Yet, instead of a shootout between warring factions, Rabe takes us down a different path with Fell teaching Pander a lesson as to who the boss is.

While he was absent, Pander took over his operations, thinking it was time to push out the old man. He disappeared for a month to a sanitarium. Like Vincent Gigante, who allegedly feigned insanity for thirty years, Fell, who ran the San Pietro bookmarking operations, was crazy.

Peter Rabe’s 1956 gangster novel, Kill the Boss Goodby, is like no other gangster novel you ever read. I certainly got my money’s worth out of it, and I’ll probably be checking out more of them. The rating is helped because I picked this up cheaply on Kindle as part of PlanetMonk’s e-reprints of old pulp novels they offer for 99 cents. It wasn’t bad, it just seems to sag a bit when compared with the earlier part and dropped it from a fun 4 stars to a solid 3. However, that piece gets wrapped up very quickly, and then the book shifts into a second phase which I didn’t like quite as much. I very much enjoyed the first half in which Fell is trying to wrestle control of his organization back from Pander with the criminal syndicate watching to see which man deserves it. I don’t think it quite lives up to the billing that Westlake gave it, but it’s still an entertaining piece of hard boiled crime writing. I heard about this one from Donald Westlake’s non-fiction collection The Getaway Car in which he raved about it in an introduction he wrote for a book of Rabe’s stories. But what could be stressful about an underworld fight for control of a city?

Unfortunately, Fell has been getting treatment for a manic disorder at a sanitarium, and his doctor warns Cripp that taking him away and putting him a stressful environment could have dire consequences.

Pander sees this as his chance to take over for good so Fell’s loyal minion Cripp fetches the boss. San Pietro is a small city with a bustling bookie business thanks to its horse racing track, but the local criminal kingpin Tom Fell, hasn’t been seen in a month after leaving his flunky Pander in charge. Leave a copy of this laying around the office and see how your boss rates you in your next performance review after he or she gets a look at the cover….

Kill the boss movie