Stranger In Our Midst by Robert Carson

Within the pages of this eye-catching cover art is a postwar story of disillusioned men and women rebuilding their disrupted lives.

Announcer Vince Bennett broadcasts live on KTFT, celebrating the arrival of overseas war brides to their waiting GI husbands in Agua Blanca, a small Nevada town. Vince welcomes Bridget Baker on-air, an attractive Irish redhead whose husband didn't arrive. Vince has been going with Donna Kirby, daughter of a wealthy family who owns much of the town. Poised and sensible at 22, she offers everything when they marry, but she makes him feel old at 27. Too proud to accept a job from her father, Vince is happy to spin records for $60 a week. When he finds Bridget Baker at the local casino, he helps her find a room and initiate an amicable divorce when her husband has second thoughts. They only married to get her out of Paris where she was in the resistance, eking out a living as a prostitute and being tortured (and worse) by the Gestapo. Vince is soon under her spell, and although they remain chaste, spending time together invites talk. His friends Pat and Ann warn him off—they married quickly before the draft, then spent years apart and now viciously fight each other. Enter Mr. Kanner, a big-time gambler with percentages in the local casinos, and his assistant Pancho. Kanner's shine is crude, so Vince is surprised when Bridget's eye is caught.

Overdrinking and mourning the last ten years, Vince spirals downward. His night terrors of fighting in the Pacific Fifth Air Force return, his insulting drunken arguments becoming political with "men crushed by the racial hatred poisons deliberately distilled in this nation by a fascistic group which controls all the wealth."

This post-war theme of soldiers' disillusionment recurs in many novels of the time, the men unable to pick up where they left off. The tone of this novel changes halfway into anger and loss, continuing as his good friend commits suicide. The writing is good, but Vince's options narrow with nowhere to go but the safest choice.

Robert Conrad is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of A Star Is Born (1938), and many films including Beau Geste (1939) and The Light That Failed (1939).

1947 / Paperback / 192 pages