A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

California Noir. On a cold Northern Californian evening, high on a cliff in the lagoon township of Bolinas, a woman is running, barefoot, toward her open convertible. Behind her in the dark is the forbidding summer house where her reclusive husband now lies dead. She will drive to San Francisco, there to break the news to her domineering mother, since she has nowhere else to go. A scandal is in the offing - and even if it can be averted, a horde of family secrets are about to hauled into light.

'Mysterious and absorbing... as a mystery story with marked psychological perceptions this one grips and pleases.' V.S. Pritchett, Bookman

'The concentration of a Mauriac applied to the fringes of San Francisco.' Sunday Times

'A taut well-planned thriller.' Books and Bookmen

276 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Aka Bud Clifton

David Derek Stacton (1925–1968) was a U.S. novelist, historian and poet. He was born on 25 April 1925 in Minden, Nevada. Stacton attended Stanford University from 1941–43, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951. He served in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector then lived in Europe from 1950–1954, 1960–1962, and 1964–1965. Stacton wrote under the pseudonyms Carse Boyd, Bud Clifton, David Dereksen and David West. Most of his books were originally published in England. He died of a stroke 19 January 1968 in Fredensborg, Denmark.

Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and his better novels are instead full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. At his best Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore and Peter Pan). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London". His other literary influences include Walter Pater, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently. Fans of David Stacton include John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, and Peter Beagle.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

High-brow low-brow fiction. Stacton is known for his mid-century literary fiction and historical fiction that would follow this. I was interested in seeing what sort of author he was taking on noir thriller. His prose (and always intriguing vocabulary choices) definitely elevates the situation and makes for a highly readable novel that is much more than pulp fiction, but far less than what he would go on to do as a writer.

I probably would have given this four stars if I had been convinced that the 'villain' of the story would have been able to manipulate and gain control over so many people, despite being so unlikeable and described many times as not particularly attractive. Perhaps that was Stacton's ultimate commentary on San Francisco's high society of the the time: By merely acting and dressing the part convincingly enough, a clever person from the wrong side of the tracks could rise in their rank without being either handsome or charismatic. It's about understanding what these people value better then they understand themselves that makes them so easy to infiltrate and control.