Jay A. Gertzman
USA
"The Lovely Lady and Noir Fiction"
The Lovely Lady has many Lawrentian themes: psychological enslavement of the younger to the older generation. The objective narrator's voice is slightly waggish, but the atmosphere behind it is sinister. Robert states, "There's a feeling almost of murder in the air."
There is much in this story that corresponds to the themes of the noir thriller, which in the late 1920s were in the formative stages. These include the sinister atmosphere, compounded of sexual frustration and a consequent morbid, prurient spectatorship; the substitution of victimhood for innocence; urbane sophistication masking willful domination ; a pervasive sense of dormant but brooding hostility ("murder in the air"); the irrelevance of legal justice, and the lack of dénouement even when the story's antagonist is gone. Lawrence's novella was a contribution to Cynthia Asquith's anthology of crime fiction, many stories in which are not typical British "cozies" or puzzle mysteries, but rather noirish instead. These include Asquith's own contribution, which was modeled after Lawrence's.
Lawrence's "Lovely Lady" is interesting to consider in the light of the contrasts between American and British mystery stories. His largely negative reviews of urban hard boiled realism by American writers such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dahlberg, and Van Vechten are relevant, as is his contempt for Maugham's Ashenden stories.