Crime writers all face the same task of dumping their heroes into hot water in new and interesting ways. In Night Walker Donald Hamilton shoves his protagonist into a bizarre situation and it all begins with him merely hitchhiking after dark. The next thing he knows he’s hurt, housebound, and forced to assume a dead man’s identity. If he doesn’t continue the charade serious consequences could result, with prison being the least of them. But of course, as in any decent thriller, there’s always the promise of great rewards, in this case the dead man’s beautiful wife Elizabeth, or possibly the dead man’s young mistress Bonita. There’s a funny line of dialogue in this one when a character refuses a cigarette:
“Don’t take it out on Philip Morris. He hasn’t done anything to you.”
Ah, the 1950s, when men were men and cigarettes weren’t coffin nails. And another staple of 1950s genre fiction is commie hysteria, also a major component of this book. But that’s fine—every literary era has its archetypal villains. The book’s fatal flaw is that the latter portion contains long monologues of the bad guy explaining his evil plot, due to the fact that Hamilton hasn’t constructed the narrative for the hero to suss it out for himself. Tedious doesn’t even begin to describe this sort of writing. Overall Night Walker is middling work from Hamilton, passable in the first half, but a bit taxing in the second. Good thing this 1964 edition from Fawcett’s Gold Medal was cheap. And the cover art is nice. It’s by Harry Bennett.
Ah, the 1950s, when men were men and cigarettes weren’t coffin nails. And another staple of 1950s genre fiction is commie hysteria, also a major component of this book. But that’s fine—every literary era has its archetypal villains. The book’s fatal flaw is that the latter portion contains long monologues of the bad guy explaining his evil plot, due to the fact that Hamilton hasn’t constructed the narrative for the hero to suss it out for himself. Tedious doesn’t even begin to describe this sort of writing. Overall Night Walker is middling work from Hamilton, passable in the first half, but a bit taxing in the second. Good thing this 1964 edition from Fawcett’s Gold Medal was cheap. And the cover art is nice. It’s by Harry Bennett.
