Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...
James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.
While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.
What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.
However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.
And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...
Recommended.
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