Effie Perine
Effie comes to San Francisco on the hunt for work and her long-lost father, so when she’s offered a job at a detective agency she figures it’s a two-birds-one-stone situation. But when her strange new boss invites her into a world of hardboiled mystery, the line between real life and film noir fantasy becomes as foggy as a San Francisco summer — and Effie’s future happiness is at stake.
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Praise for Effie Perine:
Meet Effie, a smart, snappy heroine with enough moxie to evoke Hepburn as she fights and fakes her way through that adventure which is life. Effie Perine sizzles with crackling prose and a stylish plot that kept this modern Girl Friday reading to the wee hours.
- Leslie Miller, Author and Editor, Women Who Eat and A Moment’s Peace.
Effie Perine might have been only a minor character in The Maltese Falcon, but Jackson’s brilliantly rendered plot and crisp dialogue bring Spade’s smart young secretary into sharp focus. In the hands of a writer with an astonishing ability to lend a modern sensibility to the rhythms of vintage detective fiction, Effie Perine becomes more than merely a fun and absorbing read. It’s a love song to a nearly forgotten genre.
- Bay Anapol, Author. Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, honored by the O.Henry Award, The Pushcart Prize, and The National Endowment for the Arts.
“Effie Perine wears a silk charmeuse slip as a nightgown and marabou mules on her feet. Like her grandfather, she hates the way the world has changed.” These sentences capture the style of this beautifully written first novel by Buzzy Jackson. She has crafted a captivating novel in which Nancy Drew, the naively earnest detective, meets the sultry style of Dana Scully. It will keep you reading far into the night. A mystery in the film noir tradition, Effie Perine is a riveting tale of a daughter’s struggles with romance, a father’s disappearance, and a world in which 1940’s values clash with those of the present day. We enter into Effie’s mind as she tries to work out the puzzle of her own past and how it might relate to the mystery which her detective-boss asks her to help him solve. When they are not busy following leads, he beguilingly seduces her and pushes her away in a style that keeps us waiting their next encounter.
What is Flitcraft?? This mystery is the Rosebud at the heart of the text. Girl Friday and talented (if secret) detective in her own right, Effie tries to find out while taking it all in her cool stride. She exudes respect for the characters she meets, but she does not credit them with unnecessary value when they act foolishly. “Equality, fairness, the moral rightness of trying to live in harmony with the world as opposed to simply pillaging it”; these are Effie’s truths, and she is working to live by them in every cleverly-titled chapter.
Other characters include Sam, the ever-handsome and mysterious boss, Grandpa, “who was capable of warming to individuals but never “people” as a concept,” the darling Cousin Ted, who teaches medieval history at Berkeley, and several glamorous but relatively empty beauties eager for Sam’s attention. They contrast markedly with Effie’s mom, who raised her daughter on a farm/commune a la Woodstock, with none of the laissez-faire and all of the love.
If you enjoy a good mystery or a good romance, you’ll find both here. It is a smart but modest book, an entrance into a world you’ll wish you could inhabit for hundreds more pages. In the end, it is a wonderful story about how life’s little mysteries can help us solve the biggest ones–like how is it that we want to live our lives and where do we start? Give this one a try and you just might figure it out.
- Dawn Skorczewski, Author of Anne Sexton’s Secrets and Director of University Writing and Professor of English, Brandeis University.