The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes (1941)

While on her honeymoon, a recently remarried (to her first husband) Hollywood costume designer gets mixed up with spies.

Mystery Review: The Bamboo Blonde is one of the many books that would be twice as good if it was half as long. A sort of sequel to The So Blue Marble, but where that was good, old fashioned entertainment, this was too slow and quiet to be anything better than average. Too much detail, conversation, and fretful ruminating drains tension and suspense from a novel that counts on such qualities. Each periodic murder somehow seems anti-climactic instead of astonishing. A lengthy expository (and patriotic) wrap-up doesn't help. Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-93) has retained the hard-boiled gestalt and the "always braver than she thinks she is" lead character, but a spy story should keep the reader on the edge of her seat, not plodding along mildly amused. I enjoyed the return of our protagonist, Griselda Satterlee. All her efforts to begin her honeymoon are for nothing: "It isn't fair that the delusions of grandeur of one small Austrian should have spoiled the whole world for us." I appreciate how Griselda plans her outfits like she's going into battle and her constant inner voice had its moments (especially the Saharan sense of humor: in Hollywood "A costume designer isn't much more important than a writer"). But The Bamboo Blonde isn't as good as its title. There's occasional historical interest here as the story is set in the year before Pearl Harbor and it's intriguing to see the attitudes of Americans not knowing that WWII was imminent. The East "no longer of cherry blossoms and delicate things, land of drawn sabers and crashing bombs." A minor note, apparently the word "okay" hadn't yet achieved a standardized form in 1941, as it's spelled "oke" here. Even though The Bamboo Blonde seems to have slipped through a much-needed editing process unscathed, Hughes can write. In 1930 she won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for a first book of poetry. This isn't the book that realized that promise, however. Unless you're a Hughes completist (like me), The Bamboo Blonde is one you can skip without developing a guilt complex. Not so bad, just not overly good. She has better that you can look for such as Ride the Pink Horse (1946) and In a Lonely Place (1947), both of which were made into films.  [3★]