Review: A Husband by Proxy

A Husband by Proxy by Jack Steele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not written in the hard-boiled noir style, but very much employing noir tropes. It opens with an underemployed "criminologist" (he doesn't call himself a detective, but is totally a detective) in his New York office with his name on the glass of the door, and a tall, beautiful woman coming in to hire him for something dubious. He goes on to be trailed by mysterious people, beaten up and nearly killed, while running hither and yon after clues.

There's a bit of a twist, though. The woman is hiring him to pretend to be her husband, something she needs so she can inherit under the terms of her uncle's will. By the coincidence that was such an important part of most plots at this period, after she leaves he gets another job - two in one day after a long dry period - to do an investigation for an insurance company into the death of a man who, as it turns out, is the woman's uncle from whom she is set to inherit. This places him in a conflict-of-interest situation, particularly since (on almost no acquaintance and not knowing key facts about her) he has fallen in love with her, and it looks suspiciously like she could be involved in the death.

I suspect this kind of "I trust her for no reason except that a wonderful girl like her could never" plot was being parodied by Edgar Wallace in The Angel of Terror , in which almost nobody believes that the villainess is a villainess because she looks so sweet and innocent. It's a trope that I've come across a few times in the literature of the period. Of course, people would also trust men they met for similar reasons; they belonged to a class that was supposed to have a highly developed "code," and showed all the signifiers, so of course they were trusted without further inquiry.

Apart from this rather stupid trope and the general thinness of the romance, and the inevitable coincidences and bits of good luck (alongside protagonist agency, at least), it's a good detective story, with a well-judged mix of action and investigation, and a personal stake for the investigator.

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