Chance
Molloy pursues a crooked senator’s daughter aboard an airplane, but their
flight is turbulent in more ways than one
In
the 1940s, air travel is still in its infancy. Seats turn into private
sleepers, passengers smoke in flight, and it’s no sweat to carry weapons
aboard. Chance Molloy, a self-made airline owner, is dealt a blow when his
plans to establish a passenger airline in South America are thwarted by a
corrupt US senator. At the news, Molloy’s brother, a partner in the venture,
kills himself. Seeking some kind of justice, Molloy boards Flight 14 from New
York to New Mexico with one goal in mind: to get acquainted with the senator’s
daughter, Janet Lord, a passenger on the plane. But her charms are greater than
he anticipates, and Molloy’s simple plan quickly becomes complicated.
Also
on board are three of the senator’s henchmen, a corpse disguised as a
passenger, and Molloy’s stewardess ex-girlfriend. Soon Molloy realizes that
this flight will reach a destination he hadn’t anticipated.
Originally,
I was going to give Dead at the Takeoff
2.5 stars because the story was good, even though the writing seemed clichéd
and full of adverbs. But when I went to
Amazon to get the length and price, I read the four-star review that was there,
and the reviewer said, “Thank you Mysterious
Press for rediscovering this lost classic.” I thought the book was plagiarized
and reduced that number to zero roses.
The editor contacted me and told me the book is a reprint of a
classic. That changes my whole view of the
book.
Let’s take this one issue at a time.
Dead at the Takeoff
was rather clichéd and full of unnecessary adverbs. “Jarringly, the telephone broke the labored
stillness.”
That’s how most people wrote in the 1940s. Even the line “It was a dark and stormy
night” was new once upon a time.
Mr.
Dent used a lot of passive voice, and head-hopped. The industry standard is one point of view
per scene. He changed point of view in
the middle of sentences.
This is a newer standard.
It had not been set when Dead at
the Takeoff was written.
Then
there was the use of pluperfect verbs. Who speaks this way? “We had done this? And then we had done that?”
I wasn’t around back then. Maybe people did use more pluperfect tense in
everyday speech.
There
were sentences that were just plain weird:
“He gave himself, for a few moments, to allaying his anxiety.”
Again, this may simply be a matter of the style of
writing people used in the 1940s.
Finally,
this book takes place in the forties between World War II and Korea. It
would be nice if Mr. Dent had somehow given the date at the beginning of the
book.
You don’t need to put the date into a contemporary
book. Dead at the Takeoff happens in the
year in which it was written. Who knew
it would be reprinted sixty years later and reviewed by a reader who did not
recognize the author’s name and realize it was a reprint of a manuscript that
was sixty years old?
If you can get past the differences in writing style
between then and now, you will hopefully enjoy this book. The story is engaging and fast-paced. The characters could have been a bit deeper,
but that was the nature of pulp detective novels in the forties. I suspect I’d have had a lot more fun reading
this book if I’d realized that’s what it was.
Length:
223 Pages
Price:
$7.99
Thanks
for visiting. RIW
