Originally published in Mystery Readers Journal, Volume 16, no. 2 (Summer 2000). Reprinted by permission.
Many filmgoers have been captivated by the visual aspects of the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch A Thief set in the glittering landscape of the Côte d’Azur. The film’s depiction of the beauty of the locale, as well as that of its stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, was so well done that it won the Oscar for Best Cinematography that year.
The movie was based on the novel of the same name by American writer David Dodge (1910-1974), who had been similarly captivated by the allure of the graceful curves found in the mountains and shores of the south of France and revealed on the beaches by its scantily-clad female denizens. Dodge’s often light-hearted preoccupation with southern France’s visual enticements serves as a perfect foil to his taut suspense-filled works.
David Dodge helped fuel the post-World War II revival of foreign travel with his exuberant mystery and travel writing. With the exception of his first series featuring hard-boiled San Francisco taxman James “Whit” Whitney, all of Dodge’s mystery and suspense novels spin yarns of Americans abroad. A second series chronicling the adventures of tough-guy private investigator Al Colby takes readers throughout Latin America. The Balkans, Hong Kong, and South Africa all provide locales for later Dodge novels. But with three novels set in and around southern France — the Dodge family lived in Golfe-Juan, on the Côte d’Azur, for a number of years in the early 1950s — that region established itself as one of Dodge’s favorite settings. Invariably, key plot points in those three novels hinge on the tortuous undulations of the landscape and the voluptuous undulations exposed when female characters don that garment notoriously popularized in post-War France — the bikini.
To Catch A Thief (Random House, 1952) utilizes the author’s familiarity with southern French geography to tell the story of John Robie, a retired American jewel thief living in the south of France. Robie’s unofficial amnesty — granted by the French government after his participation in the underground resistance during World War II — is threatened by the appearance of a copycat thief. Robie decides that the only way to guarantee his continued freedom is to catch the copycat himself.
Along with this intriguing and exciting tale, which, happily for the reader, presents plot details and characters that are absent in the film adaptation, the story also captures the charm of living amidst the natural beauty of the French Riviera. Dodge paid homage not only to the spectacular villas, breathtaking vistas, and undulating coastline, but also to the de facto uniform of the French beach:
He drove [John and Francie] to Monte Carlo by way of the Middle Corniche. The road, high up on a cliff after they had left Nice behind, followed the curves of the coast, in and out and around above the sparkling lights of Beaulieu-sur-Mer and Villefranche and Cap d’Ail below. The stars were bright, the night air pleasantly warm, the view magnificent. Francie thought it was all lovely beyond words.
A girl who came across the boulevard from the hotel and went down to the beach wearing a zebra-striped bathing suit that was startling even for Cannes made [the agent] hesitate, but the man who followed her gave him a cold look. The agent walked on.
Dodge even successfully included a plot device of a bikini used as a disguise, under the premise that if a woman appears before a group of men in a “startling” bathing suit, a different woman can later appear wearing the same thing and no one will notice that her face is not that of the first.
Dodge followed up the successful To Catch A Thief with two other suspense novels set in and around southern France. Angel’s Ransom (Random House, 1956) takes place on a private luxury yacht, the Angel, which is owned by an American playboy named Freddy Farr. Just prior to sailing from the port of Monaco, the regular crew is tricked into going ashore and a trio of gangsters hijacks the boat. Kidnapped with the Angel are the ship’s captain, Sam Blake, Freddy and his girlfriend du jour, Valentina, and three other guests.
Blake is ordered to sail up and down the Mediterranean coast while the leader of the hijackers, a vile man named Holtz, extorts a ransom from Freddy. As Blake tries to save his passengers from the murderous gangsters, Valentina precipitates a violent confrontation between Holtz and one of the passengers by appearing on deck in her bikini. The climax of the novel occurs in the port of Monaco-Ville as the hijackers shoot it out with the local Sûreté Publique. Although the bulk of the action takes place at sea, Dodge mixes descriptions of the coastal geography into his narrative.
In the wind-whipped mistiness … the lights of the principality were only a dim curtain of spangled brightness framing the stronger beams of the beacons, but [Blake’s] mind saw what his eyes could not, the familiar stretch of rocky coast between Cap Martin and Cap d’Ail; here the sandy hook that was Monte Carlo beach, there the facing bluffs of Monte Carlo and Monaco-Ville, the shelter of the port between them, depth markings on a chart, a compass rose.
Carambola (Little, Brown, 1961) is set into motion after American mining engineer Andy Holland observes a young woman in a bikini participating in a beauty pageant on the beach in Cannes. He is struck by how much she resembles his ex-wife, who had left him eighteen years previously. The young woman, Micaela, turns out to be the teenage daughter he never knew he had. In reacquainting himself with the girl’s mother, Marsha, Holland soon finds himself committed to rescuing Marsha’s husband — and the only man Micaela knows as a father — Harry Magill.
Holland’s task is to find Magill in Barcelona, where he is hiding out from a trumped-up murder charge, and smuggle him back to France. The trip takes them over the Pyrénées in a race to reach the French border before the Spanish authorities catch up to them. After vicariously experiencing this harrowing journey through the mountains, the reader is relieved to delight in Dodge’s description of the sweeping grandeur of the French coast.
Below the balcony a bright double strand of lights outlining the esplanade swung in a long swoop between casino and casino around the curve of the beach where [Holland] had first seen … Micaela. The loop of lights was like a necklace against the darkness of the Mediterranean.
Dodge, an inveterate globetrotter, also had a successful second career as the author of a series of humorous, anecdotal travel guides. While most authors traveled in order to have inspiration to write, Dodge was fond of saying that he wrote so that he could afford to travel. It is not surprising that his travel literature also extols the different types of natural beauty found in the French Riviera.
In The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe (Random House, 1953) he intermingles travel tips with humorous anecdotes of living in Europe. Naturally, there is a bikini episode complete with an illustration by Irv Koons. In his The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera (Little, Brown, 1962), Dodge even notes: “By the time I discovered the Côte d’Azur and its potentialities, the bikini was firmly settled on its adopted home grounds waiting for a historian.” While Dodge decided not to be the man for that job, one would never know it by looking at the dust jacket photograph of this, his last book about la belle France.
A David Dodge Companion 