“Danger for Breakfast,” by John McPartland

Danger for Breakfast, by John McPartland (Gold Medal, 1956).

According to Wikipedia, John Donald McPartland was born in Chicago, Illinois, back in 1911, and later went on to train as an engineer. However, after serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, McPartland transformed himself into a journalist and author. His controversial but fairly successful non-fiction work, Sex in Our Changing World (1947), was described by The New York Times as “essentially a sermon” about how, since the war ended, “America has changed drastically from a sex-shy, inhibited people to a hedonistic, cynical people, openly in search of pleasure.” He followed up that debut in 1952 with Love Me Now, his first work of hard-boiled fiction.

McPartland subsequently composed Tokyo Doll (1953) and Affair in Tokyo (1954)—both influenced by the time he spent in the South Pacific as an Army reservist during the Korean War—as well as The Face of Evil (1954) and The Kingdom of Johnny Cool (1959), the latter of which was adapted into the 1963 film Johnny Cool starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Henry Silva. The novel that gained him the greatest attention, though, was No Down Payment, a tale of suburban sex, alcohol, and marriage troubles that reached print in 1957 and was soon transformed into a movie of that same title starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North, and Tony Randall.

Danger for Breakfast, featuring paperback cover art by Barye Phillips, has been all but forgotten over the decades. Yet its back-cover plot précis shows the author’s taste for international intrigue:

She was half naked and sobbing when MacBride saw her first, in the fourth-floor corridor of a Tokyo hotel.

Pooled out around her were four men—one dying, one dead, and one ferociously hurt. MacBride had broken the throat of one and blinded another.

Her name was Dorrie Eden. She had copper-red hair and a wonderful body, and the secret she knew made her a living time bomb—the most dangerous woman alive in the East.

They assigned MacBride to Dorrie Eden. They told him to kill her and make it look like an accident.

It was a hell of a way to protect his country—because by then MacBride had fallen in love with her.

In all, McPartland published 11 novels, several of which remain in print (including a Stark House Press combo of Big Red’s Daughter and Tokyo Doll, and Centipede Press’ reprint of 1956’s I'll See You in Hell), and saw half a dozen of his screenplays produced. Unfortunately, his career was cut short by a heart attack in 1958, when he was 47 years old and living in Monterey, California.

Not until the settlement of his estate was it learned that the author had—as Time magazine put it—“lived as harum-scarum a life as any of his characters, had a legal wife and son at Mill Valley, Calif., [plus] a mistress at Monterey who bore him five children and who, as Mrs. Eleanor McPartland, was named the city’s 1956 ‘Mother of the Year.’ Later, McPartland’s legal widow submitted the daughter of an unnamed third woman as one of the novelist’s rightful heirs.”