Warrant for X, by Philip MacDonald (Dell, 1962). Born in London, England, in 1901, MacDonald broke into novel-writing in 1924 with The Rasp, the first of a dozen whodunits—including his best-known work, The List of Adrian Messenger—the he’d write about Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an ex-secret service agent and newspaper reporter. By 1938, when his Gethryn thriller The Nursemaid Who Vanished (later retitled Warrant for X in the United States) first saw print, he had become one of the world’s most popular crime novelists and had moved to Hollywood to embark on a parallel screenwriting career. His TV credits include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Richard Diamond, Private Detective, and Perry Mason, while among his movie projects were Charlie Chan in London (1934), Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1938), and Love from a Stranger (1947). MacDonald did not, however, pen the scripts for either the 1939 UK film version of The Nursemaid Who Disappeared or its 1956 U.S. adaptation, 23 Paces to Baker Street. He died in California in 1980.
I don’t know about you, but every time I look at McGinnis’ Warrant for X cover, I think he must have modeled his smoking man in the chair on author Gore Vidal.
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