By guest reviewer Nicholas Litchfield, editor of the Lowestoft Chronicle
A GLOBE-TROTTING private investigator unravels thieving,
murder and local vendettas while protecting a flame-haired heiress in The Red
Tassel, an atmospheric thriller set amid betrayal, violence and the chill of
the Bolivian Andes.
First published in hardcover by Random House in 1950 and
quickly reissued as a Dell paperback, David Dodge’s third and final case for
the hard-nosed Al Colby is now back in print. A California native and former
accountant, Dodge earned acclaim as both a mystery novelist and travel writer.
The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe proved so popular that Random
House published annual editions from 1954 to 1959, and two novels reached the
silver screen…To Catch a Thief, directed by Hitchcock, and Plunder of the Sun,
starring Glenn Ford as Colby.
Set in Bolivia, The Red Tassel follows American private eye Al Colby, summoned by his friend MacDougal at the U.S. embassy to protect Pancha Porter, a striking young woman from Chicago with ‘flaming-red hair, eyes like sapphires, and a beautiful figure.’ As Colby dryly observes, ‘She wore a tailored gabardine suit that treated her fine figure with the respect it deserved, and from the heels of her forty-dollar snakeskin shoes to the bonfire on top of her head she was the All-American Girl.’
After recently inheriting a silver and lead mine, Pancha
arrives in La Paz to uncover why profits are plummeting and whether sabotage is
to blame. Colby, ever wry and sharp, steps in as her interpreter and bodyguard,
but suspicion follows them.
On the way to the mine, their Indian driver Saturnino’s
hostility is palpable, and Colby suspects a bout of gas poisoning from a
tampered muffler was attempted murder. At the mine, Colby and Pancha meet the
Braillard family… ‘stoic, Amazonian’ Lili, her weary husband Simon, an American
mine manager hardened by two decades in Bolivia, and their teenage son Carl, a
reclusive ‘closemouthed kid’ who speaks five languages and doubts his sanity.
Manchego, Simon’s assistant, is eager to please but quick to
shift blame. Dinner with the Braillards brims with tension. Simon explains the
mine’s decline – vandalism, robberies, and llama raids – and blames the
enigmatic witch doctor Yatiri who ‘runs the village.’ Motives remain clouded,
and that night, a chilling scream shatters the uneasy calm, apparently from a
‘madwoman.’
Colby and Pancha visit the witch doctor, a relic with ‘pursed lips’ and sharp eyes, who curses Pancha, prophesying she’ll bear Colby ‘three redheaded children,’ and sends them away with more questions than answers. Back at the mine, they discover vital chemicals have been stolen, revealing a pattern of calculated disruption as Colby’s distrust intensifies. Dodge’s portrayal of Bolivia is vivid and unsparing, showing grim mine workings where impoverished Indian women sort ore under Simon Braillard’s cold supervision, and his claim that he pays them ‘what they are worth...they’re animals’ stuns Pancha.
Though disturbed by the suffering and warned by Colby that
‘all you can do is break your heart trying to change them,’ Pancha’s stubborn
decency compels her to reach out to the so-called ‘crazy woman,’ an outcast she
refuses to ignore. Colby’s relentless search for answers leads him deep into
the mine’s hidden tunnels, where buried secrets and long-standing lies are
finally exposed, his investigation culminating in brutal violence and death. As
Randal S. Brandt, curator of the official David Dodge website, notes in his introduction,
much of the novel’s immersive atmosphere comes from Dodge’s own travels,
including eighteen months in Arequipa, Peru.
His first-hand experience among engineers in high-altitude mining camps and with mountain sickness enriches Colby’s story with authenticity. Loaded with taut exchanges, dry humour, and an ever-present sense of dread, The Red Tassel is a fast-paced, thrilling tale brimming with wry asides and hard-edged observation. Little is what it seems in this gritty novel, and nothing, not even the rarefied mountain air, can dispel the haze of danger, deception, and desire that lingers over Colby and Pancha’s journey.
⬛Nicholas Litchfield is an English-born author and journalist who lives in Western New York. He established the Lowestoft Chronicle, a quarterly online magazine, in 2009. It publishes short stories, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews and artwork.(lowestoftchronicle.com)