You know the aphorism about intelligence, right? The one where smart people never feel smart enough and stupid people never realize they’re stupid? The lead character in Jonathan Gant’s, aka Clifton Adams’ Never Say No to a Killer constantly brags about how smart he is. He even claims to have a genius I.Q. He puts this brainpower to use in escaping prison, setting himself up in Lake City, gaining possession of a million dollars worth of blackmail material, and sparking interest from the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but you have a sneaking suspicion the entire time he isn’t really that smart.
Since the story is told from first person point-of-view you have no evidence he’s a blowhard, but for a guy who’s allegedly so much smarter than everyone else plenty of things go wrong with his schemes, and the corpses he generates don’t inspire confidence in his self assessment. And indeed, later you discover definitively that he isn’t bright at all—he just has an enormous ego, one that allows him to bluster his way through problems, but which keeps him from spotting obvious dangers and prevents him from understanding it’s he who’s being played.
He believes beautiful women are his reward for being so much better than everyone else, which makes it especially satisfying when these women begin giving him trouble. If he were really a genius he’d have known that you never cross a femme fatale. Never Say No to a Killer is not an especially well written book, but the story is great and the lead character of Roy Surratt is rare. Well, rare in fiction. In real life people like him are everywhere. Overall this is decent-but-not-great stuff from Ace Double Novels, circa 1956, with uncredited cover art, and Louis Trimble’s Stab in the Dark on the flipside.
