Marty Holland is now remembered only as the story source for a classic film noir of the 1940s, the sleazily romantic Fallen Angel, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Alice Faye as a small-town spinster, Linda Darnell as a doomed good-time girl, and Dana Andrews in his greatest performance as a down-at-heels, self-loathing con man. The screenplay by Harry Kleiner made a number of changes to the original, which was not quite so corrosive and placed more weight on the shoulders of the policeman (a line on a paperback reprint of the novel described it as “The Story of a Big City Detective and a Small Town Virgin”). Holland’s second novel, The Glass Heart (also published as Her Private Passions), like the first, showed the lingering influence of James M. cain: a lowlife drifter who insinuates himself into a California household, assorted craven characters, a murder plot, and some daring (for the time) sexual encounters. The Glass Heart’s antihero is introduced in paragraph one with a wonderfully sordid incident, biding his time at the counter of a “ritzy hash joint in Beverly Hills,” waiting for a sucker to walk in with an expensive coat he can steal. One arrives—a nice camel hair—and the protagonist grabs it on his way out, but half the diner gives chase after the coat thief. Like William Holden in the later Sunset Boulevard, the pursued hero runs into the driveway of a haunted old house and an eccentric old lady who takes him in as a handyman, and so the plot kicks in. The unfolding story uses bits and pieces from three or four Cain novels, but the effects are softer, Hollywood-influenced, lacking the force and harsh edges of the real thing (although Cain himself, perhaps sincerely flattered by the imitation, gave the topic a nice jacket blurb: “Raw, unadorned, a little brutal, here is the authentic melodrama of the American scene . . .”). The two topics were fairly successful and both were popularly reprinted as paperbacks (Fallen Angel, in its Novel Library edition, as Blonde Baggage, with a wonderfully literal cover illustration—a lush blonde crammed into an open suitcase, one of the great collectible softcover editions of the era).
The Marty Holland byline disguised the author’s real name and gender. She was Mary Holland, and little else seems to be known about her. A third novel appeared in 1949 as a paperback original, Darling of Paris (“Story of Passion, Violence and an American Singer in France”). The rest is silence.
Works
- Darling of Paris (1949);
- Fallen Angel (also published as Blonde Baggage) (1945);
- Glass Heart, The (also published as Her Private Passions) (1948)
