Read Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney for Free Online

story, and all of the major plot twists are unchanged. Minor revisions abound, though, often adding expletives or salacious details to scenes that were more innocent in the family magazine.
    In chapter seven of the novel, background details about Guy's family are added, as are more details to strengthen Jerry's motivations for robbery. This chapter also deletes the details of the plan to go cross-country in a trailer; this is held back from the reader until chapter eleven, when the five friends actually make the trip. This method of creating suspense mirrors that used by Finney in holding back the details of the actual robbery from the reader.
    Finney would use this same technique in his other three caper novels, The House of Numbers, Assault on a Queen, and The Night People, with varying degrees of success.
    The main change in the middle part of the novel concerns a dream that Tina has while they are driving to Reno; she has a nightmare that Al will be killed in the robbery, and this leads him to try to back out of the scheme. The latter part of the novel has few differences from the serialized version.
    Reviewers at the time were supportive of Jack Finney's first novel. Anthony Boucher, writing in the New York Times, called Finney "the admirable short-story writer," remarked that "the elaborately ingenious gimmicks with which the raid is carried out would stir the admiration of Raffles or even of Arsène Lupin," and concluded that "the high enterprise and dazzling execution of the crime itself will stay with you." James Sandoe of the New York Herald Tribune called 5 Against the House a "pretty sad work" but admitted that "the essential gimmick is worth a look for its preposterous ingenuities and Mr. Finney gives the events some nice panic-striking swerves." Sergeant Cuff of the Saturday Review added that "implausabilities abound, but story is well paced."
    Perhaps even more important to Jack Finney's life was the sale of 5 Against the House to Columbia Pictures; it was made into a motion picture of the same name and released in May 1955. A paperback edition of the novel was issued by Pocket Books in July 1955 to coincide with the film. Stirling Silliphant, John Barnwell, and William Bowers wrote the screenplay and Phil Karlson directed it. Finney was said to have disliked the film (Bosky 173).
    Viewed today, it is a disappointing adaptation of the novel that turns Brick into a psychotic Korean War veteran and Tina into a glamorous lounge singer. The climax is utterly different and clichéd — Brick steals the money and runs for it; he is cornered in a parking garage by Al and the police and talked out of using his gun. The film is most interesting when it follows the novel closely, in the trip to Reno and the robbery of Harold's Club. The film is discussed in more detail in chapter nineteen.
    5 Against the House is a mediocre novel that has not been reprinted in America since 1955. Its chief value is that it set Jack Finney's career as a novelist in motion and set the scene for the series of caper novels that he would write over the next twenty-five years. His second novel would be much more memorable.

FOUR
    The Body Snatchers
    Jack Finney's next published work came in the November 26, 1954 issue of Collier's, the bi-weekly magazine that had published so many of his early short stories. He had not published anything since 5 Against the House , which had been issued as a novel in February of that year, and his last story for Collier's had appeared on October 18,1952 ("Diagnosis Completed").
    "The Body Snatchers" was billed as "a new three-part serial," and would appear in three consecutive issues of Collier's (part two was published in the December 10, 1954 issue, followed by part three in the December 24, 1954 issue). Little did readers know that this would eventually become Finney's best-known tale, a story that would work its way into the cultural mind-set of the latter half of twentieth-century America.
    The story is