works, with the background of millennia of ‘fight or flight’, and how it operates in fields like medicine, where it saves lives, war, where it wins battles, if not wars, in art, where you could read about the Getty museum and the ‘ancient Greek statues’, or the proportion of very tall CEOs at the top of business and the Harding Effect, which goes back to a lousy president, nonetheless dozens of times better than Trump
Speaking of that, Beat the Devil is about scoundrels, that have nothing to show when placed against the biggest fraud in the world, the one who climbed to the top, to become the most powerful creature, and the most astounding crook in history…the characters of Beat The Devil want to get to Africa and take possession of the uranium deposits that had been so valuable – they still are, one habit of the candidate for the top job on the planet in 2024 is to keep saying ‘he does not use the N word, there are two N words one must not use, and one is nuclear’ and he keeps talking about it, proving continuously how dangerous he is…
Writers can be awesome as creators and terrible as human beings – the fact that Claud Cockburn had been a commie agitator is loathsome, and here is a joke to make it not more palatable, but more jestful –‘who is not a commie when young, has no heart, who is still a commie when old has no brain’ only heart has nothing to do it, it is true in both cases, young, old and all ages that to be a commie is gruesome, and I know it, we lived through it and I risked my life to try and change it in 1989, as this page from the Newsweek covering the events proves it http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson details how great writers have been marvelous when thinking of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen, and we could name Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Jacques Rousseau…the latter has abandoned his (were they more than eight, I wonder) children at the door of the orphanage, in an age when nine out of ten died in the situation (come to think of it, in his defense, maybe seven out of eight dies anyway, orphanage or not) http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/i...
Beat The Devil has some wonderful quotes, gems – as in The Third Man by Graham Greene ‘In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce…The cuckoo clock” http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/09/t... - one musing on time ‘the Swiss manufacture it, the French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money, Hindus say it is nothing, and I say it is a crook’ “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour…Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute…That's relativity’ says Albert Einstein
What is more, time is an essential component in reaching Peak Experience, Being in The Zone, as it is detailed, explained in the life-changing Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f... by the co-founder of Positive Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – time is relative when you reach zenith, as examples – a ballerina that reaches Flow, when on stage, feels her minute there is like a week or more, whereas the brain surgeon who had been operating asks for lunch and is told this is already evening now, he has had such an intense experience in the operating room, ten hours felt like one
Seneca, one of the greatest thinkers of humanity, a wondrous Stoic, analyzed the life span, said that we have enough time in our lives, even if most or all complain, it is just that we treat as an insignificant commodity, we behave as if it is endless http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/o... and this is the problem, when we say we ‘have some time to kill’, we should instead use the memento mori aka remember you are mortal, the words whispered in the ear of a Roman dignitary, so that he could keep a sense of proportion, but useful in trying to use life and have as much flow as possible
Beat the Devil made me think of The Screwtape Letters http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/11/t... by CS Lewis, albeit there is nothing – or so little I did not notice it – about the ‘real’ devil, the one that the Bible or other holy books present…it I a metaphor maybe, the notion that crooks are inspired by the devil, and their victims should try and Beat the Devil…I recommend this special technique and if you want the secret, call me http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
January 22, 2020
This book was made into a film by John Houston which I will look out for. The characters are all interesting and this is the main strength of the book. The plot is, well not weak exactly but somehow lost in itself. Having said that I was interested enough to want to see how it worked out - not as I expected.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 6 reviews