Thrift Shop Book Covers: "The Flight"

The Flight, by C. F. Runyan, was published as a trade paperback by Bantam in 1991. The edition that caught my eye was Bantam Falcon’s 1992 mass market edition. The shadowy and cold-colored cover art is simple with a Twilight Zone-like mysterious appeal. The artist: Unknown (to me at least)

The opening lines:

Somewhere in the large Georgian house a phone rang.

Brigadier General Scott Armitage entered his study, tossed his briefcase onto a side table, and cocked his head peevishly at the insistent ringing.

The Flight was C. F. (Clair) Runyan’s only novel. It’s a big and intriguing thriller with a science fiction element—time travel from 1994 to wartime Philippines in 1942. When I read it as a teenager, it captured my imagination with its intricate plot and the bleak rendering of the Pacific War. Runyan was a historian and retired Marine Corps Infantry officer. He served from World War II to Vietnam. He died in 2010 to little fanfare as his obituary in the San Diego Tribune attests:

RUNYAN, CLAIR F. Lt. Col. USMC, Ret. Dec. 19, 1919 to Feb. 4, 2010. No services held. Cremation with ashes scattered at sea.

My snooping around the internet also found a letter-to-the-editor Runyan wrote in the same newspaper about a critical review of the terrible Bruckheimer / Michael Bay film, Pearl Harbor (2001):

I guess we should cut critics some slack when it comes to history, and (critic-at-large) Welton Jones in his critique of “Pearl Harbor” could use some (“Echoes of yesteryear in ‘Pearl Harbor,’” May 27). Much of what he wrote was good, such as his description of World War II as “the most turbulent conflict in human history, a cruel and monstrous and capricious maelstrom. . . .” That’s a welcome counterpoint to the sappy “The Good War” we hear about. Tell the millions dead how good it was.