Don’t Crowd Me by Evan Hunter

Having just read and enjoyed Last Summer, I thought I would try another of his books. 

This one had an old school pulp fiction cover painting and runs only 175 pages. It is also an early work which, compared to Last Summer, from 15 years later is a product of the writer learning a craft. 

I don’t claim to have much knowledge about this mid-20th Century pulp fiction. I read some of the hits of the genre, such as Horace McCoy’s noir masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, but not so much of the less revered stuff like this one. 

Don’t Crowd Me is about a NYC advertising executive in his late 20s on a solo vacation in a camping situation on an island upstate in Lake George. It’s a rather complicated plot involving greed and lust. It’s all very manly. Reading it made me think of the 1950s men’s magazines that my dad got occasionally. They always had these lurid cover paintings depicting some dramatic moment of physical struggle. A solo man battling elements, savage animals and/or humans. He is usually stressed to the limit with bleeding wounds, but struggling on. The painting always depicts the moment of physical battle where it all will be decided, the cliff hanger, “Will he make it!?!” Most likely he usually does. I don’t really know since I never read any of the stories in those magazines. 

Don’t Crowd Me feels like this type of manly fiction. It also feels like something written rapidly for fast sale in an already established genre market. All that is fine. Evan Hunter is young and finding his way here, maybe the rent was due. This is a sort of outlandish B movie type quickie project. 

The main character, Steve Richmond, comes off as a bit of a provincial New Yorker at a time when a holiday out of town meant upstate, the Catskills, or as in the novel, Lake George. This is 1950s NYC destination. Now with heavy promotion by the airline industry and the tourist promo commercials they fly off somewhere far.
There is a certain townie element in the novel. The town people in Lake George are seen at the very beginning to be deeply interested in getting as much money as possible from the vacationers. The camp described is rather crude, with no showers. They jump in the chilly lake to freshen up. It’s seems kind of old USA democratic in a way. There is a wealthy couple who owns a jewelry company. I say “democratic” because they are the type of people who would be flying off somewhere more exclusive rather than hanging out with just anyone at this upstate camp. They are also at the center of the plot. 

There is a lot of manly stuff going on. Little of it really believable. After all this guy is up there for a two week vacation during which he has sex with two attractive sisters, but not at the same time. Toward the end he gets very badly beaten up, with a rock, is left for dead. After awakening and stumbling back to camp he gets seduced by a seemingly irresistible woman. Yes he has been beaten and when he gets to a mirror sees that his beating was so bad on his face that bone is exposed, but fortunately his lips were spared by the beating so he can still kiss, etc. 

(Funny how they trained us 50s and 60s boys to think we are getting away with something as a way of keeping us interested in sexual activity for the furtherance of the tribe and keeping the species going. Get in fights, win, and fuck. It seems simple and it is really just keeps us tied to family and work. Its too bad sex isn’t fullfilling enough on its own without some kind of nasty persuit and capture story attached to it to, I guess, make it more interesting.)

Don’t Crowd Me is not really very good. But it clips along rather nicely. It’s not badly written. Just fast commercial product that is only interesting because of the writer, the old time vacation setting, and it’s odd peek into the manly entertainment in a bygone era.