
Radiating with noir-ish overtones, A Noose for the Desperado fits right in there with the classical Gold Medal crime novels of the early 1950s. Clifton Adams melancholic writing reminds of David Goodis, at many points. Tall is as self-loathing as any of Goodis’ protagonists, and he is obsessed with increasingly nihilistic impulses the more he gives himself over to the criminal element. “Nothingness” and “no future” are frequent preoccupations that only depress Tall more and more. Nothing signals Tall’s downward spiral more than this realization, which would be right at home in Goodis’ Down There: “Then it hit me that maybe I could feel the day coming when I would look around me and discover how far down I had gone.”

A gripping, action and suspense filled Western, A Noose for the Desperado is even better than The Desperado. I’d put it up there as one of my favorite Gold Medal novels of any genre. And considering this novel’s affinity with noir, it comes as no surprise that Clifton Adams also wrote some terrific sounding crime novels, two of which are called Whom Gods Destroy and Death’s Sweet Song. I haven’t read them, but Bill Crider is enthusiastic about them in this essay he wrote for Mystery File.
Some particularly noir-ish quotes from the book:
“Her dark eyes were full of hell, and when she flashed her white teeth in a grin you got the idea that she would like to sink them into your throat.”
“It was a nightmare of screams and smoke, and men wandering aimlessly with bullet holes in them like lost souls in limbo.”
“I felt completely lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness.”
“Now I understood how a man could be so sick of himself that the most important thing in the world could be just forgetting.”
Nicely done. You get at the essentials (character, tone, style) without dwelling on the plot. The year 1951 also places the novel in that period of the darkest Hollywood noir films.
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