I've been picking through some short story anthologies this month and finding an amazing group of authors that I've never read before. This week's find was a short novel by William P. McGivern called "Graveyard Shift". I found the story in the 1979 spring-summer edition Hitchcock's Anthology.
The story is about a newspaper reporter who's following a tip about a mayoral candidate. The tip is a set-up that goes terribly wrong for everybody involved, including our reporter. McGivern gives us the bad guys up front but the twists the story takes are so unexpected that you just have to keep reading to find out what's going to happen. Excellent story and a great example of how to plant "red herrings" that turn a story on its head.
There was no bio for McGivern so I did a search and found that he not only wrote novels and shorts but he wrote movies like "The Big Heat" for which he won an Edgar, "Rouge Cop", and "Brannigan". He also wrote TV scripts for shows like Kojak, Banyon and Adam 12. I'll be on the look out for more of this author's work.
2 comments:
I agree 100% with you on McGivern. I did a Friday Forgotten Book a couple weeks back on Odds Against Tomorrow by McGivern. I found the writing to be wonderfully poetic for what could have amounted to an average heist plot. I also like the fact that he got into the heads of the morally conflicted felons and made them human... He was a very gifted writer.
He does a wonderful of job of bringing out the humanity in his characters. And even the "bad" guy you didn't see coming, wasn't really bad, he was just trying to keep his friend alive and make things right.
I knew I'd seen McGivern's name somewhere. Just couldn't remember where. Thanks for the reminder and a title to look for.
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