Invisible Ink 311: David Ely

Here’s a disturbing work about false identity that has vanished from bookshops, which is a pity because its topic has never been more relevant. David Ely was born in Chicago in 1927, served in the military, and became a reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

His first novel was published at the age of 36. Trot: A Novel of Suspense concerns the titular army investigator on furlough who is instructed to arrest his travelling companion for black marketeering.

When the plan goes wrong Trot finds himself being hunted in the Montmartre backstreets. Ely was finding his theme: paranoia.

In Mr Nicholas, the hero becomes the president of an electronics firm that’s part of a corporate brotherhood watching him all the time, and in the much later A Journal of the Flood Year, robots operate as the watchdogs for a Big Brother government that is in denial about its inability to govern.

One of Ely’s most successful novels has, oddly, become his rarest. The Tour has tourists visiting a South American country to engage in fake sex-and-violence thrills in a kind of reality- television tourism.

Ely was a crack short story writer, too; Always Home collects together 18 tales that are by turns claustrophobic, paranoid and disturbing. However, Ely found fame for a novel which summed up his themes and was made into an excellent academy award-nominated film by John Frankenheimer.

In the slender novel Seconds, a monosyllabic, unfulfilled banker undergoes a midlife crisis and is offered a way out. After receiving a call from a supposedly dead friend, he visits a discreet service who will stage his death and re-invent him with a new identity.

While they can change his outward appearance, their retraining programme can’t fix his inner yearnings (or his temper) and his new life starts to go wrong from the outset and moves towards a nightmarish climax.

The film became the pet project of Rock Hudson, the absurdly handsome actor who was, by this time, struggling with his own identity crisis, being gay but endlessly cast as a predatory ladies’ man. Hudson financed the film and probably used it as a cathartic experience.

Three of the “reborn” characters were played by formerly blacklisted actors, so they were actually reborn in the film. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was heavily influenced by the movie version during the making of his cult album Smile. Both the book and film of Seconds did poorly at first, but have become cult classics.