Paper Money

[from inside dj cover]

There's money in old paper -- especially when the old paper happens to be a few pages from David Pomeroy Windham's unfinished novel. Living like a hermit, buried like a dog's bone in the country, the great writer is seldom seen by mortal eye, and would have caused no stir even if he had been. Nevertheless his name resounds in Hollywood, Cal., and his latest masterpiece is to be filmed.

But the true David Pomeroy Windham lurks behind a false front. Despite a world-wide reputation, his vast knowledge of women is purely theoretical. Until he meets Miss Gloria Gaye, all his experience in the realm of romance has been culled from books and the Sunday press. He knows nothing whatever about the practical side of the business. His first instinct is to avoid Miss Gaye as if she had bubonic plague, and had it bad. It is at this juncture that Mr. Forrest steps into the breach, and from there on the famous novelist finds himself swept along lie a cork, with one eye on Gloria's curves and the other looking for the missing manuscript.

I've seen the dust jackets of a smattering of Joan Butler titles before and always thought they gave off an odd vibe for a woman writer. Turns out, there's a reason: Joan Butler was a pen name of the Irish author Robert William Alexander. There are more than forty Butler books in total, written between 1929 and 1958, none of them released in the US and all currently out of print. Paper Money is the first I've tried, but it seems like they're all of a type -- light, comedic, soft-boiled pulpish stuff. No one, and I mean no one, reading Money would think it was actually written by a woman. It's got that mid-century male popular writer's obsession with saying the word sex and their casualness about sexual harassment (pinching, etc.) Style-wise, it kind of feels like Alexander's trying to channel Wodehouse, Runyan, and the whole breed of Hammett/Chandler knockoffs that sold so well during the Golden Age of men's detective pulp. He doesn't pretend he's doing anything else, though, and the dialogue is, honestly, often zingy fun. "I understand the previous owner was a sucker for chorus-girls up to quite an advanced age." "He went for elderly chorines?" "No, sir. What I meant was..." Etc. The characters talk A LOT, though -- and Alexander's intentionally elaborate construction of their speech sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. And he tends to repeat himself. The story itself is ok. As expected, plenty of screwball elements -- lights that go out unexpectedly, bedroom-hopping, pratfalls and peepholes, hidden treasure, and a rabbit named Mortimer who noses in and out of the plot. The characters are pretty stock, but likable, and the plot's worn, but ditto. I don't know that I'd seek out another Butler, but I wouldn't mind reading one (maybe an earlier title) if, like Mortimer, it just hopped into my lap.