Daniel Mainwaring

Daniel Mainwaring (February 27, 1902 – January 31, 1977) was an American novelist and screenwriter. His novel Build My Gallows High was adapted to film by himself as Out of the Past (1947).

Biography A native of Oakland, California, Mainwaring began his professional career as a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle and enjoyed a successful career as a mystery novelist (under the name Geoffrey Homes). He worked as a film publicist and eventually abandoned fiction for a successful career as a screenwriter.

His first novel (and the only one he ever published under his own name), One Against the Earth (1932), is a proletarian novel about a young man born on a California ranch who becomes a drifter and is eventually unjustly accused of attacking a child. He made his real mark, however, with a string of hard-boiled mystery novels (mostly with small-town California settings), the first of which was The Man Who Murdered Himself (1936).

His final published novel, Build My Gallows High (William Morrow & Co., 1946), is generally regarded as his best—and its adaptation (by "Homes" himself) into the 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past assured his place in film history.

By the time Out of the Past appeared Mainwaring had already begun to devote himself exclusively to screenwriting, first under the Homes pseudonym and later under his real name.

According to Frank Krutnik's book "Un-American" Hollywood, Losey's memory seems to serve him wrong here. Mainwaring's widow claims her husband actually acted as a front for blacklisted author Paul Jarrico. Also, Mainwaring's name appears on several movie credits in the 1950s which would have been impossible for a blacklisted author. The first film to break the blacklisting rule by naming a "banned" screenwriter (Dalton Trumbo) in the credits was Otto Preminger's 1960 film, Exodus.

In 1960, Mainwaring was hired by fantasy-film producer-director George Pal to write the screenplay for the MGM Studios film Atlantis, the Lost Continent, released in 1961. He based his script on a play written by Gerald Hargreaves in 1945. Toward the end of his career, in the 1960s, he wrote for TV shows like The Wild Wild West and Mannix. He did not live long enough to see Out of the Past remade as Against All Odds (1984).