Tramp Girl by Thomas Stone. Designs Intimate (1952), approx. 124 pp.
It’s Saturday night in Modesto. Missy Shreve, a good-looking seventeen-year-old blonde, is swimming in an irrigation canal with handsome punk Harry Chalmers. Missy would like to date classier guys, but they look down her as white trash and only seek loveless sex. As Harry pursues the same goal, he’s interrupted by Loopy Lundsen, an addled codger who lives in a nearby shack. In the ensuing tussle Harry kills the old man. Missy, fearing she’ll be implicated in the crime, runs away. She soon encounters weak-willed neighbor Danny Boswell, who has long obsessed over Missy and may have been following her. She needs to leave town, but first she must insure his loyalty.
Stonebraker crosses the line between kinky love story and straight-out noir. The tale has robbery and murder in addition to sexual interludes. The book’s characters are mostly unadmirable, though their motives are not always evil. Missy’s deadbeat parents, for example, are well-meaning but ineffectual. The narrative is told in the third person and almost completely from the viewpoint of the main character. Partly for that reason Missy is portrayed with unusual understanding. Readers will easily see that she’s in a difficult spot, one that can’t be escaped by applying middle-class virtues. Missy -- by turns cynical, romantic and just plain scared -- becomes a more mature person (if not a nicer one) during the week in which the story unfolds. Readers may find that events of the boffo ending are morally justified. Seldom do works of noir fiction have a female author and a female protagonist. That in itself should be enough to entice fans of the genre to find a copy of the book.
Comments