These Lonely, These Dead

by Robert Colby

Howie was a millionaire and he and Andrea were planning to be married. But he never got to walk to the altar - he was murdered first!

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

American novelist and crime thriller paperback genre and short story writer. Colby wrote novels for a number of the paperback houses including Gold Medal, which published his most praised novel, The Captain Must Die. He was also a prolific contributor of short stories to Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne's mystery magazines. Many of these have gathered into two published collections of his stories. Colby also wrote a non-fiction true crime book, The California Crime Book, and co-authored a 'Nick Carter' book, The Death's Head Conspiracy, with Gary Brandner. Author Ed Gorman believed "Robert Colby was one of the best of the paperback original writers".

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colby, in “These Lonely, These Dead,” stylistically offers up a murder mystery with chapters alternating in points of view. The story begins with “The Murderer,” whose identity of course is not revealed until the end of the novel. From that point of view, we get the murder and we thereafter work backwards and forwards in the story. “The murderer” tells us that it is about 2:00 a.m. and a dark and foggy night in Santa Monica “so that even on lighted thoroughfares, you couldn’t see farther than the beginning of the next block.” The murderer sets the scene: “It was eerie, too. Like the dim blue neon words that cling to the faces of those streamlined funeral parlors you see on almost every other block in Los Angeles. Never bright or cheerful. Always dim, always blue. As though apologizing with gloomy unctuousness for death. It occurred to me that a blaze of red might be amusing for these parlors. Certainly more fitting. Pale blue is such a ghastly excuse for death.”

The murderer sits in a car with a rifle aimed at an apartment building entrance, waiting apparently for Howard D. Overholtzer to come out. The murderer tells us two things. First, with a name like that, you would have to have a lot of money. Second, the murderer had been stalking “them” as they danced at the Ambassador (years later the site of the RFK assassination and now a high school), and at Mocambos, and now at her apartment with “her” right on his arm. “Her” refers to Andrea “Andy” Lockridge, of the tight red sweater with her bouncing breasts and ht gray skirt, tall, and built like an Amazon goddess. When they came abreast of the lamps, the murderer was “already squeezing the trigger when his big head lit up in the cross-hairs.” The first chapter ends with the narrator telling us that dawn was just breaking, the fog had vanished, “The sun promised to be bright and warm. It was going to be a beautiful day.”

Colby enters this game with a great opening gambit as we readers follow the action through the eyes of the assassin pulling the trigger and remarking that it was going to be a beautiful day. And then, in chapter two, Colby offers us Andrea’s point of view, from her getting ready for her big date and letting us all know what a golddigger she was, hardly out of college and marrying a millionaire in eight days. She tells us her point of view – that she did not care if it worked out because, under California’s community property laws, she would get half of everything. That is not quite how it works, particularly with regard to property earned before marriage or inherited, but Andrea was a golddigging waitress, not a lawyer, so we have to understand her point of view and not dispute the finer points. She gives us the whole evening from start to finish as all her dreams of generational wealth go down the drain prematurely to the assassin’s bullet.

And then comes chapter three where Colby switches point of view again. This time we get the point of view of jilted boyfriend Douglas Coleman and his getting invited out by Vivian Manbee, who wanted to join Andy and Howard at the Coconut Grove (the club at the Ambassador hotel). Doug is not into Vivian and Vivian is not into Doug, but they both had similar motives regarding Andrea that were not hearts and flowers. Vivian, Doug explains, saw Andrea slipping out of her life. “Vivian wanted to be the sun with the world revolving around her, dependent on her light. But Andrea was the sun and Vivian wasn’t even the world. She was merely a minor satelite revolving with a pale glow borrowed from the brilliance of Andrea.” Doug is only a little bit jealous of Andrea’s new beau. Just a little. He tells us that he saw her with Jeff, the tall one, the arrogant-looking bastard with the cleft chin, and stalker-ishly waited until dawn and, when Jeff came striding out, beat him again and again, methodically destroying his beautiful features one by one.

From there, we next get Vivian’s point of view. Then, we return to Andrea’s point of view. Then, Jeff Slater, before and after his beating. Then, back to Andrea. Then, to other dates of Andrea’s such as Ralph and William and Bud. Through this ever-changing kaleidoscope of viewpoints, all revolving around Andrea, who charmed the socks off every man she met, always reaching for the next one to pull her up the ladder. It is a clever technique, but it felt a bit over-used in this case, leaving the reader with almost no one to root for or through whose eyes they could follow.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulp noir novel about the murder of a party girl's rich fiance told from the POV of all her boyfriends, and she has many. What makes the novel hum isn't the whodunit aspect of it - I figured out who the killer was a quarter of the way through - but the sordid sketches of every boyfriend the slattern dated. It's a pretty perceptive view of the varied approaches men use when dating women, and I'd lie if I said I didn't feel targeted a few times LOL. Read it for its blistering analyses of the male sexual psyche, well-defined, and not for the Perry Mason-style mystery,

[Chris Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colby was on fire with this one!
you get:
1 nympho from hell,
6 horndogs wanting marriage,
1 dead rich dude,
8 perspectives of what's up.
A recipe for disaster!

A new personal favorite of Colbys work