Once Off Guard

Scanned, converted, re-formatted, proofed, first edition book cover restoration and eBook creation by Jerry.

J. H. Wallis's best-selling book Once Off Guard (in later publications it was called The Woman in the Window) was made into a film, The Woman in the Window (1944), directed by Fritz Lang.

 Wallis’s book is an oddly depressing read, tense and claustrophobic, told almost entirely from the point of view of Professor Richard Wanley, who, overcome by reading erotic poetry of ancient Greece, gets involved with a tart and suddenly has to kill her sugar-daddy in self-defense.

Terrified of scandal and genuinely reluctant to hurt his wife, Wanley and the tart cover up the crime and hide the body, leading to a world of complications.