Author Megan Abbott has received deserved praise recently for her noirish thrillers probing the psyches of teenage girls and female friendship, including Dare Me, The Fever and You Will Know Me. But before Abbott turned to contemporary thrillers, she penned a series of historical noirs, often based on true crimes of noir’s golden era. Abbott’s 2009 novel Bury Me Deep reads like the sort of novel that would have lined the shelves of pulp bookshelves of the 1930s and 40s. But unlike the Chandlers and Hammetts of the era, Abbott’s novels squarely focus on the women of the time, women who are thrust into dire situations that could break any pulp novel tough guy.
Bury Me Deep opens in late 1930, the exuberance of the 1920s curdling cruelly into Depression. Marion Seeley arrives in Phoenix, looking for a new start and a health boost while waiting for her drug-addicted doctor husband to kick his habit in Mexico. She meets nurse Louise and her tubercular companion Ginny and is soon swept into their sisterhood of booze, men and loose living. Louise and Ginny supplement their living by throwing thrill parties for the swanky members of town, including ‘Gent Joe’ Lanigan, pillar the community and husband to a conveniently bed-ridden wife. Marion is irresistibly drawn to Joe, craving him almost as drug. But Marion’s new obsession upsets the delicate balance of her friendship with Louise and Ginny, and as story barrels towards its foregone crash, Marion is lost in a nightmare that holds no escape. But just as the inevitable will happen, Abbott adds a pitch-perfect twist that offers a sly commentary on all that transpired before.
Abbott takes the story of Winnie Ruth Judd and the notorious ‘Trunk Murders’ of 1931 and imagines a different final act for Marion. Her style is singular—a blend of pulpy melodrama, hard-bitten Depression era social commentary and poetic, dreamlike language. The pacing of Bury Me Deep feels very un-thriller like through its backstory-heavy first-half, but events of the second half more than make up for the sluggish start. Abbott has proven with her more recent novels that her characters are as deeply drawn and complex as any author, and this earlier novel is no exception. Marion, Louise and Ginny are flawed and believable, equally capable of love and cruelty, and even a bit sympathetic and redeemable by novel’s end. Bury Me Deep is recommended for fans of classic noir and pulpy crime, while readers who enjoy female-centered crime in the vein of Patricia Highsmith or Gillian Flynn may also wish to try this and Abbott’s later novels.