This Robert Bonfils cover for Dan Brennan’s 1961 novel Doomed Sinner fooled us. It looked tropical, but the story never gets anywhere warm. Jerry Bassett, a pilot during World War II now living in the north of Minnesota, stumbles across war buddy Johnny Cotton while fishing in the deep boreal forest. It’s clear Cotton is up there for a nefarious purpose, considering he’s with four heavily armed men and they have a floatplane. Trouble is avoided only because Cotton convinces his henchmen to let Jerry leave unmolested. Days later, back in civilization, Jerry goes to a dance, meets a woman who owns a small plane, and goes on a pleasure flight only to have an oil line burst. They crash land right about where Cotton and Co. are hanging out. That’s a hell of a coincidence, but okay, it happens early in the narrative, so it qualifies as the premise—we accepted it.
This time, though, Jerry is stuck in the wilderness. Cotton and his partners—who it becomes clear are bank robbers about to pull a heist—aren’t about to let him leave twice. Plus they like his female companion. Well, maybe like isn’t the word. Want to devour her like a Catskills buffet lunch is more accurate. If Jerry doesn’t get her out of those woods she’ll be in seriously dire straits, but how can they escape? Ultimately they don’t. He does, leaving her behind, and her existence is indelibly changed. This is less than a third of the way through the book. It then evolves into a tale of redemption. Jerry sees a newspaper account of a bank robbery, recognizes it had been Cotton, and decides to track him down and rescue the girl—if she’s still alive and with him. Better late heroics than none at all, we guess.
Brennan has an interesting style, though on occasion it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening because his flourishes confuse the action. There’s a double shooting, for instance, where we weren’t immediately sure who was shot. We looked him up, and it turns out he wrote a lot of books in two areas: sleaze and air war. So the combo in Doomed Sinner makes sense. One of his publishers (sleaze imprint Novel Books) claimed Brennan won a McKnight Foundation award in 1960. We couldn’t confirm that, but we wouldn’t be surprised. Brennan can write pretty well, even if it’s unfocused at moments. We’ll try him again down the line if we can find something cheap. In the meantime, we recommend Doomed Sinner. It’s a stupid title but a reasonably engrossing, occasionally hard-boiled thriller.
