Dan Cushman mainly wrote Westerns but also worked prolifically in late pulp and early paperback times in another frontier genre: the noir exotica of the declining colonial order. He cranked out hardboiled tales set in Africa and, like Jungle She (1953), Indonesia and environs. It's a contemporary story acknowledging Indonesian independence and Chinese communism, but it could just as well have been written twenty or thirty years earlier. The hero sounds like a throwback to an even earlier time, his penchant for saying "Aye" all the time explained by his formative reading of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. The hero's an American desperate to go home to San Francisco after years knocking about the Pacific, but to determined to go home in style with a fortune. This desire leads him to hire out to a once-archetypal brutal Dutch trader hunting a runaway half-caste wife, the title character. The hero's ulterior motive is to discover the Dutchman's suspected secret source of wealth. His quest uncovers a triangular trade in opium, diamonds and uranium linking the Pacific underworld, the Soviet bloc and numerous standard-issue pulp savages. Ruthless and manipulative as our hero often is, particularly vis-a-vis the jungle she, who hardly lives up to the genre's she-devil expectations, he remains a hero, at least for this book's original readers, because he refuses on principle to deal in drugs or with Communists. His story is twisty and shifty in tone in a way that made me wonder whether Cushman was making it up on the spot during each new session at the typewriter. Some parts read like a travelogue, others more like torture porn, though he has enough style to maintain a consistent atmosphere of sleazy dread. This is frontier fiction as much as Cushman's Western are, in perhaps unconscious recognition of the lawlessness at the heart of Europe's civilizing mission, and a speculative belief that that condition would continue after the natives reclaimed their nations.
