So goodly won, with her own will beguil’d.
Tonight, insomniacal, I was reading a Dick Francis novel, Smokescreen, written in 1972. It represents some of his journeyman work: competently written, showing some sign of the ideas he would develop more in his later novels, but not as much of the polish and panache. The writing does expose an interesting insight into 70s fashion, however:
He was wearing another pair of painted-on trousers, and a blue ruffled close-fitting shirt with lacing instead of buttons. As casual clothes, they were as deliberate as signposts: the rugged male in his sexual finery.
Later, a woman arrives:
She arrives like a gust of bright and breezy show biz, wearing an eye-stunning yellow catsuit, which flared widely from the knees in black-edged ruffles. She looked like a flamenco dancer split up the middle, and she topped up the impression with a high tortoise-shell mantilla comb pegged like a tiara into her mop of hair.
And finally, the temptress:
The girl was ravishing, with cloudy dark hair and enormous slightly myopic-looking eyes. She wore a soft floaty garment, floor length and green, which swirled and lay against her as she moved, outlining now a hip, now a breast, and all parts in quite clearly good shape.
Her outfit is the least repellent in the mind’s eye primarily because it’s not described in much detail. The temptress and our narrator end up on the couch:
Melanie just happened to sit beside me on the tiger-skin sofa, stretching out languorously so that the green material revealed the whole slender shape. Just happened to have no lighter of her own, so that I had to help her with Roderick’s orange globe table model.
Just so you don’t think I’m reading a bunch of smut, this is a very atypical seduction scene in an otherwise largely bloodless mystery novel. It isn’t even very badly written, regardless of how tawdry these sections may seem, out of context. What I love about it is that these people are presented without any surprise or shock on the part of the narrator; these clothes are clearly entirely acceptable to him. In juxtaposition with the rest of the book, which could just as easily have been set today instead of 40 years ago, it’s a jarring and hilarious reminder of how far we’ve come in so short a time.