2003: In the Dark Corner with a Drifter Named Loftus
6. Tremble (1954, Pocket)
Unable to sustain the fever pitch of Refugee, Loftus’s follow up book is a qualified letdown. Tremble has its moments but overall the novel feels forced and, tellingly, exhausted. Written, according to notes on the manuscript’s end page, in just two weeks, the novel tells the story of the growing relationship between Alma, a nurse at the Norcross Asylum, and a new patient, Harris, a convicted killer suffering from “dementia praecox.” The first half of the book is told from Alma’s point of view and it climaxes in a bizarre, disturbing scene in which nurse and patient copulate, violently, in a medieval-seeming “lobotomy lab.” The second half of the book is relayed from Harris’s point of view and, while it moves more quickly, its episodes become increasingly unhinged. The book devolves into a series of roadside murders as the couple drive headlong toward their ultimate fate, a confrontation with Harris’s equally disturbed father.
7. Null & Void (1956, Avon)
While Loftus doesn’t return to the heights of Refugee here, Null & Void represents a reclaiming of professional control after the macabre bombast of Tremble. A straight crime story of the good-man-gone-bad variety, it tracks the course of Ross Vernon, an everyman clerk at the registry of deeds who gets mixed up in a land fraud scheme that leads to kidnapping and murder. The book sold well and was apparently optioned for a time as a proposed vehicle for director Ted Tetzlaff.
8. Mendacity (1958, Perma)
In some ways, Mendacity can be considered Loftus’s most controversial novel. And not necessarily because of its subject matter—the pimps and prostitutes congregating along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolucion.
9. Drifter (1962, Popular Library)
Loftus’s entry in the serial killer genre, written and published years before that term had entered the American vocabulary. Local police and Federal agents still referred to such cases as “drifter murders” back in the early 1960s and the novel has the thick, foreboding atmosphere that this lost phrase suggests. Set in an unnamed beach town that resembles Truro or Wellfleet or any of the small towns at the tip of Cape Cod where Loftus occasionally resided in the mid-fifties.
