Author: Wesley Brighton, Jr. (pseud.)

About: Country Girl in Town by Wesley Brighton, Jr., is the story of a runaway who arrives in Los Angeles confused and almost penniless. The home Suzanne Corville has left is not typical; it consists of a poor farm sporadically tended by her scrawny, besotted uncle Tom, who brings Suzanne's life there to a climax when he tries to rape her. But Suzanne is typical in being young, inexperienced, and totally unaware of the many dangers she faces in the big city. Many writers — ranging from crime writers like Dashiell Hammett through more “serious” ones like Nathanael West to the English satirist Evelyn Waugh — have tried to capture and evoke the strange quality of the loneliness an individual can feel in this strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly sprawl. Hard as it may be for an outsider to believe, it is a feeling unique to this place and no other. And in trying to escape it, Suzanne goes from the frying pan straight into the inferno.

Suzanne moves into an apartment house—a house that looks like thousands of others but contains many strange secrets. She meets two men, Walter Craft and Roger Watlington, who superficially appear to be solid professional types but strike her as somehow furtive and sinister...

But this is a book full of surprises, and we don't want to spoil any of them. It is also a novel about an important segment of modern American society, but one that as a story is utterly unique — as unique as that feeling of Los Angeles loneliness which Wesley Brighton, Jr., describes as well as or better than any other writer so far.

Excerpt:

She made the rounds, going from employment agency to restaurant to circled advertisement possibility. And going from disgruntledness to hopelessness to despair. There simply was no work in Los Angeles. At least not for a country girl with some typing and no experience. Even the waitress jobs were taken by experienced girls.

Around six, she gave up and had coffee in a diner. When she went to pay her check, she discovered that her wallet was missing. She'd had it when she came in, she knew. But now it was gone. The manager was sympathetic, commiserating with her over the high crime rate in Los Angeles. Could she get home, he wondered? No? Well, if she'd care to wait a half hour, he was off and could drive her. No trouble. Suzanne gratefully sat out the thirty minutes and felt miserable.

“Ready, Miss? I'm off now.”

She looked up. “Oh. Y-Yes. Thank you.”

In the lot, the man handed her into a Ford van and let himself in the driver's side. “Where to, Miss?”

She told him the address.

“Know how to get there from here?”

“No. I don't know my way around very well yet.”

“Yeah. It's an easy town to get lost in when you're new.”

There was something in his tone that made Suzanne look closely at him. He was a short, stocky man, thickly covered with reddish hair. He was smiling to himself and humming a tuneless hum.

They pulled out into the evening traffic and he began expertly threading his way through the traffic. He talked almost incessantly, once they were underway. About wife and kids, weather, other trivia. He asked her questions about herself. Where was she from? Relatives living in the city? Where did she work?

Suzanne answered his questions, her mind on her troubles. It was a good while before she began to notice the traffic thinning out. “Where are we?”

“This is a little shortcut I know about.”

“It doesn't look like the right direction to me. We're going up, and I live below Hollywood. I know that.”

“This is Griffith Park. It beats the traffic if you go through here.”

Suzanne felt an unease creeping into her. The rush hour had been ending when they left. And traffic wasn't that heavy anyway. “I think... I think I'd better get out here, please. I'll find my way home from here.”

The man looked at her and grinned, showing large, yellowed teeth. “Relax, honey. I'll get you home okay.”

“No, please. Just let me out here.”

The hairy man laughed. “There's lots of bad things up in the woods here, little girl. I wouldn't want anything to hurt you, no siree.”

In panic, Suzanne reached for the door handle. Better to be skinned up from a fall than... But the hairy man reached quickly beneath the dash on his side and something clicked. Suzanne found the door handle firmly locked. She tried the window. The knob wouldn't turn.

“How you like that, chickee? Little thing I rigged up myself. All electric.”

The van slowed and eased off the road under the trees. Suzanne felt her heart pounding against her ribs. “Please,” she whispered. “Just let me go. I'll give you money. I'll send you some, I promise.”

The squat man laughed again, more loudly this time. “Please,” he squeaked in a falsetto imitation of her voice. “I'll send you all my money.” He roared with laughter. But there was no humor in it.