Dark the Summer Dies is definitely noir, but not in the usual conventional way. We’ll return to this point later.
Tony Bianchi, the teenaged hero-narrator, works as a swimming instructor at a country club. He is hoping to gain admission to college.
Tony has a girlfriend, Betty. Their courtship is rather chaste. Betty won’t allow him to take any liberties. Tony doesn’t really mind. He shares the prevailing attitude that nice girls don’t have sex. If Betty allowed him to have sex with her he’d know that she wasn’t a nice girl after all.
And then Tony meets Vicky. Vicky is an older woman, and she’s married. She’s twenty-eight. She’s drop-dead gorgeous and she has class. She’s so far out of Tony’s league that it’s not funny. And yet she seems interested in him. Tony doesn’t understand this at all. He certainly doesn’t understand why she proceeds to seduce him.
Tony is now hooked. He is dimly aware that this situation is not likely to end well. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he is going to have Vicky’s outraged husband sending guys round to break his legs. As usual poor Tony has no idea what he’s gotten himself into. He thinks he’s in a crime B-movie but he isn’t. He’s in a potentially nasty situation, but it’s not the kind of situation in which guys get their legs broken by hired goons.
He is involved in a dangerous game but he doesn’t know what the game is or what the rules are. He doesn’t even know how many players are involved. At this stage he could extricate himself from the situation, but there are two things that keep him in the game. Firstly there’s the obvious excitement of bedding a beautiful glamorous woman. The second reason is the excitement of bedding a woman who is rich and out of his league.
Sex is only one of the engines driving this novel’s noir plot. Equally important is money. Like so many of the American noir novels of this period Dark the Summer Dies deals with the vast chasm between those who have money and those who don’t. Those who have money can do whatever they like. Those without money have very limited options. Those who have money and those who don’t inhabit different universes. And those with money are inclined to use those without money as playthings. Which is what happens here.
Tony gets a major ego boost from the fact that he is bedding a woman from that other universe - the universe of money, power, privilege, luxury and style.
Unfortunately he is being drawn further and further the game that Vicky is playing. The suspense in this novel isn’t of the usual kind. The suspense comes from our knowledge that the game in which Tony is involved is almost certain to end messily and unpleasantly and that Tony is unlikely to come out of its unscathed, if he survives at all.
There are none of the usual noir trappings. None of the characters are involved in any kind of crime. There’s no atmosphere of corruption. Nobody carries guns. There is no hardboiled dialogue. This is not crime noir. It’s more like domestic noir, or noir melodrama. In fact it has a certain amount in common with some of the noir melodramas of Orrie Hitt.
But it’s still genuine noir. Tony is a classic noir protagonist, a basically decent guy who finds his life spiralling out of control due to his own character weaknesses and poor judgment. Vicky is a classic femme fatale. It’s a deceptive tale in the sense that it takes a long while for the real noirness to kick in.
Sex plays a huge role in this story but it’s handled in a very very tame manner. This is not quite sleaze fiction but it has some affinities with that genre, but in the early 50s a writer could deal with sexual situations but any description of actual sex was out of the question.
Dark the Summer Dies might disappoint those who like their noir to include mobsters, tough guys, heists and gunplay but if you enjoy noirish melodrama there’s plenty to enjoy here. Recommended.
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