Make Me Yours

New York: The Macaulay Company. Very Good+. (c.1934). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [quite a decent copy, the front hinge a bit weak but holding together, with a bit of wear along the top edge of the rear cover, slight fading at the spine]. "Marriage or Death! -- that was the decision that faced Perry Bannister, notorious Don Juan, when he is trapped into a meeting with five of his former flames: a film star who has a bodyguard of Mexican desperadoes; a girl noted as a good shot; a woman who is drunk enough to do something despearte; a married woman with a fierce husband; a dancer who portrays, symbolically, the act of strangling a man. Which of these has writen the note ordering him to propose to her before three o'clock in the morning?" Despite the presence of a movie star in the goings-on (by the name of "Avon Dawn"), this isn't really a "Hollywood novel" per se: most of the action takes place at Ms. Dawn's seaside estate in Ensenada, Mexico. (And despite the mention of her "Mexican desperado" bodyguards, it's never really made clear whether Avon Dawn herself is Mexican, although perhaps the reader was meant to intuit that from an early description of her as "both imperious and tempestuous.") The author (not to be confused with the modern-day novelist Eleanor Brown) cranked out a number of novels, mostly in the "women's fiction" vein for the rental-library market, during the 1930s -- although we should allow for the fact that "Eleanore Browne" may well have been a pseudonym (heck, "she" could have been the prolific and facile Jack Preston, for all I know). This title was later published as "The Immodest Maidens" in the Novel Library paperback series in 1949. .