The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 May 2009
by G. G. Fickling
Pulp Fiction (not the movie) is a genre of its own. Sure there are practitioners of the style today, but its heyday seemed to be the late 1930s to the early 1960s, with gritty heroes, loose women, preposterous mysteries, international adventures, and seedy settings (just to name a few of its attractions). A few ostensibly Pulp novelists have entered the canon of American literature. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, of course, number among these. There remain hundreds of pulp novels the reader can find on the shelves of a good used bookstore, some better than others. Starting in the 1950s, husband and wife team Skip and Gloria Fickling (though the latter has suggested it was mostly Skip's writing) penned eleven pulp novels that starred comely Honey West as a private detective down in Los Angeles. She represented a departure from the usual gritty detective in that, of course, she was a woman. Throughout this novel, other characters are constantly making reference to that fact, telling her to go back to being a housewife. But, how can she, after her father was killed on the job, running the detective agency that she inherited from him? Anyway, Honey is something else, indeed. The authors suggest we think about a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Mike Hammer. Emphasis, though, is heavy on the Marilyn. The authors want us to not forget her physical attributes. Her measurements are quoted to us and she is constantly falling out of her clothes in a surprisingly (or not) asexual way. Anyway, in the opening pages, Honey's client, a washed up Hollywood actor, is lying dead on the floor of his tiny apartment. What ensues is an incredibly convoluted journey through the seedy side of television production. There are countless potential suspects, but the list dwindles as one after another is picked off during an ill-advised sailing trip to Catalina Island. But seriously, the plot is nearly impossible to follow, as likely and unlikely motives keep cropping up, the characters remain vague and self-contradictory, and as Honey swims back and forth from the ship to Avalon. The reader will ask himself: Why on earth would a television writer own a portable lab for analyzing poisons? There is so much that is implausible here, that the trip through the novel becomes a bit of a readers' trial. Finally, the plot hinges on one key detail that appeared in the opening pages, a detail that the sharp reader is unlikely to miss. The last dozen pages are an exposition on the final shape of the crime that has been committed all around Miss West's feet. Frankly, she hasn't been a very effective detective, but she has been partially nude in the presence of a lot of death and mayhem. A seedy little novel. Definitely Pulp. A little fun, but ultimately a bit of a slog.
(Honey West was made into a television show in 1965. It starred Anne Francis and had many significant differences from the books (Not the least of which was Bruce, the ocelot). She eventually lost out to Emma Peel of The Avengers.)