TThat's a snake set against a blazing hot sun. The whole story takes place in Arizona and most of it in the desert outside of Phoenix. The sun is in the book as is the snake. And it is about a man drowning where there's no water. But the desert itself used to be an ocean, we're told, and Nick Banning, the main character and our narrator, notes that the fingers of cactus stick up like corral.

On its way to its fatalistic ending Man Drowning hits most of the items on the 1950s novel checklist of thrills: sex, violence, drinking, drugs, fast driving, crime.

It kicks off with a quote from Job (never a good sign) and the first line written by the author is "First I thought she had a dogwhip hung around her skinny neck, with the ends dangling down the front of the sand-colored blouse".

Already you can see how Kuttner is developing his characters and setting. "Dogwhip" is ominous, "skinny" gives us a preview of a character we're about to meet and "sand-colored" helps establish the pervasiveness and significance of the desert setting. All in the first line! That dogwhip turns out to be a snake and while, combined with the opening from Job, that suggests a biblical angle, it isn't overdone. Nothing in this book is overdone.

Nick Banning is in this desert because he's trying to get to Phoenix. He's broke and dishonorably discharged from the army but all he cares about is getting his ex-wife back. She left him for a few reasons but the main one turns out to be that Banning has a rage problem.

He can't help it. He loves Sherry so much that he just goes crazy. The fury and violence build up in him like heat and pressure combined and he can't contain them, he explodes. Quite a bit of this novel is about a time bomb of a man who might go off at any moment.

And in the army Banning learned some new ways to kill.

But he's different now, isn't he? He'll show Sherry that he's changed. He gets a job, for instance. But, sadly, he gets the wrong kind of job for some truly weird and damaged people. And there are wolves circling around Sherry while she herself feels time running out and is desperate to make one last break for the good life while she still can.

In addition to being a real page-turner Man Drowning is astonishingly well written. Before finishing it I ordered a bunch of other things by Kuttner, who often wrote in collaboration with his wife, C.L. Moore. It's not always certain which books they wrote together and which they wrote separately as they sometimes published just under his name, due to sexist practices in the publishing industry. Maybe this is one of their joint efforts. Either way, it's a highlight of my reading history, particularly of books of this sort.