Female on the Beach

Plots: Moving into a beach house involves Lynn Markham in mystery, danger, and romance with a beach boy of dubious motives. Lynn Markham moves into her late husband’s beach house…the morning after former tenant Eloise Crandall fell (or was pushed) from the cliff. To her annoyance, Lynn finds both her real estate agent and Drummond Hall, her muscular beachcomber neighbor, making themselves quite at home. Lynn soon has no doubts of what her scheming neighbors are up to, but she finds Drummond’s physical charms hard to resist. And she still doesn’t know what really happened to Eloise. A quarrel is heard, in a beach-house, between Eloise Crandall and Drummond Hall and he walks out, and she drunkenly tries to follow and goes over a guard rail falling to her death on the beach below. The house-owner, widowed Lynn Markham, moves in and notices police Lieutenant Galley examining the scene of the accident while real-estate agent Amy Rawlinson is on hand to greet her. Lynn finds Drummond in her kitchen preparing breakfast and she resent his intrusion, although he charmingly implies he has always had the run of the house. She send him away and retrieves the key. Drummond has had an affair with Amy but breaks it off. Lynn finds a diary left by Eloise and learns that Drummond has been staying with the gambling next-door neighbors, Osbert and “Queenie” Sorenson, hoping to snare a rich widow so they would all profit. Lynn still falls in love with Drummond and presents him with a new fuel pump for his boat they plan to use on their honeymoon. Amy warns Lynn against the marriage but she refuses to listen. They marry and she brings items for the honeymoon aboard the boat and finds the new fuel pump hidden in a drawer and the faulty one still in place. She now begins to suspect Drummond has plans on killing her and tries to get away.