Pan’s People: Moment of Danger by Donald MacKenzie (1959)

After all the excitement of October, I’m going to try to keep this blog afloat by turning to some scans of recent additions to my paperback collection - which is something I’ve not got around to for a while, so there’s plenty of stuff to work through; not least, plenty of newly acquired Pans.

As I’ve probably remarked before in these pages, Pan’s ‘50s-‘60s crime paperbacks remain such a ubiquitous and cheap presence on the second hand market here in the UK that it often feels as if I pick up a new one every time I leave the house. But, their artwork is so consistently beautiful that each one I pick up still feels like both a bargain and a treasured addition to my shelves… and this characteristically evocative number from our old friend Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer is a case in point.

As the back cover here makes abundantly clear, ‘Moment of Danger’ was adapted for the screen in 1959. Shot in Jess Franco’s future stomping ground of Malaga in Andalucía, the film was directed by Hungarian-born Hollywood exile Laslo Benedek, best known for ‘The Wild One’ (1953) and ‘Death of a Salesman’ (1951). 

Meanwhile, as Pan’s ever-busy copy editors also manage to inform us via the yellow-backed paragraph on the bottom right, author Donald MacKenzie also sounds like an interesting cat - but apparently not sufficiently so as to merit his own Wikipedia page, whilst google searches are complicated by the existence of multiple authors and academics of the same name.

From what I can gather beyond the fascinating tit-bits concerning MacKenzie’s history of incarceration provided here, he was born in 1908, and also penned the source novel for the Seth Holt-directed 1958 thriller ‘Nowhere to Go’, in addition to a series of sixteen ‘John Raven Mysteries’, published between 1976 and 1994 (the year of his death), amongst other things.

A capsule biography extracted from the website of publishing conglomerate Hachette UK (who currently offer MacKenzie’s entire catalogue for sale as e-books) repeats the quotes used by Pan on the back cover to ‘Moment of Danger’, but adds various other info, as follows:

Donald MacKenzie (1908-1994) was born in Ontario, Canada, and educated in England, Canada and Switzerland. For twenty-five years MacKenzie lived by crime in many countries. ‘I went to jail,’ he wrote, ‘if not with depressing regularity, too often for my liking.’ His last sentences were five years in the United States and three years in England, running consecutively. He began writing and selling stories when in American jail. ‘I try to do exactly as I like as often as possible and I don’t think I’m either psychopathic, a wayward boy, a problem of our time, a charming rogue. Or ever was.’ He had a wife, Estrela, and a daughter, and they divided their time between England, Portugal, Spain and Austria.

So there ya go.