Frisco Dame by Florence Stonebraker. Quarter Books (1950), 120 pp.
Gorgeous Nora Prentiss, nineteen and relentlessly sexy, receives a business proposition from George Trotter, a fifty-something lawyer and “general big shot” in San Francisco. Trotter, the longtime lover of Nora’s drunken and debilitated mother, Kate, has had his eye on Nora for many years. He now wants her to be his personal party girl, showing a good time to various business associates. Nora, however, is stuck on sometime boyfriend Tony Wolak and is reluctant to share her sexual favors. Tony, who runs a roadhouse south of town, has a yen for Nora but shows no signs of giving up other women. What should Nora do?
Even readers not put off by promiscuous sex and outbursts of violence may find this novel pretty unpleasant. Nora is the most sympathetic character. True, she was raised by a dissolute mother in a ratty rooming house and can’t find a way to hold a job because of lecherous bosses. Still, she has no plans for the future, no interest in anything beyond her daily life, and no friends of any sort. She can’t even scheme to land a man who will treat her decently. (At one point she poses as a slave up for auction.) So it’s difficult to care about her. The other characters, despite a few likeable qualities, are repellent. Even the story’s “happy ending” does little to dispel its overall grimness. Stonebraker pushes noir fiction to its logical extreme, demonstrating that unremitting cynicism is not all that much fun.
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