FIRST TRAIN TO BABYLON

I finished a Max Ehrlich trifecta of sorts last night. First, I read his classic, vintage biker novel THE HIGH SIDE a couple of weeks ago. Then, I happened to watch THE APPLE last night, a second-season STAR TREK episode written by Ehrlich. This morning I finished reading FIRST TRAIN TO BABYLON,  a thriller he wrote in 1955 (the paperback edition, pictured above and which I bought years ago, was published in 1959).

The cover blurbs give away the gist of the story but Ehrlich manages to start the narrative off in one direction before getting to the meat of the narrative. A down on his luck mail sorter, desperate for money to aid his fatally sick son, decides to rob a mail car on it's early morning run from New York City to Babylon on Long Island. He scoops envelopes from various bags, places them in an unlabeled pouch and throws it out of the train window into a culvert. The heavy snowfall will cover the bag long enough for him to recover it later. But two young brothers, out playing with their early Christmas gifts of bright new sleds, find the bag. When they are unable to open it, they hide it in a deserted barn where it remains for the next ten years. The scheming mail carrier, unable to find his bag later, takes his own life only days before his sick son dies.

Flash forward ten years. A developer has purchased the land upon which the deserted barn sits. The barn is demolished and the mail pouch discovered. The post office decides to complete the delivery of the long delayed mail, an act that garners a great deal of publicity. One of the delayed letters turns out to be a blackmail note intended for one George Radcliffe, a successful businessman with a beautiful home, a bride-to-be daughter, a son about to become a military officer and a loving and faithful wife, Martha. When Martha receives the letter, she opens it and discovers that a blackmailer had intended to put the squeeze on George ten years earlier for a robbery and murder at his workplace. At the trial, George had positively another employee as the guilty party, a man who was sentenced to life in prison because of George's testimony. Could George have lied on the stand, committed the murder himself and stolen the money? How else to explain his coming into a great deal of money ten years ago?

Martha refuses to believe that George could be guilty of such a heinous crime but as she starts to pick at various threads, the carefully woven fabric of their tranquil and blissful suburban life begin to unravel. More and more, the evidence points towards George as the real killer. What will Martha do? Is George really the bad guy she has come to believe?

I won't spoil the ending of this one except to say I wish it had turned out a different way. The story reminded me of Hitchcock's SUSPICION (1941), with Cary Grant playing the is-he-or-isn't-he murderous husband of frightened wife Joan Fontaine. At times, the novel also recalled John D. MacDonald, especially when he peeled back the veneer of comfortable mid-century middle class life to expose the darkness and demons lurking just below the surface.

FIRST TRAIN doesn't quite reach the heights of any given MacDonald novel but it's a solid, well-constructed thriller nonetheless. It would have made a nice little film in the 1950s with, say, Fred MacMurray and Vera Miles in the title roles.

Thumbs up.