The main character of Florence Stonebraker’s digest novel Frisco Dame is named Nora Prentiss, which raises the question of whether this is the source novel for the Ann Sheridan movie of the same name. No—the movie is from 1947, and the novel is from 1950. Because Sheridan was famously red-haired, and so is Stonebraker’s Nora, it’s natural to wonder if author used actress for physical inspiration. We say yes, and we wonder what Sheridan thought (she must have been told at some point), considering what Stonebraker does with Nora. Interestingly, this isn’t the only time Sheridan helped inspire a Stonebraker digest novel.
Nora is a San Francisco artist’s model who wants it all. We learn that she’s like her mother, who was once a great beauty but is now aging, overweight, and an alcoholic. In her lovely heyday she had spent many years as the kept woman of a rich man, who for years young Nora thought of as a sort of kindly uncle. But eventually he threw Nora’s mother aside for a younger plaything. You know the drill with these guys—they maintain a conveyor belt of always fresh models.
This same man, now much older, shows up at now nineteen-year-old Nora’s apartment with a very un-unclelike offer—if she’ll be his mistress, he’ll pay her well and set her up in a nice apartment. Will Nora accept? Since this is a “love” or “intimate” novel, slimy fellows get what they want, even if—as in this case—it’s eventually through blackmail. But what will the consequences be? You can bet they’ll be dire—for someone. As we’ve mentioned before, Stonebraker has surprised us in the past with some of her novels. This one is along standard lines, but for what it is it gets the job done just fine.
The cover is top quality. There’s no artist credit, but the general style narrows the possibilities down to three digest specialists: George Gross, Howell Dodd, and Rudy Nappi. In our opinion, this is Dodd’s work, but officially it’s by an unknown. There’s more art inside, a lot actually, in the form of posed photos. We’ve scanned some. The binding is tight enough that a couple of shots in the center would have been impossible to get to without destroying the book, but we were able to scan the outlying images. See below.
