Hello! I'm in the high school library again today, which, as always, gives me a lot of time to read. This morning, my book of choice was a 1958 mystery by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer titled Bianca in Black, which I'd gotten for 50 cents from a used books for charity bin at Wal-Mart. It wasn't really a bad book, but compared to a lot of the books I'd read recently, it seemed very simple. In it, a beautiful fashion model named Bianca, who refuses to wear any colors other than black, keeps marrying men that she doesn't love, and all of them promptly drop dead. Of course, she didn't do it, since she's a lovely damsel in distress, and of course, Bruce Willoughby, the detective who stumbles upon her falls madly in love with her, meaning that he feels responsible for solving the murders and clearing his darling love's good name. It wasn't an awful book, and, as I read it, it was interesting, but the plot moved in an incredibly straight line, with no room for subplots or even red herrings that were addressed for more than a few sentences at a time. It drove me crazy that through the whole book, Bianca did nothing but ask for help and beg that Bruce stay away from her, as she was ever so dangerous and didn't want to hurt him, and it was also a little strange that the entire mystery wrapped itself up in the last four pages, with nothing from the characters but an, "Oh, it's really too bad that happened, isn't it?" in response to the whole thing.
I realize that I am probably being unfair to Bianca in Black, but at about the same time, I'd bought another used book from the same line (both were labelled as Airmont Mysteries) called Crime and Judy, in which a lady detective coming up against institutionalized sexism and her wheelchair bound brother fight a swamp full of Communists, so my expectations for this were very high. What is interesting about directly comparing the two books, however, is that they were both obviously formatted to fit in a 124 page book, which means that while Crime and Judy has a pretty reasonable text size, the print in Bianca in Black is so small that it makes old Bibles look like the large-print editions of magazines.
Bianca in Black probably wasn't worth the eye strain that I got from reading it, but since I got it for 50 cents, it's hard to be upset about that. Reading it was an okay way to spend the morning, and it's not like I have to sit and read through it again and again. If it sounds like the kind of book you'd be interested in reading, it is long out of print, but it looks like, at least online, used copies can be found easily and cheaply.
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