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

[kitewithfish]

My Heart Is Like a Trumpet sent me down a WorldCat research rabbit hole, and I still haven't figured out what the book is.

I vaguely suspect it might be Moyra Charlton, who wrote several horse books in the 1930s including Tally Ho!, Echoing Horn, and Three White Stockings, which is horse POV story that does involve two horses. She was English, which feels like it relates the trumpet to a hunting horn reference.

But there's hardly any information about her except for people who collect rare horse books, and I'm probably missing something that would be obvious to someone who went thru a real horse phase.

[sovay]

I vaguely suspect it might be Moyra Charlton, who wrote several horse books in the 1930s including Tally Ho!, Echoing Horn, and Three White Stockings, which is horse POV story that does involve two horses. She was English, which feels like it relates the trumpet to a hunting horn reference.

I don't think I know her at all! And I read a lot of Marguerite O'Henry at the appropriate developmental phase. That's great. Thank you for throwing her name into the ring, horse-POV and all.

[kitewithfish]

I really thought it was Marguerite O'Henry! Timeline doesn't work out, her horse books come out after 1945, but it's almost perfect. I more I think, the more I suspect there really is some niche joke being made there that we're just never going to find. Sigh.