42. The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes

Wow was this ever a disappointment.  I was pretty excited to find an original Pocket book of one of Hughe's early works, both as a collector and to read it.  After finally getting through this one, I have but faint hope that it is a nice collector's edition that I got a deal on.  I consider Hughes to be one of the best and most influential noir/hardboiled authors (of course semi-erased today because woman writer), so would really like to understand her motivations and goals in writing this book.  It's really a disaster.

There several problems with The Bamboo Blonde and they are apparent right from the beginning.  First and foremost, the protagonist, Griselda, is so disempowered and weak that it almost seems a parody.  She is on honeymoon in Long Beach with Con. It's their second marriage and already he is walking out on her with other women in bars, not listening to her, constantly drinking excessively against her wishes.  He is a well-known radio reporter and announcer but also has a history of espionage work and Griselda is deathly afraid he is actually there on a mission.  He just seems like a total dick and the more dickish he is, the more she wants to sacrifice herself for him. He puts her in truly dangerous positions constantly all the while telling her nothing because he doesn't want her to get involved and put herself at risk.  I was hoping right up until the end that she would start to show some pluck and turn the tables on him.  This book is like the negative Bechtel test.  Con is barely in it and yet her entire internal monologue (which is a lot of the text) is all about Con.  The only actual active behaviour that Griselda manifests is calling her colleagues in Hollywood to get info. She is a costume designer and there are tiny hints that she is well-respected in her business milieu, but that is the extent of it.

It's also just super boring.  The bulk of the action is all the various characters meeting over dinners and lunches and speculating about who did what.  Nobody has any information, least of all Griselda, so you are basically in the dark about everything.  There are things happening, but I would be being generous to call it a plot.  A woman is murdered.  There is an evil British colonel who is evil because Griselda can feel it right away (of course Con exposes her to him at every opportunity).  There is a maguffin about a missing radio engineer who is working on a Pan-American network or something that is causing all these people to gather at Long Beach but nobody knows who is doing or knowing which stuff.  It just goes on and on and then at the end we get endless pages where they all explain to each other what they did and why they did it but at that point you really don't care at all.

There are a few genuinely creepy passages when Griselda is all alone at their beach house and some of the characters, like the one-legged sheriff and his candy-eating son, are fun.  I learned that this was a sequel or follow-up to The So Blue Marble which I also disliked, though not as ferociously.  Good to know that writers can improve!