Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the twist in a suspense novel isn’t much of a surprise. There are limits to the misdirections that can be placed into a narrative, so you have to figure one fourth of readers guess correctly what the author is up to no matter what. 1955’s The Passion Murders, written by the prolific Day Keene, aka Gunard Hjerstedt, and originally published as Farewell to Passion in 1951, is a tale well told, so in the end it didn’t matter that we knew from chapter two what the big surprise would be. We still had to read the book to find out if we were correct, which was a type of suspense all its own.
Plotwise a Los Angeles prosecutor discovers that his actress wife has cheated on him to secure a film role, but even so he’s willing to sacrifice his career and savings to protect her when he learns that she was behind the wheel during a deadly hit and run accident. He agrees to pay the victim’s family $50,000 for silence, but the money he cobbles together comes from a notorious gangster in exchange for dropping a case. With his career and marriage now ruined, the prosecutor flees L.A. for his Georgia hometown only to find that, though he was once a source of local pride, his obvious sell-out to organized crime has made him as welcome as a plague of locusts. Troubles follow from Los Angeles, as Keene’s tangled web includes a sexpot secretary, the local Klan, a murder, and that looming twist.
Habitual visitors to our website may notice that we’ve dug up this cover from a post in 2017. Back then we discussed the uncredited art, but couldn’t delve into the story because we didn’t have a copy of the book. Then this Avon paperback came to us as part of a group we bought not long ago, so we’ve updated and moved that old post to today after reading the novel. Generally Day Keene is a reliable author and this is another one that goes into the success column. You can read him with confidence. We have another book from him we’ll get to soon.
