Wed 25 Apr 2012
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: OWEN CAMERON – The Fire Trap.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
OWEN CAMERON – The Fire Trap. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1957. Also published as The Demon Stirs: Dell #983, paperback, 1958.
Owen Cameron is one of those talented but unfortunate writers whose work generates a small commotion when first published but for some inexplicable reason is forgotten while lesser writers achieve recognition and a large following. A successful magazine writer, Cameron published seven criminous novels; the last four of these constitute some of the most quietly compelling suspense fiction of the 1950s.
The protagonist of The Fire Trap is Deputy Sheriff Jake Brown of the northern California mountain community of Verdi, who is also featured in Cameron’s best-known novel, Catch a Tiger (1952). Jake’s job here is a grim and ugly one: to find out who is responsible for a series of arson fires, the latest of which claimed the lives of two young children.
Matters turn even deadlier when an outsider, insurance-claims adjuster Hal Moss, is found shotgunned to death on a back country road, One of the suspects in both crimes is Jake’s own father, a surly old toner who has been estranged from Jake for fourteen long, bitter years. Other suspects include Jake’s brother, Art; one of his best friends, Floyd Rupert; and a woman with whom he was once involved, Alice Newsom.
“In his stubborn, honest, relentless way,” the dust jacket blurb says, “Jake follows his hunches and tracks down his suspicions … At every turn [he] is met by his own sense of guilt and frustration-feelings intensified when he realizes that he has unwittingly set the scene for two more murders.” It is at terrible personal cost that he eventually arrives at the truth, in a series of climaxes that can only be described as shattering.
This is provocative stuff, told in lean, understated prose that makes it all the more forceful. As is the case with Catch a Tiger and two non-series books, The Butcher’s Wife (1954) and The Silent One (1958), it is a novel that has disturbing things to say about the dark side of human relationships.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Bibliographic Note: A partial list of Owen Cameron’s short fiction can be found here on the Fiction Mags Index. His first recorded story was for Collier’s in 1943. Collier’s was a “slick magazine,” but Cameron can be considered a pulp writer, too, since his list of credits also includes stories published in Blue Book and Argosy.
April 25th, 2012 at 9:13 am
It’s only half over, but Owen Cameron is at the top of the list for the most unknown or forgotten author to be covered this week on this blog.
I’ve accumulated several of his books in paperback over the years, but I’ve never read one. Looks like I’ve missed out on some good reading.
April 26th, 2012 at 6:26 am
I remember being impressed with TIGER 30-odd years ago when I first read it. Got to get back that way someday….
April 26th, 2012 at 9:39 am
I have not read a novel by Owen Cameron. But I can remember the cover of the Dell paperback. So I will have to look in the boxes in the cellar to find the book. “Catch a Tiger” was published in the Série Noire. I would like to know if Owen Cameron was a relative of Lou Cameron. Probably not.
April 26th, 2012 at 10:50 am
No, no relation. I remember I thought of the possibility once myself. But after he died last year, it was learned that Lou Cameron’s family name when he was born was Arnold. His father (Senior) was an actor under the name Lou Cameron, and somehow at least the son (Junior) adopted it as his own.