Winner Take All and Cornered! reviewed by Michael Robison

Between the two World Wars, pulp magazines reigned as the people's choice for reading entertainment, but during World War II compact and cheap paperback books supplanted them. After the war paperback popularity skyrocketed, and publishers struggled to meet the demand. Quantity often proved more important than quality, and it was not uncommon for talented authors to go unnoticed and unappreciated in the flood of paperback books. Gifted authors such as Chester Himes, David Goodis, and Jim Thompson went out of print for over twenty years. As the publishing industry moved into the sixties the paperback lost ground to television and the publishers became more selective. Into this volatile scene a fine new author made his debut. His name was James McKimmey. This article presents a brief background on McKimmey and some comments on two of his novels, Winner Take All and Cornered!

McKimmey was born in Holdrege, Nebraska in 1923, eventually moving to Omaha where he graduated from high school. To earn college tuition he worked as a draftsman for a prominent architectural firm. He studied architecture at the University of Nebraska until World War II, when he enlisted in the Army. Following basic training he attended an Army program at Indiana University. He eventually transferred to the 102nd Infantry Division and saw combat in Germany.  At the end of the war, McKimmey attended the American University in Biarritz, France, and it was during this period that his interest shifted to writing. He married his first wife Marty when he was discharged from the Army. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1950 with a Bachelor of Science degree in English. He sold his first story to American Pen magazine while still in college. After graduating he held down various jobs until he started writing fulltime in 1955. His first novel The Perfect Victim was published by Dell in 1958. Over the next five years he wrote eight novels for Dell, including Winner Take All in 1959 and the exceptional Cornered! in 1960. For various publishers he produced another eight novels, his last in 1982. He has also written several short stories. Marty passed away in 1994, and he married Starr. He has lived at Lake Tahoe for the last 32 years.

In Winner Take All, James McKimmey stacks his chips on a gambling theme and lets the wheel spin. The ball drops and bounces across long-lost brothers, a crooked roulette game, seductive women, and settles into a groove of violence, manipulation, and betrayal. He combines all the classic ingredients of the hardboiled genre in the book. A violent man moves in a ruthless, uncaring world, a femme fatale threatens to betray him, adversaries stalk him from the shadows, and a good girl provides a glimmer of hope along a dark and amoral path. McKimmey stokes the fires of enmity and the tension builds to a spectacular climax.

Although McKimmey respects the hardboiled tradition of adhering to the plot, he is not blind to the social climate. Reminiscent of Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and To Have And Have Not, McKimmey weaves subtle social commentary into his tale in the portrayal of fringe characters. The barroom scene where Steele first meets Linda provides a cynical glance at a new generation, every bit as lost as the one Gertrude Stein referred to. The brief exchange between Duck Wentworth and Steele, beyond the irony, is a stinging portrayal of social condescension.

James McKimmey's Cornered! is as hardboiled as Winner Take All, but it also has an aura of evil and desperation that lends it a noirish appeal. Forty years ago the witness protection program was a do-it-yourself affair, so after giving incriminating testimony against a gangster in a murder trial, a young woman changes her name, dyes her hair, and runs for her life. She is accepted into a small community and marries, and it looks like she has escaped vengeance, but under the blanketing snow of a midwestern blizzard a tense human storm is brewing. The quiet of the town is disrupted by a deadly shootout, and a desperate killer stalks the woman responsible for putting his brother on death row. As the story progresses, a disparate group of characters converge in a fateful confluence that will change their lives.

Crisis is a crucible of human nature and life-and-death situations produce self-revelation and epiphany that profoundly alter a person. Like the Phoenix, the flames of fear burn away the old and a new self arises from the ashes. Hemingway explored this theme in much of his work, and it serves McKimmey well in Cornered! A perceptive observer of human behavior, McKimmey demonstrates a talent for fleshing out characters with subtle psychological nuances that add richness and depth to the narrative without sacrificing the fast-paced narrative. He invests them with their own inner demons, examines their thoughts and worries and hopes and dreams, and then plunges them into the caldron of danger.

McKimmey's writing is not spiked with memorable one-liners, and rarely does a passage strike a reader as especially inspired, but this is no slight against his talent. Like John D. MacDonald and James Ellroy, the caliber of McKimmey's work is measured in the strength of the story, the power of the characters, and a smooth narrative style. Like these two authors, McKimmey is also adept at invoking an era using description, dialogue, and character introspection to transport the reader to another time. Raw emotions are a universal commodity that span the ages, but McKimmey evokes a special magic by investing them in the habits and fashions of his characters in the mid-20th century American West.

James McKimmey combines great characterization with consummate storytelling skills to pack a big punch in these two short novels. Those who appreciate hardboiled and noir writing should check out McKimmey's fine contribution to the genres.

Copyright© 2004 Michael Robison

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