The Blank Wall (1947)

This short novel by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is the best one yet in the Women Crime Writers series, fast-paced and compulsively readable, though not without elements that strain belief. Our main character is Lucia Harper, housewife. Her husband is away at war. She has a 17-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son. Her father also lives with them. A Black woman, Sibyl, is their hypercompetent maid. The daughter, Bee, is a headstrong adolescent who has taken up with a creep in his 30s who is obviously out to use her. Ted Darby’s occupation is given as “art-dealer,” which seemed innocuous until I learned it means he deals in pornography. Lucia is trying to keep them apart but he shows up this night—apparently Bee’s idea—and winds up dead in an accident. Lucia discovers the body in the morning before anyone else and recklessly disposes of it. A pretty good movie by director Max Ophuls came of this novel, called The Reckless Moment. The movie is faithful to the novel in most ways, and the title is better, except there are actually lots of reckless moments, so hard to know which was intended. The next development is blackmailers who have letters Bee wrote to Darby, and that’s the predicament Lucia spends most of her time working on. The blackmailers are two partners, one of whom comes to fall for Lucia—she’s everything that’s clean and good to this guy and so on. He has an even stranger thing for Sibyl, not as a love interest but because he thinks she’s possessed of greater wisdom, or something like that. Lots of strange tones like that here. They make it less believable but also somehow more interesting. The point, I think, is supposed to be the ferociousness of the mama bear protecting her brood. But Lucia also, plainly, falls in love with the blackmailer who loves her. The weirdest thing is the guy’s right arm going dead in a major confrontation. In the movie they sensibly ascribe it to an injury in the fight. But in the novel it just ... goes dead. It’s psychological. For the purpose of the story it’s another chance to showcase Lucia’s unnatural strength (and poise) in these situations. She always rises to the occasion, and everything is for her family. But the thing with the arm is just crazy, even working as another odd tonal feature. I understand Raymond Chandler was a fan of Holding and it’s not hard to see why from this one. It grabs fast and provides a pretty good ride—same with the movie, which flattens away some of the memorable and intriguing weirdness. Both novel and movie are worth chasing down.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)