Dead Men Rise Up Never

Christopher Landon published Ice Cold in Alex in 1957 – which was made into a film that still pops up regularly -  penned a few more thrillers and was found dead by his wife at his desk in 1961 - aged 50 - apparently from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. 

There’s something about his story that’s haunted me ever since I first heard it 50 years ago. It’s not as if it’s unique; history’s full of writers who’ve hit the bottle too hard and paid the price. And yet this one lingers in my mind more than almost all the others, probably because of this book, his last.

On the face of it, it’s a nifty 150-page thriller about a straitlaced accountant being pulled into a twist-laden murder plot by an old school friend; one of those stories in which the murderer explains everything to the protagonist at the end instead of just bumping him off and dumping the body as quickly as possible.

Before then, though, you have a portrait of a fabulist living a fantasy life, first at school, then later as a bestselling novelist, a man whose whole existence is built on deceit and envy, and fuelled by non-stop drinking. These pages come alive with confusion and despair and endless lies. You can almost smell the alcohol on his breath. And it’s next to impossible not to see – in light of Landon’s ridiculously early death – shades and echoes of a truth barely buried. I think that’s why I can’t forget it.

Or perhaps I’m reading way too much into it all and his death really was just a sad accident. If that is the case, then it doesn’t detract for a second from the fact that this little book – despite a few cliches – is a minor masterpiece of narrative and tension. (I opened it up when it arrived, just to check the quality of the copy, read the first chapter and didn’t stop until I’d reached the last page, a little over two hours later.) The characters are swiftly, vividly drawn. The pace never flags. And the plot components all click neatly, satisfyingly, into place by the end.

Definitely a mini-masterpiece.