William P. McGivern is a writer who shouldn't need rediscovery, but he consistently is being reintroduced, as publishers keep proudly offering his work (with good reason) with notes of just how good he was (with good reason) and yet you probably don't know him except indirectly, as the source of one or another brilliant film or television episode. Despite having written a number of other well-received novels, including her first, published as was From the Mixed Up Files in 1967 and a runner up for the 1968 Newbery that Frankweiler won, E. L. Konigsburg is remembered almost exclusive for this one novel, which (with good reason) has stayed in print consistently since 1967, even if the film adaptation, The Hideaways, a Rather Good Try starring Ingrid Bergman as Frankweiler, fizzled as a commercial property and was pulled down from YouTube not long ago mostly so Warner's burn on demand Archive label would have a clearer field in which to sell it to you. It's the 60th anniversary year for the McGivern novel the 50th for the Konigsburg.William McGivern began publishing as part of the cluster of writers around Ziff-Davis's Chicago-based fiction magazines in the 1940s, in fact with a collaboration with David Wright O'Brien, along with McGivern the best of the writers to break into print thanks to Ziff-Davis editor Ray Palmer (such other ZD Chicago/landers as Robert Bloch and eventually Fritz Leiber had Been Invented or at least first published elsewhere). Both of those young men went off to World War II, and McGivern was able to come back...he would grind out reasonably good copy for Palmer magazines, which were not on balance looking for anything beyond routine light adventure fiction too much of the time, along with the rest of the writer stable, but, in the manner of Bloch when also providing mere copy, even McGivern's routine stories often demonstrated a certain sophistication of technique or ideation that helped set them slightly apart from the typical Chester Geier or Paul Fairman story, or Howard Browne banging out just another page-filler...Browne, of course, being one of the other genuinely talented writers often simply grinding away for Palmer's magazines, and who eventually became the fitfully better successor editor to Palmer for ZD fiction magazines; Paul Fairman succeeded Browne in that position, and arguably averaged even worse than Palmer as editor, despite having an even more talented, on balance, cast of page-fillers turning in most of the copy in his tenure, and their work augmented by the occasional actually good story his eventual successor Cele Goldsmith pulled out of the slush pile as Fairman's assistant. (Fairman's Usual Suspects in terms of delivery of routine to occasionally better material, published apparently without anyone reading it first, in the mid '50s were Milton Lesser, not yet legally Stephen Marlowe, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett and, increasingly by the end of Fairman's tenure, Henry Slesar; among the items Goldsmith found was Kate Wilhelm's first published story.) But by the mid '50s, McGivern had already given up on supplementing his income as police reporter among other things for the Philadelphia Bulletin with hacking for Ziff-Davis, as his crime fiction was starting to get consistently good reception from better-paying markets such as The Saturday Evening Post and Blue Book, and from Hollywood, with film adaptations of his novels The Big Heat, Shield for Murder, Rogue Cop and Hell on Frisco Bay released in 1953-55, following television adaptations of his shorter work on Lights Out, Studio One and Suspense in 1950-52. Cosmopolitan became a consistent market for McGivern's fiction for at least a decade, starting with a novella version of Odds Against Tomorrow, published ahead of the novel in hardcover, also in 1957.
Odds Against Tomorrow would also be filmed, for 1959 release, rather well but in a sort of hothouse manner, with one of the most over-the-top climaxes in film history; the novel is more subtle, and with a much more realistic ending that has its own dramatic heft. Like most of McGivern's 1950s crime fiction, the novel is set in and around Philadelphia, but the author is intentionally circumspect about that; one early tipoff is that an elevator operator wonders if one of the primary cast knows the score of the Eagles game in progress. But like the film, the novel deals intensely with race relations and the tensions along those lines brought out by the alienation of the working people in this country, as well as tensions between the hothead former soldier Earl and his cohabitating womanfriend, and current financial support, Lorraine. Earl and another lost veteran, Ingram, a compulsive gambler with no one left in his life, are recruited for a bank job by Novak, who is setting up a small crew for the purpose. Unlike in the film, Ingram is not the musician Harry Belafonte plays, but is nearly as desperate and impulsive, and is African-American and not afraid to mock anyone who wants him to take a slight because of that; Earl is Texan out of grinding poverty, and Caucasian, with both a compulsive sense of honor and rigid sense of How Things Ought to Be, including relations between the races, that that background inculcated. As with the film, most of the most important parts of the story will revolve around Ingram and Earl, and Earl and Lorraine, as the crime doesn't quite resolve itself they way Novak and company hoped, nor do the protagonists behave quite the way the police pursuing them quite expect. It's a serious novel of character as well as a tense account of a crime not quite foolproofed, and while the main characters don't end up where they hoped they might, they do have somewhat more to say for themselves than their even more debased correspondents in the film adaptation.
Bill Crider this week is considering Ross Macdonald, and McGivern isn't too far in his talent and appeal from Kenneth Millar's crime fiction; as I reread this for the first time in almost thirty years, I was also reminded even more than I was then of Algis Budrys's almost exactly contemporary novel The Death Machine, originally published and usually reprinted as Rogue Moon, though the Budrys novel is more satirical as well as then near-future science fiction, rather than contemporary crime fiction; both have a small group of damaged people about to undertake a very dangerous task requiring expert team effort, and both make rather important and not too dissimilar points about what in and how lives matter, even when it seems that the characters have lost sight of such guiding principles. The tone even feels similar, hardboiled without resort to the cliches well in place by the late '50s, and the mix of conscious and less-conscious understanding of just how the characters are getting at each other, that is not merely simply a matter of the tension of the job at hand or clashing personality.
I'm also a bit amused about how I first came to this novel, after seeing the film, which I was first drawn to because of the soundtrack; I knew of McGivern's work, and had read a little of it in anthologies, but was a hungry fan of the Modern Jazz Quartet beginning in the latest '70s, and one of my early used-LP purchases was Patterns, the MJQ's interpretation of the score the quartet's pianist John Lewis had written for the film (some of which was also on the soundtrack, though mostly mixed in with larger-group recording). The film and the book are both eminently worthy of your time (as is the album), even as they diverge rather profoundly by their end. And both works have been, I think, more influential on similar work which has followed than is often mentioned.
To be reconstructed later today after a catastrophic crash. Grr.
