‘Anyone’s My Name’ is a masterfully written dark crime novel. Originally published in 1953, one year after Jim Thompson’s noir classic, ‘Killer Inside Me’, it made the New York Times bestseller list and was published abroad to critical acclaim. Like ‘Killer Inside Me’, ‘Anyone’s My Name’ is written from the mind of the killer. But while Lou Ford,  the protagonist in “Killer Inside Me”, is a broken psychopath who’s playing out his hand in some perverse game, Paul Weiler, the protagonist in ‘Anyone’s My Name’, is an average college-educated guy, but because of taking shortcuts in both his personal and professional life, finds himself caught in a sequence of events that end in a killing. Both men know that they’re doomed. Ford accepts and welcomes it, Weiler is terrified by it, realizing everything that he’s lost. Both books provide different views from the mind of the killer. Both books are noir classics. Both books should be well-known. ‘Killer Inside Me’ is, ‘Anyone’s My Name’ is not – and that’s a shame. It deserves to be up there on the same shelf as James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’, Thompson’s fierce and brilliant dark noir books, Charles Willeford’s ‘The Woman Chaser’, and Dan Marlowe’s ‘The Name of the Game is Death’.

‘Anyone’s My Name’ is written from the first person perspective of Paul Weiler, a young but established writer for the true detective magazines. His ambition is to write great novels, but he’s being paid well and he needs the money, especially if he’s going to marry a young, idealistic, beautiful woman,  Ginny. So he writes up active crime cases, cynically embellishing them as needed. After all, what difference does it make? – if the suspects have confessed, then they’re guilty and his embellishments aren’t going to hurt anyone (even if he knows that the police routinely beat the confessions out of their suspects).

Paul is started on his downward spiral when he’s asked (forced) by his editor to interview Claire Crisponi. Claire’s death-row husband had tried to implicate her in a murder, only to recant shortly afterwards. Paul’s editor, Howard Davenport, wants a puff piece written about her, about how she’s been made to suffer by her brute of a husband. Claire is a hard, phlegmatic woman, with a “sharp-featured bony face” but, as Paul notes, “provocatively pretty legs”. When Davenport wants Paul to follow up this article with an eyewitness accounting of her the night her husband is being executed, Paul knows it’s a mistake, but he lets himself be pushed into it. There’s no real feeling or passion between Paul and Claire, but there’s a hunger for sex and Paul succumbs to it.  While Paul’s wife, Ginny, is devoted and loving, she’s ashamed of sex, making Paul almost feel as if he’s raping her every time they engage in it. He can lose himself  in Claire. As Paul remarks “I wanted to think of Claire as something I could find by opening a drawer, and then put away just as easily …” But as he finds, it’s not that easy.

Cheating in his personal life leads to cheating in his professional life. He now needs more money so he can support Claire. Instead of simply embellishing his stories, he starts making up facts wholesale. This leads to a disastrous sequence of events, and ultimately to his killing another man. The killing is not first degree murder. It could be either temporary insanity or manslaughter, but he knows if the killing is discovered, Ginny will find out all about Claire, and he can’t bear that. So he continues to make one mistake after another. He’s worked on enough police investigations to know what’s coming, but he’s too paralyzed with fear to do anything about it. When the inevitable comes, it comes swiftly and brutally.

In some ways Paul’s reaction to his killing is more chilling than Lou Ford’s. Ford, in his own perverse way, has empathy towards his victiims. The only remorse Paul shows is towards the future he’s losing. While this book drips in cynicism and irony (especially the last brilliant line in it), there’s an absolute honesty to it. Paul’s motivations are real, his reaction to the killing is real, and the outcome, while brutal, is the only way it could be.

-Dave Zeltserman

Mr. Shubin has graciously provided some of his memories regarding Anyone’s My Name:

I have many memories associated with the writing and publication of Anyone’s My Name.  For instance, when the book was accepted I was asked to come to Simon & Shuster to meet the editor-in-chief. I was in my 20s and suddenly scared that my novel was actually going to be published. So I asked if I could have it back to make “some” revisions. Well, the revisions took months and months; I threw just about everything I knew into it. The manuscript I resubmitted was about twice as long as the original, and the editor said so and gave it back to me to rework. I remember his words: "You've shown you're a good writer, now show us that you're a good editor." And the result was that I took out just about everything I'd added.

People still ask me if the novel is true. In fact I remember a woman at a reading actually asking me what happened to Ginny afterwards. I made some remark, like "the curtain has come down and everyone has gone home," and then was immediately angry at myself that I'd joked about something she meant very seriously. Actually, the true parts are the true-detective writing, some incidents such as meeting the wife of a convicted killer at his sentencing to death--and all of the feelings. People often ask, too, if Ginny was based in any way on my own wife since there was a "physical resemblance"--when, in fact, I hadn't even met her when I wrote the book. I was actually writing true detective stuff at the time , and my editor was the model for the fictional one. I heard that he was angry as hell at me, but he never mentioned a word about the book to me and still gave me work to do. And it was only a few years later, after I'd stopped writing for him, that I happened to meet him at a restaurant with his new (third of fourth) wife. And he put his arm around me (strange to begin with) and introduced me to her as "the kid who wrote that great book." I think there's a lesson here for writers not to be afraid to model characters after a real person, if you do it fairly.

The book also came close to being sold to the movies several times--but all of the so-called deals were lousy and I  held onto the rights.  The first one came from a movie star of the time, Glenn Ford, whom I spoke with on the phone. I still had enough stars in my eyes to be almost chilled when he told me that Barbara Stanwick brought the book to his attention. He told me that he was trying to get his studio (I think MGM) to do it but, to almost quote him, it was as though he'd never made a movie in his life. Then he asked if I--me?--could help raise any money.  Every now and then I stil hear from someone about possibily making a movie out of it. The latest is from a screenwriter who got in touch with me just a few weeks ago to ask if he could do it as a screenplay. We’ll see what happens.

Seymour Shubin

Copyright(c) 2003 by Dave Zeltserman