MAY MACKINTOSH – Balloon Girl.

Popular Library; paperback reprint; no date stated. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s, 1977. Previous UK hardcover edition: Collins, 1976, as Roman Adventure.

   If you seek a book that has all but dropped out of sight, you need not look very much further than this one. There is only one copy of the paperback listed on ABE, and five copies of the hardcover, and for the completists among you who may be wondering, there is a single copy of the British hardcover.

    One might also wonder, or at least I am, why the British title Roman Adventure was changed for the US edition. The UK title is fairly bland, I grant you, but why did they think that Balloon Girl was a better one? That it would sell more books? It doesn’t seem that way to me, but I never was a marketing major. (Since I prefer the US title myself, it’s only a rhetorical question.)

   Under either title, I’m going to call this a novel of “gentle romantic suspense” and wait for all of the hard-boiled detective fans who are still reading this to step off the bus, if they haven’t already, before getting down to details.

    To wit: this is one of those books which never quite manages to get down to details — any questions that plain flat out need to be asked are never quite asked. They’re left somewhere off in the distance, clouds on the horizon, to be dealt with later. This is a book for someone with the flair of a master procrastinator for putting off unpleasant things in life until tomorrow.

   Take Kati Nickleby, for example, for indeed she is the primary and main character in the tale. Kati works for the restoration department at the European and American Museum in London, and when she awakes on the morning that dawns in Chapter One, she spots her flatmate Ann, her immediate supervisor at the museum, driving off in the street below with a strange man, taking all of her clothes and possessions with her.

   Later that morning it is discovered that a valuable Van Gogh is missing. While there is no proof, the conclusion is obvious. Or is it? On page 29 Ann returns, blissfully unaware that the police have been looking for her. End of Chapter Two.

   In Chapter Three, Kati is in Italy, ready for her pre-arranged stay with Signor Turo, for whom she is to work in his private gallery. What had happened to Ann is a question that Kati ponders but does not know the answer to, and life in sunny Italy begins to shoo away the clouds that had formed back in England.

   Until, shockingly, Ann appears again in a villa Kati is visiting in Tuscany. Ann is the niece of the owner, one Conte Pietro di Tiepolo, and not too coincidentally, of a chain of antique shops, each called “The Balloon Girl.”

   And also not too coincidentally, Kati’s one assured friend, Dr. Sam Frame, a Canadian museum director who also happens to have been on the scene in London when the Van Gogh disappeared and now also in Italy, suspects that forged paintings have surfaced through The Balloon Girl shops.

   Ah, sorry. This is getting (a) too complicated, while at the same time (b) I am oversimplifying things. I will skip further details, as I am sure you have gotten the picture by now.

   There is an abundance of atmosphere, with long passages in which little happens except sudden chills in the warm Italian sun — hinting ever so slightly that some insidious evil is at work — and then of a sudden, evil is at work.

   Shots ring out in an open square. Kati is attacked while touring the Tomb of St. Cecelia. Someone wants her dead. Someone else — or it is the same person? — intends to use her to take a fall. For whom or for what, it is not quite known, but nonetheless suspicion is steered by the spadeful in her direction.

   Please don’t get me wrong. There are flashes of brilliance in the plotting, just enough to keep the reader wondering, and just often enough to keep the previously mentioned reader from putting the book down for good. When the tale begins to falter, crumble and fall apart, my advice is to stay with it, as no, it never quite does.

      Bibliographic data:

   Here’s a complete list of the other mystery fiction that May Mackintosh wrote, expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, with an able assist from abebooks.com:

Appointment in Andalusia. Collins, UK, hc, 1972. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1972.
      Dell, pb, 1973.

      Pan 23817, pb, UK, 1974.

A King and Two Queens. Collins, UK, hc, 1973. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1973, as Assignment in Andorra.

      Pan 24325, pb, UK, n.d., as Assignment in Andorra.

The Sicilian Affair. Collins, UK, hc, 1974. [Laurie Grant; Stewart Noble]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Dark Paradise.

The Double Dealers. Collins, UK, hc, 1975.
      Delacorte, hc, 1975, as Highland Fling.
      Dell, pb, 1978, as Highland Fling.

Roman Adventure. Collins, UK, hc,1976.
      St. Martin’s, hc, 1977, as Balloon Girl.
      Pop. Library 04384, pb, n.d., as Balloon Girl.

   And as by REGINA ROSS:

Falls the Shadow. Arthur Barker, hc, UK, 1974. [British Intelligence agent Charles Forsyth]
      Delacorte, hc, 1974.
      Futura/Troubadour, pb, UK, 1977.
      Dell, pb, n.d.

The Devil Dances for Gold. Macdonald & Janes, hc, UK, 1976.
      Futura / Troubadour, UK, pb, 1977.

      Ballantine, pb, 1977.

The Face of Danger. Avon, pb, 1982.

   There are no birth or death dates for May Mackintosh in Crime Fiction IV, but what Al does provide is the only biographical information I have discovered so far: She was born in Scotland and later lived in Spain. I do not know who series characters Laurie Grant and Stewart Noble are (nothing on Google), but I plan on finding out, eventually. Some day…!

[UPDATE] 01-17-09.   I don’t know why I wrote such a long review of this book, but I did. I thought just now of cutting it, but in the end I decided not to. I did do some rearranging, though, to put the bibliographic data at the end, not the beginning.

   Since writing the review, I haven’t found anything more about May Mackintosh myself, but Al Hubin has. From Part 9 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, here are the years she was born and when she died: 1922-1998.