Daniel Mainwaring on AllMovie

The name "Geoffrey Homes" has been affixed to some of Hollywood's most entertaining crime melodramas, actioners and murder mysteries. Not bad for a man who never really existed. Truth to tell, Geoffrey Homes was the pseudonym for novelist/screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring. The son of a California forest ranger, Mainwaring began his writing career at the San Francisco Chronicle. After working as a publicist at Warner Bros., he secured a screenwriting job with Paramount's Pine-Thomas production unit. Mainwaring's credits under the Geoffrey Homes anonym include the novel 40 Whacks, filmed by Warner's as Crime by Night in 1942, and the screenplays for such Pine-Thomas efforts as No Hands on the Clock (1944), Scared Stiff (1945), Swamp Fire (1946) and Hot Cargo (1946). Mainwaring/Homes also worked on RKO's The Big Steal (1949), MGM's Tall Target (1951) and UA's A Bullet for Joey (1955). The best-remembered of Geoffrey Homes' literary efforts was the suspense novel Build My Gallows High, filmed as Out of the Past in 1947 and Against All Odds in 1984. Under his own name, Daniel Mainwaring scripted two of director Don Siegel's best films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Baby Face Nelson (1957).