Date With Darkness
Donald Hamilton's debut novel.
The hero is Lieutenant Philip Branch, USNR, who has been serving in the Navy during WWII at a desk job in Chicago, Illinois. He is soon to be released from active duty and is spending a couple weeks leave in New York City. There he meets Jeanette Duval, wife of a French collaborator, who is trying to smuggle her husband into the U.S. Trying to thwart her efforts, a group of idealistic French patriots want to capture Mr. Duval and see to it that he is punished for his collaboration with the Nazis. They all want Lieutenant Branch to assist them, and he spends most of the book trying to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are.
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Donald Hamilton
Donald Hamilton was a U.S. writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist mostly of paperback originals, principally spy fiction but also crime fiction and Westerns such as The Big Country. He is best known for his long-running Matt Helm series (1960-1993), which chronicles the adventures of an undercover counter-agent/assassin working for a secret American government agency.
Hamilton began his writing career in 1946, fiction magazines like Collier's Weekly and The Saturday Evening Post. His first novel Date With Darkness was published in 1947; over the next forty-six years he published a total of thirty-eight novels. Most of his early novels whether suspense, spy, and western published between 1954 and 1960, were typical paperback originals of the era: fast-moving tales in paperbacks with lurid covers. Several classic western movies, The Big Country and The Violent Men, were adapted from two of his western novels.
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