Man Running

NOTE: MAN RUNNING was young Elliot West's first published novel of international suspense in 1959. It inspired a flood of great reviews and was purchased by Columbia Pictures and director Stanley Donen as a vehicle for Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Three bad screenplays later by a great comedy screenwriter (but bad dramatic one) and the project was shelved. That's Hollywood. But the novel still stands out in the tradition of Hemingway and Graham Greene. It's the desperate and exciting tale of Ben Dana, an unemployed newspaperman in post-WWII Madrid. Out of luck, he meets "charming" Otto Steck, late of the Wehrmacht, not a vehement Nazi exactly but a "professional soldier who had fought for the wrong Army". He had a problem. Dana had the solution - his US passport. Steck needed it to get back to Paris and retrieve a fortune in gems that he had stashed there in those last crazy days of the occupation. Desperate, Dana agrees to "loan" his passport to Steck for a few days in exchange for a share of the jewels. And that proves to be a big mistake.


Genre: Romantic Suspense