WILLIAM GOLDMAN – Marathon Man. Delacorte, hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Other reprint editions include: Random House, softcover, 2001.

   William Goldman, the well-known novelist and screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), achieved his first major commercial fiction success with Marathon Man. The first half of the novel is some of the finest suspense writing committed to paper during the past three decades. Goldman weaves a complex plot involving a young budding intellectual/historian/student/marathon runner named Babe Levy, a superspy named Scylla, and Nazi war criminals on the loose in New York City. The characterization is excellent, the story line taut and fast-moving, and there are a couple of unexpected twists.

   The last half of the book, however, might have been written by someone else, because the plot and everything else falls apart. The characters suddenly begin to think and act implausibly, there are several bizarre and unbelievable progressions, and the climax on the Jewish-controlled Diamond Exchange along Forty-seventh Street is unsatisfactory and filled with gratuitous and glorified violence.

   Goldman never seems able to make up his mind whether he wants to be funny or deadly serious; the fluctuation works surprisingly well in the first half and not at all in the second. (There is one nicely handled scene in the last half. a chilling interrogation by torture, simple and bloodless, that involves the use of a dental drill. This scene was likewise one of the highlights of the 1975 film of the same title, starring Dustin Hoffman.)

   All in all, a potentially classic novel in the suspense field, weakened and made distasteful through mishandling of its material.

   Goldman’s other suspense novels include No Way to Treat a Lady (1964; originally published as a paperback original under the pseudonym Harry Longbaugh) and Magic (1976).

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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.