Charles Williams strikes again with 1958’s find-the-real-killer novel Man on the Run, also known as Man in Motion, and motion is the operative word, as his protagonist Russell Foley is about to leap from a moving train in the tale’s first sentence. We soon learn he’d had a fistfight with a man who’d been bedding his wife, and the ruckus had caused neighbors to call the police. Somehow his romantic rival was murdered by an unknown in the few minutes after Foley fled and before the cops arrived. Maybe it was even someone inside the apartment the entire time. That would make them someone that didn’t want to be seen by Foley—the first clue. But how do you solve a crime when the police are searching for you? Foley manages to acquire an unlikely and lovely ally, but he’ll need more than random help to survive.
What sets Man on the Run apart is the ubiquity of the police. They’re everywhere. In most novels and movies of this type the fugitive pulls down his hat, pushes up his collar, and sneaks around mostly unmolested, though perhaps scared or paranoid. Here, none of that works. The cops are all over Foley, all the time. Bartenders recognize him. Clerks. People on the street. He spends much of the book sprinting—thus the title. He’s safe nowhere except in his confederate’s apartment. The ratcheted up desperation helps carry the story through its unlikely sections, and in the end Williams hits hard again. It’s more like a sliding triple than a grand slam, but he’s just too good to whiff. French television producers agreed, and in 1989 made the book into the movie Mieux vaut courir, which means, “better to run.” The cover art on this Gold Medal edition is uncredited.
