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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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