Kitten With a Whip / Kiss Her Goodbye
The classic 1959 thriller Kitten with a Whip,by the prolific writing team of Bob Wade (1920–2012) and Bill Miller (1920–61), is the story of a family man, temporarily on his own—wife and daughter are visiting relatives—who wakes up one morning to find a nubile 17-year-old girl rummaging around in his house. She feeds him a sob story, and he buys her some clothes and drops her off at a bus stop, figuring that’s the end of it. Oh, boy, is he wrong: the girl isn’t what she seemed to be, and soon our family man is being jerked around like a puppet on a string. It all comes to a violent end, of course, but it’s really the only possible way a story like this could end. Kiss Her Goodbye, the second-billed novel in the collection, was actually published a few years before Kitten; it features a seductive and destructive girl, too, although her motivations are quite a bit different. And in place of Kitten’s rather ineffectual family man, we get the girl’s doting brother, who will have to decide just how far he will go to keep his sister out of harm’s way. The authors’ writing style here, especially in Kitten, is playful—noir with comedic undertones. For many readers, this volume will probably be their first introduction to an excellent writing team (whose novel Badge of Evil, published under the pseudonym Whit Masterson, was the basis of Orson Welles’ classic film Touch of Evil). For others, it will be a welcome reunion. --David Pitt