Only Couples Need Apply - Doris Miles Disney

Jay & Gretchen are looking to relax after a series of “projects” they’ve finished in various states across the country. They find a charming furnished coach house in Connecticut after seeing an ad that states Only Couples Need Apply (1973) and successfully rent it from Mrs. Mercer. They'll stay here before heading to Maine where they intend to retire from their “business.” All is well until we discover that those projects were elaborately planned robberies that drained the bank accounts and financial investments of several unmarried senior citizens. Gretchen gets herself hired as a secretary or companion, inveigles her employer to turn over control of their finances to her and with the help of Jay she robs them blind. The project usually ends (quite unnecessarily) in murder. Are the couple planning to do the same to Mrs. Mercer? It doesn’t seem that way. In fact, nothing much happens at all until Jay gets the egotistical idea to go solo, but this doesn't happen until well past the halfway mark.

When Jay tries burglary on his own mayhem ensues. But all this action and genuine suspense comes too late.  And the tying up of the unusual plot complications is very rushed.

If nothing really happens until the last three chapters then what is the book about? Character study -- and it's mostly in the past. More than three quarters of the book is the story of the five different “projects” that Gretchen and Jay have already completed. Disney attempts to compare and contrast the criminal worldviews of Gretchen and Jay. We get the horrible childhood Gretchen had that led her to stealing and her first thrilling murder. Jay is nothing more than a puppy in training and he’s bitter and resentful in his role of last minute hitman and getaway driver. He wants his own “project” and sees his chance when they land at the coach house in Connecticut. But the needless repetition of these projects with the same M.O. with the same kind of gullible and lonely victim gets increasingly tiresome and dull. Only when the penultimate project is described and we have a very cautious daughter overseeing the interview and hiring process for her invalid mother is there any real variety and a modicum of suspense in what amounts to a litany of thefts and death by gunshot.

And converting the stolen money into traveler’s checks?! It seems such an old person’s habit --especially in the 1970s -- not the practice of a hip young woman in her 30s. Gretchen only makes things more difficult for herself. She has three different sets of traveler’s checks all with different signatures of fake identities. Far from clever this absurd idea unsurprisingly proves to be her biggest mistake.

This is the most hardboiled of Disney’s books I’ve read. I thought she did malice domestic really well, but here she allows the 1970s vibe to intrude in a way that she can’t quite handle. Her dialogue gets stilted when she means Gretchen and Jay to be harsh and cruel. The sex scenes are laughably tame when I think she intended them to be steamy. But the violence and torture is right on target for a hardboiled crime novel. A truly odd mix from this writer.

All the while the entire plot is utterly preposterous. Through a series of plot contrivances Gretchen always manages to find people who do no background checks on her, never see her out of her disguise (a brunette wig, nerd glasses and fat suit) and allow her to take over their money managing as if she were hired to be their CPA. That Gretchen thinks she needs Jay as an accomplice is the biggest flaw of the story. She has a disguise, he does not. She does all the work prior to him stepping in for the final theft and execution of the victim. In the final stage (always the same) he shows up, points a gun at the victim, while Gretchen demands that her employer call the bank and allow her to close the account and leave with cash. Then after all that is done they tie up and shoot their victim. If Gretchen has so cleverly managed to drain the bank account on her own all those weeks why is it necessary for her to ask permission to get the last portion in cash? And why does she have Jay walk in with a gun and not bother with even a simple disguise? He uses the same gun for each murder. Never bothers to get rid of it. His fatal mistake for the book just as Gretchen had hers.

The final three chapters are mixture of suspense and sloppiness. Disney excels at creating tension in parallel scenes like the cinematically inspired section when Jay is committing a burglary in the main house while Mrs. Mercer is on her way home. This particular book, however, is overloaded with plot contrivances and last minute background info that comes at the most inopportune moments. We learn of a deep, dark secret in Mrs. Mercer’s past that changes the way she behaves for the rest of the book. It was a bit outlandish and would have made better sense had we been told the secret much earlier in the book. As it occurs everything from the climax onward to the finale is rushed and compacted. Crucial scenes are condensed to a few sentences that should have taken several paragraphs to lay out. Disney spent so much time on the history of her antihero couple that she seemed to have run out of patience with her characters. Eager to get everything over and done with she has the FBI enter the picture and prove to be super agents in connecting all the murder/theft cases and doing it all in what seems like a couple of hours. They prove Gretchen guilty for all of the murders thus allowing Mrs. Mercer to live happily ever after. Never mind that she herself is guilty of something horrible.

Betrayal. Amanda Blake as Mrs. Mercer
at the mercy of cruel Gretchen played
by Tisha Sterling (in wig cap)

In the end so much of this book is either disappointing or dumb.  Only Couples Need Apply – a title, by the way, that has no real significance – comes very late in Disney’s career, her fourth to last novel. She must have been running out of ideas and watching too many made for TV movies.

Interestingly, many of Disney's books were adapted for TV -- including this one! Only Couples Need Apply was made into the TV movie Betrayal (1974). Amanda Blake (best known as Kitty, the saloon owner, from the ancient but long running western TV series Gunsmoke) stars as Mrs. Mercer with Tisha Sterling and Sam Groom (both 1960s-1970s TV stalwarts) as Gretchen and Jay. You can watch it on Amazon Prime but even with its minor improvements -- only one "project" is shown with Jay as the aggressor in the duo, Gretchen is trying to reform, Mrs. Mercer's secret makes more sense and is introduced earlier in the story [just as I suggested!] -- it still doesn't change the overall ineffectiveness of this sadly unexciting suspense novel.