When it opened on Broadway, The Desperate Hours was clearly a beneficiary of what is now known as "marketing synergy." Within one year, Joseph Hayes's story was released as a novel, as a theatrical production, and as a motion picture. To some degree, the fact that it was in so many places at once must have helped it gain audience attention. This would not, however, account for the fact that the play was awarded the Tony Award for best play of 1955. More relevant, in fact, is that The Desperate Hours, in whatever form, tells a compelling (if familiar) story, and tells it in a powerful, focused way. As C. V. Terry explains in a 1954 review of the novel for the New York Times, "The story-line is a familiar one. . . . So, inevitably, are most plot patterns in novels of this genre: it is the treatment, not the...