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I started by really liking Anne Austin’s Girl Alone, but as it went on, I found myself getting more and more creeped out, and I didn’t really realize why until I got to the ads at the back of the book. The storyline is a straightforward, predictable one, mostly. It goes like this: Orphan (Sally Ford) is sent to work as a hired girl on a farm for the summer. There she meets a cute boy (David Nash). They end up running away and joining up with a circus for a while. Then the mother Sally’s never known shows up and adopts her. This would be an extremely unsurprising children’s book, right? Only it’s not.

Sally is 16 and very sheltered, and even before she leaves the orphanage the outside world and the farmer bringing her home with him are treated as a sexual threats. David is 20, and he’s a nice guy, but his attraction for Sally and hers for him is primarily physical. He understands that his desire for her is inappropriate, and the fact that she doesn’t kind of underlines why. The circus stuff is pretty cool, and Sally becomes a fairly successful fortune-teller, but she and David are mostly separated, and their few meetings leave me increasing unconvinced/creeped out by their relationship.

Then Sally’s mother, Enid Barr, shows up and stops Sally and David from getting married, which is nice, and drags Sally off to boarding school, which I think is probably a really healthy decision. But there’s an extra layer of complication. Sally was the result of an affair that Enid had as a teenager, and now Enid is married to a man who has forgiven her for her youthful indiscretion but is pretty uncomfortable about being faced with it’s product. They adopt her and make her a debutante, and because she’s pretty and rich a few men show interest in her, but she doesn’t feel she can accept a proposal unless she tells the truth about her birth, and Enid won’t let her do that. And anyway, she still wants to marry David. Finally, after being rejected by this guy Mr. Van Horne who’s been following her around and sexually harassing her since she was in the circus, her mother admits defeat and lets her do that, much to everyone’s relief.

At first I couldn’t put my finger on why all of this made me so uncomfortable. All of the elements of this story are ones I’ve had no trouble with elsewhere. But then I saw the ads at the end, which were all for scandalous stories of divorce and betrayal and things, the kind of books that say “how racy can we be and get away with it?” They looked like fun, in a pre-code Hollywood film kind of way. And then I sort of understood. Girl Alone isn’t just a more grown-up version of a typical children’s story; it was purposely created to be as adult as reasonably possible. It just doesn’t work, because there’s a dissonance between “orphan girl runs away and joins the circus” and “16 year old girl makes out with her 20 year old boyfriend.” Both of those are things I’m open to, and I believe that the first can be done well in a way more suitable for adults than for children, and that the second can happen without setting off statutory rape alarms in my head, but Anne Austin manages neither of those things.

It might work is Sally was different. The Sally we see is sweet and timid and worryingly innocent. The Sally we’re told about is a sparkling, clever, talented actress. Neither rings true. The outgoing Sally, made just a bit more convincing, might have made the book work. The shy, innocent Sally always seemed too clueless to understand what was happening around her, which made a really poor argument for her ability to consent. In the end, Girl Alone made me feel kind of dirty. I don’t know that this would be the case for everyone, and I’ll freel

I sort of don’t like how odd and ends of more-recent-than-1923 fiction pop up on Project Gutenberg, although I recognize that’s just me being silly, or a tiny bit annoyed by the fact that lots of things with interesting titles turn out to be short stories from SF magazines, which really aren’t my kind of thing. But you also get the odd mystery novel from the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, and those can be pretty entertaining. Murder at Bridge, for example. It’s from 1931 and it’s by Anne Austin, who apparently wrote several mystery novels between the late twenties and mid thirties, although Google Books is choosing not to make them available. Or, I don’t know, they could all be under copyright. But Murder at Bridge seems not to be, and Google hasn’t made their text of that available either. Whatever. Let’s just say that Google Books is, as ever, a mystery to me.

Anyway. Murder at Bridge. The setting is a moderately sized city called Hamilton, the detective is an investigator attached to the DA’s office who has been saddled with the name “Bonnie Dundee,” and, thankfully, you don’t have to know much about bridge to figure out what’s going on.

Also attached to the DA’s office is Penny Crain. She’s a secretary now, but until her father went bankrupt and ran off to New York she was part of Hamilton’s social elite, and her old friends still include her in their activities and try not to let things get awkward. She’s still part of the Forsyte Alumnae Bridge Club, Forsyte being the fancy East Coast finishing school that Penny and the women in her social circle attended. Austin tries to make a big deal out of it, but it’s almost entirely irrelevant to the mystery. The bridge club isn’t though, because is has a new member, and she’s not a Forsyte girl. Her name is Juanita Leigh Selim, and she’s a Broadway dancer who one of the local women, Lois Dunlap, has brought to Hamilton to help found a theater group or something. She’s tiny and dark-haired and very beautiful, and the women of Hamilton mostly like her, even though all of their husbands have kind of fallen in love with her — most notably Penny’s boyfriend, Ralph Hammond.

So. Nita Selim gets shot at the end of a bridge party at her house, and all of the club members are there, along with most of their husbands and boyfriends, plus This guy named Sprague who Nita brought from New York with her. And because Penny asks him to and he’s a little bit in love with her, and also because it’s, you know, his job, Bonnie Dundee investigates.

There were a few things I didn’t like so much about this book, like Penny’s chartreuse dress with big brown polka dots, but mostly I thought it was pretty good. You’re given a lot of clues — easily enough to allow you to solve the mystery, but not all at once. And Dundee’s investigation proceeds sort of similarly — he follows up on different clues, and sometimes he gets bits of helpful information and sometimes he doesn’t. Most of the characters are just interesting and likable enough to work, and even Nita, the sexy dancer who brings her lover with her from New York and flirts with everyone’s husbands isn’t vilified, which was surprising and pleasing.

But hey, maybe I really just liked it because I figured out who killed Nita and how it was done before Bonnie Dundee did. I never manage that.