Megan Abbott and Why Did I Tell You I Was Going To Shanghai

I’ve been looking for a way to shoehorn the writer Megan Abbott into this blog for a while now. She’s a great crime writer who’s dark, deep noirs are set in 1940s/1950s LA and rightly deserve comparison to the noir greats – Cain, Chandler, Thomspon, Ellroy. One of her best is Die a Little (they all come with very cool retro-covers) and I noticed that she does have a scene, a great scene of a drunk and louche party, where the soundtrack is Doris Day’s Why Did I Tell You I Was Going to Shanghai. I’ve never really thought much about that song – lyrics by Bob Hilliard and the composer Milton De Lugg – as, the way Day interprets it, it’s a schmaltzy cutsey tune, the way she delivered everything basically. It’s got a couple of gags about going to Shanghai but not liking rice. However, in Megan Abbott’s book, a rather deliciously corrupt woman sings it and by slowing it down and vamping it up turns it into a very sexy song – which is the way Shanghai should always be. Listening to the song again you can get how it could be a very sexy tune taken away from someone as wholesome and dreary as Day. Here‘s Doris’s saccharine version anyway.

I’ve looked around a bit but can’t find a sexier version a la Abbott’s book – this Peggy Lee version is a little huskier but not much and this Judy Cannon version is pretty awful I think. And here is a version by four grown men in green shirts in a barbershop quartet – which is just so wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to start!!

So it seems we can put the sexy version of the song down entirely to Megan’s imagination!!