Clifton Adams is best known for his westerns, having won two Spur Awards for best novel in both 1969 and 1970. But he also wrote two of the best Gold Medal noir thrillers. As August West said of Deaths Sweet Song in the Vintage Hardboiled Reads blog, This may be the best crime fiction novel that Gold Medal published in the 50s. Its got it alla beautiful, conniving woman, a vulnerable safe, and a guy with lots of moral flexibility. Whom Gods Destroy is the tense story of a self-destructive bootlegger and the woman he cant forgive. Cullen Gallagher of the Los Angeles Review of Books provides a new introduction.