The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes. Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1941), 314 pp.
Con and Griselda Satterlee have just remarried. Much to Griselda’s consternation they’re spending their second honeymoon in a beat-up cottage in Long Beach. On the way to the Bamboo Bar for a drink, she becomes more annoyed when Con, a news broadcaster and former spy, stops to chat with the beautiful Kathie Travis, wife of a naval officer. When they arrive, Griselda spots an old friend, journalist Kew Brent, in conversation with an evil-looking guy who turns out to be Major Albert George Pembroke, a free lance espionage agent. Con heads for the bar, where he picks up an attractive blonde, Shelley Huffaker, and walks out with her. Griselda’s anger turns to fear when Pembroke follows her home and tells her about a broadcasting scheme that may endanger her husband. The next day she learns that Huffaker has been murdered. Could Con be the killer?
In an edgier book Con might be a serious suspect. Here he’s just a presumptuous jerk who refuses to tell his wife what’s going on. He’s irritating, but he’s not one of the book’s main flaws. These concern plot and narration. Hughes’ underlying story is so complicated that it defeats her attempts to decipher it. She never explains, for example, what Pembroke is trying to do and why his many opponents have so much trouble stopping him. On top of this Hughes pours several failed romances that are unrelated to espionage but nevertheless lead to murders. The author tells the story in the third person from the viewpoint of Griselda, the novel’s main character. She’s in every scene; only her thoughts are revealed. But nothing much happens in her presence. She learns about important events only when someone tells her. Readers thus must try to reconstruct the action from a long series of conversations, a process that generates boredom rather than excitement. Hughes has more success with this narrative technique in In a Lonely Place (1947). Anyone interested in her work should probably start there.
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CALIFORNIA NOVELS FROM OVERSEAS
I like to think of each of the books I’ve been reading as a kind of primary source. The plot and characters are products of the author’s imagination but the ambience (even when settings are fictionalized) reflects his or her own real-life experiences. A historical novel, no matter how well researched, lacks the immediacy of a first-hand account. Sometimes the problem is an erroneous detail; sometimes it’s anachronistic thoughts or actions. So to get reliable information about the past, I’ve limited my reading to works set in times that the authors can remember.
What hadn’t occurred to me until last weekend, when I cam across this fascinating site, was that the same standard needed to be applied to setting. That is, I needed to make sure that the author actually had experiences in California. I knew that a few novels translated into English had authors who probably never spent time in California. Edward Stilgebauer’s geographically garbled The Star of Hollywood (1929) was an example. And I thought that the multitude of Carter Brown detective novels, often set in Los Angeles although the Australian author seldom visited the United States, provided only a rare exception to the rule that California novels were produced by writers who resided in the state.
Actually, however, what made Brown’s novels unusual was not the use of California settings by an author unfamiliar with them. Instead, it was their reprinting in huge numbers by an American publisher. Starting in 1958 Signet distributed millions of copies of Brown’s books in the United States. His books are still difficult to miss in bins of used paperbacks.
I hadn’t realized that many other English-language writers (mostly British) were setting pulp-fiction novels in the United States. Using what they learned from books, magazines and movies, they imitated as best they could American speech and attitudes. Hundreds of titles appeared in the years after World War II. Like their American counterparts, the books featured lurid covers and pseudonymous authors.
New York and Chicago were apparently the favorite settings, but California made some appearances as well. So we had Rex Richards’ San Francisco Dame (1952), Al Bocca’s Ticket to San Diego (1953) and Nat Karta’s Los Angeles Be Damned. Maybe the first to put his stories in California was famed mystery writer James Hadley Chase. In 1949 and 1950 he produced a three-part series featuring P.I. Vic Malloy: You’re Lonely When You’re Dead (1949), Figure It Out For Yourself (1950) and Lay Her Among The Lilies (1950). Malloy had his office in the town of Orchid City, vaguely located somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Only occasionally did one of the British-American novels make it across the Atlantic. The first two of the Malloy novels were reprinted in the United States, for example. Another was Payoff for Paula, produced in 1951 by the hyper-prolific pulp writer Stephen Francis and issued under the popular pseudonym “Jeff Bogar.” It’s apparently a femme fatale tale set in Hollywood. Later that year Lion Books reprinted the novel as The Tigress. I had been thinking that I wanted to read the book. But now that I know the author never resided in California, I think I’ll skip it.
I have already been fooled at least once. It turns out that Sex Gantlet to Murder (1955), ostensibly written by “Mark Shane” was actually the work of Victor Norwood, a British pulp writer best known for jungle stories. I haven’t found any evidence that the book was ever published in England. How Norwood got together with Fabian Books, the fledgling publisher in Fresno, is anyone’s guess. In any case, I should have been suspicious when I read the book, since some of the addresses mentioned didn’t quite make sense.
THE FRIGHTENED CHILD
About a hundred of the books of California fiction that I’ve read have been made into movies. When it comes to the more obscure films, I’ve almost always read the book before I find out that a movie adaptation exists. But that was not the case with The House on Telegraph Hill. When I saw the film listed, I needed to check the IMDB to see whether a California novel had been the inspiration. It turned out that the movie was adapted from The Frightened Child, a book that hadn’t even made it onto my don’t-bother-to-read list.
The Frightened Child by Dana Lyon. Harper (1948), 186 pp.
After spending years in a Nazi concentration camp, Anya is not enjoying her new life in the United States. She came to retrieve her son Eric, whom she sent abroad after the Germans invaded her native Poland. When she met Paul Tessenden, Eric’s guardian and trustee of his large inheritance, Paul convinced her that only if she married him could she be reunited with her son. The marriage took place just three days later. Now Paul, using her worn-out condition as an excuse, has nearly imprisoned her on his ranch in one of California’s coastal valleys. Local doctor Steve Orcutt becomes suspicious when Anya and Paul offer strikingly different accounts of her supposed illness. Milo, Steve’s cynical lawyer friend, thinks the two are conspiring to get the family fortune, but Steve believes one of them will soon kill the other.
Lyon uses brief first-person narratives by Anya and Paul to present their different versions of events. But when the author takes up the third-person, readers will quickly figure out who is telling the truth and thus deserves the readers’ sympathy. By removing doubt about what’s actually happening, Lyon dissipates tension and forces her to seek conflict elsewhere. She finds it in the courtroom. Unfortunately, judicial procedures have so changed in the past sixty years that surprise testimony no longer seems plausible. And an attorney’s responsibilities to his client, a topic of much concern for Milo, have been hashed over so many times in so many novels and TV shows that his musings now seem naïve. As a result, little remains to keep readers interested, and modern audience for the book appears unlikely. The movie, incidentally, is not much of an improvement.
