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.

The Magic Grandfather - Doris Miles Disney

Something Special!  The exclamation mark in a circle on the bottom of the front flap of The Magic Grandfather's hardcover 1st edition dust jacket indicates that this Doris Miles Disney mystery defies simple subgenre categorization. I was excited to read it.  Would it deliver the goods like so many of L. P. Davies' similarly tagged and utterly unique crime novels? Would it too be a daring shake-up of crime fiction conventions? Well, yes and no.

Like most of Doris Miles Disney’s crime fiction The Magic Grandfather (1966) is one of her many books in Doubleday’s Crime Club. In the late 1950s and 1960s the editors devised a special marketing tactic with clever logos to indicate if a book has a Favorite Sleuth, is a Damsel in Distress story, a Chase and Adventure thriller, Classic Puzzler or fits into some other subgenre (see the chart with all the logos below). The “Something Special” tag and logo indicates a book not easy to stuff into any recognizable subgenre yet were always standouts for plotting and characters. The Something Special books almost always prove to be intriguingly constructed novels that play with detective fiction conventions, add modern touches to the plot, and still manage to surprise and bring a smile to my face. I have made a concerted effort to seek out as many of these books with the exclamation mark logo as I can find and read. More often than not these books are the cream of the crop of the Crime Club imprint. Only rarely do they disappoint with a final twist that was not a surprise at all.

The Magic Grandfather (1966) has a relatively simple plot: it’s revenge pure and simple. But there are secrets in the past that remain hidden until the final utterly bizarre chapter. In a nutshell – Etta Lane has been living happily as a widow for over 27 years until Dan Ferris, her ex-father-in-law, who has been hunting for her since 1925 finally finds her. Then he slowly makes her life hell blackmailing her for something criminal that happened in her past and extorting her lucrative dividends from wisely invested stocks. The secret in the past involves her dead husband Jim, Ferris’ son. Just what exactly happened we will not know until Part Two in the novel which takes place in 1925. We learn about Etta's life with Jim and his father in a vaudeville touring company that climaxes in a courtroom trial for the crime Ferris alludes to throughout Part One. The story wraps up in an 13 year flash forward to 1965 when Sarah Prince, who was a precocious and intrusive 5 year-old in 1952 back in Part One, comes of age and is in her first year of college. On her Thanksgiving holiday she visits Dan Ferris who now lives in Etta Lane’s house in order to deliver him some food for his lonely holiday. What she sees and hears is a nightmare come true and explains the various mysteries left hanging back in Parts One and Two.

So is this deceptively simple plot really Something Special? As you know I’ve seen every trick a writer can pull in detective and crime fiction since I first fell in love with the genre as a teen back in the 1970s. It’s a matter of being able to perform even the oldest trick in the book with finesse and panache that will make me stand up and cheer. I’ve also sampled more than my fair share of very weird books with bizarre endings like the one that appears in The Magic Grandfather. And sorry to report, my friends, I saw this trick coming pages before the shattering climax.

Oh yes! I figured out the entire book, all the twists, even the detailed and unusual vaudeville act that Dan Ferris alludes to repeatedly but never once describes to anyone, and of course the bizarre final scene was telegraphed all because of a simple few sentences that occur in Part One. And though I shouted aloud “I KNEW IT!” when I got to the end I was a bit let down that it was all so obvious.  At least to me. I enjoyed what Disney attempted to pull off. But she let the ace fall from her sleeve rather clumsily.  I really wanted this to be a winner for me like so many of the Crime Club's "Something Special" mystery novels. Simultaneously and ironically, I was rather astounded that I managed to get it all so accurately.

This may be a truly flipped out suspense thriller with genuine shocks for some of you. Granted it is well constructed and has genuinely suspenseful moments. The characters are well done and you are rooting for Etta from the outset and hoping Dan gets what's coming to him. But savvy readers who have seen a lot of horror movies and read a lot of Robert Bloch, John Keir Cross and seen a few specific Alfred Hitchcock episodes from his two TV series will most likely be able to figure it all out. And that's a disappointment.

As a concluding coda for any of you still interested in reading this book I offer a warning. By all means avoid buying the Zebra paperback which has as its cover illustration a massive spoiler that will fairly ruin the book before you even read the first sentence. I mean MASSIVE. Unbelievable!  I have chosen not to include that cover among the paperback reprint edition photos used here.  This title was one of Disney's most financially successful, if not artistically competent, books with at least six editions in English that I uncovered, two from the same publisher. But what editor or publisher would ever allow that kind of artwork on a mystery novel? The mind boggles. Also, one publicity blurb I found online says that Dan Ferris, the title character who survives to age 90+, is murdered. And that is utterly wrong. Caveat emptor! And Caveat lector, too.

FFB: Voice from the Grave - Doris Miles Disney

1st US Paperback
(Macfadden, 1970)

THE STORY: Adele Van Ostrand refuses to believe her son and his friend died in a canoeing accident when they went away for a camping trip and never returned. Neither body has been found, but the smashed remains of the wooden canoe washed up along the river banks leading police to believe that both boys drowned. Adele holds out hope that Howie survived while her family, friend Ursula, and police try to convince her otherwise. Then the phone rings. Howie is on the other end. He begs her not to tell anyone he is alive. Something has happened and he needs money. He outlines a plan and pleads with his mother to carry it out. And so begins a sinister plot tinged with deceit and exploitation of grief culminating in a truth more horrible than Adele could imagine.

THE CHARACTERS: In Adele Doris Miles Disney has created one of the least sympathetic portraits of a grieving mother in all of crime fiction. Voice from the Grave (1968) is both an exploration of mother too in love with her son whose devotion spills over into co-dependence, an obsessive need to control and a delusional hope that the person who is exploiting her must be no one other than her boy Howie. Only when her friend Ursula gives her solid proof that Howie and Dennis both must have died does Adele begin to suspect that she is being used. When she relents  she turns her attention against her stepson Lee, a young man who she has basically ignored all his life.

Adele has been married three separate times and has several step-children while only Howie is her own child. Unable to give love or see it offered from others, Adele is a pathetic picture of narcissism and selfishness. She claims others are self-interested, like her step-son Lee, but cannot recognize her own self-absorption. The reader cannot really sympathize with her in any way. She is being victimized by someone and, whether it is Howie or not, we feel that she absolutely deserves it.

US 1st edition (Doubleday, 1968)

The only real satisfaction in reading the book is trying to figure who is on the other end of the phone and why that person is taunting Adele and taking from her everything they can -- money, her trust and eventually her sanity.  Is it some sort of revenge for the past?  In part perhaps, but there is another aspect of the novel that will tie into the Adele/Howie story.

Disney also uses this novel to write about troubled young people desperate to find themselves, to be free from controlling and suffocating adults, and who in their rebellion lead themselves down the path of destruction. The opening of the novel tells us that two teenage boys have broken into an elderly man's home in order to steal his prized collection of whiskey. Caught in the act and fleeing from the house one of the boys strikes out at the man causing him to fall. The man hits his head on the stone steps in front of the porch and is sent to the hospital in critical condition. The reader awaits the old man's fate and the boys worry that if he dies they will be then guilty of a felony -- death caused during the commission of a robbery.

The camping trip that Adele thinks is going to be nothing more than canoe paddling and fishing turns into a hedonistic indulgence of underage drinking, picking up girls at the beach, and wild partying. When news surfaces in town of a young girl who has gone missing, the reader starts to put together the cleverly dropped hints that Howie and Dennis must have got up to no good and may be responsible for her disappearance.

These ostensibly independent plot threads must connect somehow leading the reader to ask multiple questions. Who survived the canoe accident?  Was it merely a sham? Are both boys dead?  Is someone pretending to be Howie? Who would want to prey on Adele and keep asking for her to drain her bank account? And is the missing girl dead or alive?  Could she be involved in causing the canoe accident?  Is she behind all the mysterious phone calls?

QUOTES: [Adele's] skin looked too tight for the bones of her face, Her pallor made her eyes look even bluer than they were. She had an indestructible elegance, Ursula thought, that neither time nor sorrow would ever take from her.

THE AUTHOR: Born in Glastonbury, Connecticut Doris Miles Disney (1907-1976) lived most of her life in her home state. She published at least one book a year throughout her writing career beginning in 1943 with A Compound for Death. With the exception of one mystery novel all of her work was published by Doubleday's "Crime Club" who said that Disney's books sold approximately 675,000 copies over her long career.

Her novels were a mix of hardboiled crime novels, domestic suspense, and some of the earliest examples of an inverted historical detective novel, with a particular leaning for the 19th century. She created three series detectives -- Jim O'Neill, a cop; Jeff DiMarco, an insurance investigator whose novels are the closest Disney came to writing genuine noir; and a postal inspector named Dave Madden. However, the bulk of her novels feature no series characters and tend to feature guileless senior citizens as the victims; duplicitous husbands and wives plotting murder against each other; adultery and blackmail. Disney employed familiar motifs of noir and hardboiled crime fiction but transplanted the usual urban scenes and gritty city life to rural and suburban settings recalling the work of her contemporaries Charlotte Armstrong and Ursula Curtiss.

Disney had one daughter, Elizabeth Disney Laing, with whom she was living in Fredericksburg, Virginia at the time of her death. Disney also had two sisters who both lived in Connecticut.

MOVIES & TV: Three of her books featuring insurance investigator Jeff DiMarco were made into movies. Fugitive Lady (1950) (probably taken from her 1946 crime novel Dark Road, aka Dead Stop) was an Italian & British co-production which included Janis Paige the only American actor in the mostly Italian cast. Stella (1950) was an attempt to make a contemporary black comedy based on Disney's much darker novel Family Skeleton (1949) with Ann Sheridan in the title role alongside Victor Mature as DiMarco. The Straw Man (1953) adapted from the 1951 novel of the same name is a B movie that changes DiMarco's name to Jeff Howard in the script adaptation.

In the 1970s three more novels appeared as TV movies. Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971) starring veteran actresses Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Mildred Natwick and Sylvia Sidney in a strange tale that combines computer dating and a psychopath. Betrayal (1974),based on the novel Only Couples Need Apply (1973), is about an elderly woman (Amanda Blake) preyed upon by a murderous con artist couple. Yesterday's Child (1977), based on her 1967 book Night of Clear Choice, stars Shirley Jones as a mother whose 3 year-old daughter was kidnapped and never returned, fourteen years later someone claims to be that missing daughter.