Charity is a pretty blonde with a problem. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there. That’s not an unusual event in Charity’s life so she isn’t particularly worried. If a girl worried every time she had a blackout she’d spend her whole life worrying. She imagines she’s been to a night-club. Possibly several night-clubs. Possibly with Milton. She knows she was with Milton earlier in the evening but he was being tiresome. He wanted to sleep with her but she doesn’t like him very much. She left the night-club and everything after that is just a blank space.
She figures she needs to talk to someone wise about her problem. In her experience the wisest people in the world are bartenders. She finds a bar and as luck would have it the bartender is a very wise man indeed.
There’s a piano player there, named Joe Doyle. He’s battered and ugly and seedy-looking but Charity thinks he’s the most beautiful man she’s ever seen. She decides she wants to sleep with him. Which she does.
The next morning she has another problem. She will have to explain to her husband Oliver why she didn’t come home the previous night. Her husband is very rich (which is good) but he can be tiresome about such things (which is bad).
Charity has had lots of one night stands with no unpleasant consequences. She has had a couple of actual affairs and in each case the man ended up getting a very severe beating. It has crossed Charity’s mind that her husband might have had something to do with this but that thought was too disturbing so she instantly dismissed it from her mind.
Oliver Farnese lives his life to a rigid schedule. His father left him a vast fortune but ensured that Oliver would never have to make a single business decision. The truth is that Oliver is incapable of doing anything useful. He goes to the office every day and does no work at all. His entire life is a series of empty rituals.
There’s more to Oliver Farnese than this. There’s something very dark inside him, something cruel and twisted.
These four people are all, in their different ways, twisted up inside. These are not normal healthy people. They’re either self-destructive or destructive of others or both. Not one of them could be considered to be totally in touch with reality. And not one of them could be considered to be in control of his or her life. They all do things with no clear understanding of the own motives.
They are all players in a game but they’re not necessarily all playing the same game.
Joe Doyle isn’t stupid. He knows he should have nothing to do with Charity but he can’t help himself and in any case it doesn’t really matter. He has a very bad heart condition and has maybe a year to live. He has nothing to lose. His affair with Charity becomes more serious.
You can see where this plot setup is likely to go, and you can see where other writers would have taken it. Flora takes it in a slightly less expected direction. But more interesting than the plot twists are the character twists. If you’re a reader of noir fiction you will have decided roughly where these characters should go as noir fiction characters. In fact they don’t do quite what you expect them to do. At the same time you end up realising that their actions are entirely consistent with everything we’ve learnt about them. They behave in the kinds of irrational frustrating ways that real people behave, rather than in the ways that genre fiction types usually behave. They don’t do things just because those things would be convenient in plot terms.
Charity is difficult to predict because she’s not a conventional victim or a villainess or a conventional noir protagonist or a standard femme fatale. She’s a woman who has found her own way of dealing with her situation and it’s not a very good way to deal with it but it’s the only way she knows, it makes sense to her, and it makes sense in terms of everything we know about her. Much the same could be said about the other characters. They do what they feel compelled to do.
The ending is entirely right and entirely satisfactory but it still manages to be not quite what we expected.
Fletcher Flora achieved no more than modest success during his lifetime and after his death he was largely forgotten. He is still to achieve the recognition he deserved.
In its own low-key unobtrusive way Park Avenue Tramp ignores the accepted genre conventions. This is an offbeat neglected gem. Very highly recommended.
This novel is one of three in the Stark House Noir Classics paperback A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man and Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed. All were originally Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals.
I’ve reviewed a couple of other Fletcher Flora titles - Leave Her To Hell and Killing Cousins.
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