Run From The Hunter by Keith Grantland

This 1957 thriller has a solid claim of being the inspiration for the hit TV series The Fugitive. An innocent man escapes a charge of murder, fiercely pursued by law enforcement, desperate to clear his name.

Journalist Chris Adams finds himself on a train to Alabama State Penitentiary, wrongly convicted of killing his girlfriend, the beautiful singer Steffany Fontaine. A fellow convict is a notorious gambling boss who killed his double-crossing first lieutenant. The boss tells Adams that when they cross a certain bridge, an escape plan has been arranged and within minutes, a terrific explosion derails the train into the swamp below. Crawling over the dead, Adams runs towards freedom, pursued by the law. His only chance is to find Felix Kline, a bartender who knows Chris was not the murderer.

Police Lieutenant Howard Carr cannot let this affront slide; he also dated Steffany and is closer to the case than he lets on. Chris finds help along the way from a tough old bayou woman and her sexy young daughter (even knowing who he is), a Cajun medicine man, and a fellow journalist at Adam's newspaper. Under the cover of Mardi Gras festivities from Biloxi to Mobile to New Orleans, the mystery unfolds, leaving a few more bodies in its wake.

This gave everything I wished for in a fugitive thriller, including a dame who is trouble with a capital T and a mysterious package worth over $50,000. Inventive and propelled, we quickly end up quite far from where we began. Solid and recommended.

Keith Grantland is a pseudonym for the team of John Tomerlin and Charles Beaumont. A seminal influence for speculative fiction writers, Beaumont wrote many episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the screenplay for The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao.

Run From The Hunter is so close in plot to the hit TV series The Fugitive (1963-67) and the 1993 hit film starring Harrison Ford that claim can be made it was the inspiration. Writer David Goodis claimed it was based on his novel Dark Passage (1946), made into a film starring Bogart and Bacall in 1947, which also featured a wrongly convicted man, and that litigation continued after his death in 1967.

1957 / Paperback / 142 pages