Thin Air - Howard Browne

THE STORY: Ad exec, Ames Coryell, returns from a vacation in Maine with his wife Leona and 3 year-old daughter Phoebe.  While Ames unloads the luggage from the car Leona quickly exits the car and enters the house.  When Ames goes in with his daughter and the suitcases he can't find his wife. Her handbag is on the table in the dining room but no sign of his wife.  He panics.  Runs through the neighborhood and cannot find her.  When he calls his neighbor Sally Fremont to ask if maybe Leona made a quick visit at their home Sally is perplexed. It's 2 AM in the morning! Why would Leona stop by? "Where is Mark?" Ames asks inquiring about Sally's husband. She tells him Mark is still awake in his office working on his latest architect's project. "Will you check? Maybe Leona is there."  Sally does so and is shocked when she discovers that Mark too is gone. Did the two run off together? If not, have they vanished into Thin Air (1954)?

THE CHARACTERS:  This is primarily Ames' story and he acts as first person nareator. Once is wife disappears he reveals himself to be a wilful and temperamental man. He makes an immediate enemy of Lt. John Box assigned to look into the claim that Leona Coryell has disappeared. Box makes no pretense that he suspects Ames has something to do with her disappearance which of course infuriates Ames. The two do not get off to a good start and it only worsens as the book progresses. Fed up with a detective who won't listen and has already accused him of murder Ames is determined to solve the mystery of his missing wife on his own.

Then Mark is found unconscious not far form his home and taken to a hospital where he lapses into a coma. He has been struck on the back of the head with the ubiquitous blunt object. Now Box thinks that Ames is acting out some revenge plot having picked up on hints that Ames imagined that Mark has perhaps had a secret affair with Leona and that they were running off together. Box is sure that Ames found Mark and attacked him. He warns Ames that if the coma worsens and Mark eventually dies he will be after Ames Coryell for a definite murder.

French paperback edition
(Editions Ditis, 1957)

Coryell then dismisses the police altogether and comes up with an ingenious plan. He enlists his entire advertising firm to turn his wife's disappearance into a regional campaign. Everyone from the art department head to every agent writing copy will work on the project. Ames even involves the agency's market research team who work at a completely different company to help in their elaborate campaign.  They will create a public interest in Ames' missing wife. TV ads, magazine ads, radio spots--the whole shebang.  Leona's face will be everywhere and she will be on everyone's mind just like the many products that the advertising firm sells. Create the need and the public will respond with purchase power.  Or in this case with possible eyewitness accounts and other information. The ultimate aim is to turn the public into a collective of amateur detectives. Soon the police and the ad agency are deluged with phone calls offering  tips and witness stories.

Some of the tips pay off and Ames soon finds himself paying a visit to a blonde woman staying in a fleabag hotel. And that's when the story begins to get complicated and a bit fantastical. Best leave it at there. Unexpected twists and unbelievable coincidences compound leading to a shocking murder and the somewhat outlandish reason for Leona's disappearance.

INNOVATIONS:  The idea of using an ad agency to solve a crime is wholly original. Many of the sequences where the men from Palmer & Verrick, Market Researchers offer their expertise to Ames show a truly clever way to introduce detection into the story. Market researchers, as head agent Uhlman, tells Ames are little more than compilers of statistics. They have at their hands multiple references and databases (mostly in book form in this decade) to help locate anyone and any company. As an example: when Ames shows Uhlman and his men a photograph of Marty Dry wearing tee shirt, jeans and house slippers standing in front of  car parked near an apartment building and another building with the letters ERY visible at the edge of the photo Ames is sure than the photo was taken in front of his home. Who would be dressed like that anywhere else? Remember it's 1954 and slippers were only worn in the home not in public like they are now in this age of "slovenly chic" fashion choices. They also notice the numbers 773 on the building with the letters ERY.  Uhlman offers up a variety of businesses those letters might be: grocery, stationery, bakery, millinery, etc.  After looking up addresses in Manhattan where those numbers occur in the street address he then brilliantly eliminates all neighborhoods where those businesses could not be next to an apartment building using his vast knowledge of sociodemographics.  Then Uhlman and a crew of eight other men use phone directories, split up the alphabet, and within only a few minutes they have pegged a few possible addresses where Marty Dry lives and when Ames drives to the firt and most likely address he is astonished that the photo matches the location exactly. Very impressive detective work, I'd say. Completely believable, too, given how market research firms work.  

Some more innovative detective work is performed by Ame's daughter who is only 3 years old. When she asked her mother "Do you like me, Mommy?" while they were driving home from a brief stop in Connecticut Phoebe tells her father that her mother said the wrong thing.  It's a game that she plays with her parents. She asks the question and they always says No. And then Phoebe asks "Why not?" and they reply "Because I love you." When the woman said yes to the question "Do you like me?" Phoebe knew it wastt' her mother sitting next to her. This surprising news leads Ames to the most startling discovery in the book and the beginning of his action filled search for the whereabouts of his wife.

THE AUTHOR:  Howard Browne (1907-1999) worked at several advertising agencies as well as being the editor of two notable genre fiction magazines according to the DJ blurb on the back of my copy of Thin Air.  Further research revealed to me that those magazines were Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. NOt only wa she editor of those magazines Browne dicontributed his own fantasy, adventure and science fiction stories under both his own name and a viarietiy of speudonyms.  He his probably best known for the crime novels he wrote under his pseudonym John Evans. As Evans he created the private eye Paul Pine who appeared in a series of four novels set in Oak Park, Illinois and Chicago.  In 1001 Midnights Bill Pronzini called the Paul Pine "one of the best of the plethora of tough guy heroes" from the post-WW2 era. He goes on:  "Although the Pine novels are solidly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, they have a complexity and character all their own and are too well crafted to be mere imitations."  Browne also worte for television and radio. Thin Air was adapted several times for television and movies.  The first of several TV versions was the sixth episode of the second season of Climax! with Robert Sterling as Ames and Pat O'Brien as the policeman. Later adaptations of the missing person motif would appear in numerous crime dramas including an episodes of The Rockford Fiels and Simon & Simon.  In addition to numerous TV scripts from series in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly westerns and crime dramas, Browne wrote the screenplays for three gangster movies: Portrait of a Mobster (1961), The St. Valentine's Massacre (1966) and Capone (1975) with Ben Gazzara in the title role.

QUOTES:  If I don't get [my wife] you're going to be up to your tie clasp in police. 

He looked slightly less dangerous than the Bobbsey Twins. 

When a girl's that close to a guy it would only seem reasonable that she'd have his phone number or his address... Maybe in a little black book. Girls who live alone in cheap hotels along shoddy back streets have books like that. ...At best this was a lonely world. 

I was making enough racket to alert half the county. This was what came from preferring football and girls to a membership in the Boy Scouts.

Looking into his eye was like looking at the falling blade of a guillotine

I was up to my hatband in doubt.

There was no warning, no advance whisper of sound. Only the world blowing up in a sudden sea of white flare laced with agony, and I was falling through it in slow motion toward the edge of blackness.

It was time for the organ music and please omit flowers.

EASY TO FIND? Multiple editions are offered for sale on line, a mix of paperback repirnts and the original Simon & Schuster hardcover. The first paperback (Dell 894, 1955) is the most common edition for sale. A later 1984 reprint from Carrol & Graf also turns up often from online dealers.  The first edition will of course cost you more with pries ranging from $75 (dampstained book with a VG- DJ) to $450 for a fine copy in DJ that is also signed by Howard Browne. Happy hunting!