With the Korean War
underway, Naval Lieutenant Dave Young has been called back into
service. Young, who had been doing a graduate degree in engineering
on the GI Bill, is not happy with this, and he has drunk through the
train fare the Navy sent him. So he finds himself hitching in
Maryland on his way to Newport News. He's picked up by Larry Wilson,
a former employee of the Navy Department, who agrees to drive out of
his way to Washington and front Young bus fare. But he also explains
he was fired from his design job for having Red sympathies (in the days before Tim Russert simplified everything, Red meant communist or socialist, not Republican). Young
gets nervous right away, but while he's looking over Wilson's design
for a yacht, he's knocked unconscious. And when he wakes up he's in
the hospital, his head wrapped in bandages, being called Mr Wilson,
and told he's been lucky to survive the car crash and ensuing fire.
Then the beautiful Elizabeth, Mrs Wilson, shows up and without even a
moment of surprise, takes him home.
Night Walker
reads like a pure pulp nightmare, but actually it was published first
as a serial in the slick magazine Colliers in 1951, called Mask
For Danger. Dell reissued it in 1954 under its present title.
Hamilton may not have worked his way up the pulps, but he certainly
absorbed both their sometime frenzied pace, and, as with the best of
the noirish genre, their sense of confinement, paranoia and
hopelessness.
Most readers will
know Hamilton best as the writer of the Matt Helm series of novels,
which began in 1960 and were often held up as America's grittier more
realistic alternative to James Bond, something the movie-makers who
adapted them with Dean Martin as Helm never seemed to notice.
Hamilton also wrote western novels, including The Big Country,
and another adapted as The Violent Men,which were treated with
more respect by filmmakers. Helm's
world is one of cynicism, hard-edged betrayal and more than a little
male-chauvinistic. Those qualities are all present here, but there is
also a nightmarish mystery here worthy of Mickey Spillane, as Young
struggles to escape from the quicksand of Commie espionage.
The
opening car scene is beautifully over-the-top: it reminds me of
nothing as much as Detour,
and if you were thinking of filming Night Walker,
you might see a mix of that classic noir film with another, Pickup
On South Street. Casting the film would be fun: if you'd made it then you might have Richard Widmark or Sterling Hayden as Young, and Susan Heyward or Joan Bennett as Elizabeth, a
classic femme fatale with a seemingly vulnerable edge. The
doctor who plays along with the deception has his own motives and
Wilson's Aunt Molly, with whom Larry and Elizabeth live, is
suspicious from the go, but the biggest enigma is Bonita
'Bunny' Decker, Wilson's 'old friend', for whom he was designing the
boat, and whom Young keeps calling 'Red'. It's claustrophobic, and
it's set on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, seemingly always at night,
which is a masterful bit of noirish writing. I've gone back once or
twice to the Matt Helm books, without the same satisfaction I had when I was
a youngster devouring them, but in a sense, even though written in
the previous decade, this is a more mature Donald Hamilton, working
in a mature genre, and for all its madcap reversals and unlikely
situations, Night Walker
is a treat.
Night
Walker by Donald Hamilton
Hard
Case Crime 2006, £6.99 ISBN 9780857683489
This review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
This review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
