G.G. Fickling's Dig a Dead Doll

Before Cathy Gale, before Emma Peel, before Modesty Blaise, there was Honey West. Honey West was the original tough cookie action heroine. She made her debut in 1957 and featured in eleven novels by the husband and wife writing team Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing under the name G.G. Fickling. Dig a Dead Doll, published in 1960, is the seventh of the Honey West private eye thrillers.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until a case went wrong and he was murdered. Honey took over the running of the West Detective Agency. That doesn’t mean she took over the business side. She is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles the cases herself. Her father taught her the ropes. She has a private investigator’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it. She has been taught how to handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI.

Honey is also all woman. She is young, blonde, very pretty and very feminine.

The Honey West private eye thrillers are hardboiled, with touches of humour, they’re fairly violent and quite sleazy. In other words they’re everything that PI thrillers should be.

The book begins with a very large very mean guy trying to kill Honey. He has something else in mind for her before he kills her. Honey is half-naked and fighting for her life and her virtue. Things are looking grim, until she remembers the bull. Thank goodness for the bull. The guy attacking her is big and mean but he’s not as big and mean as that bull.

Honey is in a bullfighting arena in Mexico. It all started with a telephone call from Pete. Honey and Pete had been childhood sweethearts. Then Pete moved away. He moved to Mexico, to pursue his dream of becoming a matador. Now he wants Honey’s help. When the first boy who kissed you asks for help you don’t hesitate. Honey heads for Tijuana.

It looks like that dream might have cost Pete his life. Honey saw him gored by the bull. No-one could survive that. But there are things that don’t add up.

The bull-fighting business in Tijuana involves more than just bull-fighting. Drugs, for instance. And then there’s Vicaro, the impresario. He has a reputation for taking quite an interest in handsome young matadors. An interest that is not strictly professional.

Honey also discovers some of the more colourful night spots, where pretty girls dance. The dancing involves a lot of high kicks. The girls don’t bother with panties. It’s a night spot that caters for those with exotic sexual tastes.

As I said earlier the Honey West books are very sleazy. Honey is a nice girl but she has a lot of bad luck with clothing. Her clothes just seem to come off at the most opportune moments. She is also not a great believer in brassieres, which is rather daring for a girl with a 38-inch bust. In this adventure her clothes come off a lot. A girl does feel undignified hanging naked upside-down from a tree, but it’s all in a day’s work for a lady PI.

Honey has reason to believe that a man known as Zingo is the leader of some kind of criminal conspiracy but while everyone knows of Zingo no-one knows his identity. The conspiracy may concern drugs but it may also involve corrupt practices in the bull-fighting arena. Mexico’s leading matador, Rafael, may know something. Pete’s young protégé Carlos may know something. Quite a few people may know certain things but Honey has no idea which of them she can trust. And she has people in aeroplanes firing machine-guns at her. In fact she has machine-guns fired at her from all directions.

There’s plenty of action, not always involving guns. Action at sea and in seedy night-clubs and in the bull ring. Honey loses her clothing on several further occasions.

The plot is solid with some decent twists although it does at one point make use of a certain plot device that I have always found unconvincing. That’s a minor nit-pick. On the whole the plot works just fine.

The style is lively (Honey acts as first-person narrator) and there’s lots of fairly hardboiled dialogue. The pacing is pleasingly frenetic.

Honey is a delightful heroine. She’s not an unrealistic wish-fulfilment super-woman. She’s just quick-thinking and very determined and she keeps her head in a crisis and people like to help her because she’s cute and bubbly.

The Honey West books are enormous amounts of stylish sleazy action-packed fun. They’re essential reading for anyone who loves sexy lady private eyes, and what right-thinking doesn’t? Dig a Dead Doll is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.