She died Dancing by Kelley Roos

She died Dancing by Kelley Roos

 aka The Blonde Died Dancing

published 1956 or 1957

 

Did I wish this book into existence? No, I weirdly don’t have that power, but consider this: there was a ballroom dancing school in a book I featured last year, and I literally said in the post on Dead Wrong by Stewart Sterling

I felt I could happily have had a whole other book based round the dance salon.

And here it is!

She Died Dancing gets going quickly and doesn’t slacken off. We are in 1950s New York, and narrator Connie is concerned about her husband Steve: he is sneaking off for secret appointments, is he having an affair? She follows him one day, and discovers him with a tall, willowy, ravishing female. Of course it turns out that he is having dancing lessons in order to please his wife. All well and good, but then, during the spying/stalking/foxtrotting session, his dancing teacher, Anita, is murdered. Connie was there outside the studio, and would in fact be an excellent witness to the fact that Steve must have done it, but obviously she believes in her man. The police haven’t tracked him down yet so the young couple set out to find the real killer. This involves Connie taking over the dead Anita’s job – ie she is suddenly teaching dancing – while she tries to establish who might have had a motive and an opportunity, as the studio seems to have been inaccessible. It turns out, surprise surprise, that everyone within a 50-yard radius is inter-connected, and not just as work colleagues or pupils.

There is a lot of visiting bars, and racing round New York and breaking into apartments and climbing on roofs, and there is a slightly forced deadline whereby if they don’t solve the crime ‘by 4 o’clock Saturday’, Steve will be arrested. The crime is featured prominently in the tabloid press and the whole of Manhattan is apparently involved in the manhunt – the missing murderer is excellently known as The Waltzer: ‘any news about the Waltzer?...He should be shot on sight.’ And there is even some lipstick detection.

The book is – of course – very much of its time.

The women are all competing for men, and the main thing that matters is looks, but – to win the prize you have to be sexy and beautiful, but also look as though you will make a good wife and mother later. It must have been exhausting. Connie has to dye her hair blonde to try to hang on to her husband.

Anita and then Connie are teaching the men of New York ballroom dances, so the men in turn can deal with women in nightclubs and restaurants – waltzes, foxtrots, rhumba, samba, (all very Strictly Come Dancing), and these are individual lessons. There are group lessons at the school, but those are obviously of no interest in terms of romance, suspicion, blackmail, murder opportunities. One of the other dance teachers has the splendid name of Hooray Rose.

Was there really so much demand for dance schools as implied in these two books?

The owner of the school, Mr Bell, tells Connie that his three sons are at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

“Well!” she replies “And where did you go to school?”

“Arthur Murray’s” Mr Bell said.

Arthur Murray’s was a very famous nationwide chain of dance schools, as featured in the advert here (making no bones about why you would want to learn to dance). There is a remark about how it was cheaper for Mr Bell to start the school than to pay for lessons for those three sons, and though this is a joke, there is the clear implication -  along with the fancy expensive colleges - that there was a lot of money to be made in the business.

And then what else should pop up but a

‘smart receptionist with bejewelled glasses… A brunette with glamorous eyeglasses – a smoothie with hopped-up spectacles… She made me wonder if I shouldn’t invest in a pair of those gold-bedecked, odd-shaped glasses.’

Such fancy spectacles were the subject of much discussion in another blogpost last year, on The Wife of Ronald Sheldon by Patrick Quentin. So I’m calling it that these were the new and very fashionable harlequin frames – read more about their history in the blogpost (original research by CiB you see).

And yet another connection:

Steve is being chatted up by a flirtatious woman, and says he is married. ‘What’s she like?’ says the flirty one.

‘About five-five, weighs 122. She’s right-handed.’

Now, this is meant to be a bit weird (flirty girl was expecting, presumably, ‘she’s a beautiful brunette’) but even so bears out my contention – in a recent post on Ross Macdonald – that characters in American fiction are all too ready to estimate each other’s weight, in a manner unfamiliar in the UK.

I read about Kelley Roos over at Jim Noy’s The Invisible Event blog: not a writer I was familiar with but I am, as ever, grateful for the tipoff. (Apparently there is a series with regular sleuths Jeff & Haila Troy, but this is a standalone.) The book is action-packed, fast-moving, amusing, entertaining

Couple with a definite air of the sleuthing pair – from Vivat tumbler.

Three girls in their summer dresses, with a definite air of the dancing teachers, Queensland State Library.

Arthur Murray dance school advert File:1953 - Arthur Murray Dance - 12 Jul MC - Allentown PA.jpg - Wikimedia Commons