It's a fairly wild ride and one of the strongest such books that I've read. But I can't agree with Barry Gifford's assertion that it's "an astonishingly well-written literary novel that just happened to be about (or roundabout) a crime".

This is making a claim for the book that the book itself doesn't support. It could have been a book like that. It starts out as a heist story but instead of the usual male crew, the conspirators are a man and a woman locked in a fatalistic crazy sadomasochistic love sex fever.

About halfway through, though, you might get the impression that Chaze didn't know where this thing was going to go when he started it.

And so what began as a solid coherent narrative starts to fragment and go in different directions. Even while reading the first half of the book you might have noticed how the main character occasionally gets injections of "character" and back story, perhaps as the author realized that his people weren't particularly real or more than surface.

In the second half there's a contrived return home for "Tim Sunblade" (not his real name), and it's brutal in at least a couple of ways and for more people than just him.

This is also where Chaze takes a turn to ultra-violence. While there was already plenty of violence, the reader is taken to unexpected extremes, still disturbing today and who knows how shocking to readers sixty years ago.

"When he came back to me he broke the fingers of my left hand, one by one, neatly and with no wasted action, the way you'd snap celery at the table, almost politely."

The celery comparison is horrifyingly apt. Earlier the same people, police officers, have him tied naked and supine to the hood of their police car. "And they had a game. It seems all three of them smoked cigars and in this game they tried to figure out every possible way to use me for an ash tray. Sometimes the cigars went out. But they lighted them again and kept inventing new ways and places to stub out the cigars. They had plenty of matches."

The "It seems" at the beginning of the second sentence might be the most gut-wrenching touch here, almost an over-understatement of violence.

Violence is inevitably partnered with sex in crime stories, and Tim's partner Virginia can keep pace with him and easily take the lead in both departments. She's often too much like a nympho Lady Macbeth and doesn't seem to interest the author as much as the book's narrator does. Often her actions seem to derive from the necessity of driving the plot than from the realistic motivations of an actual person. She's the classic femme fatale, the bad girl, however you want to put it. Like the violence in the novel, she's more extreme than what you're used to, and I suppose it's this over-the-top quality that most distinguishes the story.

In an absurd scene apparently played straight, she passes on huge chunks of information to Tim while they're locked in separate cells of the same jail, by singing hymns along with the other prisoners, just changing the words to tell him what she needs him to know. It's not clear to me how this would work and I think that's because it wouldn't.

Given enough of a shove in one direction or another, this could have been some kind of surrealist or absurdist risky masterpiece, or possibly one of the greatest smash and grab, sex and violence paperback originals of all time. It might have also been just a great, solid "literary" novel. But it just doesn't have the qualities I associate with such books.

It's certainly worth reading if you're interested in this kind of thing, but it didn't convince me as some kind of lost literary classic. It is a wild ride, though, and definitely a classic of mid-century sex and violence and drinking and crime and corruption and despair and betrayal and much that is both uplifting and dismaying about the so-called "human condition".

The first line is "I'd been roughnecking on a drilling rig in the Atchafayala River for better than sixteen weeks, racking the big silver stems of pipe, lugging the sacks of drilling mud from barge to shore, working with my back and guts and letting my mind coast".