The Men in Her Life

New York: Sears Publishing Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1930). First Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, light age-toning to edges of text block, vintage price sticker (from San Francisco department store The White House) on rear pastedown; jacket has a bit of paper loss at most corners, a few other random tiny chips and small tears]. Novel about a "little Irish beauty" who is "too innocent to know what all these men want from her," but manages to string a bunch of them along "through the bewildering whirl of modern high society, in night clubs and cocktail parties, threading her way amongst the pitfalls in the houses of the fastest sets." (The jacket blurb, with its reference to "these days of flaming youth," strongly suggests that the Twenties were still Roaring in the author's (or at least publisher's) mind, even though the book was published about a year after the stock market crash.) This was the fifth of seven novels written by Adams under his "Warner Fabian" pseudonym, which he had originally adopted to segregate his work as an investigative journalist and respectable mainstream novelist from his more sensationalistic (or trashier) endeavors. Wouldn't you know it, though: the first Fabian book, "Flaming Youth" (1923) became a bestseller, and he obligingly kept cranking out similar fare ("Summer Bachelors," "Unforbidden Fruit," etc.) until the mid-1930s. I'm not sure exactly when his cover was blown, but by the time this book appeared it was already well known that Adams and Fabian were one and the same. (Boni & Liveright rather cheekily printed quotes from both authors in an ad for a book they published in 1925.) Several of the Fabian books were adapted for the movies, including this one, by Columbia Pictures in 1931 under the direction of William Beaudine. .