Fan Nichols
Fan Nichols (married name, Frances Nichols Hanna) is a now-little-known author of pulp crime novels and noir romances in the 1950s and 1960s. She was born in South Dakota, was educated in Oregon and California, and trained to become a concert pianist. She was a song plugger in Portland, Oregon—a pianist who played in music stores to promote sheet music sales—as well as a model, stenographer, and cosmetologist before becoming a freelance writer in New York City. She published more than 20 novels, hardcover and paperback originals, and numerous stories.
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“A thriller that truly thrills” (Pretty Sinister Books blog), Be Silent, Love (1960) is the story of a woman who finds herself a passenger in a hit-and-run car and a captive of her secret commitments. With a new introduction by J F Norris.
When his brother’s wife is found dead, Mitch Mercer takes his brother—a brain-injured ex-fighter—on the run to a rural gambling house, where their troubles only get worse.
Wanted for a murder she didn’t commit, a New York City lounge singer hides out in a Florida backwater, where she finds herself caught among a handsome but weak piano player, a possessive racketeer, a local dope syndicate, and a Federal agent. In this 1954 tale of suspense, Fan Nichols again uses an expert crime novel to depict the societal traps that capture women.
In her 1951 novel Dolly, Fan Nichols gives us a pulpier version of Patricia Highsmith, in which a small weakness of an itinerate worker expands into a damning self-created downward spiral toward destruction as he fruitlessly attempts to free himself from a femme fatale. “Dolly is a real book written by a really lovely woman. Instead of containing the agreed upon ‘realism’ of the literary cults of the Cerf Bored tradition, it contains real realism…. Fan has always been adored by readers who read because they want to instead of to accumulate fake culture….” Jack Woodford (from the introduction)
See all formats and editions When a murder plot between an heiress and chauffeur goes wrong a lone-wolf insurance investigator finds himself torn between the seductive daughter and a beautiful innocent bystander.