Reliving Good Times, Ready for the Sequel

This is an especially good season in the already good life of Glori Fickling. The distant past has rolled around again in a most surprising way, and even if F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct that there are no second acts in American lives, he never said you couldn’t do Act 1 twice.

It must seem that way to Fickling, whose late husband Skip created the “Honey West” private eye series that started as pulp fiction in the 1950s and culminated in a one-season TV run in 1965 starring Anne Francis. Those were the salad days for Skip and Glori, full of laughs and dancing and thoughts of movie deals and, most of all, living large in a hillside Laguna Beach home that yields a spectacular look at the Pacific Ocean.

And now, it’s all back for Glori, because the Overlook Press publishing house in New York is reprinting the first Honey West book, “This Girl for Hire,” and has announced plans for the second book next spring. A company publicist says renewed interest in “the noir kitsch” world of paperback fiction has convinced it to reintroduce the sassy private eye bombshell, who debuted in 1957, to a new generation.

And that, to an extent, reintroduces Glori Fickling to a pop culture world she thought had long ago said goodbye to Honey. And over some chilled chardonnay on her patio, she describes what it’s like reliving some of the best times of her life.

What it’s like is pretty darn good.

“It’s a total thrill,” she says. “I can just see Skip looking down and saying, ‘You go, girl!’ ”

Skip, a decorated soldier who served in World War II and the Korean War, died of a brain tumor in April 1998. Glori can remember him sitting on the patio 50 years ago of one of their previous Laguna homes and saying, “Honey, I’ve got a great idea.”

The idea was to create a typical gumshoe but who looked like Marilyn Monroe. He chose “Honey” because people like girls named Honey and “West” because the Ficklings lived in the West. And then he wrote 11 books over a dozen years or so with language like, “You make a lot of observations for a blond walk-on with no talent but plenty of chest muscle.”

The reprint pays homage to that lingo, referring to West as the “nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles” and touting her 38-22-36 chassis.

“I’m mainly hoping this [book revival] will trigger a movie sale,” Glori says. Over the years, she says, nobody could capture Honey in screenplay form, despite a few tries. Glori, a brassy one herself, is convinced that language will still play. “That’s the charm,” she says. “That’s what made it sell then and will make it sell again.”

Skip wrote as G.G. Fickling, borrowing his wife’s initials. He did all the writing, while Glori, a fashion writer in her younger days, helped with details. Because she had the sass, though, lots of people over the years in Laguna Beach thought she was the one putting the words into Honey’s mouth.

The revived Honey West, of course, blows life into memories that stretch back forever. Glori tells them in loving detail, minus any maudlin references to the man she met on Catalina Island in 1948, when he “was chasing a blond” and she was there with relatives. He never caught the blond, but apparently was enamored of Glori, whom he first saw in a rainbow-striped two-piece bathing suit as she was backing out of the window of her room (don’t ask).

She remembers her first words to him being, “Aren’t you cute?” She can still picture him, she says, holding her hand for two hours the next day in church.

“I can feel Skip’s presence here,” she says. “I thought I’d be a little schizzy without him, but I walk downtown from here or to different events and walk back, like 10 at night, and I never feel trepidation. It’s just like he’s protecting me, he’s a part of me.”

From 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, Glori will sign books at the Barnes & Noble in Aliso Viejo. If people want stories, she’ll tell them stories.

Such as when Skip, knowing he was near death, told her he wanted his ashes kept in the living room with an ocean view. And that he wanted her to date only gay men, because, he said, “they’ll be very good to you, they’ll take good care of the house and they won’t touch your body.”

Glori did him one better. She kept the ashes in her bedroom, with the ocean view. Now, she says, laughing, “he knows there’s not going to be any hanky-panky.”

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana. parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.