“…You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”
Sam Brice is a former pro football player who left the sport under a cloud, losing his trophy wife in the process. He genuinely loved her, and has never gotten over it. Now he works as an insurance adjuster on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He used to date Janice Gantry, who works in the same office. She grew frustrated with his lack of ambition, and they broke up. But they remain friends. She’s thinking of getting married to someone else now, and Sam wishes her well.
As Where Is Janice Gantry? begins, Sam is awakened by someone scratching at his screen porch. It’s Charlie, a young local man who has escaped from prison. All Charlie wants is a place to sleep a few hours and a short ride. With some misgivings, Sam helps him; he always thought there was something off about the story of his crime. It’s still dark when he drives Charlie to a phone. Then, on impulse, he watches from concealment to see what happens next. Charlie makes a call, and soon Janice Gantry appears. She drives Charlie to the office where she and Sam work. Sam spies through a window as she makes a phone call. Then a suspicious sheriff’s deputy on patrol attacks him and arrests him for prowling. Sam is finally released by the sheriff, who knows him but doesn’t like him. The sheriff warns him to keep his nose clean.
The next morning Janice does not arrive at work, and soon she’s officially a missing person. The sheriff thinks Charlie must have murdered her, or she ran off with him. Sam can’t tell him what he knows, and wouldn’t be believed anyway. He talks to a friend, a local gossip, who directs his attention to the house of a reclusive millionaire who lives on a nearby Key. This is the man whose safe Charlie was originally convicted of robbing. Sam makes a plan to meet the millionaire’s lonely wife, but instead meets her sister, a lovely woman who happens to be visiting. She too senses something is wrong in the house…
Where Is Janice Gantry? is one of those John D. MacDonald non-McGee books that left a particular impression on my memory. Sam Brice is a little like McGee (who wouldn’t be created for about three years at that point), but he has the advantage of the non-serial character in that he’s allowed to grow. Sam is sympathetic, but secretly bitter and openly gun-shy about relationships and life in general. The extreme exertions and dangers he’ll face in this book will change his life.
There’s a lot of sex in this book. Sam’s beautiful new lover spends a fair part of the story pretty much naked, as was suitable for the paperback market at that time in history. Even though the sexual revolution was fairly new at the time, it’s already assumed that lovers will sleep together before marriage. So morality cautions are in order. One character may be meant to be homosexual, but it’s not explicitly stated.
Nevertheless, Where Is Janice Gantry? is a well-written, gripping mystery/thriller by a master of the genre. Recommended for grownups.