Fri 6 May 2016
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: G. G. FICKLING – This Girl for Hire.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[9] Comments
by Bill Crider:
G. G. FICKLING – This Girl for Hire. Pyramid G274, paperback original, 1957. Reprinted at least four times by Pyramid. Cover art by Harry Schaare.
G. G. Fickling was the pseudonym of the writing team of Forrest E. (“Skip”) Fickling and his wife, Gloria, creators of Honey West, billed on the front cover, the back cover, and even the spine of This Girl for Hire as “the sexiest private eye ever to pull a trigger!” Honey’s sex is made much of in the course of the book: She spends as much time getting into and out of bathing suits as she does working on the case,and her measurements (38-22-36) are cited both on the back cover and in the text.
The case itself, which involves eight deaths before it ends, begins when Honey is hired by a down-and-out actor whose apparent murder leads to the other killings, all of people involved in the television industry. Despite the setting, there is little actual insight into television, unless the actors, producers, and directors really do spend most of their days and nights drinking and carousing.
The book is filled with incident, even including a strip-poker game, but the plot is so confusing that the reader is unlikely to be convinced by its unraveling, which comes about more by accident than by good detective work. Still, there is a certain pre-feminist charm in seeing the hard-boiled Honey at work in a man’s world, despite Lieutenant Mark Storm (his real name) and his attempts to persuade her to leave the brain work to the men.
Pyramid Books occasionally referred to Honey West as “literary history’s first lady private eye,” and undoubtedly the novelty of a female first-person narrator helped sell the series, but James L. Rubel’s Eli Donavan was playing the same part years earlier in Gold Medal’s No Business for a Lady (1950). Still, it was Honey who wasa success, starring in eleven books and a TV series in which she was portrayed by Anne Francis.
The Ficklings produced one other short-lived series for Belmont Books, this one featuring a male private eye named Erik March, in such titles as The Case of the Radioactive Redhead (1963).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
May 6th, 2016 at 4:02 pm
I have no idea how these books would hold up today, but I remember that as a 15-year-old, they promised a lot more than they delivered.
May 6th, 2016 at 5:46 pm
I was about that age when I read one, and I was never tempted to try another .
May 6th, 2016 at 9:16 pm
Quite a few female eyes before Honey actually including Bertha Cool, Carrie Cashion, and Dol Bonner in the thirties and forties, and not to mention Henry Kane’s statuesque Marla Trent. Frederick Arnold Kummer even had a husband and wife private detective team pre WWI.
I’ll grant the Honey West books aren’t much, but I’ll also admit I enjoyed most of them. I recall one particularly well where she goes to New York to star in a Broadway play based on her called THE BELLE FROM BELLFLOWER replete with some lyrics. It stuck with me as I had a close friend from Bellflower (also home of X-FILES Chris Carter). That’s the one that opens with her naked in a snow storm in an alley in New York being chased by a killer — that never happened to V.I. Warshawski or Kinsey Milhone — or luckily to Mike Hammer.
She later appeared in some Bondian stuff, and she and Mark Storm teamed up at least once with Erik March.
I was more of a fan of Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz, not quite as bright as Honey or as tough, but the plots tended to be better, but I can’t help it, I have a soft spot (likely in my head) for Honey West adventures. They are harmless half hour reads (well, forty five minutes with time out for laughing and bathroom break), and once I had Anne Francis in my minds eye as Honey all that disrobing was much more interesting.
Keep in mind though I was about seventeen reading these. I read them like a palate cleanser between other better and more difficult books. Honey West makes a wonderful antidote to SILAS MARNER.
May 7th, 2016 at 3:17 pm
To say nothing of such precursors as Bertha Cool and Miss Maud Silver, making Honey West sort of a honey-come-lately.
May 7th, 2016 at 5:41 pm
Honey was really a latecomer, when it comes down to it. I did some research on the subject of fictional female PIs some time ago, but I don’t believe I ever published or posted anything about them. But Kevin Burton Smith has, and here’s the beginning of his chronological list, from
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv138.html
“Here are some of the major players…
1933
Trixie Meehan and Mike Harris by T.T. Flynn
Make no mistake — big, rugged Mike was supposedly the lead here, but his “pert sidekick” Trixie was what made these stories, which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly, so special.
.
1934
Grace Culver by Roswell Brown
One of the first female eyes, Grace appeared in the back pages of The Shadow. She worked for the Noonan Detective Agency as a secretary and sometime-op, and while she wasn’t exactly hard-boiled, she was smart, brave and independant. Think of her as the great grandmother of Kinsey, Sharon et al.
.
Nora Charles by Dashiell Hammett
Smart, tough when she had to be, but always a woman. And she knew how to drink.
.
1935
Violet McDade and Nevada Alvarado by Cleve F. Adams
The first hard-boiled lady eye, Violet McDade, and her partner, Nevada Alvarado, slugged their way through a string of stories in the pulps
..
1936
Sarah Watson by D.B. McCandless
Another pulp eye, this one “medium-boiled,” although she admits she’d like to “beat up a man proper, for once!”
.
Torchy Blane by Frederick Nebel (sorta)
The movies transformed Nebel’s drunken reporter Kennedy into fast-talkin’ girl newshawk Torchy Blane, in a successful and entetaing series of films starring Glenda Farrell.
.
1937
Carrie Cashin by Theodore Tinsley
The most popular of the female pulp eyes by a long shot, and arguably the most popular female hero in all the pulps. Attractive as sin and hardboiled as hell, she appeared in over three dozen pulp stories.
.
Dol Bonner by Rex Stout
Possibly the first novel featuring a woman private detective. Although the book never had a sequel, Dol showed up later in several of Stout’s Nero Wolfe books.
…***… Me again. I stopped here with what Kevin suggests may be the first novel a female PI was in. I’m not so sure about that. I think there might have been one or more in the late 19th century, although if so she (or they) may have been called investigative agents back then.
May 8th, 2016 at 5:43 am
I preferred the HONEY WEST TV series.
May 8th, 2016 at 1:32 pm
Although I have the DVD box set of the series, I have not seen a single episode since it was on the air, which was for one season in 1965–1966, and I don’t remember it all that well. Something else to look into this summer!
May 8th, 2016 at 1:35 pm
Wikipedia reports that when ABC cancelled HONEY WEST they decided to import a series from the UK called THE AVENGERS. That one I do remember, from the first episode on.
May 8th, 2016 at 2:41 pm
The television version of Honey was more Honor Blackman’s Cathy Gale and Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel than Honey to begin with, no wonder they axed it in favor of THE AVENGERS.