At the start of Chapter Five Benchley gives Amity some backstory by running through memorable moments in the town's history from the Revolution to World War Two. Included in the list is a reference to an illicit cargo of rum being salvaged from a wrecked ship. If you change the word rum to morphine, you have the bare bones plot of the author's next book, The Deep.
This is not the only instance of synchronicity in the paragraph. The most recent piece of local history Benchley provides is "the widely reported (though never fully ascertained) landing of three German spies on the Scotch Road beach in 1942." When including this detail he must surely have had in mind his father Nathaniel Benchley's novel The Off-Islanders, a cold war satire published in 1961, in which a Russian submarine runs aground on a sandbank off an East Coast island and sparks a fear of a Soviet invasion amongst the locals. The book was made into a less subtle film with a much less subtle title The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which gave Alan Arkin his first screen role.
The fear of a foreign invasion was, coincidentally, used to (some say) comedic effect in Steven Spielberg's 1941, a film that misfired on its initial release in 1979. The movie included a Jaws parody that - along with other examples of overblown comedy - had many critics saying that the wunderkind director had lost the plot and was all washed up. He then made Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. back to back.
