Book review: “Flee the Night in Anger” by Dan Keller

Flee the Night in Anger, published in 1954 by Dan Keller, is a pleasant enough noir novel.  Its plot is overly complicated, but that’s par for the course with a lot of mysteries. Some of the action — well, to be honest, a lot of the action — is pretty preposterous.

But it has its interesting and odd quirks.

• For instance, the narrator is Dan Keller, an ex-con, just out of prison after serving three years for manslaughter. So, the reader is supposed to think that the author and the character are the same person.  However, it looks from the copyright that Dan Keller is the penname for someone named Louis Kaufman.  Not sure why a pseudonym would be necessary.
• The novel is set in Montreal and Toronto, providing an unusual Canadian setting for a hardboiled crime story.  Keller, the narrator and author, mention places and streets in both cities that anyone familiar with the two places would be likely to recognize. But he doesn’t give much of a feel of the cityscape which could just as well be in Pittsburgh or Akron or San Diego. (It’s like that frequent Hollywood dodge of filming a story about Chicago in Toronto to save money.) In fact, I was thirty pages into the book before I realized that the opening scenes were set in Toronto.
• Keller’s writing is workmanlike, except for a nine-page section at the halfway point in the 160-page book. This is when Keller and one of his love interests, Joan Martin, jump into Lake Ontario at night to elude the police. There is a strong and surprisingly intense feel to the descriptions of Keller and Joan trying this way and that go avoid capture, finally breaking into a yacht.  The prose here is so much not like everything before and after that I wonder if Keller (Kaufman) had someone else write it.

One last oddity is the book’s cover which shows an attractive young woman standing on a rowboat.  She’s in what seems to be a bikini top over capri pants and shows some skin, but it’s quite an innocent image compared to the usual over-sexed, more than half-undressed woman on nearly every other noir cover.

And the interesting thing — again in contrast to the usual cover with little or no connection to the story of the book — is that the image depicts an actual moment in the Keller’s novel.  It’s when Joan is returning to the yacht with supplies.

She rowed like she swam, with clean, even strokes that brought her alongside in short order.

“Hi, sailor.”  She grinned up at me, looking cute enough to eat in a pair of gray slacks and a gaily colored halter.

Oh, and one final oddity: Where did Keller (Kaufman) come up with the title of Flee the Night in Anger?  It doesn’t seem to be a literary reference although it sounds like one.  And, for a noir novel, especially this one, it strikes me as rather extravagant.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

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