RogerBW's Blog

1925… thriller, I suppose. Prince Séliman works as secretary to Lady Diana Wynham, a scandalous woman. Original title La Madone des sleepings. Banned in Boston!

…well, from nearly a hundred years later, it's difficult to see why. Certainly there's no eroticism here beyond an occasional description of "her déshabillé slightly open showing a silken thistle embroidered over her left breast". But Diana bestows her favours as she chooses, which is clearly A Bit Much.

The story itself is fairly nonsensical. Diana's investments crash, and she takes steps to gain a new income: she inherited some dubious claims to oil-bearing land in Georgia, and sets out to try to persuade the Communist government to let her exploit them. This, naturally, involves seduction, and eventually a promise of marriage to Varichkine, a Soviet leader in Berlin. That engenders opposition, most visibly from Varichkine's mistress, Madame Mouravieff. Prince Séliman is sent to check up on things and ends up imprisoned by the Tcheka [sic.], but manages to escape. It all comes to nothing, and Diana sets off with only twenty-five thousand dollars a year to embark on new adventures, while the Prince (who has of course never slept with Diana) is reconciled with his ex-wife.

"It is like a bird of prey whose blind tentacles grope at random in the black depths of the cells, carrying away this victim, sparing that one for no apparent reason."

I suppose the prison sequence could be regarded as in loosely the same genre as Buchan, and John MacNab, came out in the same year; but while Buchan's book is certainly much better written, Janet Raden-to-become-Roylance is a young lady who stays within the (recently-widened) lines of what polite society finds acceptable, while Diana doesn't care what scandal she causes as long as she does it with style. (Indeed, when the news of her impending impoverishment is about to break, she dances nearly-nude at a charity event in order to hijack the headlines.)

A little German girl put her arms around my companion and shivered. "How beautiful she is! She makes me think of a statue in the Tiergarten in the shade of which I surrendered myself on Armistice night."

And that, I suppose, is what offended the censors of Boston: here is a woman who is not fitting into the role of daughter, wife or mother, and she doesn't even feel ashamed of it or have the decency to come to a bad end. What a pity that that's pretty much all there is.

(Dekobra was one of the best-selling authors of his day, and I recommend this article at Neglected Books for some idea of his style.)