BOOK REVIEW: Plunder the Sun by David Dodge (1950)

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Plunder the Sun is great title, you have to admit it. David Dodge also has a book called It Ain’t Hay which is also excellently named. Furthermore, I should not overlook that he wrote To Catch a Thief. Had I known I that I probably would not have picked this up.

But not to worry because this is pulp writing as it was – probably – intended.  The story has the scope of a 45 minute TV mystery and a page count to match. There are contrasting South American locations that provide the backdrop to the mystery of an antique smuggling job which inevitably leads to something much bigger. It is also peppered with characters getting guns pulled on them and others being violently assaulted. 

The brevity of the story is genuinely well matched to the novella style of the story; the plot is purposeful and Dodge gets on with the action, never wasting a page. On the negative side of the ledger I will say that his prose are flat, some of his Spanish grammatically incorrect, there is the suggestion that Quechua is a dead language which is patently untrue and his dialogue somewhat derivative. For instance, this line “I took her arm. She went for my eyes with the stiff fingers again, quick as a cat.” But this lack of flair is compensated for by the tidiness of the plot. I am happy to speculate that Dodge is a disciplined writer with a strong handle on self-editing. 

There is a good cast of characters, everyone an anti-hero except for the women who are treated very poorly throughout. I would have to read more Dodge to get a bead on this but it did feel as though this was a subtext to the story. Plunder the Sun actually ends with the most significant female character in the book choosing her own destiny and going off into the world by herself instead of opting with to be with the now wealthy protagonist. Given the decade this book was written in (i.e. five years before the Civil Rights movement), combined with the genre this seems like an uncommon note to end on and one which I like. 

Don’t get me wrong, Dodge is still a man of his times and there are plenty of bald things to criticize here also, but he deserves a modicum of credit too. There is an investment in the character development up until the very end. Without being too mawkish Dodge leaves Glenn Ford with some money in his pocket and an absence of Love in his life.