The Intruders by Evan Hunter, 1954

This week’s contribution for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

I had almost forgotten, when they came and reopened all the old wounds—the woman who swam naked before my unseeing eyes, and the man who had already killed once…

Just over six thousand words, this short story by Evan Hunter (alias Ed McBain) is not as gritty and hardboiled as the blurb hints. Instead, what you get from the legendary crime fiction writer is only a degree of suspense and the atmosphere of a thriller. It’s enough to keep you glued to every word in this cracking story. 

Adventure, April 1954

Jeff Toland is a brave young man, a former soldier, and blind. He is angry and frustrated because he is patronised. His older brother, Tom, treats him like a simpleton and his father follows him around lest he trips and kills himself. Jeff rebels. He wants to be left alone. He decides to go up to the cabin in the woods next to a brook and live there all by himself.

"I had liked the world I made. It was a world of quiet darkness, with no people in it."

And then one day, Jeff is walking along the trail he knows too well and making his way back to the cabin guided by familiar sounds and smells of nature. He steps inside the cabin and makes his way across the room when his toe hits the leg of a chair that isn’t supposed to be there. That’s when he realises something is wrong. The next moment a .45 is rammed into his back.

Sam, the owner of the .45, is hiding from the law. He has killed a man in a fight. He is not really a bad man, only a victim of circumstances, we are told. He and the woman with him, Dot, want to spend a few days in the cabin. Sam is threatening until Dot tells him that Jeff is blind and can't do harm. When Sam mocks Jeff about his blindness, he reopens his old wounds. Jeff seethes with rage and plots his revenge.

Bestseller Mystery,
March 1959

Evan Hunter weaves the suspense nicely into the narrative. Jeff’s furtive search for his rifle in the closet and the hidden chemistry between him and Dot are the notable suspense elements in the story while Jeff’s mental picture of Dot and his exuberance upon learning that she is Sam’s sister and not his wife or lover add a touch of humour to it. None of this means anything for Hunter ends the story on a bit of an anticlimactic note. But he doesn’t leave you in a blind alley.

The Intruders, one of dozens of short stories Evan Hunter wrote in crime, mystery, and science fiction, was apparently first published in Adventure: The Man’s Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, April 1954, and reproduced in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, March 1959. I read the story in the latter, online.