In 1945 U.S. fiction writers laid one golden egg after another and sold them for golden prices. The public craved, and was given, gulps of cloak-&-dagger melodrama or sack-suit passion. Some of the year's novelists managed, with the help of book clubs and cinemagnates, to earn a life annuity with a single book. Among the bestsellers:
Cass Timberlane, the story of a middle-aging Midwesterner's love for an intermittently erotic bobbysoxer, grossed Novelist Sinclair Lewis well over a quarter-million dollars before publication. Once on the stands, the novel soared into second place on the best-seller list, with 675,000 sales in ten weeks.
Daisy Kenyan, Elizabeth Janeway's study of a woman's heart skewered by two ardent wooers, went to 20th Century-Fox for $150,000. Said the Retail Bookseller, "Daisy . . . and the men she loves are America."
The Black Rose ("feudal England . . . exotic Cathay . . . forbidden love"), by Thomas B. Costain, reached and held first place on the lists, cost 20th Century-Fox $100,000.
Three O'Clock Dinner, Josephine Pinckney's smart, brittle, readable novel about life and love in Charleston, S.C., loped off to what the New York Times termed "a nice start"—600,000 advance copies as Literary Guild choice for October. It also won $175,000 from MGM. Probable star: Lana Turner.
The Manatee, a tale of love and whaling-men ("Violent . . . corrosive. . . . Jabez Folger['s] soul was possessed by an evil demon. . . ."), was the year's freak success. Nancy Bruff, wife of a Wall Street broker, hired crack Press Agent Russell Birdwell to put over her first novel. With a nude heroine in the form of a ship's figurehead enlivening its cover (see cut), and pretty Author Bruff. décolletée, enlivening its advertising. The Manatee soared high on best-seller lists.
A better first novel was Adria Locke Langley's A Lion Is in the Streets. It described the political and love life of a Huey Longish character who rose from pack peddler to total boss of Magnolia State. For A Lion, hungry M-G-M paid $250,000—the highest price on record for a novel's movie rights.
Behind these best-sellers trailed other novels of unquestionable sales-merit. In a world of uneasy consciences, the problems of man's fate and faith were almost as marketable as adultery. Notable were Bruce Marshall's The World, the Flesh and Father Smith (in which the wise innocence of a Catholic priest prevails against the world—his parish—and the flesh—the problems of his parishioners); James Hilton's So Well Remembered, a simple Englishman's struggle between good (his principles) and evil (his wife); James Ramsey Ullman's The White Tower, in which men's aspirations to faith were symbolized in terms of mountain climbing.
Some old best-sellers still hung on—notably Lloyd C. Douglas' The Robe; Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber; Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile; Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Conspicuously missing from the lists at year's end were war novels of this and previous years, though Peter Bowman's Beach Red (TIME, Dec. 10) was the Book-of-the-Month Club's December choice.