Shake Him Till He Rattles / It's Cold Out There by Malcolm Braly

Shake Him Till He Rattles / It's Cold Out There by Malcolm Braly

SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES

North Beach, San Francisco: It is the early 1960's and the beat scene is changing. The Narco Squad are coming down heavy. One particular narc, Lieutenant Carver, really has it in for Lee Cabiness. All Cabiness wants to do is jam on his sax, score some weed and hang with the action. He had a thing going with Jean but that's cooled off, and now she's going with that flashy pimp, Randozza. One night Cabiness's friend Furg introduces him to Clair Hubler, a slumming rich girl who wants to hire them for a private party. She's got an anti-guy vibe but you never know. But all Furg wants to do is score some junk to find out what all the excitement's about. Naturally he thinks of Sullivan, the local junkie playwright. But Sullivan has a problem--Carver is using him to set up his friends. One summer in North Beach, they all collide. That's when things get crazy, real crazy.

IT'S COLD OUT THERE

JD Bing is out from San Quentin, just trying to get by selling encyclopedias--but he's not very good at it. In fact, he's getting desperate. Kristie has just lost her airline job and is holding herself together so tight she's beginning to lose touch with reality. Grove is a quiet young man who gets by selling clever little cartoons to the papers, trying to work up his nerve to ask out Kristie. When Bing comes around their apartment building in a last ditch attempt to sell, their lives are forever changed. Because Bing has entered a world of backstabbing winos, lonely check-kiting old men, cocktail waitressing divorcees, bullying counterfeiters, impotent ex-generals and crazy street people. It's a California underground--life on the fringes. And as Bing soon finds out, he was safer in prison.

Malcolm Braly was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1925 and died in 1980. Braly was raised in foster homes and institutions for delinquent children after his parents abandoned him, and by the age of forty, he had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin State Prison, and Folsom State Prison. He authored three novels while incarcerated: Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It's Cold Out There (1966), and began writing on On the Yard after his release in 1965. When jail officials found out about the book, they threatened to revoke his parole, so he had to finish it in secret. On the Yard was published in 1967, after Braly's parole had expired, and gained widespread acclaim.

False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisoners (1976) was his autobiography, and The Protector (1979) was his final piece of fiction. Malcolm Braly was free for fifteen years before dying in a car accident at the age of fifty-four. Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven books, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Maine.