In my research into the source texts (novels, plays, magazine stories) of Hollywood’s earliest sound films — the Pre-Code era, as it’s usually referred to — I have amassed stacks of cheaper hardback novels published by Grosset & Dunlap. One of the fundamental forces that drives the publishing business is “another one like.” People who enjoy reading an Agatha Christie mystery will usually pick up another one (and another one and another one) because they can count on its being reliably similar in style, plot, characters, length, etc. From its founding in 1898 to its acquisition by Putnam’s in 1982, few American publishers stuck to the principle of “another one like” as steadfastly as Grosset & Dunlap.
Grosset & Dunlap was the home of dozens of popular young adult series, including the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, and Tom Swift. They were also a leading publisher of the sort of romances that Mills & Boon produced by the millions in the U.K., and to make sure their readers didn’t miss a chance to pick up “another one like,” their novels always included several pages of listings of similar authors and novels. Vida Hurst (Marriage a la Mode), May Christie (The Jazz Widow), Ruby M. Ayres (Heartbreak Marriage), and Beatrice Burton (The Flapper Wife) were among those regularly featured.
Among the titles listed in editions from 1930 or so was Miss Hard-Boiled by Jane Dixon. I knew Jane Dixon’s name from various histories of Jazz Age New York City because she was considered the city’s leading newspaper woman of the time, a reporter who covered big stories like the Ruth Snyder murder trial and Lindbergh’s landing in Paris. Along with other pioneers like Ishbel Ross, she founded the New York Newspaper Women’s Club in 1922. This and the title seemed to promise something better than the usual low-middlebrow fare of Vida Hurst et al. It also helped me accomplish the goal of reading at least one of the many novels that were serialized in American newspapers in the 1920s to 1950s — the grandmammy of which is Adele Garrison’s Revelations of a Wife, whose 41-year run give it fair claim to being the longest novel ever written.
Miss Hard-Boiled opens promisingly, with its heroine, Raquel Rojos, huddled in a dark corner of a night train to Phoenix, having run away from her home in Hermosa, Arizona, near the Mexican border:
She was glad for the darkness. Glad for the haze of alkali dust that hung like a curtain between her and the idly curious eyes of fellow passengers. Cattlemen, with hunched shoulders and gay knotted kerchiefs that belied the dreary routine of their trade. Two or three traveling salesmen, the urban stamp on their easy-fitting clothes and polished shoes. No women.
Most of the men are sleeping, which Raquel takes as a good omen, for “Men always noticed Raquel. And remembered her. These men would not remember.”
Raquel is fleeing the prospect of a forced marriage to one of the henchmen of her father, who makes little secret of his gang’s reputation for robbery, kidnapping, and murder. She’s borrowed enough money to get to New York, where she figures to get a job on the strength of her beauty alone.
And she does, which is our first clue that despite her own hard-boiled reputation, Jane Dixon will be following in the footsteps of Vida Hurst and May Christie and the other ones like them. In a matter of weeks, Raquel has won a coveted place among the mannequins (live models) in the salon of Monsieur Alphonse, Manhattan’s most exclusive designer. “By heaven,” she hears a customer gasp the first time she steps onto the show floor, “the creature can’t be real!”
Raquel is not just stunning but savvy. She quickly charms Alphonse’s wealthiest patron by gasping, “I — I — I thought I was seeing myself,” when they first meet. This despite the withering portrait that follows:
The woman’s face was ravaged as a battlefield over which all the armies of beauty had waged their battles and gone down to defeat. The skin was stretched so tautly over bone and flabby muscle that it seemed it must part. A death’s head smile drew the withered lips tight at the corners. A smile that was perpetual, even in repose. Eyes, glassy, like agate marbles, held wide open by invisible props. Throat stringy, crinkled like crepe paper despite its heaving coating of enamel.
Jane Dixon had witnessed Ruth Snyder’s execution in the electric chair at Sing-Sing, and she shows no mercy when it comes to slaying her fictional characters.
It’s a woman-eat-woman world Dixon creates in Miss Hard-Boiled, and beauty is the weapon of choice. She does make one friend — Greta, a fellow model just enough less beautiful not to be a threat. And, unlike Raquel, Greta is not trying to keep her virginity safe until the highest bidder shows up. The only person Raquel has to worry about is Monsieur Alphonse, who is not only a most generous employer (he takes the two to Paris first-class in return for nothing more than their parading around the ship in his outfits), but madly in love with her. You know it can’t be anything less than madly.
Raquel manages to keep not only Alphonse but Bertie, the polo-playing millionaire wastrel, and an over-ardent marquis at bay through a two-year stay in Paris (which seems to involve little in the way of actual modelling work). There’s a confrontation in a nightclub; the threat of a duel at dawn in the Bois du Boulogne over the right to her hand. Until one day she meets Jerry, and within a week, she knows he’s the one. Why? Because, of course, he has that certain “something”:
Yet there was something about him [I told you]. The slow turn of his head when he looked at her. The set of his chin when he had reached a decision. The way his gray eyes smiled when his lips were grave. The touch of his hand on her arm.
The way he wears his hat. The way he sips his tea…. Sorry, I’m getting Jane Dixon mixed up with Ira Gershwin.
The one very definite quality Jerry possesses is enough money to pry Raquel out of her commitment to Monsieur Alphonse, and soon the two are on their way back to the States (a shipboard wedding to keep everyone’s morality squeaky clean). And just to keep the narrative design neat, Jerry contracts a life-threatening disease (“It must have been either in water he drank or food he ate while he was in Europe. Anyhow, he has it,” declares fiction’s most convenient doctor) that requires the two of them to retire to a hot, dry climate. Perhaps at that grand ranchero just outside Raquel’s home town of Hermosa?
Miss Hard-Boiled is, as you can see, no noteworthy deviation from Grosset & Dunlap’s formula. It does, however, illuminate some of the special requirements of the newspaper serial. Dixon wrote the novel for the Metropolitan Newspaper Service, which began offering it to papers in the spring of 1929 as a ten-week feature. The Fort Worth Record-Telegram ran it between late-August and early November in 72 installments (followed by a John Buchan-esque mystery by Roy Vickers called The Hawk).
Miss Hard-Boiled ran in over thirty newspapers, including the Boston American, the Cincinnati Post, the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Call-Bulletin over the next two years. Grosset & Dunlap published the book as a hardcover roughly a year after the serial’s first appearance, which seems to have been a standard practice for such arrangements. The book simply repackages the newspaper chapters, sans the recaps that were provided every few days for readers who might have missed an installment or two. This makes for a speedy read, as no chapter runs for over 5-6 pages and there’s some sort of plot development in every chapter.
It’s not easy to stick to a straightforward plot line over 72 chapters without a few detours, but Miss Hard-Boiled‘s are more Perils of Pauline-ish than anything like Charles Dickens’ divagations. If a threat to this Raquel’s progress pops up in Chapter 26, you can be sure it’ll be squelched by Chapter 27 or Chapter 28, tops. And the momentum is aided by what was once referred to as Dixon’s “megaphone style”: “short, crisp sentences that issue forth like so many bullets from a gun.”
No self-respecting book critic would has wasted a column inch on Miss Hard-Boiled, not the least because the novel was usually run by papers as a “Woman’s Page” feature. So by 1932, the book was showing up on lists of remainders in bookstore ads, and soon after, it vanished forever. Jane Dixon had moved on, in any case. City Girl appeared in newspapers that year, followed by Bargain in Love (1933), Restless Woman (1939), Lucky for Love (1940), and A Man’s Woman (1942). Of these, only City Girl was published in book form, again by Grosset & Dunlap, under the title Free to Love.
Serial novels such as these were a staple of many American newspapers. On any given day between 1920 and 1950, installments of several dozen novels could be found in different papers around the country as well as in Canada. In some cases, the serialization was the only published instance. A novel by Evelyn Shuler (another former reporter) called Dangerous Cinderella appeared in papers in 1938, for example, and never saw book form. In other cases, such as with novels by Faith Baldwin and Viña Delmar, serialization was either a precursor to the book or a parallel release (these usually in abridged form). Even Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was packaged (abridged/censored) for newspapers in 1937, a dozen years after its first publication. I would love to see scholars take a more in-depth look at this neglected expanse of our literary history. I think it’s unlikely that there are any undiscovered masterpieces awaiting such research — but, who knows?
The pattern of Jane Dixon’s professional career becomes coherent against the backdrop of her marriages. Born Estelle Kegler in Massillon, Ohio and raised in Marion, she married Earle Wilson, the son of a hardware manufacturer in 1905. Wilson abandoned her not long after and she went to work for later-President Warren G. Harding’s Marion Star as a society reporter and drama critic while she sent detectives looking for her husband. She finally tracked him down in California, where he was living under another name, and took a train to Reno, Nevada to get a divorce.
From Marion, she moved on to Poughkeepsie, New York, and then to New York, where she became the first woman to do straight reporting for the New York Herald in 1911, taking the pen-name of Jane Dixon. After working her way up to a byline position with the New York Evening Telegram, she switched from fact to fiction in 1927 when she married Major Walter H. Wells, then the public relations man for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. (It was Wells who got the hype around the annual Army-Navy football game going in the 1920s).
Though she still took occasional reporting jobs, such as the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh’s son in 1932, it was easier (and less career-threatening to her husband) to write newspaper serial novels. She appears to have stopped writing completely in 1943, when her husband was assigned to the Pentagon. They retired in the early 1950s to Manhattan, where she died in October 1960 at the age of 78.
Fascinating! Had no idea they would serialize novels in the newspaper
It was very popular for decades and an under-studied phenomenon.