The Girl in the Trunk by Bruce Cassiday

The only picture of the author I could find

I read this book as an old paperback that was published by Ace Books in July 1973. It appears to have been recently been brought back into print, after 40 years of being out of print, by a POD publisher called Bold Venture Press.

Bruce Cassiday got his start as a script writer for radio dramas, and then he became western and crime fiction editor for pulp magazine publisher Popular Publications. He also wrote for the pulps, eventually graduating to the paperbacks, cranking out not only his crime novels but novelizations of movies and TV series, as well as a bunch of Flash Gordon novels. A working-stiff writer, he even wrote how-to, diet books, and celebrity biographies.

Review

The Girl in the Trunk begins with a mosaic of events presented in short chapters. An earthquake off the coast of Chile starts a tsunami that will, in a few hours, sweep across Hawaiian beaches with destructive force. The naked corpse of a young woman is found in the trunk of a car abandoned at the Honolulu airport. The head accountant for a local firm is discovered to have embezzled half a million dollars and disappeared. Two muggers attack a drunk only to discover that he's not drunk at all but, rather, a violent cop hellbent on meting out physical punishment. Meanwhile, the daughter of the head of the police force is having a love affair with a man he hates, the leader of the Hawaiian secessionists. All these seemingly disparate threads and more, however, will smoothly merge together by the end of the novel as the action builds into a deadly race against time.

I can't claim this book rises above its time and its genre, but Cassiday does deliver a clever, fast-paced, old-school police procedural. I enjoy this sort of thing and can happily read an old Ed McBain or a recent Michael Connelly with equal pleasure. One thing I appreciate about the older, vintage American crime novels, though, is that they are usually short and action-oriented and can be easily read in a day or two, all of which describes The Girl in the Trunk.

For me personally there was an added element of interest in the fact that the novel was set in 1970s Hawaii. Having spent a fair amount of time in Hawaii myself, I was impressed with Cassiday's knowledge of the culture, locations, and idiom of Oahu. He also clearly delineates the tensions and prejudices that exist among the Pacific Islanders, Asians, Whites, and hapa who make up most of the populations of the islands. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which is still around, was especially strong in the 60s and 70s.

The racist language used by some of the characters (remember, the Vietnam war was still ongoing) may be a bit hard to swallow for current readers, but it is true to the times. So, unfortunately, are the sexism and misogyny. But, to paraphrase the way Walter Cronkite would end his evening news broadcasts back then, that's the way it was. If you enjoy vintage crime novels (Macdonald, McBain, etc.) or gritty 70s crime movies, The Girl in the Trunk will likely fall into your precinct.