Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (5 page)

This curious rationalization by Al Mercer hurts the story, especially because he never wrestles with his conscience again. Jack Finney would use a similar excuse in
Assault on a Queen,
and it is problematic there as well. To enjoy "5 Against the House," the reader is required to accept Al's argument, and (fortunately) the story is good enough that one soon forgets about the ethical dilemma and gets wrapped up in the events.

Tina concocts a method of arriving in Reno unnoticed and tells Al, but Finney keeps the reader in suspense by not telling us at this point in the story. Tina thus becomes the fifth member of the title group.

Her plan is revealed a few pages later, and she explains that they can cross the country hidden in a trailer, emerging only at night for supplies. They plan to abandon the trailer in Reno and then rob Harold's Club disguised as cowboys during the Rodeo Week celebration on the Fourth of July. The group decides to go through with the planned robbery, and part one of the serialized novel ends with Al and Tina struggling with the idea of marriage.

Part two appeared in the next issue of
Good Housekeeping,
published in August 1953. This section begins as Al and his friends collect supplies and work out the details of the trip to Reno and the robbery. Jerry flies to Reno and takes photographs at Harold's Club; when he returns, he explains his plan to his friends but again the details are withheld from the reader. Eventually, the gang begins driving crosscountry, with Jerry behind the wheel and everyone else hiding in the trailer.

During the trip, Al gets to know Tina better and falls deeply in love with her. They decide that the robbery is too risky and Al tries to back out, but Brick refuses to allow this and threatens to harm Tina if Al does not cooperate. Al stays with the group against his better judgment as the trailer crosses the state line into Nevada.

After reaching Reno and Harold's Club, the men don their cowboy suits and Tina heads for a boarding house. Jerry waits with the car as Al enters the club and surveys it, followed by Guy. Al watches a man pushing a cart and sees him go in and out of the cash room. The cart contains silver dollars that are used to replenish supplies at the gambling tables. Al approaches the man with the cart and tells him that Guy will kill him if he does not smile and cooperate. The man walks out of the casino with Al into an alley, where Brick threatens him.

At this point, the details of the plan start to become clear to the reader. There is a duplicate cart waiting in the alley, and Jerry is allegedly hiding inside the cart. However, the reader learns that it's actually a tape recorder inside the cart that plays a recording of Jerry's voice. "Jerry" threatens to kill the casino employee and himself if the man does not cooperate. They convince the man to go back into the casino with Al, who watches anxiously as he enters the cash room.

The man emerges and wheels the cart over to where Al is standing. Al takes the money sack from the cart, gives the man a warning about raising an alarm, and exits into the alley. As part two ends, Al finds himself alone, the getaway car having disappeared.

The last of the three-part serial appeared in the September 1953 issue of
Good Housekeeping.
From the alley, Al climbs a fire escape and looks down as people pour out of the casino. Al runs up onto the roof and hides the money in the netting that surrounds a big balloon advertising Harold's Club. Al removes his costume and climbs back down to the alley when the coast is clear. He then re-enters the club in street clothes and goes unnoticed; he plays a slot machine and hits the jackpot but walks away from the money to avoid calling attention to himself.

Reaching the boarding house where Tina is staying, he joins her and they spend the night together. They are wed at the courthouse the next day and honeymoon in Virginia City. A description of the city foreshadows themes that will be central to Finney's next novel,
The Body Snatchers:

Virginia City is a ghost town; eighty years ago forty thousand people lived there, and mined and fought for the millions in silver they dug out of these hills from the famous Comstock Lode. Now, surrounded by the still raw-looking old slag heaps, maybe five hundred people live in the dead town, running bars, restaurants, and curio shops for tourists. Off the main street we walked past empty old houses, gray and paintless, their windows gone, their porches sagging, their once expensive ornamental porch railings hanging twisted and loose. We stared at roofless walls that had once held a family, trying to imagine it. At one end of 
town we walked up a broken flight of stone stairs leading to nothing but weeds, rubble, and humming insects, the house that had stood there long since gone [171].

In "5 Against the House," this scene depicts something that Al and Tina see on their honeymoon, but in
The Body Snatchers,
similar scenes would have more ominous connotations.

Back in Reno, Al walks to a pre-arranged meeting place, where he sees Brick. Brick explains that a patrol car had made Jerry leave the alley. Al refuses to tell Brick where the money is hidden (Brick, after all, had forced Al to remain involved), and the next day Al and Tina travel to Lake Tahoe to continue their honeymoon.

Back at the same meeting point, a little boy points out Brick to a policeman, and he is caught. Brick identifies Al, who manages to escape and tries to leave town with Tina in a taxicab. The alert cabbie signals a police car, however, and the newlyweds are arrested, taken to the police station, and interrogated. The plan failed because a nine-year-old boy had written his name in the dust on the trailer in Salt Lake City. He was then able to identify Brick as the driver for the police after the robbery.

Al and Tina are taken to an office, where they learn that Brick had given everyone's names to the police. Al agrees to tell them where the money is in exchange for Tina's freedom. After the money is recovered, Al gets a lecture and the club decides not to prosecute anyone in order to avoid bad publicity. Al flies home that evening and never sees Brick again. The story ends with Al holding Tina's hand and realizing that "now I knew what is important and what life is for..." (190)—he has matured in the course of the story and now realizes that love matters more than money.

The three-part serial in
Good Housekeeping was
successful enough for Jack Finney to turn it into his first novel, which was published by Doubleday the next year, in February 1954. The novel is not significantly different than the serialized story, and all of the major plot twists are unchanged. Minor revisions abound, though, often adding expletives or salacious details to scenes that were more innocent in the family magazine.

In chapter seven of the novel, background details about Guy's family are added, as are more details to strengthen Jerry's motivations for robbery. This chapter also deletes the details of the plan to go cross-country in a trailer; this is held back from the reader until chapter eleven, when the five friends actually make the trip. This method of creating suspense mirrors that used by Finney in holding back the details of the actual robbery from the reader.

Finney would use this same technique in his other three caper novels,
The House of Numbers, Assault on a Queen,
and
The Night People,
with varying degrees of success.

The main change in the middle part of the novel concerns a dream that Tina has while they are driving to Reno; she has a nightmare that Al will be killed in the robbery, and this leads him to try to back out of the scheme. The latter part of the novel has few differences from the serialized version.

Reviewers at the time were supportive of Jack Finney's first novel. Anthony Boucher, writing in the
New York Times,
called Finney "the admirable short-story writer," remarked that "the elaborately ingenious gimmicks with which the raid is carried out would stir the admiration of Raffles or even of Arsène Lupin," and concluded that "the high enterprise and dazzling execution of the crime itself will stay with you." James Sandoe of the
New York Herald Tribune
called
5 Against the House
a "pretty sad work" but admitted that "the essential gimmick is worth a look for its preposterous ingenuities and Mr. Finney gives the events some nice panic-striking swerves." Sergeant Cuff of the
Saturday Review
added that "implausabilities abound, but story is well paced."

Perhaps even more important to Jack Finney's life was the sale of
5 Against the House
to Columbia Pictures; it was made into a motion picture of the same name and released in May 1955. A paperback edition of the novel was issued by Pocket Books in July 1955 to coincide with the film. Stirling Silliphant, John Barnwell, and William Bowers wrote the screenplay and Phil Karlson directed it. Finney was said to have disliked the film (Bosky 173).

Viewed today, it is a disappointing adaptation of the novel that turns Brick into a psychotic Korean War veteran and Tina into a glamorous lounge singer. The climax is utterly different and clichéd — Brick steals the money and runs for it; he is cornered in a parking garage by Al and the police and talked out of using his gun. The film is most interesting when it follows the novel closely, in the trip to Reno and the robbery of Harold's Club. The film is discussed in more detail in chapter nineteen.

5 Against the House
is a mediocre novel that has not been reprinted in America since 1955. Its chief value is that it set Jack Finney's career as a novelist in motion and set the scene for the series of caper novels that he would write over the next twenty-five years. His second novel would be much more memorable.

FOUR

The Body Snatchers

Jack Finney's next published work came in the November 26, 1954 issue of
Collier's,
the bi-weekly magazine that had published so many of his early short stories. He had not published anything since 5
Against the House
, which had been issued as a novel in February of that year, and his last story for
Collier's
had appeared on October 18,1952 ("Diagnosis Completed").

"The Body Snatchers" was billed as "a new three-part serial," and would appear in three consecutive issues of
Collier's
(part two was published in the December 10, 1954 issue, followed by part three in the December 24, 1954 issue). Little did readers know that this would eventually become Finney's best-known tale, a story that would work its way into the cultural mind-set of the latter half of twentieth-century America.

The story is told in first-person narration by Miles Bennell, a 28-year-old doctor in the small town of Santa Mira, California. His former girlfriend, Becky Driscoll, arrives at his office just before closing time on a Thursday to report that she is worried about her cousin Wilma, who has come to believe that her Uncle Ira is an impostor.

After going to see Ira and finding him unchanged, Miles refers Wilma to a psychiatrist named Mannie Kaufman in nearby Valley Springs. On Friday, another patient tells Miles that her husband is not himself. By Tuesday, he has referred five more patients to Dr. Kaufman for the same problem.

On Wednesday night, Miles and Becky go on a date to the movies but are summoned by Jack Belicec, who takes them to his home and shows them a strangely unformed body that has appeared on the billiard table in his basement. Miles examines the body and decides that it is somehow not yet alive. He, Becky, Jack, and Jack's wife Theodora agree that they do not want to call the local police. Miles notices that the body appears to be a model of none other than Jack Belicec.

At three a.m. on Thursday morning, Jack and Theodora arrive at Miles's house and Miles has to sedate Theodora. She is frantic because she had trouble waking Jack after he fell asleep. On a hunch, Miles runs to Becky's house, breaks into her basement, and finds a double of Becky there. He takes Becky home and meets Jack, Theodora, and Mannie Kaufman. They return to Jack's house, only to find the body gone from the basement.

In part one of "The Body Snatchers," Finney sets the stage for a tale of horror and moves the story along quickly. All of the main characters are introduced and the small town setting is depicted quite well. The ending is a cliffhanger that is sure to make readers anxious for the arrival of part two.

The second part of the serial begins with Mannie Kaufman providing a logical explanation that the people of Santa Mira are suffering from mass hysteria. Jack produces a file he has amassed of clippings reporting unusual events (much like those found in the books of phe-nomenologist Charles Fort), including a local story about seed pods from outer space.

After Miles and Jack finally report the body in Jack's basement to the police, the tide in Santa Mira starts to turn. First a patient tells Miles that all is well, then he hears the same story from Wilma. That night, however, Jack finds four giant seed pods in Miles's basement. Miles and Jack recall the news clipping about seed pods from outer space as they watch the pods begin to take human form before their eyes. Miles destroys the pods and attempts to telephone the FBI in San Francisco, but the lines are tampered with and the call is unsuccessful.

Miles, Becky, Jack, and Theodora pile into Jack's car and drive out of Santa Mira, traveling eleven miles on Highway 101. They stop and check the trunk of the car, where they find two more pods that Miles destroys. They decide to return to Santa Mira to get help.