Marty Holland’s Fallen Angel

Marty Holland’s Fallen Angel is a 1945 hardboiled murder mystery. It has definite noir overtones but as is always the case whether or not a novel is true noir depends a great deal on the ending.

Marty Holland was a pseudonym used by Mary Hauenstein (1919-1971). This was her first novel. She enjoyed some modest success and had two of her stories filmed but her career soon seemed to run out of steam.

The protagonist of Fallen Angel, Eric Stanton, had been an insurance investigator but not an honest one, which was why he had to leave L.A. in a hurry. He’s headed for Frisco but his money has run out. He’s sitting in a diner in a nondescript small town named Walton. There’s where he notices the waitress, Stella. She’s really something. She gives him the brush-off but he’s persistent. She goes out with him. Things are going well between them but they need money.

Stella drags him along to a spook show where a very incompetent phoney medium is fleecing the punters. That’s when Eric gets his bright idea. A woman in the audience, by the name of Emmie, wants advice from her dead father on investing the very large inheritance he left her. Eric has figured a fool-proof angle which will allow him to get his hands on Emmie’s money. Then he and Stella will be set. They can get married.

The murder throws a spanner into the works. At first Eric is not a serious suspect. There are two other much more obvious suspects, but when it becomes clear that those other two guys could not have committed the murder the cops start to figure Eric as the prime suspect.

Eric’s instinct all through his life has been to cut and run whenever the going gets tough and that’s what he does now. He has now acquired a wife and she insists on running with him.

Eric knows the cops have a net spread for him and he’s getting increasingly panicky.

The worst thing is that he knows he is innocent but he can’t prove it. Of course if he could prove the guilt of the actual killer he’d be off the hook but he genuinely does not have the slightest idea of the killer’s identity, or why the murder took place.

Eric is a bit of a louse but he’s not really evil. He would never kill anyone. He’s just a chronic loser without the discipline to succeed in an honest line of business. He’s not short of self-pity. He lies because his instinct is always to lie. But he’s not beyond hope. Whether he can learn to accept responsibility and make a proper life for himself remains to be seen. And while he’s committed various criminal acts in the past he really is innocent of this murder. It’s just that he can’t see a way out.

For all his faults he’s a reasonably sympathetic protagonist.

This is a pretty decent murder mystery which looks like it might turn out to be full-blown noir, or it might not. It’s still quite entertaining and it’s recommended.

Stark House have issued Marty Holland’s second novel The Glass Heart and her novella The Sleeping City in a double-header paperback edition. The Glass Heart is flawed but interesting. The Sleeping City on the other hand is absolutely superb erotic noir.

Otto Preminger’s film adaptation Fallen Angel (1945) is top-notch film noir.