A Girl's Best Friend

This collection of twelve short stories has diamonds as the common theme. The title is taken from the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” made famous by Marilyn Munro. The first eleven stories are light and humorous. The point of departure is that diamonds and human greed make good bedfellows. The last story is a novella tracing the lives and times of successive owners of a large diamond which exhibits unusual properties.
The first story, set at the end of the 18th century, is about an impoverished Venetian aristocrat and a money lender. The two try to out-wit one other. Rank and breeding count for little as the aristocrat turns out to be as ruthless as the money-lender.
The second story is a farcical tale about a brother and a sister competing for their inheritance. Their mother has collected diamond jewelry over many years and the collection is worth a fortune. As she nears the end of her life, the two siblings try various strategies to get their hands on her diamonds.
In stories three, five and eight we meet two apprentice crooks aged twenty four and twenty five. Jerry is the leader and Charlie is the follower. Jerry has a major personality problem while Charlie’s only defect is that he scores rather low on the IQ scale. They try every stratagem to “get rich quick”. Their efforts meet with little success. The first story is inspired by the famous Redford-Newman film: “The Sting”, but in this version, guess who is stung?
The fourth story is set in Naples in the early nineteenth century. A servant girl in the employ of a jeweller saves her master from bankruptcy. However, she demands a high price for saving him.
The sixth story is an African version of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor”. A handsome bigamist marries three women at various times and places without going through the inconvenience of a divorce. He travels to Kimberley in the early days of the diamond rush in order to make his fortune. The three wronged wives are unaware of one another’s existence and only meet when they book into the same hotel. After their initial shock at discovering that their husband has been unfaithful to them, the three wives plot vengeance.
The seventh story is about the discovery of alluvial diamonds on the banks of the Orange River in the Northern Cape. Who owns the land? Is it the farmer-settlers, the mining company or the descendants of the original inhabitants, the Khoi Bushmen?
The story “A Girl’s best Friend” advances the theory that we are closer to the animals than psychologists and men of religion would have us believe. How much of our behaviour is governed by instinct without us realizing it? Take for example Anthea, the most beautiful girl of her generation, and her choice of a husband.
Isotropy is the story about a gang of jewellery thieves based on the French Riveria.
“Switch”, is a farcical story about an employee at a wholesale diamond merchant who tries to steal from his company. His plan works perfectly, except that he makes the wrong “Switch”.
The last story is a novella, tracing the lives and times of successive owners of a fabulous diamond which has the unusual property of changing colour. The diamond was found by a Khoi Bushman and is used by him in “throwing the bones” or foretelling the future. He gives it to a tramp who is then murdered. The man who steals the tramp’s diamond himself meets a violent end. The diamond ends up in America during the prohibition era. It is given to a beautiful jazz singer as a present by a gangster. Later, the diamond is bought by a European aristocrat whose family is caught up in World War II. The diamond is stolen by the aristocrat’s two servants as they flee from the war. They catch a boat to Africa and the diamond eventually returns home. In the final scene, scientists subject the gemstone to various tests to try to discover the secret of how it is able to change colour.