A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Julie Smith

   

DOROTHY DUNNETT – Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Johnson Johnson #6. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1983. A. A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1984.

   Dorothy Dunnett’s “Dolly” series is about spy Johnson Johnson, skipper of the yacht Dolly. Each novel is titled for the “bird” (British slang for woman) who narrates it. The “bird” in this case is Rita Geddes, a punked-out young makeup artist with blue and orange hair who is hired to travel with a client, TV personality Natalie Sheridan. In Madeira, however, Rita is severely beaten and then her friend, Kim-Jim Curtis, another makeup artist, is killed. The nefarious doings seem to involve drugs, but in fact, much, much more is going on.

   As must all Dunnett’ s “birds,” Rita becomes professionally involved with Johnson Johnson, who, in addition to being a yachtsman and sort of spy, is a famous portrait painter.

   Johnson enlists Rita’s aid in running to ground the drug smugglers, but she really wants to avenge Kim-Jim, for reasons that she withholds from the reader. Though Rita is the narrator, Dunnell (a pseudonym of Dorothy Halliday) skillfully sees to it that she withholds any number of pertinent details-including the fact that she has a serious disability. The real mystery, locked within Rita herself unfolds satisfyingly and amid plenty of action, including piracy on the high seas and a rip-roaring hurricane.

   Dunnett, also a noted author of historical fiction, is a very deft, very literate writer; Johnson is a sardonic, quasi-hero who grows on the reader as he grows on the birds on whom he tends to make poor-to-awful first impressions. Other titles in this series include Dolly and the Singing Bird (1982; original 1968 title, The Photogenic Soprano); Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1982; original 1970 title, Murder in the Round); Dolly and the Starry Bird (1982, original 1973 title, Murder in Focus); and Dolly and the Nanny Bird (1982).

         ———
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.
   

Bibliographic Update: Omitted from the list above of other books in the series are Dolly and the Doctor Bird (1971) and Moroccan Traffic (1991).