Reading California Fiction

BLUE MURDER

    It may be that I’ve missed the joke with Blue Murder. The author was one of those pulp fiction writers who could type as fast as he could think. He published some 3,000 short stories in his career, many in Spicy Detective. Several collections of his stories have recently been reprinted. His fans today appreciate his over-the-top use of Chandleresque prose. But there’s a question whether he was engaging in parody or just writing badly. I’m guessing the latter.

    Blue Murder by Robert Leslie Bellem. Phoenix Books (1938), 256 pp.
    Duke Pizzatello works as an investigator for Joe and Steve Kohlar’s detective agency in Los Angeles. He’s told to find evidence that Nelia Mason’s husband has been cheating on her. Nelia is interested in a more permanent separation than divorce. When she arranges an incident in which Duke shoots the husband in his wooden leg, Duke wants off the case. But then Gertie Kohlar, Joe’s wife, tells Duke that she’s pregnant, he’s the father, and she needs money for an abortion. Nelia is his only source of ready cash. Dixie Parker, a secretary for the agency, urges Duke not to get involved with Nelia again. But he does – and soon discovers her husband’s dead body and the hacked up remains of an unidentifiable woman. Duke becomes the prime suspect in the double homicide.
    This is a tough-guy novel that relies almost completely on plot twists. Duke, the protagonist and narrator, is neither sympathetic nor perceptive. At best he’s amusingly irresponsible as he bounces from one episode to another. The women in the story are notable primarily for their flimsy outfits, though Dixie adds a ridiculous determination to keep Duke out of trouble. The male characters are hardly developed at all. Bellem might have been able to get all this to work if he had kept the plot under control. But too much of what happens just makes no sense. The book was perhaps mildly titillating seventy years ago. Today it’s likely to appeal only to less discriminating fans of noir fiction.

MY FACE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

    There seems to be a general agreement that the two best Hollywood novels are The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West and What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg. The number three spot is still up for grabs. I’d like to nominate My Face for the World to See, which produces a greater emotional impact than either of the top two. It got wonderful reviews when it was published but seems to have faded entirely from view in the past fifty years. I am, incidentally, casting Campbell Scott and Katherine Heigl in the movie adaptation.

    My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes. Harper and Brothers (1958), 183 pp.
    A New York writer is on one of his annual stints in Hollywood. He’s repelled by the superficiality and pretentiousness of the movie business but relishes the high salary and respite from his unsatisfying marriage. At a typically boring beach party he sees one of guests, a beautiful young woman, walking into the ocean with a cocktail glass in her hand. When she stumbles, he races into the water, gets her back to the beach and revives her. He ruminates on the meaning of this event until she calls a couple days later to thank him. Then he asks her out to dinner, hoping to assuage his loneliness one way or another. He gets much more than he bargained for.
    Hayes takes two familiar Hollywood characters, the cynical writer and the aspiring actress, and turns the stereotypes upside down. Beneath the writer’s air of detachment is not incipient idealism but a deep fear of involvement. And below the actress’s game determination to succeed is not an admirable spunkiness but the compulsions of a tormented soul. Hayes depicts their relationship in a series of powerful scenes that lead to a shattering conclusion. The writer narrates the story in a tone of mild self-criticism that often smacks of rationalization. The actress’s version of the tale would be much different. Some readers might find the book too concerned with psychological explanation. But even they are likely to be won over by Hayes’s acuity and sensitivity. This is a terrific novel and deserves a wide audience.

HOSPITAL NOCTURNE

    What intrigued me about this book was its publisher. I’m not talking about the paperback publisher, which labeled it a “Dell Romance” and put some smooching medicos on the cover. I mean the original, hard cover publisher, Vanguard Press. Vanguard put out a lot of left-wing books in the 1930s, both fiction and non-fiction. It published James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, a Marxist critique of the lower middle-class, in the same year as Hospital Nocturne. So I figured I needed to check it out. (Note to the eagle-eyed: Dell actually did misspell the author’s middle name.)

    Hospital Nocturne by Alice Elinor Lambert. Vanguard Press (1932), 306 pp.
    Carol Maitland is about halfway through her nurses’ training at a large hospital in San Francisco. Sincere and unsophisticated, she had trouble at first trouble fitting in to the constrained institutional environment. Now Carol likes the work and takes particular interest in two patients, one an old codger who sides with the nurses against their supervisors, the other guilt-ridden rich kid who suffers from debilitating seizures. She also enjoys the companionship of two fellow trainees, Enid and Sheila. Carol does not, however, share their enthusiastic involvement with the opposite sex. As her time in the hospital continues, Carol learns more about work and life.
    The author seems to have something more complicated in mind than simply recounting the romances of some nurses. She wants to portray their everyday lives without any false glamour. As she portrays it, the hospital is rule-bound and hierarchical. The patients’ treatment is seldom individualized. The nurses go for days without ever leaving the hospital grounds. Their supervisors are petty and distrustful. The doctors, like all men in authority, are constantly on the make. Many of the nurses are happy to respond. Only Carol, the protagonist, refrains from love affairs, and she does so not for moral reasons but because she fears emotional damage. The story is made up of episodes, most of which are focused on work. In one Carol breaks the rules to reenergize an elderly patient, for example; in another Enid tries to understand a botched abortion. So the novel seems to step out of character when it concludes by neatly tieing up all the subplots. Hospital stories are much more familiar today than they were in 1932. Even so, some modern readers are likely to enjoy the book.

LOVE AFTER FIVE

    I suppose there are statistics on this somewhere, but from what I’ve been reading I’d say middle-class people in the 1950s did a lot of drinking. Five cocktails before dinner were nothing. A couple of bottles of wine during the meal had no impact. A few more shots afterward produced only a pleasant glow. In Love after Five the protagonist, a business executive, at least dimly understands that he sometimes drinks too much. No one faults him for it, presumably because that's exactly what everyone expects.

    Love after Five by Raymond Mason. Fawcett Gold Medal (1956), 160 pp.
    Tony Albertson is only thirty-one and already vice-president in charge of marketing for a successful San Francisco paint company. His boss, Mort Custer, is about to retire and apparently favors Tony to be his successor. Tony is pretty sure he wants the job, but he’s less certain about his love life. Ann, his girlfriend, provides no spark, while Penelope, the boss’s wife, keeps propositioning him. Then Zoe, the girlfriend from high school about whom he daydreams, shows up hoping to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, Tony has come to notice that Stella, his longtime secretary, is not only loyal and efficient but extremely attractive as well.
    This book might be considered Gold Medal’s answer to Executive Suite or The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Tony works hard, appreciates his success, but is growing tired of the corporate rat race. Loveless bachelorhood is the problem, and Tony must endure episodes of self-doubt and hard drinking before he finds the solution. (The reader will be way ahead of him.) Unfortunately, neither he nor the other characters in the book are especially sympathetic or compelling. The exception is Zoe, whose partying and gay friends raise Tony’s defenses against the unconventional. The story ends implausibly though not surprisingly. The book reads easily but is today probably of more historical than literary interest.

VALLEY BOY

    Sometimes authors should have more confidence in their narrative abilities. In Valley Boy Theodore Pratt paints a masterful picture of a boy neglected by his parents and seeking affection elsewhere. Few readers are likely to overlook or misunderstand the boy’s problem. Even so, Pratt has another character spell it out. And she does this early in the book, at a time when other interpretations were still possible. “Steve,” says Kit on p. 31, “that boy is starved for love.” This would have been the right time for an editor to get out a red pencil and chop out this needless piece of dialogue.

    Valley Boy by Theodore Pratt. Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1946), 331 pp.
    Johnny Birch, a sensitive and impressionable ten-year-old, is about half way through summer vacation in the newly developing San Fernando Valley. He wishes he could be like a regular kid, but so much about his life is odd. He lives in a house designed to look like a dilapidated adobe. His street is only a block long and only half paved. His neighbors behave in strange ways that he tries but usually fails to understand. His parents, caught up in the romance of Spanish California, attend to their horses and ignore him completely. Johnny’s only friend is unusual too -- Oscar, a sea lion. When Kit and Steve, a young couple facing an unconventional issue of their own, move in next door, Johnny believes he has finally found some people who can appreciate him.
    Pratt divides his attention somewhat in this book. His main focus is on Johnny, and his portrayal is spot on. Johnny’s need for companionship and his quest for understanding are plausible and affecting. Even his relationship with Oscar avoids the saccharine. Pratt also addresses the problems of other residents of Johnny’s block. Here the author is less successful. While these characters are interesting enough, their stories are so much less vivid than Johnny’s that they seem to be digressions. Despite the boy-and-his-pet theme, the overall tone of the book is not as light as might be expected. The parents are almost criminally negligent, the neighbors’ difficulties include drunkenness and sexual dysfunction, and a couple scenes are actually scary. Pratt deserves extra points for his descriptions of the San Fernando Valley before it became thoroughly suburbanized. Although the book may tie everything up too neatly at the end, it is still well worth reading.

HEADLONG

    Have you ever gotten half way through a book and then realized it was turning into garbage? That was my experience with Headlong. It started out fine and ended up nearly insufferable. Parkhurst was apparently something of a feminist in her early career and may have hoped to make a statement in the book about women’s lives. A lack of literary skill did her in. This was, I believe, her only novel.

    Headlong by Genevieve Parkhurst. Henry Holt and Co. (1931), 297 pp.
    This novel depicts the life of Victoria Mead from the 1880s to the 1920s. Her childhood and adolescence in the Bay Area seem idyllic. Victoria is spunky, smart and imaginative. Her family is wealthy. Her father is protective. Her siblings are congenial. At convent school she’s a bit rebellious but makes friends easily and graduates at the top of her class. She has an eye for the opposite sex and soon falls in love with Dick Bolling, a handsome but weak-willed rogue hoping to live off her family’s fortune. They sneak off to get married. Then Victoria’s troubles begin.
    The book has an interesting story at its core, but the author fails to put it together coherently. The episodes are out of balance. Parkhurst drags on the unhappy marriage for 75 pages, for example, then skips through several barely foreshadowed instances of duplicity and nastiness. She misses chances to put the story in historical perspective by making almost no reference to anything happening outside Victoria’s life. And the protagonist (once she grows up) is not sufficiently well rounded to generate much sympathy. Even in the middle of a scandalous affair, she seems prissy and mawkish. Students of feminist fiction might find something here. Others should probably stay clear.

THREE SHORT BIERS

    Jimmy Starr (1904-1990) apparently was something like the protagonist of this book -- a well-connected writer who produced work with the public in mind. Arriving in Hollywood in 1919, he became known primarily as a columnist, but he also worked over the years as a screenwriter and publicist. Google Books shows some 120 references to him, usually in biographies of movie stars. His books include a collection of Hollywood short stories (1926) and two other mysteries with reporter Joe Medford (1944 and 1950).

    Three Short Biers by Jimmy Starr. Murray and Gee (1945), 232 pp.
    One of three circus midgets hired for a movie musical is found hanging above the sound stage during a lunch break. Joe Medford, a cynical but high spirited Hollywood insider, is the first reporter on the scene. He quickly decides the death must be murder and calls in the story. Joe then tells the police that he will solve the crime before they do. He has learned that a director known for his practical jokes has sent three small caskets to the director of the musical. It may be a clue -- and a portent of more killing to come.
    Joe Medford is no noir hero. He’s relentlessly cheerful in the face of evil-doing. Joe wants to solve the murder all right, but not so much to bring the culprit to justice but to enhance his own career. He’s certainly not a loner in his investigation. He relies on friends and acquaintances all across movieland. One of Joe’s main problems -- choosing a companion among two actresses and a beautiful rival reporter -- has nothing to do with the crime. So the story, told by Joe in the first person, is light weight and somewhat loosely plotted. The novel is probably most notable for its droll portrayal of what passes for journalism in Hollywood.

DIG ME A GRAVE

    Cleve Adams (1895?-1949) was one of a group of struggling Los Angeles mystery writers in the 1930s who wrote for the pulps and hoped for a larger audience. He broke through with the publication of his first book, Sabotage, in 1940. Its success led to another eleven novels in the next four years. One recounted further exploits of Bill Rye, the central character in Dig Me a Grave. The pseudonym “John Spain” was used three times, though I don’t know why. Adams didn’t publish any novels after 1944, but three of his drafts were completed by Robert Leslie Bellem after Adams’ death.

    Dig Me a Grave by Cleve F. Adams. Dutton (1942), 255 pp.
    Erstwhile Los Angeles P. I. Bill Rye is working as a troubleshooter for political boss and oil tycoon Ed Callahan. Several problems need his attention. Callahan’s randy wife, Sybil, is the subject of some incriminating photos. His irresponsible son, Gerald, has gotten involved with gangster Pat Powers and night-club singer Dee Blossom. Most perplexing, though, is a letter from Carmelita Machado, who claims to be Callahan’s daughter from a liaison he had in Mexico. Rye handles Sybil’s blackmailer quickly (if ruthlessly), but he has more trouble resolving the other issues.
    This novel has everything readers expect from tough-guy stories -- a diligent crime fighter with a sardonic attitude, several bad guys following different agendas, some hot babes (including Rye’s girlfriend), and recurrent episodes of action and violence. The author uses a third-person narrator but keeps the viewpoint limited to his protagonist. Hanging over the story is the question raised earlier in Dashiell Hammett’s Glass Key -- whether the political boss deserves the loyalty that his protector gives him. Fans of tough-guy crime novels are likely to enjoy the book.

DESERT TOWN

    I bought Desert Town early last year but was reluctant to start it because of lukewarm reviews. I got the impression it was a glorified piece of magazine fiction. In fact, its first rendering was as a serial in Collier’s. But when I realized that nearly all of its characters were unscrupulous, I understood that it was a noir tale in an unusual setting. The novel was snapped up by the movies soon after publication. The A-list film version, Desert Fury, written by Robert Rossen and A. I. Bezzerides, came out in 1947.

    Desert Town by Ramona Stewart. Morrow (1946), 248 pp.
    Seventeen-year-old high-school student Paula Haller is bored by her daily routine in a Barstow-like town in the California desert. A free spirit, Paula is pondering options for a more stimulating future. She enjoys training horses, though her more obvious career choice is to begin work in the well-established local business run by her mother, Fritzi. The business, however, involves operating a saloon, a gambling hall, several liquor stores, and a brothel. Fritzi, who has not quite overcome public disapproval despite ten years in business, wants something better for her daughter. When Eddie Benedict, a gangster on sabbatical, moves into a ranch outside of town, Paula’s prospects take a dangerous turn.
    Ramona Stewart explores several themes in this ambitious novel. The first is a coming-of-age story in which Paula learns valuable lessons from her relationship with Eddie. The second is an examination of the corruption and hypocrisy of small-town life. Fritzi, for example, pays off everyone who might give her trouble – except kindly Judge Lindquist, who is her silent partner. And finally, Stewart takes a look at the pleasures and limitations of male bonding. In one pair are two deputy sheriffs, in the other Eddie and his longtime henchman. The novel has other characters and several subplots. At first it seems that Stewart will be unable to keep all this under control. But as the gangster (somewhat reminiscent of Roy Earle in High Sierra) comes into focus, the story generates increasing tension. Though it is an entertaining read, the book primarily deserves attention as a study of amorality and its consequences.

INCORRIGIBLE

    An author who wants to make a point in his or her novel must take care to maintain the coherence of the story. An egregious manipulation of situations and characters undercuts the message by throwing the writer’s integrity into question. Incorrigible shows what happens when an author’s determination to make a statement overwhelms his need to tell a story. Karl Brown (1896-1990) had, incidentally, a long career in Hollywood, first as cinematographer and cameraman, then as a writer and director of B movies.

    Incorrigible by Karl Brown. Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1947), 214 pp.
    Seven-year-old Skipper Ryan is delighted when his father, Dan, returns home from the war. Since Skipper has no use for school, he’s more than willing to spend days with his parents touring bars in downtown Los Angeles. After Dan drinks up all his money, he fires his son’s imagination by landing a job with the local gambling syndicate. Skipper’s happy life soon ends. He’s picked up one night by the police. When he returns home, his drunken father uncharacteristically hits him. Skipper becomes so traumatized that he can’t speak. He is then sent to a crowded and understaffed mental institution for observation, where his physical and psychological well-being is threatened.
    Brown’s point in this book seems to be that public institutions poorly serve adventuresome children. The welfare agency is helpless to counteract the influence of Skipper’s irresponsible parents. The mental hospital is wrapped in red tape and ultimately out of anyone’s control. And Skipper’s school, corrupted by the ideas of progressive education, is in the hands of left-wing ideologues. Discipline and patriotism, Brown concludes, are what unruly children need. The novel has too many flaws to fulfill the author’s purpose. Skipper’s ideas and observations seem more appropriate for someone twice his age. The levels of violence and chaos at the hospital are implausibly high. To steer the plot in the right direction, Brown often makes Dan behave out of character. And the book’s ending is just silly. It’s unlikely that this novel would have much appeal to modern readers.