Sat 14 Mar 2009
A Review by Mary Reed: LOUIS TRACY – The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[3] Comments
LOUIS TRACY – The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley. Edward J. Clode, US, hardcover, 1919. Serialized in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, May 30 to July 25, 1920. Previously published in the UK as The Case of Mortimer Fenley: Cassell & Co., hardcover, 1915.
Artist John Trenholme is staying in the Hertfordshire village of Roxton, having gone there at the request of a magazine to do paintings of the local area before the railway arrives and ruins everything.
His request to thus immortalise a nearby Elizabethan mansion is rebuffed by its owner, Mortimer Fenley, private banker and father of two half-brothers.
Trenholme finds out there’s a public right of way across Fenley’s parkland and on a lovely June morning he avails himself of it to paint the view — which includes a young woman in a bathing suit taking a morning dip in the lake. He is thus on the spot to hear the shot that kills Fenley on his own doorstep.
At this point one of my favourite sleuthing teams, Superintendent James Leander Winter and Detective Inspector Charles Francois Furneaux, arrive on stage when Scotland Yard is called in by oldest son Hilton Fenley. To add to the family’s troubles, both siblings wish to marry their father’s beautiful ward Sylvia Manning — she of the bathing suit — which worsens the already bad blood between them.
The younger son Robert is a ne’er-do-well who was in London when his father died, or was he? Could the murder be connected to a bond robbery at the Fenley Bank? How was the seemingly impossible crime committed when a prime suspect was known to be in the house when the murderous shot was fired from a wood some 400 yards away?
My verdict: Much as I have enjoyed the Winter & Furneaux stories, I must mark this one as a B. The Fenleys are curiously thin as characters, and I felt the lesser players in the drama were more rounded out, probably because Tracy provides a different angle for the traditional supporting cast.
Thus for example we have the oft bibulous butler depicted instead as a wine connoisseur and the village bobby as intelligent and quick thinking. On the other hand, the touch of melodrama towards the end of the novel seems somewhat out of place, and prospective readers should be aware there are a few comments of an un-PC nature.
Etext: http://www.munseys.com/diskseven/mofendex.htm
Bibliographic data: John D. Squires’ long chronological checklist for Louis Tracy (1863-1928), aka Gordon Holmes and Robert Fraser, is online here here.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
The Furneaux books were published both as by Louis Tracy and as Gordon Holmes, a pseudonym with M.P.(Matthew Phillips) Shiel (though not always). I don’t know a great deal about Tracy, save that he was fairly popular in his day and had another series character Reginald Brett. Shiel, on the other hand, is fairly important in the genre.
By any account Shiel was a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, racist, jingoist, and downright peculiar. Despite that, or because of it, he’s an important figure in the realm of popular fiction. In the mystery genre he is best known for his short stories about Prince Zaleski and King Cummings Monk. Zaleski is an armchair detective more in the mode of Dupin than Holmes. A product of the decadent movement Zaleski solves most of his cases while lying around in a drug induced stupor. His most famous case, “The S.S.” actually gets him up and out of his apartments to defeat a league of assassins based on the Spartan society who committed social or political assassination for the public good (and state purity)in ancient Greece. Zaleski defeats them, but only reluctantly. He,and Shiel one assumes, sympathize with their goals. Monk is a more colorful if less interesting amateur sleuth.
Shiel’s real importance is in other areas. His science fiction novel The Purple Cloud is a notable story of the last man on Earth after an apocalyptic disaster (very loosely the apparent basis of a film ironically starring Harry Belafonte, The World the Flesh and the Devil). Lord of the Sea is an anti-Semitic novel about a Jewish superman who becomes the Napoleon of the seas before being finally defeated by circumstance and racially pure English spunk and seamanship. Finally there is The Yellow Danger(1898), generally considered to be the first of the yellow peril novels that found fruition in Dr. Fu Manchu and has hung on down through Ian Fleming’s Doctor No and Hawaii Five-O’s Wo Fat.
Shiel’s novel has the ‘yellow’ masses invading Europe through a series of treacheries inspired by a lecherous half Chinese half Japanese doctor who can’t pronounce the letter “t” and threatens the pure English heroine with a “lillie kiss,” and other indignities. Eventually only England stands against the ravenous invaders. The hero, naval officer John Hardy, defeats the “yellow peril” by the use of biological warfare, killing millions with a virulent of strain of cholera. The threat ended, now all of Europe is part of “Great England,” though names like France, Spain, and Russia are retained for the convenience of the postal codes… Even by the standards of late Victorian England The Yellow Danger is racist and violently jingoistic, but it’s impact on popular fiction can’t be denied.
The Prince Zaleski and King Cummings Monk stories were collected by Arkham House and some can be found as e-books. Lord of the Sea has been reprinted over the years and can be found fairly cheaply. The Yellow Danger can be downloaded as a PDF from Google Books, but is difficult to find otherwise. Shiel isn’t a bad writer, and he has a certain power, but he’s certainly unpleasant, still his importance to popular fiction is undeniable, and Zaleski is perhaps the most extreme example of the armchair sleuth in action (or inaction). Anytime you read popular fiction of an earlier era you may have to park your more modern sensibilities, or at least curb them, but in Shiel’s case nothing less than novocaine will do the job. There is nothing casual about his racism, nationalism, politics, or jingoism, and little in the way of charm to brunt the impact.
March 26th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Shiel’s biography is as strange as his bibliography in many ways, a half-caste (half black) he was crowned king of the little island of Redonda at age fifteen, and yet despite this colorful background (or because of it) he became an ardent English nationalist, jingoist, and racist.
The Purple Cloud is interesting because it is one of the few science fiction novels to follow the model of Edgar Allan Poe rather than Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, and because its unpleasant hero travels around the devastated Earth burning down cities until he meets a woman, and after deciding not to kill and eat her, sets out to repopulate the planet.
Shiel still has enthusiasts, and he certainly is a fascinating writer of some power, but there is a lot to be forgiven or overlooked in his work even for those familier with the prejudices of his era. Compared to Shiel Sydney Horler seems only mildly eccentric and G.K. Chesteron’s anti-Semitism a minor character flaw.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
[…] The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley, 1915. […]