Mysterious, ambiguous, sensational, ridiculous

[sovay]

The fantasy-prone heroine of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) is an aspiring novelist and not very successful proprietor of a small bookshop which is lately out of copies of the best-selling bodice-ripper Always Opal, an obvious riff on Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber: "I was appreciating Opal's hot affair with Monseigneur de Montrouget and you interrupted me just as they were about to—" Alternatives proposed to a disappointed customer do not meet with success. The new Russian novel The Dniepier Goes Rolling Along is equally kidding Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows Home to the Sea, but I have no idea what My Heart Is Like a Trumpet is riffing on. "Mary Myrtle Miven's latest . . . a sort of idyllic love story about two horses. Very tender and poetic." I feel I should be able to detect the joke from the available information, but I got nothing. When the love interest entered the scene with an armload of unwanted ARCs, I was faintly surprised I had never encountered a copy of Fun with a Chafing Dish at a library sale myself.

Comments

[ethelmay]

I wonder who Mary Myrtle Mivens is riffing on. Most of the three-barrelled lady-author names of the period that I remember involved two surnames, like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Inez Haynes Irwin.

[sovay]

I wonder who Mary Myrtle Mivens is riffing on.

It didn't ring any bells with me, either, which makes me feel there must be an obvious clanger waiting around the corner.

[selkie]

I think it's got to be Mary Roberts Rinehart? She was so prolific, for a person who was always writing the same book.

[sovay]

I think it's got to be Mary Roberts Rinehart? She was so prolific, for a person who was always writing the same book.

Hey, I liked the hospital melodrama!

[ethelmay]

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/the-woman-who-crossed-the-cascades-and-inspired-batman/ is interesting. (I got there because horses are mentioned in the context of Mary Roberts Rinehart.)

[sovay]

is interesting.

It is! Thank you for the pointer. I'd heard the claim about Batman, but never encountered any of her travel writing, or even any of her nonfiction. "The Middle Boy, who is by way of being a chemist and has systematically blown himself up with home-made explosives for years—the Middle Boy found at least a dozen silver mines of fabulous value, although the men in the party insisted that his specimens were iron pyrites and other unromantic minerals."

[ethelmay]

Miven, not Mivens, sorry. I was thinking she might actually have been called Niven, but Google gives me a whole lot of David Niven and Bring On the Empty Horses (which I remember greatly enjoying when I was in middle school - it came out when I was around twelve or thirteen).

[sovay]

David Niven and Bring On the Empty Horses (which I remember greatly enjoying when I was in middle school - it came out when I was around twelve or thirteen).

Ten years ago I picked up at a copy at, actually, a library sale and gave it to spatch. (I have since read it myself, of course.)