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I'm sewing together a day from these hours and the way you touched my hand just now
I can't understand why no one ever made a movie of Hildegarde Tolman Teilhet's The Rim of Terror (1950). It is a terrific little entry in the field of mid-century romantic suspense, where it matters just as much or more to me that the former component as well as the latter holds up. My disbelief suspends more easily for espionage than love and I am pleased to report I didn't have to shelve it for either.
I do not mean to short-shrift the suspense, which is well-timed and propulsive and never feels the need to escalate to world-saving rather than the stakes of a couple of human lives. The title accurately indicates the nightmare quality which the novel shares with film noir and many thrillers, where an action as banal and decent as stopping to give a lift to a stranger in the rain can precipitate the heroine into a helter-skelter road trip across three states with totalitarian thugs hot on her heels and a defector riding shotgun, hardly any of it conforming to her ideas of spy games except for the part where the bullets are real. Set pieces include a roadblock, a shootout, a carnival, a captivity, the solidity of the ordinary world wavering and smearing like the sign on the side of a van that shouldn't have been freshly painted. The panoply of roadside Americana would have filmed beautifully, all mountain roads and motor courts and all-night garages and lodges by the lake. It's just obvious that its plethora of thrills is the trellis for the relationship to find purchase on and bloom, which it does on the satisfying model of I Know Where I'm Going (1945). Literally, Elizabeth Whitehill is on the last leg of her cross-country drive in the champagne-colored Bentley which is the one extravagance of her straitened, sheltered life when the bedraggled hitch-hiker she expected never to see again after Winnemucca turns out to need active rescuing from the agents of the "Left Arm," the secret service of his never-named country which is so nonspecifically a Central European Soviet satellite, I began to think of him as a denizen of Orsinia. She has a fiancé waiting for her in Seattle. Her passenger could not be a less suitable or a more inevitable distraction.
As Elizabeth reminds herself at regular intervals, her marriage to Charles Mathews is a sealed deal, a heaven-sent assurance of the security she has never had since her father's death left her grinding out her education on scholarships before settling to assist her mother in her charitable work. A high-powered, well-connected lawyer, he comes from old money as lightly worn as his rugged, distinguished good looks and his faultless tailoring. His war record is sterling. His political future is expected to start with a governorship and run as far as the White House. Every social success and comfort that a woman could dream of, he can give her without strain, not to mention a diamond so casually grand, she can't even think about pawning it in any of the little desert towns they zigzag through without looking like a thief. His personal integrity is beyond reproach. "All her life she would know where Charles was. He would come home each night on the expected hour." No such guarantees attend the penniless refugee of Alex Peck, more properly Dr. Pécz, an ex-partisan who put himself through university fiddling in beer halls and let himself be trained as a sleeper agent in order to get back to the country of his birth where instead of the supersonics of missiles he can work on his dream of pressurizing caesium into a new element, not because it might be atomically valuable, just to see if it can be done. "Did you ever want to do one thing in your life and nothing else?" He's dark, wiry, not conventionally attractive even without his rakishly broken nose—an experiment that blew up on him—could be Jewish and is foreign in everything but his birth registered thirty years ago in the state of Nevada. Before he explains his origins, Elizabeth thinks that his curiously plain English, so accent-free that it sounds artificial, makes him seem like an alien in more than the national sense, "a stranger from the moon who had learned to speak the language spoken on the earth as it was spoken ten to twenty years previously." He has no heed for his own injuries and will always be the kind of person who can forget what's said to him if he's thinking about his research. He's so risky and disreputable, he doesn't even own a hat. He never frightens her. He never treats her as fragile. She is always thinking of herself as hopeless, timid, an insipid dead weight especially when compared with the fearless, free-living women he must have known in his partisan years, and all the while she's running herself down the reader can see what Alex is seeing with some amazement and appreciation, that he wouldn't have gotten a mile from his handlers without the nerve and sense of this small blonde girl with the surprising contralto voice who may have been raised never to take a risk in her life, but is anything but helpless when they happen to her. Neither of them is infallible, but they can be trusted with one another far more than they have reason to fear. He does underestimate the depth of her sexual naïveté, but then so does she. Perhaps unavoidably thanks to its publication date, the sexual politics of The Rim of Terror jounce every now and then over some assumption which I wouldn't take for granted if it came with a stipend, but it is amazingly explicit that Elizabeth has reached the age of twenty-six without the experience of sexual desire for another person, whence her willingness to persuade herself into a marriage of propriety rather than passion, and once she has realized what it feels like to want rather than expect to tolerate, while it takes some time and argument to work out her ambivalent feelings of disloyalty toward Charles, in the clinch she just isn't willing to settle for years of decorous, unsatisfied marriage to a man she can no longer imagine touching her when she could run off into a rackety, uncertain, ridiculous future with a sardonic ex-Eastern Bloc scientist who thinks she's an incredible hot number and is hilariously indignant at the thought that she was jilted over the nearly chaste night they shared a bed—as dictated by the trope, there was only one—even when he has been obviously jittering for the chance to propose himself. "This is one experiment I won't let blow up. What do you say?"
I like these people and their eventual get-together, formulaic as it may technically be: it is believable to me not merely because she looks liberated in a slouchy sweater and stolen jeans and his self-protective detached irony has to run out sometime, but because of all their improvisation, collaboration, and mutual rescue, which since neither of them is actually a professional agent includes its fair share of bonehead plays. The Red Scare element has dated as badly as any other anti-Communism of the day, but the novel doesn't let it turn into an excuse for the demonization of immigrants such as semi-stateless Alex. I was intrigued by its attitude toward fallout shelters, which is as horrified and repulsed as Elizabeth when she imagines those individuals who can afford it building themselves private little bunkers within which to hoard their food and weapons and wait out the horrific deaths of their neighbors by radioactive cataclysm: she can't see it as foresight as opposed to FYGM and while she is already determined to break her engagement by the denouement, Charles relieves her of any potential second thoughts by informing her, as though it were a totally normal expression of affection instead of atomic hysteria, that once married he intends to install her in a walled compound outside of Guatemala City in the event of World War III. Such patronizing crudity would never occur to Alex, who recognizes no such thing as certainty even in his own beloved science and once asked her, "Isn't the only real safety in the mind and heart?" It's the only kind he offers; it's the only kind Elizabeth for the first time wants, not to be cosseted as a dear little puddinghead, but trusted as a partner to risk the world with. He does overreach himself in claiming to have read her mind on a certain jubilantly contentious point, but she lets the misunderstanding lie for the moment in the knowledge that "he would have to learn that her mind was not to be read, either by him or by Charles or by any other man. Her mind would remain hers. Only her heart and all else that went with her heart would belong to Alex." He'll get through it. He survived the absentminded mortification of needing to be told her name three times before it stuck.
I found this novel through listening to the very much abridged adaptation done for the May 12, 1950 Escape because it co-starred Hans Conried, who as correctly noted would have made an ideal screen Alex, although in a pinch I would also accept Vittorio Gassman. I got what looks like a first edition out of the Malden Public Library; it appears to have been out of print since a pulp-covered Bantam paperback about a year later; it is exactly the sort of thing that Stark House Press, especially with their emphasis on women writers of suspense and crime fiction, should be reprinting. Certainly I had never heard of Teilhet before. The Internet Archive offers me one of her earlier novels, The Double Agent (1945), which also seems to feature a female protagonist and share a supporting character with The Rim of Terror. HathiTrust nets me another, The Terrified Society (1947), which looks like a sort of social message thriller and shares the same supporting character, as now I wonder if all of her novels do. I should warn for animal harm in this one, even if it is heroically done; I don't believe a warning is necessitated by Elizabeth's Vermont twang, but I was entertained every time it was mentioned. I like the absence of a MacGuffin, which ties in with the novel's Ambler-esque, self-reflexive assessments. "It wasn't at all like seeing a spy movie, either, for he placed everything upon a different plane, on a solid, careful, unadventurous level, where men avoid all hazards if possible. She could understand that, too; it became very real to her." I would just so much like a spy movie of it, which does not usually occur with the novels I read. A more available edition would also be fine.
I do not mean to short-shrift the suspense, which is well-timed and propulsive and never feels the need to escalate to world-saving rather than the stakes of a couple of human lives. The title accurately indicates the nightmare quality which the novel shares with film noir and many thrillers, where an action as banal and decent as stopping to give a lift to a stranger in the rain can precipitate the heroine into a helter-skelter road trip across three states with totalitarian thugs hot on her heels and a defector riding shotgun, hardly any of it conforming to her ideas of spy games except for the part where the bullets are real. Set pieces include a roadblock, a shootout, a carnival, a captivity, the solidity of the ordinary world wavering and smearing like the sign on the side of a van that shouldn't have been freshly painted. The panoply of roadside Americana would have filmed beautifully, all mountain roads and motor courts and all-night garages and lodges by the lake. It's just obvious that its plethora of thrills is the trellis for the relationship to find purchase on and bloom, which it does on the satisfying model of I Know Where I'm Going (1945). Literally, Elizabeth Whitehill is on the last leg of her cross-country drive in the champagne-colored Bentley which is the one extravagance of her straitened, sheltered life when the bedraggled hitch-hiker she expected never to see again after Winnemucca turns out to need active rescuing from the agents of the "Left Arm," the secret service of his never-named country which is so nonspecifically a Central European Soviet satellite, I began to think of him as a denizen of Orsinia. She has a fiancé waiting for her in Seattle. Her passenger could not be a less suitable or a more inevitable distraction.
As Elizabeth reminds herself at regular intervals, her marriage to Charles Mathews is a sealed deal, a heaven-sent assurance of the security she has never had since her father's death left her grinding out her education on scholarships before settling to assist her mother in her charitable work. A high-powered, well-connected lawyer, he comes from old money as lightly worn as his rugged, distinguished good looks and his faultless tailoring. His war record is sterling. His political future is expected to start with a governorship and run as far as the White House. Every social success and comfort that a woman could dream of, he can give her without strain, not to mention a diamond so casually grand, she can't even think about pawning it in any of the little desert towns they zigzag through without looking like a thief. His personal integrity is beyond reproach. "All her life she would know where Charles was. He would come home each night on the expected hour." No such guarantees attend the penniless refugee of Alex Peck, more properly Dr. Pécz, an ex-partisan who put himself through university fiddling in beer halls and let himself be trained as a sleeper agent in order to get back to the country of his birth where instead of the supersonics of missiles he can work on his dream of pressurizing caesium into a new element, not because it might be atomically valuable, just to see if it can be done. "Did you ever want to do one thing in your life and nothing else?" He's dark, wiry, not conventionally attractive even without his rakishly broken nose—an experiment that blew up on him—could be Jewish and is foreign in everything but his birth registered thirty years ago in the state of Nevada. Before he explains his origins, Elizabeth thinks that his curiously plain English, so accent-free that it sounds artificial, makes him seem like an alien in more than the national sense, "a stranger from the moon who had learned to speak the language spoken on the earth as it was spoken ten to twenty years previously." He has no heed for his own injuries and will always be the kind of person who can forget what's said to him if he's thinking about his research. He's so risky and disreputable, he doesn't even own a hat. He never frightens her. He never treats her as fragile. She is always thinking of herself as hopeless, timid, an insipid dead weight especially when compared with the fearless, free-living women he must have known in his partisan years, and all the while she's running herself down the reader can see what Alex is seeing with some amazement and appreciation, that he wouldn't have gotten a mile from his handlers without the nerve and sense of this small blonde girl with the surprising contralto voice who may have been raised never to take a risk in her life, but is anything but helpless when they happen to her. Neither of them is infallible, but they can be trusted with one another far more than they have reason to fear. He does underestimate the depth of her sexual naïveté, but then so does she. Perhaps unavoidably thanks to its publication date, the sexual politics of The Rim of Terror jounce every now and then over some assumption which I wouldn't take for granted if it came with a stipend, but it is amazingly explicit that Elizabeth has reached the age of twenty-six without the experience of sexual desire for another person, whence her willingness to persuade herself into a marriage of propriety rather than passion, and once she has realized what it feels like to want rather than expect to tolerate, while it takes some time and argument to work out her ambivalent feelings of disloyalty toward Charles, in the clinch she just isn't willing to settle for years of decorous, unsatisfied marriage to a man she can no longer imagine touching her when she could run off into a rackety, uncertain, ridiculous future with a sardonic ex-Eastern Bloc scientist who thinks she's an incredible hot number and is hilariously indignant at the thought that she was jilted over the nearly chaste night they shared a bed—as dictated by the trope, there was only one—even when he has been obviously jittering for the chance to propose himself. "This is one experiment I won't let blow up. What do you say?"
I like these people and their eventual get-together, formulaic as it may technically be: it is believable to me not merely because she looks liberated in a slouchy sweater and stolen jeans and his self-protective detached irony has to run out sometime, but because of all their improvisation, collaboration, and mutual rescue, which since neither of them is actually a professional agent includes its fair share of bonehead plays. The Red Scare element has dated as badly as any other anti-Communism of the day, but the novel doesn't let it turn into an excuse for the demonization of immigrants such as semi-stateless Alex. I was intrigued by its attitude toward fallout shelters, which is as horrified and repulsed as Elizabeth when she imagines those individuals who can afford it building themselves private little bunkers within which to hoard their food and weapons and wait out the horrific deaths of their neighbors by radioactive cataclysm: she can't see it as foresight as opposed to FYGM and while she is already determined to break her engagement by the denouement, Charles relieves her of any potential second thoughts by informing her, as though it were a totally normal expression of affection instead of atomic hysteria, that once married he intends to install her in a walled compound outside of Guatemala City in the event of World War III. Such patronizing crudity would never occur to Alex, who recognizes no such thing as certainty even in his own beloved science and once asked her, "Isn't the only real safety in the mind and heart?" It's the only kind he offers; it's the only kind Elizabeth for the first time wants, not to be cosseted as a dear little puddinghead, but trusted as a partner to risk the world with. He does overreach himself in claiming to have read her mind on a certain jubilantly contentious point, but she lets the misunderstanding lie for the moment in the knowledge that "he would have to learn that her mind was not to be read, either by him or by Charles or by any other man. Her mind would remain hers. Only her heart and all else that went with her heart would belong to Alex." He'll get through it. He survived the absentminded mortification of needing to be told her name three times before it stuck.
I found this novel through listening to the very much abridged adaptation done for the May 12, 1950 Escape because it co-starred Hans Conried, who as correctly noted would have made an ideal screen Alex, although in a pinch I would also accept Vittorio Gassman. I got what looks like a first edition out of the Malden Public Library; it appears to have been out of print since a pulp-covered Bantam paperback about a year later; it is exactly the sort of thing that Stark House Press, especially with their emphasis on women writers of suspense and crime fiction, should be reprinting. Certainly I had never heard of Teilhet before. The Internet Archive offers me one of her earlier novels, The Double Agent (1945), which also seems to feature a female protagonist and share a supporting character with The Rim of Terror. HathiTrust nets me another, The Terrified Society (1947), which looks like a sort of social message thriller and shares the same supporting character, as now I wonder if all of her novels do. I should warn for animal harm in this one, even if it is heroically done; I don't believe a warning is necessitated by Elizabeth's Vermont twang, but I was entertained every time it was mentioned. I like the absence of a MacGuffin, which ties in with the novel's Ambler-esque, self-reflexive assessments. "It wasn't at all like seeing a spy movie, either, for he placed everything upon a different plane, on a solid, careful, unadventurous level, where men avoid all hazards if possible. She could understand that, too; it became very real to her." I would just so much like a spy movie of it, which does not usually occur with the novels I read. A more available edition would also be fine.
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I'm seeing an Alfred Ryder type here! Also, is it just me or does this sound possibly Elemental-ish?
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Yes! Thank you! I knew there was someone other than Gassman. I was tired and my brain kept suggesting actors from the wrong generation. Alfred Ryder would have been great. Jeff Corey, too, maybe.
Meaning no offense to Lowell's own Nancy Kelly, I am afraid that between all the driving around the American Southwest and the canonically deep voice which no one ever expects from her petite frame and abundance of golden hair which she normally, ruthlessly pulls back from her face in the delusion that she is an essentially plain and businesslike person, I took the character of Elizabeth as an excuse to cast Lizabeth Scott.
[edit] It is of course irresistible to think of reteaming Alfred Ryder with June Lockhart, although Janet Leigh also fits much of the bill. Charles I would cast with someone like Jeff Chandler, because he's supposed to be eye candy, prematurely grey in a silver-foxy rather than paternal way. Help, I don't even really know how to make photosets and I don't have time!
Also, is it just me or does this sound possibly Elemental-ish?
There is definitely something Elemental about speaking a language as perfectly as if you learned it on the moon.
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All right: Lizabeth Scott she is.
(And you know what, she could totally be an Element too!)
(It's so true. I volunteered Burn Gorman as Caesium originally, but I could change my mind.)
I'm hopeless at fancasting, and even worse at photosets, you need thisbluespirit's talent and expertise here!
I kludged one together for Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (2013) and I remain proud of the results, but it took something like twenty-four hours and I could just read so many other books in that time.
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Oh, perfect! Luckily, there are enough Elements that we can cast everyone and never run out! (By the way, have you seen
And you should definitely remain proud of your photoset! Even without knowing the novel it's for, I obviously approve of Peter Cushing!
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Yes! I love them! She actually made me sets for Curium, Fermium, and Palladium, who I still need to write something for, speaking of Peter Cushing. Or you should feel free!
And you should definitely remain proud of your photoset! Even without knowing the novel it's for, I obviously approve of Peter Cushing!
Thank you!
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Maybe I'll find a suitable prompt somewhere? ;)
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(I just want you to know that only once before have I left a prompt for fic and that was on a promptfest a friend of mine was running, so thank you for being some kind of accelerant.)
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Wait, does that mean I'm an Element too? XD
(I saw your prompts and I approve! <3)
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I love this. The novel sounds awesome, and you write about it beautifully. I wish it were more readily available, but I'm going to listen to the radio adaptation (because Hans Conried).
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Thank you! I had no expectations for it beyond curiosity about the source material and I actually loved it.
I wish it were more readily available, but I'm going to listen to the radio adaptation (because Hans Conried).
He has an accent in the adaptation for reasons I cannot explain because I did not write for Escape in the 1950's, but he's great. They could at least have done a two-parter!
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This sounds great. I'm so glad you found it! Voyaging into the cold was worth it.
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Charles has a remarkable talent for the most patronizing endearment available. It is one of the many and justified reasons the heroine dumps his ass.
(I really appreciate how firmly the novel delineates that Alex is not just a sexual catalyst for Elizabeth, he's a potential partner who sees and takes her seriously as a person, matter-of-factly, as a part of normal human interaction, but it's exactly the consideration that Charles in his magisterial complacence fails to give her when they meet again—has probably always failed to give her, treating her like a darling accessory instead of an equal-minded human being to fall in love with and have fights with and trust—and Elizabeth has to spend the time with Alex to know the difference. It's how he can get away with that goofy remark about mind-reading, of which he can be disabused in time because he really does know that Elizabeth is not just some kind of ornamental extension of him. They are going to be fine rather than compulsory het. Charles would have been very compulsory.)
This sounds great. I'm so glad you found it! Voyaging into the cold was worth it.
Thank you! It totally was!
(And now we have acres of snow in the streets, which at least looks like real winter.)
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Eat? Yes?
Enjoy the snow! Romp with glee! Angle your shovel steeply, you're too old for that nonsense!
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Enjoy! I really am surprised I couldn't start by reviewing the B-picture!
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In 1950?! In the Southwest?! Crazy!
because it co-starred Hans Conried, who as correctly noted would have made an ideal screen Alex
😊
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He's being dramatically rained on when they meet!
(I would have given a lot for Hans Conried playing a romantic scientist.)
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You're welcome! It was an absolutely delightful surprise to me.
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I'm amused that the fiance who must be ditched is Charles, though, so I have used the appropriate icon. XD
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Thank you! I could really see it being one.
I'm amused that the fiance who must be ditched is Charles, though, so I have used the appropriate icon.
Excellently chosen.
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I was intrigued by its attitude toward fallout shelters, which is as horrified and repulsed as Elizabeth when she imagines those individuals who can afford it building themselves private little bunkers within which to hoard their food and weapons and wait out the horrific deaths of their neighbors by radioactive cataclysm A-f'ing-Men!!
"Isn't the only real safety in the mind and heart?" PREACH!
I loved reading your reading of this novel so much. Thank you again.
PS: When I first saw the entry, I thought for sure it was a movie and wondered why it wasn't tagged "patreon"--but I soon realized :-)
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I'm so glad!
A-f'ing-Men!!
I have almost strictly seen fallout shelters in science fiction or historical fiction, where they are treated as anything from mundane to satirical. I've never just seen a character in a narrative of the time presented with the concept and immediately deciding "NOPE."
"Isn't the only real safety in the mind and heart?" PREACH!
Possibly one of the other reasons I kept flashing on Le Guin's Orsinia.
I loved reading your reading of this novel so much. Thank you again.
I was hoping it would be fun, because I had enjoyed the abbreviated radio version. Now I can't figure out why it hasn't been reprinted in ages. I can't even find very much information about the author, except that she seems to have written two or three more solo novels in addition to the three mentioned here and several more in collaboration with her husband, also a writer with a career of his own. Like, The Rim of Terror is far and away the best of the three I've had access to—even so, I do want to write about one of the other two, but I also need to write about actual film—but the degree of disappearance is just nuts. I have not even been able to find a complete bibliography. I've just done a lot of copyright searches and occasionally gotten lucky with an incomplete index from the '80's or something.
[edit] I have also found at least one claim that the Teilhets did nearly all of their writing in collaboration regardless of the name on the copyright or the byline, but it does not offer a source for this information, which means I can't tell if I am looking at a real husband-and-wife team à la Richard and Frances Lockridge or a case of how to suppress women's writing, since the assertion came in the form of a profile of Darwin Teilhet which discussed his style and themes extensively and hardly mentioned his wife except as an adjunct, which is honestly the sort of thing that will bias me against a critic, especially one who analyzes novels published under a joint credit as if the husband were the sole auteur.
PS: When I first saw the entry, I thought for sure it was a movie and wondered why it wasn't tagged "patreon"--but I soon realized :-)
I wish I could point people toward the movie of it!
*hugs*
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....sheyeah! What the hell!
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If they were in fact a writing team, fine, cool, jim-dandy! But then talk about both writers in the partnership, not just the dude half of it! Especially when I'm trying to find anything more verifiable than birth and death dates for the writer I started with. Why is nothing interesting I discover straightforward.
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https://alphaphi.historyit.com/items/view/digital-history/298498/
(page 20,under the title "San Francisco's celebrity soirée")
So you were 100% right about wanting a movie of it!
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So at least someone had the good sense to option it! Thank you so much! That much closer to the hell of a good video store next door.
(I see it's also a claim of joint authorship that comes from a less obnoxious source. Copyright still in her name.)