3 DAY TERROR

Everything about the way 3 DAY TERROR (1957) is packaged sets up certain expectations in the minds of potential readers. For one thing, there's the vertical "CRIME" logo at the top of the cover, adjacent to the "Prologue Books Presents" banner. The cover blurb sets up a mysterious stranger in a small town where something bad is destined to take place. The back cover, which prints a portion of the text, describes an encounter between a young woman and a man that is fraught with tension and peril. Hell, even the title itself, 3 DAY TERROR, is appropriately lurid and suggestive, promising danger over a short span of time. You'd have every right to expect some kind of standard mystery thriller in which a stranger, possibly a killer, comes to a small town and wreaks havoc over a weekend.

And you'd be wrong. Dead wrong.

3 DAY TERROR isn't a crime novel by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is it a mystery. It is an exercise in suspense however along with a weird mash-ups of genres. It's PEYTON PLACE meets MISSISSIPPI BURNING, a Douglas Sirk film with a screenplay by Sam Fuller. It's gripping, compelling and powerful.

Bastrop, Alabama, is a small town whose one public school is about to be integrated by rule of law on a Monday morning. The narrative begins on a Friday evening and runs through that fateful Monday. Some of the townspeople support the integration, some with grudging respect for the law, while others are steadfastly against it and will do anything to stop it. The racist townspeople are stirred up by Richard Buddy, a Northerner seething with racial hatred who has come to Bastrop on his own to rally the townsfolk against integration. Buddy's thoughts, words and deeds (including a vile, racist pamphlet that he distributes), are full of raw, naked hate.

Into this potent, simmering boil, a situation ripe for exploitation, comes Delia Benjamin, a local woman who unexpectedly left the town and her jilted beau, local newspaper editor/publisher Jack Chadwick, several years prior for a husband in New York City.  Delia hits town at the same time as Richard Buddy and it's inevitable that their paths will cross several time during the course of the story. Delia's return to Bastrop opens up a number of old wounds in relationships, some of which can be repaired, while others can't.

Everything comes to a head on that Monday morning and while the school does peacefully integrate, two people end up dead by the end of the book.

3 DAY TERROR was written by Vin Packer, a pen name for author Marijane Meaker. As Packer, Meaker wrote 20 crime/mystery novels between 1952 and 1969. Originally published by Fawcett Gold Medal as a paperback original in 1957, 3 DAY TERROR paints a vivid portrait of small town America undergoing a seismic upheaval and the fallout that such an event causes in various lives.

 The characters are all well drawn and surprisingly sympathetic. Even the worst of the racist characters are given grounding and motivation for their thoughts and beliefs. There are no real heroes or villains here, just real people struggling with enormous problems, trying to keep their lives on an even keel. The language is extremely harsh and Packer pulls no punches in her depictions of the small minded vermin who consider the African American citizens of Bastrop as sub-human "apes." It's raw stuff but it's extremely well written and Packer knows how to keep a reader turning pages.

3 DAY TERROR masterfully subverts your expectations by setting you up for one thing and then delivering something entirely different. Thumbs up.