The Darkening Door

by Bill S. Ballinger

159 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Bill S Ballinger received his B.A. in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin. From 1934 he worked in advertising, and as a radio and television writer. After traving Europe and the Near East, Ballinger moved to southern California, to take advantage of the television 'boom' of the 1950s as a script writer. Between the years 1977 and 1979 he was an associate professor of writing at the California State University, Norhtridge. In 1960, Ballinger received for his TV work Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America.

Reviews

[Still]

Originally published in 1953.
Sordid for its day tale of a woman who rises from poverty, meets an elderly gentleman while working as a home nurse and marries into wealth with security and happiness for the first time in her life.

Nothing good ever happens to girls like her.

The lady gets bored, starts screwing around and winds up on drugs by around page 113.
All without her husband’s knowledge of course.

Interspersed are detours into the personal sleaze the supporting characters are engaged in.
The abortionist. The dope selling “doctor” and his hep cat supplier.
The good girl gone wrong and the poor little rich dope fiend.
They all went to heaven in a little row boat.

I could kick this up a star but the first 100 pages really dragged and I almost bailed.

Forgot to add - I read an e-book edition.
Not at home & I’m not sure I own the original Signet paperback copy of this Bill S. Ballinger.

[Dave]

Ballinger’s “The Darkening Door” is a top-notch private eye noir set in the fictional town of Jewel Bay, somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Timothy Wilde of the O’Conner Wilde Agency is in town on a $100 dollar retainer to Frank A. Wetzler, Jr., but has no idea of what it’s about. Junior sets an appointment in a local bar, but it’s the wife, Catherine, not Junior who meets Wilde there, telling him her husband wanted to hire Wilde to watch her. Wilde has been around the block a few times and knows there is more to it than she’s telling him.

Unfortunately for Wilde, he’s smitten with her: “She nodded again, then glanced at her watch. I saw the long, dark lashes and the way her hair grew at her temples, the grave, beautiful curve of her upper lip; and I realized something was happening to me, happening just the way they said it did in the stories and the songs, suddenly and bewilderingly.” He tells us: “She was so lovely that morning. Her beauty, I thought, just by itself, could break your heart.” From there, it is the firecracker of smoldering love at first sight between them and she even offers to divorce Junior and join Wilde up in San Francisco.

And before he can learn anything else about what’s going on, Wetzler, Senior turns up dead with a revolver in the study. Nothing about the apparent suicidal makes sense except it looks like the slightly bonkers Junior couldn’t wait any longer for hud inheritance. And Wilde is nearly kidnapped at gunpoint and is shot at by people he doesn’t know and for no reason he can discern.

Ballinger set this one up perfectly as Wilde learns to operate in a town where the officials don’t want him and even his own client quickly unaired him. Like all private eyes, Wilde is shot at, arrested, pushed off a cliff, and told to mind his own business. Ballinger just knows there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark and he’s got to figure out what it is before anyone else gets killed. Along the way, he uncovers secrets he probably wished he hadn’t.

The atmosphere here is gloomy and fatalistic.