Forgotten Book - Eighty Dollars to Stamford

Eighty Dollars to Stamford, published in 1975, was Lucille Fletcher's penultimate novel. She was 63 when she produced it, and although she lived until 2000, she only wrote one more novel after this one, a book called Mirror Image which appeared in 1988 and which I haven't read. Perhaps she tired somewhat of crime writing, but there is nothing tired about this novel.

It's a first-rate story of suspense, a verdict with which estimable fellow bloggers such as Kate Jackson, Xavier Lechard, and John Norris (all of whose blogs I strongly recommend in the unlikely event you're unfamiliar with them) concur. I agree with the view that in effect it amounts to a gender reversal on the traditional woman-in-jeopardy trope. This time the protagonist in jeopardy is a man, the naive but likeable David Marks. He is a school teacher who has taken up cab driving in the evening as an odd sort of psychological therapy following the death of his wife in a hit and run accident.

One night he is asked by a beautiful young blonde woman to take her to a house in Connecticut. She offers him eighty dollars for the return trip. One of the problems with writing about sums of money in a novel is that inflation dates the narrative, but in 1975, this was a huge sum of money for such a journey. David is puzzled and becomes suspicious, especially when his passenger asks him to take her on another such journey a few days later.

Before long, David finds himself embroiled in a murder plot. This is a novel of mounting suspense, although it also has an excellent plot twist. Fletcher's taut writing reveals her apprenticeship as a radio writer: she knows how to make each word count. The book was turned into a film in 1982, and renamed Hit and Run (such a forgettable title that it's been re-used several times for other films), alternatively known as Revenge Squad. I haven't seen the film, and judging by comments on the internet, it's barely worth watching. But the book is definitely worth reading.