The Last of Philip Banter
"Terror can strike by day as well as by night. Although the frightful is, perhaps rightly, conjoined in our minds with the darkly colored, the harshly dissonant -- with bludgeon blows and the order of decay -- the most terrible experiences are often bereft of these properties of melodrama. The words "I love you," spoken on a sun-streaked terrace during a joyous day, can cement a betrayal. The unchecked gratification of an impulse, conceived in sensation, can bear the bitter fruit of misery. And a prophecy can -- by auto-suggestion or soothsaying? -- deliver a man to evil.
Who was driving Philip Banter to destruction -- himself or another?
"Reversing the customary pattern of crime fiction, this gripping novel open with first planted seed that will lead to murder and is nearing its surprise ending when the actual killing is committed....
.....Philip Banter is an alcoholic and a neurotic with a growing fear of insanity. An ex-newspaperman, now member of a prosperous advertising firm thanks to a brilliant marriage, handsome and debonair, his twin weaknesses are woman and whisky. He can resist neither.
Since his school days, he has been troubled by a penchant for forgetting by the morning experiences of the night before. He finds a growing tendency to complete forgetfulness. He will remember nothing from then to the morning's awakening.
And then "Confessions" begin appearing mysteriously on his desk. They are Confessions, not of what will take place in the past, last night, but of what will take place tonight. And strangely the essential parts develop into fact.
There is Philip Banter's beautiful, jealous, neglected wife. There is her doting father, hating Banter as he would have hated anyone who married his daughter. There is Jeremy Foulkes, whose girl Banter's wife had been. There is his secretary, hating Banter because he was pushed into his present job on the shoulders of the man she loved. There are others.
There follow Banter's exploits with the woman, including the night he spends with Jeremy's fiancee. There is Jeremy's jaunt to a suburban roadhouse and inn with Banter's wife. There is much of that, plenty of alcohol, but over it all the growing threat of insanity..." -- W.J.M., Jr. The Montgomery Advertiser 2/23/47
Bardin Lore -- John worked in advertising for nearly two decades and at times not unlike "Philip Banter", lived hard.
From the JFB website
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