Beat the Devil

This is the classic '50s noir novel that brought John Huston and Humphrey Bogart together for the last time in film. Published under the pseudonym James Helvick, this sophisticated comedy-thriller was in fact the work of Claud Cockburn, whose early career as a Communist agitator prompted his publisher to demand a pseudonym in the McCarthy years. Beat the Devil shows how effortlessly Cockburn moved from agitprop to elegant and witty fiction. Alexander Cockburn's introduction delves into the long-simmering debate over the real source of the movie's most famous lines. Was it Truman Capote, Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertel, Robert Morley, or Claud Cockburn himself?