The Longest Second

The mid-century author and screenwriter Bill S. Ballinger is most famous for his noir novel The Longest Second (1957), selected as a finalist for the 1958 Edgar Award for Best Mystery novel. Using a split narration, with one half of the book written from the point of view of its main character and the other half a third-person description of the police investigating the protagonist’s situation, the plot revolves around a man piecing together clues to discover his identity after a vicious attack leaves him with amnesia.

The novel opens as a man comes to consciousness in what he realizes is a hospital room (he eventually discovers he is in New York City). However, when he tries to turn to his head, the extreme pain in his neck makes it clear that he has a grievous wound. It turns out that his throat was slit and he would have died had he not been found and tended to by a kind stranger. Because of the condition of his neck, the man cannot talk. However, the main problem is that he has no idea who he is or why anyone would have targeted him for this kind of assassination in the first place. He drifts back into unconsciousness and suffers the first instance of a recurring nightmare that will plague him until the end of the novel: “At first there wasn't much to it; it was only that the hospital room was no longer the same room. It was another room, darkly lit except for a light in the far corner. I kept waiting for something to appear from behind that spot of light. That was all. But the terror of waiting, the anticipation of fear were freezing. Never have I been so monstrously frightened.”

The police interview the man, but receive limited information since the only way he can communicate is by writing his answers down. They take his fingerprints and get a match: The man’s name is Vic Pacific. Unfortunately, this doesn’t ring a bell for the victim. He digs deep into what few memories he has, but all he remembers are some quotations from the philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and lists of names that seem meaningless.



Vic is discharged from the hospital. He decides that the best place to find clues is the house of the person who helped him when his throat was first slit—Bianca Hill. A beautiful young woman, Bianca tells Vic that she found him in a pool of blood on her doorstep. She offers Vic a place to stay, finding some light jobs around the apartment for him to do, which he gratefully accepts. Still, Bianca has no idea why Vic would have been in her building, and her roommate, the even more beautiful Rosemary, is completely against the idea of them sheltering Vic for any length of time. Rosemary is scared that whoever wanted to kill Vic will come back to finish the job, endangering the two women.

Something about Rosemary seems off to Vic, but he can’t put his finger on exactly what. Meanwhile, the police are working to figure out what happened to Vic. His story of amnesia doesn’t completely convince them, and one detective, in particular, wants to catch Vic in a lie to get him to confess what he is sure Vic actually knows. At this point, Vic’s memory kicks in with another confusing clue: He knows some Arabic words, but it’s not clear where he learned them or why.

Increasingly panicked, Rosemary runs away from the apartment, which turns out to be a mistake—the same murderous agents who are, indeed, still after Vic, kill her. As the simultaneous investigations of Vic and the police yield more and more results, including a safe deposit box and a huge hoard of cash, we learn that Vic wasn’t on Bianca’s doorstep, but on Rosemary’s. He and she were working together on something quite sinister when the bad guys caught up to Vic, and Rosemary decided to take his amnesia as a sign to try to get out—with terrible results.



In the end, Vic’s recurring nightmare holds the key to uncovering his pursuers, as the novel’s finale puts him face to face with the “someone” that is on the verge of emerging from “the spot of light” in his dream.