Damage Control by Denise Hamilton: Novel with Perfume Interest (book review)

To come across a book referencing scents, and specific perfumes on top of that, is one of the rare and largely misunderstood pleasures of a distinct nerdo-subgroup called "fumeheads", who, like illicit drug addicts, turn to whatever can give them their daily fix of olfactory stimulation. Usually it's liquids in beautiful bottles that do it, but the more cerebral of the lot turn to written material as well. Beyond specialised perfume books, novels in which perfume stands as both a symbol and a clue can provide infinite hedone. The latest of those is Damage Control, a noir thriller by Denise Hamilton.

Actually, set in Los Angeles and the latest of a long tradition that dates back to James Ellroy, Hamilton's novel reads as a neon noir film would, were it originally written for the page rather than the screen. The bright light that sheds everything in the end, the ocean lapping on the desires and memories of the people who work in this city of glam & slum recall the best elements of the genre in an intoxicating and punitive cocktail of celebrity and sex.

Crime novelist and journalist Denise Hamilton is known for her crime novels and the Edgar Award winning anthologies Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics.
In Damage Control everything is recounted through the first-person narrative of PR executive Maggie Silver, a middle-class woman grown up in Los Angeles with a problematic chidlhood, a cancer-striken mother to support and a mortgage to pay off, engaged in a top damage control Los Angeles firm dealing with the elite. She's also a budding "perfumista", a hobby that will come in handy by the end of the book when fragrance provides a clue. Maggie's toughtest case to date involves senator Henry Paxton, a revered statesman suspected of being involved with his young assistant, when the latter is found dead in her flat. Paxton also happens to be he father of Anabelle, Maggie's estranged best friend from high school. Immersing herself into the case, Maggie gets flooded with memories of her friendship with Anabelle, severed via an unexpected tragedy which marked both. Now that she's back on track with the Paxtons, Maggie must contain the scandal before it explodes beyond control and test the boundaries of friendship once again.

Erotic nuances and flirting with potential killers, psychological insights, ambitions that boil underneath, power struggles and the dirt of top management PR companies are woven expertly into the plot. The time shifting serves as a cubbist's vision into how things got the way they did for Maggie and Anabelle and allows for some twists that have us guessing till the end on who's been nice and who's been seriously naughty.
The writing flows breezinly, shaded with the necessary darkness of the subject, but at the same time illuminated by the courageous, everyday heroism of Maggie who puts herself in harm's way more than she might be expected to given her smarts. Maybe it's the make believe which helps her come through. How else can you explain her poignant impromptu reinvention of her childhood, right at the Paxton's table, giving her alcoholic father the protective mantle of a Hollywood ghost writer?
In some regards we're supposed to identify to some degree with Maggie, who often asks the questions we are asking ourselves pacing through the pages. The language is even poetic in parts, evocative of her feelings and images that take shape and form before our very eyes, without veering into purple.

"Anabelle?

What if she’d crossed the highway to the ocean, swimming out until she drowned? I pictured her body carried on the swell of the waves, arms spread like wings, orange crabs crawling in and out of empty eye sockets, long blond ropes of hair floating like seaweed, a million microscopic sea animals clinging to her curves, illuminating her in a phosphorescent shroud."

Hamilton isn't reinventing the wheel by spluttering the book plot with several scent mentions. Fictional sleuths especially, from Sherlock Holmes and the heroes of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories to modern examples (such as Ruth Rendel's The Rottweiler, where characters wear Jo Malone Tuberose, Charriol’s Tourmaline and Bobbi Brown), have been known to use all five senses to solve a crime. In Agatha Christie’s novel Mrs. McGinty’s Dead,  the murderer sprays someone else’s signature perfume in the room to make the police incriminate someone else instead. But the references by Hamilton aren't just passing snippets; they reappear throughout the plot and resonate with the perfume collector reader. Probably because Denise is actually one of us, her perfume collection accordingly taking a decent portion of her residence. That's why recherché mentions sprinkle the pages, from Serge Lutens Chergui (offered for sniffage to Anabelle by Maggie), or Dior Dune, its trail picked up by Maggie's mother, right through to the heroine's office scent Eau de Guerlain ("just a subtle scent amulet to infuse me with secret grace and power").
Witness the following telling snippet:

Le Boutique was a thrift store. Like many women I knew, I struggled to make ends meet. [...] So, frugalista that I am, I waited for sales and then splurged on basic black and good bras. [...]
At the counter , I browsed the jumble of cheap jewelry and asked to see a box of perfume. It was Chaos by Donna Karan. and smelled smoky, sweet, and spicy. I said I'd think about the 29.95$ price tag (pretty steep for the thrift store).
"Too exotic" I told the clerk as I left ten minutes later, the clothes racks having proved a disappointment.

Back at the office, I found the fragrance had dried down subtle and intriguing -a warm essence of cinnamon and cardamom, musk and lavender. It conjured Southeast Asian bazaars, aromatic oils, harems, Arabian genes emerging from lamps to grant wishes.
 On impulse, I Googled it.
Chaos was discontinued and highly sought after, selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Sniffing my wrist again, I revised my initial opinion.  Now I could appreciate its complexity. Shallow and easily swayed, that's me. [from chapter 14]

Hamilton is forthcoming with the challenging characterisations as well, agree or disagree. PR man Bernie Saunders, drawn in darker colours, is wearing Kouros by YSL. "If Satan wore cologne in hell, it would be Kouros". Touché!

The greatest triumph of Denise Hamilton is her Damage Control simultaneously makes you want to slow down and savour it, while at the same time it keeps you on your toes into making it to the end to see what actually happened.
Damage Control [Scribner,  ISBN-10: 0743296745] is available on Amazon and in Amazon Kindle version.

In the interests of disclosure I was sent a copy by the publisher. Author's photo via Bluebird blog

Fragrance Choices in Relation to Character & Ambience Delineation in Novels

"He had been before in drawing rooms hung with red damask, with pictures 'of the Italian school'; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's shabby hired house, with its blightened background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skillful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, 'foreign', subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses."
~Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

I have been re-reading Wharton's masterpiece and noticing page after page the meticulous care with which the author has created a vivid universe of that crumbling world of social conventions. I follow the eyes and thoughts of late 19th century young gentleman Newland Archer, about to marry the perfect girl of his New York circle, May Welland, but who nevertheless ~out of a rebellion of his inquisitive spirit~ ends up in a frustrated, unfulfilled love story with her cousin, the Countess Olenska; a woman who inwardly snubs conventions, but seems eternally trapped by them in a pre-arranged world of genteel suffocation. No detail has been spared by the author in delineating the mores, the customs, the rites and rituals of a disappearing world and, within it all, one of the most characteristic seems to be the one hinting at smells; such as the above passage, recounting the house in which the Countess Olenska stays, a house she has decorated herself and which reflects her rebellious, cosmopolitan and free nature.

Other fragrant details surface frequently too: May Welland receives posies of lilies of the valley daily ~ Diana-like, pure, beautiful, virginal and above board~ all through her engagement to Newland. As he shops for her bouquet he suddenly notices...

..."a cluster of yellow roses. He had never seen any as sun-golden before and his first impulse was to send them to May instead of the lilies. But they did not look like her -there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty. In a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did, he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of the Countess Olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box".

Such small details can create a whole scene! The lily of the valley stands as the symbol of the virgin bride who is spotless and seems frail, yet surfaces triumphant in the conventional approach to marriage she seeks in the end, much like the aroma of the tiny blossom is piercingly sweet and surpasses most others. The sun-yellow rose is more mature, more feminine in a retro, "full" way, symbolising the giving and open nature of Ellen Olenska, its delicate scent a crumbling beauty that is trampled by those whose trail travels farthest.

Perfume mentions in novels, whether by general description or by specific brand names is not new, but it always strikes me as poignant and significant in setting the mood and tone of the literary work at hand. Indeed, there are books in which it sets the very plot, like obvious paradigm Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind, À Rebours (Against the Grain) by J.K. Huysmans or Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Then, they are those which use perfume references creatively, like The Petty Demon (Melkiy Bes) by Fyodor Sologub, chronicling Peredonov's ambition to rise from instructor to rural gymnasium to school inspector as well as the erotic dalliance between Sasha Pulnivok and Lyudmilla Rutilova.
Take White Oleander by Janet Finch as well, where every character signals a hidden side of them by their choice of fragrance: The biological mom looks stealthy if deliquent, but smells of shy, tender violets. The foster mom with the suicidal tendencies chooses L'Air du Temps, fusing her frail personality with the graceful and assured arc of the Nina Ricci's classic. The upscale hooker down the road wears steely and classy chypre Ma Griffe by Carven. Even the fragrant gift of the promiscuous neighbour to the girl heroine, Penhaligon's Love Potion No.9, is a plea and realisation for what the protagonist needs most: approval.

In Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love the protagonist's wearing of Guerlain's classic Après l'Ondée elicits favourable reception. In Joanne Harris's Chocolat the depiction of all the village women wearing Chanel No.5, till the arrival of the trail blaizer heroine, is akin to a red flag of conventions-adoring set to be shred to pieces. In Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle the scent that permeates the romantic atmosphere is Penhaligon's Bluebell; as British as you can get.
Sometimes scent in novels can even become an idée fixe:

"...and I could see Maxim standing at the foot of the stairs, laughing, shaking hands, turning to someone who stood by his side, tall and slim, with dark hair, said the bishop's wife, dark hair against a white face, someone whose quick eyes saw to the comfort of her guests, who gave an order over her shoulder to a servant, someone who was never awkward, never without grace, who when she danced left a stab of perfume in the air like a white azalea."

Thus writes Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca and continues:

"And then I knew that the vanished scent upon the handkerchief was the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas in the Happy Valley." Or "The wardrobe smelt stuffy, queer. The azalea scent, so fragrant and delicate in the air, had turned stale in the wardrobe, tarnishing the silver dresses and the brocade, and the breath of it wafted toward me now from the open doors, faded and old."

And who can forget literary giant Honoré de Balzac when he describes down to the filthy detail and to the last minutiae the places where his heroes live and work in Père Goriot?

Fragrance references and scented descriptions add a whole different sublayer to a novel's charm and sometimes worth, by injecting it with a subtle nuance like nothing else. Simply put, the novel would be incomplete without referring that sense which makes up for so many of our memories, sentiments, preconceptions and aversions.


What about you? Do you enjoy fragrance references in novels or do they distract you? And which are your favourites? Share them in the comments.