All women are wonders because they reduce all men to the obvious.

As director Joseph Losey whose The Lawless was adapted by Mainwaring from the writer's own short story (publication undetermined) The Voice of Stephen Wilder noted:

This is one of the things that makes me very close to Dan Mainwaring--his experience of Americana the nostalgia of the good things about small towns. I remember the smell of burning leaves at night in the autumn too. I'd get to the end and have to say whodunit and be so mixed up I couldn't decide myself.

Daniel Mainwaring (22 July 1902 – 31 January 1977) was a novelist and screenwriter. And Dan remembers them all. Mainwaring's widow remembers that actually Mainwaring himself acted as a front for blacklisted author Paul Jarrico.