Safe Return Doubtful

American Literature – Published 1961

I am new to the writing of Vin Packer, and began with this, widely thought to be the best of her psychological thrillers. The intentional running down of a cat by a car driver, grows into a murder, though the real suspense in the story is the watching the mental disintegration of the protagonist, Joseph Meaker, reminiscent of a Patricia Highsmith novel..

Published in 1961 and set in the late 1950s, at the time when the advertising industry was in its heyday, as observed in the TV series Mad Men, Meaker’s wife, Maggie, is in advertising and commutes daily from their home in rural Pennsylvania to New York City. Meaker himself, is an academic, studying hex-signs on local barns, though he spends much of his time ruminating on his ex-lover, Varda, a Hungarian woman whose activism contrasts starkly with his pseudo-intellectual apathy, even more so than Maggie’s. In 1948 at a rally for President, he fled racist hecklers of Henry Wallace, for whom Varda was of course working.

Vin Packer is the pen name of Marijane Meaker, who wrote under several other names. As Packer she wrote twenty crime novels, and in these she is credited with launching the genre of lesbian pulp fiction. She wrote several books of non-fiction also on her observations of gay women in the 1950s and 60s, as well as several novels for young adults and books for children. Quite a range..
This however, is more literary than pulp, and in addition to being a gripping thriller it has very strong characterisation and is excellent as a record of rural Pennsylvania at that time.

Amongst Meaker’s claims to fame, is that she was the lover of Patricia Highsmith. They lived together for two years in a converted barn in the same area of rural Pennsylvania where this is set. Meaker’s own memoir is entitled Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950’s. She died in 2022 at the age of 95.
It is therefore easy to see how this particular novel is far more Highsmith than Packer, intentionally so I am sure, especially in the character of Joseph, who has her own surname.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5