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. 

Last Summer: A novel by Evan Hunter

  

I cat sit in the apartments of friends in the summer and this one in East Harlem, maybe not far from the author’s childhood home, has a few Evan Hunter/EdMcBain novels on the bookshelf. One of which is an old Signet paperback of Last Summer. I needed something to read and since I had positive feelings about the old movie and the novel is only 206 pages, I thought, “Why not?” Sometimes it is good to follow an impulse. 

I had remembered the movie as being good and the first time in saw both Barbara Hershey, and Richard Thomas. Also that it was not a happy movie, it involved bullying and worse. The movie script was written by Eleanor Perry and directed by Frank Perry. As a pair, they made some fine movies in the 1960s-70s. They made David and Lisa, another intimate human drama. After reading the brief Last Summer novel, I’d like to see the old movie again although it seems out of distribution currently. 

Last Summer is about four high school aged white children of economic and social privilege from Manhattan private schools dealing with life at their parent’s summer places on an island somewhere outside the city presumably a brief ferry ride off Long Island somewhere. 

The boys know one another from summers past. They bond in sort of a moderate triad with a brash attractive bikini clad girl, Sandy. She has found an injured seagull. These three hang out, acquire beer, do stuff with the seagull, none of which is heartwarming, and take Peter’s dad’s sailboat out. All the while we are becoming familiar with their characters and their relationship with one another. Dan (was that even his name?) is the sketchiest character even through his suggestions propel some of the plot. He is mainly focused on Sandy. Not so much in love with her but seeing her as a vehicle for his urges to act out sexuality. He is not motivated by need for intimate human connection, but sensational pleasure that is selfish and greedy and heightened by getting away with something natural and beautiful turned nasty naughty. He is a consumer. There must be a core of attempted connection in showing other boys/men how one has scored. 

They meet Rhonda. She is the opposite of Sandy. She’s injured by something horrible that happened in her family and socially awkward. 

Sandy is the dominant force in the triad. Through a series of encounters Rhonda is granted a type of provisional acceptance by Sandy into the group. The boys just follow. Ultimately it would have been better had Rhonda stayed away from them. 

The novel is written from the point of view and in the voice of Peter. This character is the nicer of the two boys, the nicer of all three really. Perhaps it is that he is the only one who gets to tell his side of the story. His description of the characters and their actions are all we have. We have to take him on his word, unreliable narrator that he no doubt is. There is the sort of weakness in him, an insecurity that compels him to stay with the group and its power. His is a self-protective chameleon nature. He blends in to hide, thrive, and consume. He develops sympathy and ultimately affection toward Rhonda.  But can he follow through? 

Peter is the story. He is the one who represents maybe all of us when we are on the fence, know what is right action, but must drift along with power. When we are given the choice of the uncertainty of loving, and take the alternative route with the others into fleeting sensation and a type of gang mentality. 

Evan Hunter presents a wonderfully constructed scene with the entrance of the Anibal character. Having read the brief online biography of Salvatore A. Lombino and his East Harlem roots it appears Anibal from Puerto Rico, with learner’s level but carefully accurate English, and living in East Harlem, is a sort of stand-in for the author or based on men he once might have known as a youth. Even Anibal is not immune to the allure of the young white rich pleasure seekers. Heartlessly they call him “Annabelle”, ignoring his repeated prompting that the accent is on the middle syllable, after all he is not a real white man. He’s just another disposable toy to bored consumer kids. The sequence is also of retro interest because it has a modern element of ancient computer dating. In the way familiar, not remote, from 21st Century hookup apps, as well as reflecting current “Build a wall” mentality incubating in kids. 

  50 years after this book came out, it is easy to see that the people in it are in their late 60s now and perhaps still holding on to that kind of gang power thing that seemed to work for them back then. They are the elite in business and politics still running things. Getting ready to pass it on to their survivors. Sophisticated yet ruthless they went through whatever it took to please their spouses,  children, and their good old American narcissistic personal needs. 

The rest of us? Maybe we are all Rhonda hanging on the fringes trying to fulfill our own narcissistic needs, by attracting high profile miserable jerks in control. We would probably be better off wandering away from them and playing alone or among ourselves.

Evan Hunter presents a sunburned noir. 

It still holds up.