Description

[from review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle 29 Apr 1916] Hollings Harland, a copper broker, and his partner, Johnstone Barker, are engaged in a discussion on the eighteenth floor of the Black Eagle office building. Following this Harland is found dead on the sidewalk and Barker is missing. Suicide, say the newspapers, but a lawyer and two detective friends call it murder and the real clue is discovered when "The Girl at Central" attempts to solve the mystery.

Notes

"Black Eagle" is the second of Bonner's three Molly Morgenthau adventures, and in many ways, the strongest. It's got a solid mystery and gives Molly lots of space to exercise her initiative and East Side savvy both on and off the 'board. Technically, the romance in the novel's between Molly's good friend, criminal lawyer Jack Reddy (their strong platonic friendship's one of the series' highlights), and the beautiful real-estate-developer-turned-suspect Carol Whitehall, but my heart's with Molly and her Soapy Babbitt -- star reporter -- "Himself" -- and it's a pleasure to revisit them, here settling in as newlyweds. The best thing about their relationship is his unabashed pride in her smarts and her principles. He tags along with the investigators and files his stories, but it's Molly who does the independent sleuthing and makes the difficult moral calls and he'd never try to stop her (short of maybe discouraging her dining out with a murderer...but, about those plans, she just doesn't tell him).

One of the most interesting things about all three books is, of course, Molly's switchboard work. There's a terrific article by April Middeljans in the Spring 2010 edition of Journal of Modern Literature, "'Weavers of Speech':Telephone Operators as Defiant Domestics in American Literature and Culture" that talks about how and why that career became pink collar and analyzes the way that these young women's portrayal in art and culture subverted the corporate model of the "hello girl" as a docile, almost mechanical "handmaiden whose discipline oiled the gears of men's business without restructuring traditional social spaces." (39) Middeljans outlines three genres of telephone-girl stories: disaster, detective, and romantic comedy. Molly herself features prominently in Middeljans' middle category, which, even more than their heroism in disaster, showcases "operator autonomy and defiance." Her description of these girls' cheerful breaching of company protocol -- of their transgressive, "working-class moxie" -- is 100% Ms. Morgenthau-Babbitts:

For the operator sleuth, the customer is not always right, and no amount of rote mechanical training can skew her moral compass nor alienate her from an intuitive self-reliance. Her rebellion against company control allows her to restore a more egalitarian social order. The privacy protocols of aristocratic men, established to counteract the telephone network’s dangerously democratic access, are ultimately circumvented by the female linchpin of the system. (46)

In Black Eagle and her other outings, you root for Molly's empowerment -- "for the triumph of human initiative and decision-making over the efficiency of mechanized work" (57) all the way. Can't wait to read the fiction about young women similarly circumventing AI. You know it's coming!

An aside: Molly, at one point, quotes the hugely popular (one of the most of the 19th century -- it was a favorite of Queen Victoria) poem "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight" and that inspired me to read up on it. The author, Rose Hartwick Thorpe wrote "Curfew" in 1867 when she was 16. In 1887, she relocated from Michigan to San Diego, for her health, continued writing there, and left a lasting mark on the landscape: "False Bay" was renamed "Mission Bay" after being so called in one of her poems.

Flags: Suicide, offensive racial slurs -- infrequent but they really jar.

Tags

1910-1919, American, United States, Northeast, brave, courageous, can't help loving you/love despite, cheerful, clever, competent, determined, f/m, female, forthright, independent, intelligent, loyal, married, multiple narrators, mystery, reporter, secret past/my lips are sealed, spirited, strong m/f friendship, young

Flags

insensitive or outdated language (race/ethnicity/disability/sexual orientation), suicide