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

[asakiyume]

I wonder! When I type "My heart is like" into Google, it offers up "a truck," "a zoo," "a wheel," "a stallion," "a river," "a singing bird," "an open highway," " house," and "paper" ... which shows a good range, but not a single musical instrument! Where are the lutes, pianos, drums? Never mind the more violent, dramatic metaphors... where are the fires, volcanos, and hurricanes?

Fun with a Chafing Dish seems like something one could induce a right-wing civic group to ban...

[ethelmay]

My first thought was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers (1940). Not a great match, but Hunter is an assonance with Trumpet, sort of. ("Don't ask him what an assy-thingummy is. He's only longing to be asked.")

[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.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

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 saw this post on the "latest things" page, and I immediately thought of "National Velvet", which is probably wrong, but I can't unsee it, so I had to share it!

[nineweaving]

A quick check of recent bestsellers with vaguely similar titles or by triple-named or alliterative women yields The Sun Is My Undoing by Marguerite Sheen (1941 and 1942); Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham (1945); A Lion Is in the Streets by Adria Locke Langley.

Nothing that makes me go "Aha!"

Nine

[galdrin]

So what was the title of Mary Myrtle Miven's idyllic love story?

[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.

[vr_trakowski]

Grace Livingston Hill is a long shot - but she wrote romances (mostly Christian-flavored), including The Sound of the Trumpet, published in 1943. Unfortunately it's not one I've read, so I don't know if it includes any horses.

Her Wikipedia page doesn't have a complete list of titles, but the fan site has quite a few.