REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

   

JEROME WEIDMAN – I’ll Never Go There Any More. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1941. Reprinted in paperback several times, including Avon T-153, 1956, shown below:

   Two Summers and a lifetime ago, I picked up a novel at a Used Book Store just to be polite; I wasn’t really looking for it, but it seemed interesting and the shopkeeper looked bored, so I figured to brighten her day for two dollars and fifty cents.

   The book was I’ll Never Go There Any More,  by Jerome Weidman, and it’s a young-man-in-New-York novel, a colorful, sprawling thing about Arthur Thacker coming to the big city, meeting lots of colorful, sprawling people, and learning about Life in all its sprawling color.

   And it ain’t bad, either. The characters are well-drawn, the story moves apace, and the ending seems fateful and natural, profound and shocking, all at once, just the right coda for a young-man-in-New York novel. It looks to have been published just before America entered World War II, which is probably why it isn’t better remembered today – after December 7, readers had a lot more on their minds than the adventures of a young man in New York.

   But as I was reading this thing, getting the background on the various characters popping in and out, I came upon six or eight pages that seemed kind of familiar: something about an Italian banker and his sons, and how they all turned out. Damn, it just kept reminding me of something.

   So I did some research and found that this was the basis of Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1949 movie House of Strangers. Not the book: just these six or eight pages. That’s right, Twentieth Century Fox bought I’ll Never Go There Any More, tossed out three hundred and thirty pages of it, and filmed what was left. House of Strangers is an okay noir drama, but I always felt it lacked a proper pay-off at the end, and it’s certainly very far removed from Weidman’s novel.

   But that’s not the end of our story. No, friends. Because in 1954 the studio did what studios always did in those days: they took the script of House of Strangers, added some guns and horses and re-made it as Broken Lance. And that’s how Jerome Weidman’s young-man-in-New-York novel ended up as a Western.