Frank Gruber was a successful and above all else extremely prolific pulps writer of the Thirties who like Cornell Woolrich and other pulps writers transitioned into publishing crime novels in the 1940s. He produced several series, the most significant of which was the fourteen-book series about loveable scam artists and incidental murder solvers Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg. Twelve of the Fletcher and Cragg books appeared over the Forties, followed by a couple of more, one in 1954 and another a decade later in 1964. There were two other series as well, one with Otis Beagle and Joe Peel, and the other with Simon Lash and Eddie Slocum, both numbering three books apiece.
All of these books are light and and slick and they tend rather to resemble each other, but Gruber also published some non-series mysteries which are more original. One of these was the noirish crime novel The Lock and the Key (1948), filmed as The Man in the Vault in 1956, which is being republished this year by Stark House, with an introduction by me. Another was Twenty Plus Two (1961), filmed the same year it was published under the same title.
In the early 1940s Gruber moved out to Los Angeles with his wife and son Robert to work in the film industry. Among other things, he wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios, co-wrote with Steve Fisher the script for Johnny Angel, and worked on scripts for films in the Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond series. In 1960 he wrote Twenty Plus Two with a film adaptation expressly in mine. The novel was published in March 1961 and the film opened seven months later in October. It must have gone into production about the time the novel was published.
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| the Bantam pb ed |
Gruber not only wrote the film's screenplay, but he produced the film as well. It was directed by Joseph Newman, whose greatest accomplishment to my mind was directing the 1965 adaptation of Ethel Lina White's shuddery (shuttery?) short story "An Unlocked Window" on the television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (It's the one about the nurse and the serial killer.) Newman also directed the series' earlier adaptation of Margaret Millar's Beast in View. But let's leave off the film for a bit and get back to the novel.
The novel, which is set in 1960, is about the the investigation by 41-year-old WWII veteran Tom Alder, who is not a PI exactly but rather a professional finder of missing heirs, into the murder of Julia Joliet, a dowdy, middle-aged fan mail secretary to film stars, including 34-year-old WWII hero and screen heartthrob Leroy Dane.
Tom thinks Joliet's death may have had something to do with the famous unsolved Doris Delaney kidnapping case--fifteen-year-old heiress Doris disappeared in New York in 1938 while cutting school to go to a malt shop--and he is soon looking into that affair, which is much more promising. Doris' grief-stricken father is now dead, but her mother, a recluse, is still around, still very rich and utterly convinced that her daughter, who would be 37 now, is very much alive.
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| Who killed dreamy war vet film star Leroy Dane's fan mail secretary? (actor Guy Madison, 1922-1996) |
Tom spends the novel flying back and forth across the United States, with stops in New York, Chicago, and, of all places, Bismarck, North Dakota, mostly spending his time making long distance phone calls to get people to dig up information for him. The phone bills must have been horrendous!
Along the way he's pursued across the country by his sexy twice-married, twice-divorced, gold-digging, long-ago fiancée Linda Foster, who heartlessly Dear John'ed him way back in '42 when he was fighting in the Pacific. Now Linda, it seems, brazenly wants him back.
Linda's modern menage includes her pet stockbroker fiance, Harris Toomey, and her filthy rich friends Walter and Nikki Collinson. Before he leaves LA Tom spends the night with amorous Linda. On his flight to New York the next day, however, Tom encounters beautiful Nikki, who like Linda is a few years younger than he, and becomes rather smitten with her.
Nikki alights in Chicago, but Tom finds plenty to do when he gets to NYC. There's a drunken newspaper reporter who covered the Delaney case to be located, for example, not to mention a call to be made upon reclusive Mrs. Delaney. Then there's the big fat man named Jacques Pleshette who has his own case for Alder--he wants him to find his long lost brother Auguste--and just won't let him alone.
Late in the novel Gruber manages a moving wartime flashback to Honolulu and an exciting, violent climax somewhere in the sticks in North Dakota. You might even be reminded of the great Nineties crime film Fargo. No wood chippers are involved though!
Fully a dozen years ago at this blog in happier days I reviewed a non-series Gruber novel which I hardly remember now but I quite evidently enjoyed; and I similarly enjoyed Gruber's Twenty Plus Two. It has a complex plot (people's ages matter), some interesting characters and a good resolution. I believe it will be the next Gruber reprinted by Stark House.
It's interesting to compare the film with the book in this case, because rarely does a crime writer have his fingerprints all over the film adaptation like Gruber did. The film is not terrible, but on the whole I have sadly to conclude that Gruber somewhat mucked up his own adaptation.
Of course the production values of the film were low--at one point on a supposed small plane flight you can see an insect crawling in front of the front window of the "plane"--and it looks like an episode in a TV crime series, but that does not in itself make for a bad film. The biggest problems stem from the casting and the changes which it prompted in the time frame of the book. Gruber just blew it here.
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| David Janssen and Dina Merrill chat with fifty-six-year-old Frank Gruber on the set of Twenty Plus Two. Oddly Merrill looked younger here than she did in the film, as did Janssen. Both he and Gruber, who definitely looked his age and died nine years later at 65, have cigarettes. A hard drinker as well as a smoker, Janssen died of a heart attack at the age of 48 in 1980. |
Thirty-year-old David Janssen of TV series The Fugitive fame plays Tom Alder and gives a creditable "tough" detective performance of the sort we would have seen in Forties hard-boiled detective films. He's actually over a decade younger than his book character but arguably could have passed for closer to forty. However the script chooses to make him a veteran of the Korean War, rather than World War Two, and moved the Doris Delaney case up a full decade to 1948. Gruber, in short, makes a hash of his own novel's crucial timeline. I can't go into full detail, but it's a definite plotting problem.
Janssen's female co-stars Jeanne Crain and Dina Merrill were both older than he, respectively 35 and 37. This is actually around the age of their characters in the book, but the discrepancy with Janssen's age, particularly in Merrill's case, is noticeable. The script would have us believe that Dina Merrill is fully a decade younger, younger than Janssen, and it's just not plausible--even less so when she appears in a flashback scene in Korea, where she's supposed to be around twenty. There is no conceivable way that Merrill could be a near teenager.
Aside from her age, the somewhat matronly Merrill just doesn't have the chops for this complex character, or the raw sex appeal. Crane on the other hand is a better fit as the alluring yet perpetually artificial Linda.
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| David Janssen and Jeanne Crane |
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| David Jansen and Dina Merrill looking like matronly Donna Reed of The Donna Reed Show (or maybe even her mother) |
The worst (indeed incomprehensible) case of miscasting, however, belongs to Brad Dexter as Leroy Dane. There is no way this beefy, 43-year-old westerns actor is credible for a minute as a teenybopper film idol. (Think someone like pretty boy Guy Madison.) There's an unintentionally hilarious scene where Dexter as Dane is pursued by a pack of smitten young girls at a hotel--I can't imagine what Gruber was thinking, particularly as he created the book character.
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| "And I'm telling you, bud, them teenyboppers love me!" |
William Demarest and Agnes Morehead are in the film too, but both of them are only in one scene apiece (as the alcoholic reporter and Mrs. Delaney respectively). The novel ends appropriately with Mrs. Delaney being crucially referenced, but the film ends frivolously instead with a throwaway bit of humor concerning Jacques Pleshette.
About frere Jacques, he's a great character in the novel, though Gruber obviously cribbed him from Caspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. (There are elements of Mask of Dimitrios too.) In the film actor Jacques Aubuchon, in decided contrast with Brad Dexter, is technically right for the part (though too young by two decades), but I was aching to see Sidney Greenstreet, sadly dead and gone for seven years when the film was made. When you read the novel you will none other than him. What zest he would have given to this role! Aubuchon I found a little too understated.
One piece of casting that Gruber got right was his own twenty-year-old son, Robert, or Bobby as he was familiarly known, in the twelfth-billed position as "bellboy." Perhaps unsurprisingly given his father's connections Bobby was an aspiring actor, but in IMDB he has only has this role and "sergeant" in a 1975 episode of M*A*S*H to his credit. He also published a single known mystery short story, quite credible, which I expect to see reprinted with Twenty Plus Two. He died unmarried in Los Angeles in 1982 at the age of 41. There's a tragic story there, I suspect. Was Bobby Gruber an early casualty of the AIDS plague?
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| The studio desperately tries to sex up the film and make sense of its title. If there are twenty clues in this film, I missed them and the "beautiful victims" both make it out of the film alive. The stilettoed blonde dish apparently is supposed to be Dina Merrill, who never exhibits a-tenth of that raw sex appeal. |
The most egregious part about Gruber monkeying with his own timeline in the film adaptation of his novel is that the title, which was kept, now makes absolutely no sense! It's been not 22 years since the Doris Delaney kidnapping, but 12. Did no one involved in this film ever point that out to Gruber? I guess Ten Plus Two didn't sound as good, though Ed McBain two years later would publish the crime novel Ten Plus One.
Gruber evidently adhered to the pulp fiction ethos "Don't ask questions, just get it down!" A little more care in casting would have made a better film, however. It also must be admitted that watching a guy make a series of phone calls from hotel rooms is not necessarily thrilling viewing. Some extra effort might have turned a fine little crime novel into a truly effective, cinematic film. For example, would it not have been more interesting to open the film with the Doris Delaney disappearance, then flash forward to the murder of Julia Joliet?
My advice on this one: read the novel when it's reprinted, don't see the film first. Currently, although the novel was reprinted in paperback and published in the US and UK, it's extremely rare; but that problem should soon be rectified.
