The Glass Heart - Marty Holland

Down on his luck Curt Blair is waiting out a rainstorm in a “ritzy hash joint” just outside of Hollywood, USA when he steals a fancy camel hair overcoat then flees intending to sell the coat. It’s how he makes his living these days – ripping off suckers' coats, rifling the pockets for treasures and cash, then selling the ransacked coat. But this time all hell breaks loose and he’s being chased. While hiding from his pursuers he ends up in the backyard of Virginia Block’s home. She mistakes him for the handyman she recently hired from an agency. Curt being the opportunist that he is wisely plays along and learns the job comes with a free room and kitchen privileges. So he accepts the job, gains a cheap salary of $20/week and a place to stay and eat.

Later the same day aspiring actress Lynn York shows up at the boarding house. She is paying $60/month for an upstairs room, but no kitchen privileges for her. Mrs. B is greedy and a miser we soon figure out. Within hours Curt and Lynn are hooking up and doing the dirty deed in the dirty basement where while putting the moves on Lynn Curt is bothered by the irritating sound of a dripping pipe. He vows to fix the leak though that task is not on the insanely long list of arduous work Mrs. Block expects of him.

While dealing with the plumbing problem Curt discovers a gruesome surprise and jumps to conclusions.  A bit of detective work supports his rash theory and he sees dollar signs. He schemes to blackmail his landlady and employer. Soon he finds his paltry salary increased to a cool $1000/week.

And if you haven’t already figured out that the tables will be turned then you don’t know your crime fiction.

Reading The Glass Heart is like travelling back in time to a 1950s movie palace watching a B movie programmer. It’s crammed full of action, double dealing, manipulation, greed, lust and crime. Everyone is out for himself or herself. James M Cain, who penned multiple densely packed novels about two timing lovers and how greed controls their lives admired the book so much he 1. wrote a praiseworthy blurb for the Julian Messner first edition dust cover and 2. wrote a screenplay adaptation that unfortunately was never produced.  Even he recognized the cinematic potential of this hard to resist story.

While it’s not hard to predict that Curt and lovely Lynn will hook up within hours of meeting I doubt many readers will be able to predict the unusual plot twists. Soon a handful of supporting characters descend upon Mrs. Block looking for handouts including Elise, Lynn's future roommate and a member of an evangelical church devoted to enlisting new members and coaxing money out of them to help build their new church.

The story is overloaded with plot and incident. It’s almost like reading two books in one at the same time. There’s almost no time in the action-filled pages to question the often outlandish turn of events. But I did! And frequently. Some of my nagging questions included: Why on earth is Mrs. B such a pushover? Why didn’t she just throw Curt out of her house rather than be bled dry? And why is Lynn so simple minded and easily manipulated? I guess there is no room for common sense in potboiler fiction. The book exists solely to explore crime and base motives (mostly dealing with lust and avarice) but offers no insight into any of the reasons the characters need so desperately what they long for. I wasn’t asking for heightened literary reasons just a few mundane ones.

Late in the book it all turns a bit ridiculous. Elise receives a telegram that her husband was killed in action overseas. She refuses to accept this and in her religious mania keeps praying that hubbie be returned to her. Like a true believers she’s asking for a miracle. One guess as to how that turns out. Because of course every absurd coincidence one can possibly imagine will be crammed into these 192 pages.

Why have one kook when you can have two? Mrs. B is later revealed to be a bit of a loon herself. Lynn spends much of her time eavesdropping throughout the book and hears her landlady talking to herself and singing in a little girl’s high pitched voice. She has conversations with her dead husband, very intimate and revealing conversations. It all leads to a confrontation between the two woman involving a revolver and a golf club that doesn’t end well at all.

Do you think anything will end well in a book of this sort? Think again!

It starts off as noir but some odd detours and intrusive subplots among the minor characters transform the book to a quasi romance. This schizoid state results in a near parody of noir by the time you get to the two climactic moments. Remarkably – almost unbelievably – for something so laden with doom, insanity and murder, both intentional and accidental, it all ends with a cop out finale that includes a wedding and happily ever after honeymoon in New Mexico! I gather that Holland opted for a hearts and flowers finale because she wants the real villain of the piece to be revealed as a vile monster who “deserved” to die. And she seemed to want to make her leads into decent people who were victims themselves. Really strange considering they were crooked and corrupt from the get-go. When the penultimate chapter exposes the villain’s wide ranging schemes of cheating, thievery and mean-spiritedness one wonders if Holland knew a similarly horrible person and this was a revenge piece.

Marty Holland (1919 - 1971)

And yet though I sound like I’m disparaging this book I found it all utterly addictive. The Glass Heart is, I confess, a guilty pleasure. I couldn’t stop reading and had to know where each ludicrous scene would lead and of course how it all would end. It truly is one of the best examples of a genuine B movie on paper. And no wonder – the author Marty Holland was a secretary at Republic Pictures, one of the leading producers of B movie programmers, for many years. She was writing pulp fiction in her spare time, wrote the book that became the classic noir thriller Fallen Angel, and a story treatment for another crime movie classic The File on Thelma Jordan. Typing all those scripts at Republic Pictures taught her well, I guess.

Stark House has reprinted all of Marty Holland’s crime novels over the past year and a half. The Glass Heart is the newest reprint added to that small pile of books. For decades this novel was unavailable to mere mortals like you and me because the few copies for sale were listed by booksellers at unaffordable collector’s prices. It’s wonderful to have Marty Holland’s books all available to the general public in Stark House’s usual handsomely produced editions. For lovers of noir, kooky melodrama and twisty plotting these books are a must have. Highly recommended – even with all the caveats listed above. The Glass Heart is genuine thrill ride that will leave you both gasping in awe and laughing in shock.

NEW STUFF: Untamed Shore - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Agora/Polis Books
ISBN: 978-1-947996-92-1
284 pp $25.99
Publication date: February 2020

I can never resist marketing hype. Why? I should know better. I really should. But when I learned that one more person was attempting to liven up the classic noir thriller and that writer was primarily known for her revisionist fairy tales and fantasies and mash-ups of science fiction and the traditional romance novel how could I possibly pass it up? Silvia Moreno-Garcia with three bizarre homage novels of fantasy, supernatural and fairy tale motifs to her credit and a handful of anthologies as editor/compiler has published her first crime novel, Untamed Shore (2020). It’s modeled on the old-fashioned James M. Cain style story of a sucker being led down the road of temptation by a greedy devious woman. But in Moreno-Garcia’s revisitation of this very familiar plot she has reversed the roles. The tempter is a gorgeous and very desirable man and the sucker is a young woman.

Viridiana is hired as a translator/typist to a non-Spanish speaking would-be writer. The writer is rich. He’s married. And his wife’s brother is in tow with them as they rent the ultra-modern mansion called The End located at the very tip of Baja peninsula. It’s the brother, Gregory, who latches onto Viridiana. She may be all starry-eyed but the reader knows she is hardly headed for a happily ever after ending. This kind of role reversal while not wholly original provides an imaginative writer with definite possibilities to shake up a tired formula. I’ve read several Cain style crime novels with reversed roles of temptress/patsy. I’ve even read one where the duplicitous schemers are gay men trying to kill a third man for his money. Did Silvia Moreno-Garcia pull it off? Much to my surprise she did.

I was not buying much of the book for its first half. Moreno-Garcia is clearly still very much sticking to the romance novel formula in this her sixth full length novel. To be honest I have not read any of her other books but going purely by the plot summaries I can see that she is in love with love. All of her books feature young women in the lead roles and all of them are entranced by dangerous men. This is the rudimentary ingredient for all romances and especially the Gothic romance novel (two of her most recent novels are heavily influenced by that subgenre). She’s revisiting very well worn territory here. And the romance angle even though it may be ornamented with paragraphs of startling shark imagery and some intriguing lore about shark fishing is overly familiar and hardly eye opening.

Her protagonist saves the book. Viridiana invigorates what might have been just another romance redux book. It's not just her unusual name (her father named her after the lead character in a Luis Buñuel movie he loved) that makes her unique. With her odd job as reluctant tourist guide and interpreter for the 1970s gringos who find her native Baja peninsula Mexican town an exotic attraction Viridiana is the kind of character you want to spend a lot of time with. She has a horrid home life, she’s dumped her dull fiancé and in the process of being willful and independent has alienated both her mother and would-be mother-in-law, not to mention the would-be groom. Viridiana wants desperately to escape her dead end town. Unappreciated, insulted and maligned by nearly everyone in her town, lectured by her mother who constantly reminds her she does not know a good provider is enough to save her its no wonder that Viridiana retreats into solitary fantasy. We know she deserves a better life. And we want that for her – at any cost.

Enter the trio of rich and flashy Americans who bring to life all of her Hollywood fantasies. You see, like her father Viridiana is a movieholic. She can’t help but draw comparisons to Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun as she finds herself drawn into a risky romance with Gregory. All of her references relating to love and sexual attraction are from old movies. She embarrasses herself with her indulgent imagination and finds herself dictating her dreams into a cassette tape recorder her absent father gave her as a substitute for a diary. She knows it’s wrong to dream girlish fantasies, but can’t help herself. And Gregory exploits her Hollywood fantasies with promises of taking her away and setting up a new life in Paris. She wonders aloud in her tape recorded musings if it all is just too good to be true.

You better believe it is.

Soon her employer is found unconscious at the foot of the stairs. They call the police and a doctor. But by the time they arrive at The End, miles away from the town center, he is dead. Convenient accident or murder? Viridiana begins to suspect the worst and sees Gregory and Daisy, his sister, in a wholly new light as the police begin to question them. She even turns snoop and amateur sleuth and uncovers additional mysteries that need explaining. The movie she dreamed of begins to seem more and more like A Place in the Sun. She had forgotten about the death of Shelley Winters in that movie -- an accidental drowning that leads to Montgomery Clift’s being charged with murder. Her movie fantasies become even more terrifying the more she tries to find out exactly who Gregory and Daisy are and why they came to Baja.

At this point the book kicks into high gear shifting in tone and piling on more action, Moreno-Garcia abandons the dreamy introspective narrative that dominated the first half and takes up the motifs and situations of genuine noir and pulp fiction. Con men, gangsters, crooked cops, bribes galore, a convoluted will, a suspicious nephew, ultra bloody violence. We get it all. Viridiana is forced to grow up almost instantly. She recognizes she’s been used and turns the tables on her exploiters.

I’m glad I took the time to stick with this one. It paid off in ways that I didn’t think the writer was capable of. If Moreno-Garcia has not read the typical crime novels to familiarize herself with this genre she at least has watched a lot of movies to get a handle on the right conventions and plot elements. I thought I knew exactly where this was headed but she managed to throw in a few unexpected curve balls and surprised me at least twice. She sure was not afraid of some gory violence and torture either. I usually don’t applaud this in any writer, but after the ostensible false start of the book it was exactly what the novel needed. Without it Viridiana probably never would have changed and realized at least something resembling a Hollywood ending. And, of course, getting the long overdue life that she richly deserved.

FFB: The D.A. Calls It Murder - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE STORY: Newly elected district attorney and sheriff for Madison County, California, Doug Selby and Rex Brandon, have their work cut out for them. A dead body is found in Room 321 of the Madison Hotel and the owner and police want to hush it up as a suicide but The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937). Doug Selby takes charge of a case involving alternate identities, blackmail, arcane divorce laws and a missing heir.

THE CHARACTERS: Doug Selby is the polar opposite of Perry Mason. Mason is a criminal defense attorney while Selby is a prosecutor. Mason is shifty manipulator willing to do anything, even break the law in order to protect his client who is almost always innocent. Selby is upstanding and thoroughly decent, but with a very short fuse of a temper. In his first outing Selby must prove himself to be the people’s choice for D.A. and stand up to the inherently corrupt and grifting locals who have come to depend on the graft laden police and former D.A. When the owner of the Madison Hotel wants the possible suicide hushed up as quickly as possible to prevent bad publicity Selby must deal with ingratiating demands, implied favors and tacit bargains that Sam Roper, the former D.A. had in place with the hotel management. Selby will have none of it. He knows that something is suspicious about the death of the minister. And publicity cannot be avoided when they learn that the minister is not who he says he was. After bringing in the widow all the way from Nevada to identify the body she insists that the man is not her husband. Who was he? And why was he pretending to be Rev. Charles Brower?

1st US paperback, 1944
(8 printings over six years
with this cover)

Selby has a gal pal reporter in the person of Sylvia Martin. She represents a paper that backed Selby in the election and she wants the scoop on the minister’s murder. If Selby will give her the facts first she promises to report the truth and wipe away the bad press he is getting from an ugly tabloid whose specialty is insinuations and innuendo. The editorial staff are eager to besmirch Selby’s good name and make him look not only incompetent in his first week as district attorney but imply that he’s more corrupt than Sam Roper, his predecessor.

Selby also has to contend with the secretive actress Shirley Arden who has a special room at the Madison Hotel c complete with private entrance and all-expense paid for by an anonymous benefactor. She enters the case because Selby and Sheriff find among the personal effects of the dead minister a pile of press clippings with Shirley’s name and photo all over them. There are also newspaper articles about a high profile lawsuit involving the rightful heir to the Perry estate. Both the mystery surrounding Shirley Arden’s private retreat at the Madison Hotel and the Perry lawsuit will tie in with the murder of the mystery man in Room 231.

1950 Pocket edition, (9th prtg)

INNOVATIONS: Gardner was a master at convoluted plotting and The D.A. Calls It Murder is one of his trademark stories filled with interlocking subplots and neat little twists. Only Gardner could manage to find a way to make the nasty poisoning of a German Shepherd and the subsequent rescue of the dog become one of the most crucial clues to the unraveling of all the mysteries.

This particular novel is remarkable for Gardner’s portrayal of the women characters who usually come off as either wiseacres or vamps. But Shirley Arden is far from a typical wily vixen archetype found in his pulp fiction. Gardner has a unique understanding of the perils of celebrity in Hollywood and gives Shirley a monologue both trenchant and poignant about how she views her fan base and how she values her private life.

One of the most unexpected scenes comes when Sylvia accompanies Selby to the home of Mrs. Larrabie, the real widow of the murder victim. Together they deliver the dismal news of her husband’s violent death and his curious masquerade as a different person. The scene is a rare example of Gardner's understanding of women and how they are better suited to take care of each other in times of trouble. Selby may have the difficult task of breaking the news, but it is Sylvia who takes on the burden of comforting Mrs. Larrabie, a total stranger, and who is overcome with emotion herself when she sees how the widow takes the news stoically. In an ironic touch Sally finds herself being comforted by the grieving widow.

Cardinal C-295, 1958 1st thus

QUOTES: Shirley on how she views her public: "They're like telegraph poles whizzing by when you're traveling on a Pullman train, if you know what I mean. They tell me things about themselves and I smile at them sympathetically and work my eyes; but all the time I'm thinking about my last income tax return, how long I'm apt to be working on this present picture, whether the director is going to listen to what I have to say about the way I should say "Farewell" to my lover or whether he's going to insists on doing it according to some standards which don't register with me. I give my fan my autograph and turn loose my best smile on him. I know I'm never going to see him again and he's in sort of a daze anyway which he's conjured up to wrap around me as an aura."

Shirley on her keen observational skills: "Men who tell me how much they admire my acting are quite numerous, but it's not very often one comes in contact with a man who's so completely genuine, so wholeheartedly sincere as this man [the murder victim]. Naturally, as a woman, I noticed his clothes."

"You're a very prickly porcupine. When your quills are out, Mr. Selby, you're exceedingly difficult to deal with."

THINGS I LEARNED: A portion of the problem with determining the rightful heir to the Perry estate has to do with a marriage that was performed when an interlocutory decree of divorce was still in effect. The most concise definition comes from Law.com: "Interlocutory decrees were most commonly used in divorce actions, in which the terms of the divorce would be in force until a final decree could be granted... The theory was that this would allow for a period [of time] during which a reconciliation might be [reached...]. Interlocutory decrees of divorce have been abandoned as a procedure in most states because they seldom had the desired effect and appeared to waste the parties' time." California still allows for interlocutory decrees in divorce; the time period can not exceed six months.

In the novel Charles Perry marries Edith Fontaine while he was in effect still married to his first wife. Edith has a child and Charles thinks this is his rightful son, but in the eyes of the law he was not legally married to Edith since his first marriage was still in effect under the interlocutory decree. When the first wife died it is generally believed that Charles never remarried Edith again in a legal ceremony and so his son could not legally be considered his heir. Charles' brother Herbert is contesting the will and claims he is the true heir. A search is on to find out whether or not Charles ever remarried Edith, who might have performed the ceremony, and where it took place so a certificate of marriage can be produced. This is why the several ministers in the story become extremely important.

Doug Selby Detective Novels
The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)
The D.A. Holds a Candle (1938)
The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939)
The D.A. Goes to Trial (1940)
The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1942)
The D.A. Calls a Turn (1944)
The D.A. Breaks a Seal (1946)
The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948)
The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949)