Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill

Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill was published in 1960. It can be described as moderately hardboiled and very noir.

Richard Deming (1915-1983) wrote an enormous number of novels under his own name and a bunch of pseudonyms and his output included a lot of TV tie-in novels.

The protagonist in Kiss and Kill is a con artist and I have to say up front that I seriously love stories about con artists. In this book we get detailed accounts of several fairly clever cons. But this novel is in fact the story of how two bunco artists get into the murder business.

Sam is working on a long con when he meets a dark-haired girl in a bar. Her name is Mavis. There’s something odd about her. Sam figures she’s a meek little receptionist on vacation trying desperately to appear rich and sophisticated and badly overdoing it.

By the hotel swimming pool he runs into her again and he is vastly amused when he realises she’s a fellow bunco artist and she’s selected him as her mark. She’s rather devastated that he sees through her at so easily. This is obviously her first time and she’s a bungling amateur but it just so happens that Sam needs the services of a young woman for the con he’s working at the moment. He persuades her to be his assistant.

She’s a very quick learner and she has a natural flair for the con game.

Mavis wants to be Sam’s regular partner. He’s agreeable to that but suggests that they might as well make it a personal partnership as well by getting married. She’s happy with that suggestion.

They’re quite successful but Sam feels that the bunco game is too risky. The mark might call in the police. And might give evidence if there’s a trial. Sam comes up with a variation which he considers to be superior. If the mark is no longer alive there’s no danger. And murder is risk-free if you know what you’re doing. This at least is Sam’s view.

Mavis is hesitant at first but she trusts Sam and she can see the logic in his arguments. Her moral qualms about murder are easily overcome.

These are still cons of a sort it’s just that the payoffs are achieved in a different way.

This definitely qualifies as noir fiction. It also belongs to a sub-genre I’d describe as anti-hero crime fiction which is certainly closely related to noir fiction. The outstanding anti-hero protagonist is of course Donald E. Westlake’s Parker who made his first appearance in 1962 in The Hunter. Westlake had already experimented with an anti-hero protagonist in his underrated The Cutie, published the same year as Kiss and Kill. These anti-heroes are not quite like the violent psychos and serial killers which were also becoming popular in crime fiction. An anti-hero is oddly attractive and we can admire him for his cleverness and, as is the case with Parker, we find ourselves hoping he’ll get away with his crimes and appalled at ourselves for hoping such a thing.

Mavis is not quite a femme fatale. Sam has her figured out from the start. She is not corrupting him or tempting him into crime or wickedness. It’s more that he tempts her into getting more deeply into moral corruption. We also find her oddly admirable - she is a very shrewd operator.

We can’t help liking Sam and Mavis, apart from the minor detail that they’re cold-blooded murderers.

This is a clever crime tale with satisfying twists and a nicely cynical atmosphere. Highly recommended.

And it’s in print, from Wildside Press.