Dodie Eberhart

Dodie Eberhart is a former Washington call girl, a careful collector of money, and an avid reader of hard-boiled crime novels. When she goes to confront Frederick Clawson over overdue rent, she finds his apartment door ajar and discovers that he has been murdered. The encounter makes her both a witness to George Stark’s violence and a striking example of how Stark’s crime-fiction world has entered ordinary life.

Background and Character

Dodie is introduced as a physically imposing woman who once ranked among Washington’s most sought-after call girls. Her height, six feet three inches, and striking appearance had made her conspicuous at political social events. She later left the business with money obtained from two regular clients, a Democratic senator and a senior Republican representative. She had secured that financial cushion herself rather than trusting promises that either man would provide for her in a will.

Her practical approach extends to managing tenants. She is accustomed to collecting rent and does not confuse a tenant’s excuses with reliable income. She has, however, allowed Clawson to fall behind repeatedly because he persuaded her that money was coming. Her patience has limits: when she climbs to his apartment, she is prepared to demand payment rather than make another polite request.

Reading and George Stark

Dodie’s taste in fiction is specific. She has read Elmore Leonard since before he became widely popular and admires crime writers including Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Horace McCoy, and Charles Willeford. She favors hard-boiled stories about robbery, violence, and relationships governed by power rather than sentiment. Within that tradition, George Stark is, in her judgment, the best of them. She has followed his novels from Machine’s Way and Oxford Blues through Riding to Babylon, which she assumes may be his last.

The books’ imagined violence shapes how Dodie interprets the evidence before her. She had noticed Stark novels and notes among Clawson’s belongings on an earlier rent visit, and the pages struck her as unusually convincing—as if George Stark, rather than Thad Beaumont, had written them. That impression gives her an intimate, if mistaken, way of understanding the murder: the fictional criminal she admires seems to have stepped out of the books and into Clawson’s apartment.

Discovery of Clawson’s Murder

On her next visit, Dodie reaches the third-floor landing prepared to hammer on the door. Seeing it already ajar, she initially assumes that someone has broken into the apartment. She knocks and calls Clawson’s name; as she enters, the scene reveals that the danger is not an ordinary burglary. Clawson has been killed, and Dodie is confronted with the aftermath.

Her response is immediate fear. At one point, she becomes convinced that the measured sound in the hallway means the fictional killer Alexis Machine is returning. The expectation is shaped by her knowledge of Stark’s novels: Machine is a remorseless figure whose violence seems impossible to halt. Dodie faints, an unprecedented reaction for her.

When she regains consciousness, Dodie cannot bring herself to look outside the apartment. Instead, she secures the door’s lock, bolt, and police bar, choosing to remain inside with Clawson’s body rather than risk encountering what she imagines may be approaching. She then makes her way to the kitchen phone, keeping her eyes turned away from the scene. The incident leaves her with a lasting mental image of the murder.

Narrative Role and Significance

Dodie’s episode places a reader of crime fiction inside the very kind of violence she has sought out in books. Her familiarity with Stark’s work gives her a vocabulary for interpreting the murder, but it also intensifies her terror: she does not experience Alexis Machine simply as a character but fears that he may return as a real assailant. The contrast is central to her role. She has treated fictional violence as a genre she can choose and enjoy; confronted with Clawson’s death, she discovers that the boundary between the story and the crime has collapsed.

Her scene also establishes Clawson as a Stark reader and connects his murder to the novels surrounding him. Dodie does not solve the crime or confront its perpetrator. Instead, she becomes an unwilling witness whose practical habits fail to protect her from an event that cannot be handled as a routine matter of rent collection.