Frank Gruber was a profitable and above all else extraordinarily prolific pulps author of the Thirties who like Cornell Woolrich and different pulps writers transitioned into publishing crime novels within the Forties. He produced a number of collection, probably the most important of which was the fourteen-book collection about loveable rip-off artists and incidental homicide solvers Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg. Twelve of the Fletcher and Cragg books appeared over the Forties, adopted by a few extra, one in 1954 and one other a decade later in 1964. There have been two different collection as effectively, one with Otis Beagle and Joe Peel, and the opposite with Simon Lash and Eddie Slocum, each numbering three books apiece.
All of those books are mild and and slick they usually have a tendency relatively to resemble one another, however Gruber additionally printed some non-series mysteries that are extra unique. Considered one of these was the noirish crime novel The Lock and the Key (1948), filmed as The Man within the Vault in 1956, which is being republished this yr by Stark Home, with an introduction by me. One other was Twenty Plus Two (1961), filmed the identical yr it was printed underneath the identical title.
Within the early Forties Gruber moved out to Los Angeles together with his spouse and son Robert to work within the movie business. Amongst different issues, he wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of Eric Ambler’s The Masks of Dimitrios, co-wrote with Steve Fisher the script for Johnny Angel, and labored on scripts for movies within the Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond collection. In 1960 he wrote Twenty Plus Two with a movie adaptation expressly in mine. The novel was printed in March 1961 and the movie opened seven months later in October. It will need to have gone into manufacturing in regards to the time the novel was printed.
| the Bantam pb ed |
Gruber not solely wrote the movie’s screenplay, however he produced the movie as effectively. It was directed by Joseph Newman, whose biggest accomplishment to my thoughts was directing the 1965 adaptation of Ethel Lina White‘s shuddery (shuttery?) quick story “An Unlocked Window” on the tv collection The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (It is the one in regards to the nurse and the serial killer.) Newman additionally directed the collection’ earlier adaptation of Margaret Millar’s Beast in View. However let’s go away off the movie for a bit and get again to the novel.
The novel, which is ready in 1960, is in regards to the the investigation by 41-year-old WWII veteran Tom Alder, who is just not a PI precisely however relatively knowledgeable finder of lacking heirs, into the homicide of Julia Joliet, a dowdy, middle-aged fan mail secretary to movie stars, together with 34-year-old WWII hero and display heartthrob Leroy Dane.
Tom thinks Joliet’s dying might have had one thing to do with the well-known unsolved Doris Delaney kidnapping case–fifteen-year-old heiress Doris disappeared in New York in 1938 whereas reducing faculty to go to a malt shop–and he’s quickly trying into that affair, which is far more promising. Doris’ grief-stricken father is now lifeless, however her mom, a recluse, continues to be round, nonetheless very wealthy and completely satisfied that her daughter, who could be 37 now, could be very a lot alive.
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| Who killed dreamy warfare vet movie star Leroy Dane’s fan mail secretary? (actor Man Madison, 1922-1996) |
Tom spends the novel flying backwards and forwards throughout the US, with stops in New York, Chicago, and, of all locations, Bismarck, North Dakota, largely spending his time making lengthy distance cellphone calls to get folks to dig up info for him. The cellphone payments will need to have been horrendous!
Alongside the best way he is pursued throughout the nation by his attractive twice-married, twice-divorced, gold-digging, long-ago fiancée Linda Foster, who heartlessly Expensive John’ed him method again in ’42 when he was combating within the Pacific. Now Linda, it appears, openly needs him again.
Linda’s trendy menage consists of her pet stockbroker fiance, Harris Toomey, and her filthy wealthy mates Walter and Nikki Collinson. Earlier than he leaves LA Tom spends the evening with amorous Linda. On his flight to New York the following day, nevertheless, Tom encounters stunning Nikki, who like Linda is just a few years youthful than he, and turns into relatively smitten along with her.
Nikki alights in Chicago, however Tom finds loads to do when he will get to NYC. There is a drunken newspaper reporter who lined the Delaney case to be situated, for instance, to not point out a name to be made upon reclusive Mrs. Delaney. Then there’s the massive fats man named Jacques Pleshette who has his personal case for Alder–he needs him to seek out his lengthy misplaced brother Auguste–and simply will not let him alone.
Late within the novel Gruber manages a transferring wartime flashback to Honolulu and an thrilling, violent climax someplace within the sticks in North Dakota. You may even be reminded of the good Nineties crime movie Fargo. No wooden chippers are concerned although!
Totally a dozen years in the past at this weblog in happier days I reviewed a non-series Gruber novel which I hardly keep in mind now however I fairly evidently loved; and I equally loved Gruber’s Twenty Plus Two. It has a posh plot (folks’s ages matter), some fascinating characters and a superb decision. I consider will probably be the following Gruber reprinted by Stark Home.
It is fascinating to check the movie with the guide on this case, as a result of not often does a criminal offense author have his fingerprints all around the movie adaptation like Gruber did. The movie is just not horrible, however on the entire I’ve sadly to conclude that Gruber considerably mucked up his personal adaptation.
In fact the manufacturing values of the movie had been low–at one level on a supposed small airplane flight you’ll be able to see an insect crawling in entrance of the entrance window of the “airplane”–and it appears like an episode in a TV crime collection, however that doesn’t in itself make for a nasty movie. The most important issues stem from the casting and the modifications which it prompted in the timeframe of the guide. Gruber simply blew it right here.
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| David Janssen and Dina Merrill chat with fifty-six-year-old Frank Gruber on the set of Twenty Plus Two. Oddly Merrill seemed youthful right here than she did within the movie, as did Janssen. Each he and Gruber, who undoubtedly seemed his age and died 9 years later at 65, have cigarettes. A tough drinker in addition to a smoker, Janssen died of a coronary heart assault on the age of 48 in 1980. |
Thirty-year-old David Janssen of TV collection The Fugitive fame performs Tom Alder and offers a creditable “robust” detective efficiency of the kind we’d have seen in Forties hard-boiled detective movies. He is really over a decade youthful than his guide character however arguably may have handed for nearer to forty. Nonetheless the script chooses to make him a veteran of the Korean Battle, relatively than World Battle Two, and moved the Doris Delaney case up a full decade to 1948. Gruber, in brief, makes a hash of his personal novel’s essential timeline. I can not go into full element, nevertheless it’s a particular plotting downside.
Janssen’s feminine co-stars Jeanne Crain and Dina Merrill had been each older than he, respectively 35 and 37. That is really across the age of their characters within the guide, however the discrepancy with Janssen’s age, notably in Merrill’s case, is noticeable. The script would have us consider that Dina Merrill is totally a decade youthful, youthful than Janssen, and it is simply not plausible–even much less so when she seems in a flashback scene in Korea, the place she’s speculated to be round twenty. There isn’t any conceivable method that Merrill could possibly be a close to teenager.
Apart from her age, the considerably matronly Merrill simply does not have the chops for this advanced character, or the uncooked intercourse attraction. Crane then again is a greater match because the alluring but perpetually synthetic Linda.
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| David Janssen and Jeanne Crane |
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| David Jansen and Dina Merrill trying like matronly Donna Reed of The Donna Reed Present (or perhaps even her mom) |
The worst (certainly incomprehensible) case of miscasting, nevertheless, belongs to Brad Dexter as Leroy Dane. There isn’t any method this beefy, 43-year-old westerns actor is credible for a minute as a teenybopper movie idol. (Suppose somebody like fairly boy Man Madison.) There’s an unintentionally hilarious scene the place Dexter as Dane is pursued by a pack of smitten younger ladies at a hotel–I can not think about what Gruber was considering, notably as he created the guide character.
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| “And I am telling you, bud, them teenyboppers love me!” |
William Demarest and Agnes Morehead are within the movie too, however each of them are solely in a single scene apiece (because the alcoholic reporter and Mrs. Delaney respectively). The novel ends appropriately with Mrs. Delaney being crucially referenced, however the movie ends frivolously as an alternative with a throwaway little bit of humor regarding Jacques Pleshette.
About frere Jacques, he is an amazing character within the novel, although Gruber clearly cribbed him from Caspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. (There are parts of Masks of Dimitrios too.) Within the movie actor Jacques Aubuchon, in determined distinction with Brad Dexter, is technically proper for the half (although too younger by twenty years), however I used to be aching to see Sidney Greenstreet, sadly lifeless and gone for seven years when the movie was made. Whenever you learn the novel you’ll none apart from him. What zest he would have given to this position! Aubuchon I discovered just a little too understated.
One piece of casting that Gruber acquired proper was his personal twenty-year-old son, Robert, or Bobby as he was familiarly recognized, within the twelfth-billed place as “bellboy.” Maybe unsurprisingly given his father’s connections Bobby was an aspiring actor, however in IMDB he has solely has this position and “sergeant” in a 1975 episode of M*A*S*H to his credit score. He additionally printed a single recognized thriller quick story, fairly credible, which I anticipate to see reprinted with Twenty Plus Two. He died single in Los Angeles in 1982 on the age of 41. There is a tragic story there, I think. Was Bobby Gruber an early casualty of the AIDS plague?
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| The studio desperately tries to intercourse up the movie and make sense of its title. If there are twenty clues on this movie, I missed them and the “stunning victims” each make it out of the movie alive. The stilettoed blonde dish apparently is speculated to be Dina Merrill, who by no means displays a-tenth of that uncooked intercourse attraction. |
Essentially the most egregious half about Gruber monkeying together with his personal timeline within the movie adaptation of his novel is that the title, which was stored, now makes completely no sense! It has been not 22 years for the reason that Doris Delaney kidnapping, however 12. Did nobody concerned on this movie ever level that out to Gruber? I suppose Ten Plus Two did not sound pretty much as good, although Ed McBain two years later would publish the crime novel Ten Plus One.
Gruber evidently adhered to the pulp fiction ethos “Do not ask questions, simply get it down!” A little bit extra care in casting would have made a greater movie, nevertheless. It additionally have to be admitted that watching a man make a collection of cellphone calls from resort rooms is just not essentially thrilling viewing. Some additional effort might need turned a positive little crime novel into a really efficient, cinematic movie. For instance, wouldn’t it not have been extra fascinating to open the movie with the Doris Delaney disappearance, then flash ahead to the homicide of Julia Joliet?
My recommendation on this one: learn the novel when it is reprinted, do not see the movie first. Presently, though the novel was reprinted in paperback and printed within the US and UK, it is extraordinarily uncommon; however that downside ought to quickly be rectified.
