The plot of Blue Fire by Phyllis A. Whitney (originally published in book form in 1961*) deals with the South African diamond trade and apartheid. While the story follows a similar pattern to many of Whitney’s bestselling romantic suspense novels – a parentless or alienated heroine with a buried, violent secret in her past, a controlling, disapproving boyfriend or husband, and the oppressing sense of isolation and danger that surrounds the heroine - it has a more pronounced social conscience than is common in romances. In fact, although Whitney’s romantic suspense novels are often grouped together under the gothic umbrella, I hesitate to call Blue Fire a romance. Whereas the heroine’s love life is central to the story and there is an HEA, the treatment of marriage and romance ushers Blue Fire closer to mainstream fiction.
Newspaper photographer Susan van Pelt‘s mother took her away from South Africa when her father, Niklaas van Pelt, was disgraced and imprisoned. Although he was released three years later, Susan has not heard from him once. At the age of twenty-three she returns to Cape Town, newly married to a childhood friend, Dirk Hohenfield, who is now an associate of the father she does not want to see. Susan’s bitterness against her father is compounded when it appears he is even now only interested in what she may know about the whereabouts of a famous diamond that was stolen around the time of her parents’ breakup.
But Susan has suppressed all memories of that traumatic time. She wants to concentrate on her fragile new marriage and her photography, not delve in the painful past. None of those around her accept that wish, however. Dirk’s unpredictable mood swings seem somehow related to what she can or cannot remember. John Cornish, the journalist and author whose investigation into diamond smuggling contributed to her father’s downfall, insists on re-examining the case, and in doing so causes Susan to re-examine her hasty marriage. And South-Africa in all its beauty and conflictedness is seeping back into her blood and consciousness, questioning loyalties and testing truths.
The title of “Blue Fire” refers to the blue-white light dispersed by the Kimberley Royal, the infamous diamond that figures prominently in the novel’s plot. The draconian laws regulating diamond mining and De Beers' monopoly of diamond industry in South Africa have given rise to smuggling, a crime for which Niklaas van Pelt served a prison term. While the Kimberley Royal was also in his care when it disappeared, that particular case was never reported to the authorities due to the owner’s friendship with him. When Susan learns that her father impoverished himself to pay back the diamond’s worth to the owner in full, the seeming inconsistency between Niklaas’s supposed offenses and his behaviour begins to sow the first doubts in her mind about his guilt.
The Kimberley Royal and the mystery surrounding its disappearance drive a good deal of the motivations of the characters in Blue Fire. As in the new book that John Cornish tells Susan he is writing, it is the “fever” that diamonds breed in people who come into contact with them that interests Whitney, not the business side. Parallell with with this obsession runs another source of tension, the “cancer of apartheid” (p.100).
In a condescendingly indulgent commentary on Phyllis A. Whitney’s work (Twentieth Century Romance and Gothic Writers, edited by James Vinson, published by Gale, 1982) Nancy Regan writes (p.700): “[...] Whitney has created a species of romance fiction which might be called Tourist Gothic. She writes well and lovingly of the various places in which her books are set, but always with the enthusiasm of a visitor, not with an inhabitant’s long knowledge of place. Thus Whitney provides her readers with a kind of exciting vacation, replete with interesting locations, confusing romances, and outright danger.” Apart from questioning Regan’s assumption that seeing a place through fresh eyes means being insensitive to the nuances beneath its surface glamour, I have to wonder whether Nancy Regan ever opened Blue Fire.
Scenes that confront the heroine, and the reader, with the realities of South African society at the time include the incident with the sjambok or rhinoceros hide whip, which Dirk affixes as decoration on the living room wall; the Hohenfield servants’ sleeping arrangements, which are regulated by law to bar direct entry into the house; and the destruction of Susan’s film roll when she is coerced to surrender it to a policeman in District Six. Susan may admire the scenery of Cape Town but she never forgets or allows the reader to forget the ugliness of the system beneath its splendour. Through her family roots, her marriage, her household, and her work, she observes the daily inequalities and prejudices, and slowly becomes engaged in obstacles and controversies that directly affect the course of her life and shape her character. Yet apartheid is never turned into a vehicle for giving Susan a starring role as the selfless saviour of helpless or incapable locals – a convention which other writers who place Western characters in foreign places practise with astounding frequency.
In Blue Fire as in most of the roughly seventeen Whitney novels I have read, the psychological insights into the characters compensates for the less than heart-warming romantic relationships. While there is almost invariably an HEA (although that of The Moonflower, for example, is hardly the expected, conventional one), the attitude to love between a man and a woman is typically heavily weighted with issues of domination, coldness, belittling, and mistrust on the man’s side. The Quicksilver Pool (a historical) is a prime example. Sometimes a second potential love interest appears, which is the case in Blue Fire, and it is not always immediately clear whether he poses a threat to the marriage or the possibility of something better. Blue Fire scrutinizes the effect of a controlling partner on a heroine whose reactions range from a debilitating sense of powerlessness to silent resentment. Susan's past experiences have taught her not to make trouble even as she feels crushed by the burden of dissimulating her true feelings. There is an unspoken parallell between what goes on emotionally in her marriage and the oppression under which her native country struggles.
In re-reading Blue Fire I have come to regard it as one of its author’s most interesting novels. It has the hallmarks of a vintage Whitney in terms of a thoughtfully plotted mystery, absorbing psychological portraits, an unsettling atmosphere, and a setting that comes fascinatingly alive under Whitney’s descriptive powers. After a literally stumbling start in a somewhat distancing style the narrative quickly gets its bearings to become an intriguing and fresh-voiced study of a young woman’s struggle to establish her identity in a society where questions are dangerous.
The last words of the novel are for those who work for democracy and human rights in South Africa. When one recalls that Whitney’s book was published in 1961, before her own country’s (USA) Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act (1965), and three decades before the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, it seems simplistic and naive to dismiss Blue Fire as a mere “tourist gothic”.
Excerpt
(Appleton Century Crofts, Inc., 1961, page 213):
“Ahead, where the uphill climb toward home began, the tall rocks glistened like black marble, a little eerie in the gray light. The ravine was deserted, and it was foolish to be afraid of passing a mere huddle of rocks. Perhaps it was their shape that always vaguely disturbed her, as if they had been raised into position by some antique force that had left a malignant spell upon the place.
She thrust her hands deep into the pockets of the mackintosh, feeling the crumbled cigar beneath the fingers of her right hand. She had been foolish once today and once was enough. As she started up the hill toward the rocks she did not permit herself to hurry in the panic of her own imaginings.
There was no sound at all save the dripping of moisture from bushes and trees, and the movement of her own feet on the steepening path. The odor of wet pine was heavy on the moisture-laden air. She was safely past the rocks now and her fears had proved childish, as always. Soon she would be at the house and out of this cold wind. The crack of a twig on the path behind her sounded at the same instant that something struck her full in the back. She was flung forward to her knees, the breath knocked out of her, and something rough was thrust over her head and pulled down, smothering her cry, blinding her.”
*A shorter version had previously appeared in Redbook Magazine.
A film of related interest: The subject-matter of (the decidedly non-romantic) Blood Diamond (2006) is the mining and trade of African conflict diamonds, commonly referred to as blood diamonds. During Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, a priceless diamond seized by a slave worker (played by Djimon Honsou) in the diamond fields of Sierra Leone leads to a bloody fight over its possession by various individuals and syndicates. Among them is a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) who trades arms for diamonds. The negative publicity the film generated for the diamond trade prompted De Beers to launch a website called Diamond Facts.
