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So, here is a thing that could pass for a description of a book, or possibly a Hallmark Christmas movie, minus the Christmas:

A girl manufactures a fictional fiancé to show up her dismissive roommates. She tells them she’s getting married the day after their double wedding. When she gets on the train for the country retreat she’s planned for her “honeymoon,” she discovers that her friends and their husbands are on the same train, because the friend who lent her his farmhouse has also lent them houses on the same property. She talks the nearest man into impersonating her fiancé, only to find that he’s her crush, disguised in order to avoid the man who’s trying to serve him with a subpeona.

Weirdly, those are the parts of Wanted: A Husband that I didn’t like. Also, that is just the second half of the book. The first half is a makeover book, and I kind of love it.

The heroine is Darcy Cole, a graphic artist living in an apartment with two other girls, Maud and Helen, both of whom have recently become engaged. Darcy is the cranky, dull, disheveled one. She receives no male attention, ever, and doesn’t seem likely to, which is why the opening of the book finds her at the door of her friend Gloria Greene. Gloria is an actress, and a generally pretty awesome person, and, after warning Darcy that it’s not going to be easy or cheap, she offers to make her over.

I love makeover books, I guess. And this — well, it’s Samuel Hopkins Adams. And there’s a grumpy trainer. And Darcy becomes nicer as she becomes more physically fit. The whole sequence is so deeply appealing to me that I don’t know what to do with myself. Mostly I just wish there was more detail.

Once Darcy’s new good looks and attractive personality are faits accomplis, Wanted: A Husband loses momentum. I mean, the fake engagement scenario is fun, for sure — see Patricia Brent, Spinster — and I understand that the whole first half of the book is setup for it, but maybe that’s not where the book wanted to go. And it’s not just my partiality for the makeover section — both halves of the book would have been better if they’d had more space to move. Almost every plot point would have been better for being expanded upon. Still, it’s a delightful, Samuel Hopkins Adams-y romp, and it’s full of bits that couldn’t have been improved upon, like Maud’s fiancé’s appreciation of Darcy, Gloria’s dislike of Maud and Helen, and Jack Remsen and Tom Harmon’s defeat of the subpoena-server. And honestly, I  almost never think the second half of a book lives up to the first half, or that a book I like wouldn’t have been even better if it was more detailed, so maybe it’s just me.

Check out the previous post in the series for stuff about short story series you’ve almost certainly heard of, and for my philosophy of short stories, which pretty much boils down to “they’re better when they come by the bookful and are all about the same character.”

These are the stories that I’ve written about here before. They’re in order from least to most awesome, which is not to say that the Our Square stories aren’t pretty good, or that Torchy isn’t a little higher on my list of favorite things ever than Emma McChesney. I mean, I put them in worst-to-best order by accident, and thought I might as well make a note of it.

Our Square

Samuel Hopkins Adams’ fiction is, mostly, ridiculously charming. He’s also occasionally pretty good at feelings (see The Clarion). He has a harder time mixing the two in short story form — what would be adorable or poignant in one of his novels sometimes ends up twee or depressing instead. He’s also hampered by what I guess must be a lack of creativity — I don’t know why else he’d choose to write variations on the same story over and over. Maybe it’s just another of the drawbacks to choosing to do your short story series about a location rather than a person or group of people. Still, overall Adams can’t help being ridiculously charming and occasionally good at feelings, and some of these stories are pretty great. Try “The Guardian of God’s Acre” in From a Bench in Our Square for the feelings and the eponymous “Our Square” in Our Square and the People in it for the first and possibly best iteration of the story Adams writes most often.

Pollyooly

The Pollyooly stories are super weird, funny, and surprisingly unsentimental about children. They also feature one of my favorite things in short story series, an improbably capable central character. And not just at grilling bacon. It’s not just that Pollyooly always lands on her feet — that category also includes characters who are constantly facing various kinds of doom, but manage to escape it somehow. Pollyooly never lets herself get that far — she’s too relentlessly competent for that. Conceptually Pollyooly is just like any other character with her own short story series: visually distinctive, really good at something, and exercising some kind of narrative gravitational pull. But the specifics make her different. She’s strange because she’s so mundane. This is the kind of setup where the beautiful orphan is supposed to be dreamy and imaginative, or bright and cheerful. Instead, Pollyooly is hardheaded, acquisitive, and totally lacking a sense of humor. It’s wonderful. The first stories here are the best, so start reading Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them</em>, and if you’re not enjoying yourself by the time Pollyooly finds employment as an artist’s model, you have my permission to stop. It’s also completely acceptable to skip the final book, Pollyooly Dances, which bears very little relation to the earlier stories.

Torchy

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on the Torchy stories, you’ll have noticed that I don’t know how to write about them at all. Part of it is that I love them unreasoningly. Part of it is that I have to consider the possibility that my intense reaction to them has nothing to do with their actually quality. I mean, maybe they’re not that good. I like them too much to be able to tell. That said, they’re textbook short story series, with a ridiculously resourceful main character, a well-defined and likable cast of characters, a great sense of place and time, and just enough adventure.

There’s basically no Torchy story I don’t recommend, although the last books in the series aren’t as unrelentingly awesome as the earlier ones. Start at the beginning, with Torchy. If at any point you are able to stop, I have nothing to say to you.

Emma McChesney

Emma McChesney is extremely unusual. She’s a woman — a single mother, even — in the 1910s who’s allowed to be ruthless, and smarter than the men around her. She’s also allowed to be sad sometimes, because Edna Ferber finds sad a lot easier than happy — as do many human beings, but few heroines of popular fiction from the 1910s. I know the secondary theme of this post is characters who are excellent at what they do, and no one is better at her ob than Emma McChesney.

Thinking about the Emma McChesney stories doesn’t overwhelm me with feelings the way thinking about Torchy does, but reading them is a perfect experience every time. They’re some of the few books I’ve talked about here that I feel comfortable describing as objectively excellent. It doesn’t even matter what you start with, but chronological continuity is nice, so I recommend Roast Beef, Medium.

Halfway through The Mystery, by Samuel Hopkins Adams and Stewart Edward White, I decided that I definitely was not going to review it. But now that I’m done, I kind of feel like I have to. It’s just so weird. At least, it seemed weird do me, but I’m not really in the habit of reading slightly sci-fi pirate-y horror stories, so.

The Mystery has a Frankenstein-esque framing narrative, which takes place aboard a Navy ship, the Wolverine. The ship is sort of wandering around the ocean, blowing up wrecks, when it comes across a schooner called the Laughing Lass. This is odd for two reasons: first, that the Laughing Lass had disappeared two years before with eminent scientist Dr. Schermerhorn, journalist Ralph Slade, and its captain and crew. The second reason is that the ship is entirely uninhabited, beyond the dead bodies of a few rats. That, and there’s food and still-warm ashes from a fire, so the Laughing Lass can’t have been unmanned for long. Then…well, more mysterious stuff happens. And eventually one of a large number of missing people shows up and tells his story, and it’s absorbing and awful.

I usually have trouble with books fueled by impending doom, but not here. Or rather, I was pretty freaked out the entire time I was reading, but not in my usual, irrationally upset about bad things that haven’t happened yet way. Actually, I think I might have been reacting to it the way people are supposed to react to scary books and movies but that I never do. I mean, I’m not going to start reading more scary stuff, because I’m still a wuss, but I’m closer to understanding the appeal than I was a week ago.

I should probably also mention the animal slaughter. There was a lot of it. It was very effectively horrible in the traditional sense of the word, and I can’t believe I managed to get all the way through it. I just — there are a lot of dead seals, okay? A lot.

In conclusion: way to go, Samuel Hopkins Adams. I trusted you, and now I don’t. And I guess it could just be Stewart Edward White at fault, but, not having a whole lot of information on the subject, I’m going to blame them equally.

Predictably, The Flagrant Years left me wanting to read more Samuel Hopkins Adams. Less predictably, it mostly made me want to reread books of his I’d already read. So I thought I’d take advantage of the impulse and finally review Average Jones, which I’ve now read three times.

     WANTED—Ten thousand loathly black beetles, by
     A leaseholder who contracted to leave a house in the
     same condition as he found it. Ackroyd,
     100 W. Sixteenth St. New York

The Flagrant Years is Samuel Hopkins Adams’ novel of the cosmetics industry. I say “of” rather than “about” because while most of it takes place in a Fifth Avenue beauty parlor, mostly it’s about people. You get the impression that if Consuelo Barrett’s job search had led her to a different industry, the novel would have followed here there. It would be a wrong impression, because Adams clearly knew what he meant to write about, but this is exactly the kind of sleight of hand he’s best at — his ridiculously engaging characters are there to mask the lump of information he’s forcing down your throat and it actually works.

So, Consuelo Barrett. My favorite thing about her is that when she first meets Ipsydoodle Smith — who has just offered to make her a movie star — she tells him her name and he thinks she’s joking, because it’s such a perfect movie star name. Actually, that’s not my favorite thing about her. My favorite thing about her is her. Connie Barrett is one of those fictional heroines who is frank and straightforward and subtly classy, which is both a thing I really enjoy and a thing Adams does really, really well.

Connie is in New York looking for a job, and after running into Ipsy Smith at Coney Island and getting his recommendation to Gerstel Corss, an Upper West Side hairdresser, she finds one. She learns how to give all the “treatments” and is soon a fully-fledged “operator.” And when Gerstel Corss’ salon closes after a woman ends up with green hair, she doesn’t have much trouble joining her friend “Bob” Roberts at Primavera, a salon on Fifth Avenue.

Bob is pretty awesome, too — she comes from a totally different world than Connie does, but you never feel like that’s a bad thing. Yeah, she’s in the book because Connie has to have a friend, but she sometimes almost feels like she isn’t. She gets to have an inner life.

The other three main characters are the men: Ipsydoodle Smith, Rowdy Pontefract, and Waller Daniels. No, Rowdy’s name isn’t really Rowdy, but his manner is, when he’s drunk. Yes, Ipsydoodle’s name is really Ipsydoodle, but it’s his middle name. This is so Samuel Hopkins Adams, in that it’s kind of twee and irritating, but it turns out that Adams’ occasional twee and irritating moments work a lot better in a book that’s occasionally kind of dark. Although, to be fair, it’s still Samuel Hopkins Adams. Even a murder can’t make it particularly dark.

Ipsy Smith enters the story at Coney Island, where he flirts with Connie and sets her on her path towards becoming a cosmetologist. By the time they meet again, they’ve become friends. He’s a bit of a mysterious figure — everyone knows and likes him, but it’s rarely clear what he’s up to. Connie meets Rowdy Pontefract outside Gerstel Corss’ salon. He’s a girl-shy overgrown boy with an alcohol problem, but he overcomes his girl-shyness in order to fall in love with Constance.

Then there’s Waller Daniels, one of those vastly wealthy, notoriously ruthless businessmen you find in books. They’re never quite as ruthless as people think they are, but Daniels almost is. He’s also Rowdy Pontefract’s uncle, and once he gets to know Connie, he’s absolutely in favor of her becoming Rowdy’s mistress, or even marrying him. I love any and all scenes between Connie and Ipsydoodle, but I think my favorite relationship in The Flagrant Years is the one that springs up between Connie and Waller Daniels. My fondness for fictional cranky middle-aged men aside, every interaction between them is just…interesting. Really interesting.

Poking around on the internet for information about Samuel Hopkins Adams, I learned that in the ’20s he published some books under the name Warner Fabian, apparently because they were too scandalous to publish under his own name. And sure, fair enough. But having read The Flagrant Years, I’m a lot more curious about how racy the Warner Fabian novels were, because it’s full of casual sexual relationships and even women talking about their sexuality, and I would have thought that if there were books not fit for Adams’ real name, this would have been one of them.

Anyway, if it’s not clear, I liked this a lot. There are times when Adams’s irrepressible charm is a bit too much for me, and having it tempered with a little bit of tragedy and what I assume Adams thinks is realism makes it just about perfect. I don’t know if he could write a sad or realistic book, but I like what happens when he tries.

I was totally fine with The Island Mystery until I read The Unspeakable Perk. Now I wish George A. Birmingham and Samuel Hopkins Adams had traded books. That way The Island Mystery would have been charming as it needed to be and The Unspeakable Perk would have been as cynical as it ought to have been. For the record, I am only comparing the two because they’re novels about American millionaires’ daughters on fictional islands. If you add in Romance Island, this starts looking dangerously like a trope.

That said, I like The Unspeakable Perk a lot better than The Island Mystery. If there is one thing Samuel Hopkins Adams is super consistent about, it’s his charm, and that’s one of the few things that will win me over to an otherwise unsatisfying book.

Not that The Unspeakable Perk isn’t enormously enjoyable. It’s just that it falls to pieces a little bit when you sit down and think about it. On the other hand, the hero is basically the scientist version of Clark Kent. Imagine Clark Kent is a doctor stuck on an island for a number of months, and one day a Sabatini heroine comes along and they start flirting. He’s awkward and shy and his glasses are sort of disfiguring, and she’s straightforward and secretly unconventional and easily swayed by popular opinion/prone to misunderstanding things/disinclined to accept explanations. And there’s disease on the island, and unrest among the natives, and an entertaining, loosely-knit group of foreigners in lieu of local color.

There’s some fighting, a lot of orchids, a plot that’s convoluted without being terribly interesting, and some casual xenophobia, but it’s fun. I enjoyed reading it, I adored a lot of the early scenes with the two main characters, and most of the time it didn’t bother me that nothing made very much sense. Adams is one of those authors who can pull stuff like that off. Most of me is pretty impressed with him, but the rest is a little disappointed.

Yeah, that was ambivalent.