Julie Guille has an unusual background. Daughter of dead American millionaires, she was brought up in France by her aunt and uncle, who manipulated her into giving up control of her inheritance. After the Nazis occupied Paris, Julie discovered her uncle was a collaborator and escaped, taking a priceless diamond necklace to pay her way. Now, she lives illegally in New York, a refugee with no identifying papers and no right to be in the country of her birth. Julie is perpetually looking over her shoulders, convinced that the Gestapo or the FBI or even her Uncle Paul might be on her trail.
A chance encounter with a pre-war acquaintance leads her to fantasize about escaping to Mexico with the help of a “Blackbirder,” someone who ferries refugees across the border with no questions asked. She is forced into action when her renewed acquaintance is killed right outsider her apartment building. Turns out that guy at the restaurant really was looking over at the table a little too frequently.
Julie flees New York for Santa Fe, where she thinks she knows someone who can help. The only hitch is she has to save the man she loves before she can cross the border. Fran is technically a cousin through marriage, but Julie has loved him since she was a child. Now she has word that he’s been unjustly imprisoned in America, the result of some nefarious German plot. But if she’s going to do that, she might have to shake off the man in the gray suit who appears to have followed her all the way from New York to Santa Fe. Is he really an injured British flyer on leave like he says, or something more sinister?
Dorothy B. Hughes is a writer who is often overlooked, but her novels are as dark and twisted as any in the noir canon. The Blackbirder is a suitably thriller wartime story of misplaced allegiances and peril lurking at every turn, but Hughes tends to get bogged down in minutiae. Julie, perpetually on the run, obsesses over the best means of escape in a way that is understandable but less than entertaining.
This is also a novel where the coincidences and revelations start to pile up and feel a tad ridiculous. How many chance encounters can one person have? But if you have a high tolerance for the unlikely, The Blackbirder has thrills to offer in compensation.