An Eye for an Eye by Leigh Brackett

As you know, Bob, many SF writers published fiction in other genres, like the mystery or pornography, either out of a passion for those genres or a need for money.  Leigh Brackett, besides selling stories to magazines like Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories and writing screenplays for directors like Howard Hawks, also wrote a bunch of crime novels.  As a change of pace from the science lectures and engineering extravaganzas of 1930s Astounding and the vampires and alien gods of 1930s Weird Tales, let's read a 1957 suspense novel by Brackett, An Eye for an Eye.  I borrowed a first edition hard cover copy via interlibrary loan that was "published for the Crime Club by Doubleday & Company." The book's first page, where it has the plot synopsis come-on, has a little picture of a clock that I guess is The Crime Club's icon for the suspense subcategory, and also says "Scene: Ohio;" I found it amusing that the publisher thought there might be a sufficient number of mystery fans out there for whom a story set in Ohio would be particularly enticing or particularly off-putting to render it advisable to let everybody know this piece of info up front, like a trigger warning or something.

(Presumably the novel takes place in Ohio because California-born Brackett and her husband Edmond Hamilton lived in Ohio, Hamilton's native state, from the time of their marriage in 1946, facilitating getting all the local color right, like the fact that in Ohio the DMV is called the BMV.)  

Ben Forbes is a lawyer in the city of Woodley, OH, a town of 60,000 people.  He and wife Carolyn only have one car, and they live in the suburbs so she needs the car to get anywhere, so she drives him in to work downtown every morning and picks him up every afternoon.  But today she is late...in fact, she never arrives!  Carolyn has vanished!  In the fourth of An Eye for an Eye's 26 chapters the novel's perspective changes so that the main character to whose thoughts we are privy is Al Guthrie, a working-class brute, and we learn what happened to Carolyn.

Guthrie is a wife beater who is always getting into trouble with landlords and neighbors, and his wife, a good-looking dope named Lorene, finally got fed up with him and filed for divorce.  Ben Forbes was Lorene's lawyer.  Guthrie, who drinks a lot and has a terrible temper and resents middle-class people, blames Forbes for the loss of Lorene, and came up with the insane scheme of kidnapping Carolyn (Forbes took his wife, so he figures it's fair that he take Forbes's wife, you know, an eye for an eye) and using Mrs. Forbes as a hostage to force Mr. Forbes to convince Lorene to return to Guthrie.  An Eye for an Eye is written in the third person, but each chapter more or less takes the point of view of one particular character; Chapter Four relates the kidnapping from Al Guthrie's point of view, and Chapters Five and Six describe the ordeal from Carolyn's point of view.  Later on we get chapters for Lorene and police detective Ernie MacGrath as well as Ben Forbes, Carolyn Forbes and Al Guthrie.

Like 24 hours after Carolyn's disappearance, Guthrie calls Forbes and makes his crazy demand, giving the lawyer five days to bring Lorene back to him, saying that he (Guthrie) has no fear of death, having nothing to live for if Lorene is gone, and if Forbes call the cops Guthrie will kill Carolyn out of hand and then kill more people until the police get him.  Forbes, even though his childhood friend Ernie MacGrath is already on the case of Carolyn's disappearance, decides not to tell the police about his call from Guthrie and try to rescue Carolyn himself. 

Brackett focuses on the psychology of the characters--for example, Ben Forbes's agony of worry over his wife and the way his mental health deteriorates and his character changes as he takes up the quixotic role of amateur detective, running all over town trying to interrogate people and follow clues without letting McGrath or Guthrie find out what he is up to.  We also get Carolyn and Lorene's terror (and how they overcome their fear) and MacGrath's bewilderment over his friend's behavior and disillusionment as the detective begins to suspect Forbes is cheating on Carolyn and has perhaps murdered her.

And of course we learn all about Al Guthrie and his own extreme personality.  Brackett succeeds in presenting Guthrie as a villain who is committed to a course that is morally atrocious and ridiculously counterproductive and self-destructive, but keeping him believable and even understandable; he is neither a moron nor a schizophrenic, he more or less understands the world but has a cock-eyed take on it.  For example, he says stuff that ordinary people who are perhaps bitter or cynical might say say, like 

Justice, hell.  A man like him was a sap if he expected it.  Justice was for the fat-asses who could pa for it, not for the working-man.

Guthrie also says stuff like "A man's wife belongs to him" and that cooking is a woman's job, making me wonder if Brackett was playing up to a feminist audience.  But the novel also offers a quite unflattering portrait of Lorene, an empty-headed and childish woman who uses her body to manipulate men and, it is implied, liked Al Guthrie because he was good in the sack; it is strongly suggested that Lorene--selfish, amoral, flighty--needs a strong man to keep her under control. 

Besides gender issues the novel is chockful of class issues, as we see in the quote above.  Guthrie vents his spleen against "rich bitches" and people with book-learning, while middle-class Forbes is forced by his frantic search for Carolyn to spend a lot of time in places he does not belong among the working classes and lower classes.  In a bar in the working-class part of town where Forbes is looking for clues, for example, we are told "He [Forbes] was the only one there in store clothes."  

Brackett does a good job of creating tension, as Forbes risks getting beat up by the people he is bothering and getting arrested by his friend MacGrath and as, under greater and greater stress as time ticks away, he acts more and more desperately.

Almost two-thirds of the way through the novel Ben Forbes's manic detective work causes a crisis that draws the attention of the police; Ben is forced to tell Ernie the truth about what he knows about Guthrie's kidnapping of Carolyn.  This is a sort of cathartic climax moment, as we no longer have to worry about the police arresting Ben, or Lorene's new boyfriend beating him up, but of course Carolyn is still in the hands of the kidnapper and there are still like 70 pages to go in the 186-page book.  The authorities take over the investigation, and over those seventy-odd pages we see this pursuit from the point of view of the quarry, Guthrie and Carolyn, as well as from that of the cops.  

One of the interesting aspects of An Eye for an Eye is its endorsement of the police.  In Alpha Centauri or Die! Brackett (besides seeming to support traditional gender roles) presented the government as the villain and celebrated people breaking free of its constraints and pursuing their own courses, but here in this novel Ben tries to solve his own problem and just screws everything up, and we are made to see that he should have trusted the government to help him all along.  (The vapid and emotional Lorene follows a similar narrative arc, trying to solve her problems herself before being basically forced to subordinate herself to the police for her own good.)  

This is a diverting, straightforward thriller (there is no twist ending or crazy surprise at the end like those Fredric Brown novels we read a while ago.)  I liked it.