North Beach Girl / Scandal on the Sand
His real name was Marvin Leroy Schmoker, but in his heyday, he was better known by his pseudonym, John Trinian. These two books, originally published in 1960 and ’64, respectively, have been out of print for decades, and that’s a real shame. North Beach Girl, the story of a beautiful San Francisco woman who’s tired of working for a living and who rather conveniently comes into a lot of money, is written in a hip, swinging-sixties style (“I just don’t dig working”) but with an impish sense of humor. Scandal on the Beach follows a group of people—a cop, a Mob hit man, a drug-addicted actor, a photographer who specializes in nudes, a self-deluded man and his would-be girlfriend—who find themselves gathered around, of all things, a dying, beached whale. The novel feels very different from North Beach Girl: less breezy, more noir. But thematically it’s very similar: both books are character studies of mixed-up, desperate people caught up in situations they can’t control. Almost completely unknown today, except by collectors, Trinian is long overdue for republication, and we can only hope further titles are waiting in the queue. --David Pitt