Wed 26 Feb 2020
COLLIER YOUNG – The Todd Dossier. Delacorte, hardcover, 1969. Dell, paperback, 1970.
The Todd Dossier by “Collier Young†— actually a pseudonym of Robert Bloch — is for the most part a fairly gripping and well-constructed medical mystery about a shady heart transplant and it’s slow unraveling… right up to the end, when Bloch throws the story away.
Having set up an ingenious crime and some very nasty bad guys, then whipped up a good amount of suspense over the fate of his doctor-detective, he decided for some reason to resolve it with a facile plot device from nowhere that goes unconvincingly against the grain of his characters.
Most of the time I was reading this, I wondered why Bloch put a pen name on it, but when I finished, it occurred to me if I’d written an ending like that I probably wouldn’t give my right name either.
Dossier does offer, though an insightful look back to another time, one that I hadn’t thought quite so distant. Fifty years ago, when this was written, heart transplants had just crossed the line from Sci-Fi to reality. It was the time of the Jarvic Heart, Baboon hearts in babies, and other faltering steps toward what is today routine surgery.
Bloch’s awe — expressed by his characters — about the dawn of a new biology, is as quaint in its way as the speeches in old war movies (Pick a war — any war) about the New and Better World that will surely follow once we kill these bastards. We also get an actual plot point about a couple whose marital bliss is threatened because the husband feels emasculated by his wife’s job — was this really just fifty years ago?
As I say, Todd Dossier is mostly taut and readable. I just never expected anything so antiquated “by the Author of Psycho.â€
February 26th, 2020 at 3:13 pm
There’s a little more I can tell everyone as to how this book happened to be written. This I found online:
“Bloch wrote this medical thriller from a film treatment by Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, but with no contractual protection the novel was credited to screenwriter and producer Collier Young. The film was never made.”
So Bloch was in essence the ghost writer for this book, rather than Collier Young being one of his pen names, but all in all, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t t?
February 26th, 2020 at 5:33 pm
Young produced of television’s IRONSIDE, WILD< WILD WEST, and ONE STEP BEYOND, among other shows. He was married five times; two of his wives were Ida Lupino and Joan Fontaine.
February 26th, 2020 at 7:12 pm
The ghost writer screen novelization explains how this seems to get away from Bloch.
Boy though, he was the perfect writer considering that heart of a twelve year old boy he always claimed to keep on his desk.
February 27th, 2020 at 9:48 pm
Why I didn’t think of this earlier:
Robert Bloch himself tells the story (briefly and painfully) in his memoir, Once Around The Bloch – in Chapter 40, pages 347-349.
Names all the names and everything.
As you might have guessed, Mr. Bloch didn’t care at all for the experience …
February 28th, 2020 at 12:44 am
I certainly can guess, but can you say more? Inquiring minds and all that.
February 28th, 2020 at 11:54 am
Steve:
Bob Bloch tells the story far better in his book than I ever could.
Here’s a digest version:
The Todd Dossier was what we call “work for hire”; Bloch was in a slow patch and needed the money (which wasn’t a hell of a lot, but beggars can’t be choosers …).
Collier Young, the producer of the ultimately unmade movie, hired Bloch to novelize Mr. & Mrs. Dunne’s screen story, for which Bob would get a shared byline with the Dunnes when the paperback came out.
Eventually, Young informed Bloch that “the publishers” insisted that he (Young) should get the byline solo (“Sorry about that, Bob …”).
Complications, legal and otherwise, ensued, and Bloch wound up with chump change and no byline – and had to wait two decades and change to get his own back, in memoir form.
Needless to add, Bob Bloch’s book tells all this in far more entertaining fashion than I ever could (and if you don’t have a copy, you can still find some at Amazon [which is where I got mine]); very much worth the effort.
Once Around The Bloch, by Robert Bloch, copyright 1993, published by Tor Books.
Presented as a public service.
February 28th, 2020 at 7:50 pm
And for that Public Service, Mike, I do thank you. Nothing terribly new in what happened to Bloch in this deal, but still.
February 28th, 2020 at 7:51 pm
Am I right in remembering that Bloch also did not make much money in selling the rights to PSYCHO to Alfred Hitchcock?
February 28th, 2020 at 8:53 pm
Bloch’s entire book is filled to the brimming with tales of how Hollywood brass routinely lowballed him for his story properties.
As I said above: GET THE BOOK.