Thu 23 Jul 2009
A Review by Curt Evans: CAROLYN WELLS – Feathers Left Around.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[18] Comments
CAROLYN WELLS – Feathers Left Around. J. B. Lippincott, US/UK, hardcover, 1923.
Perhaps the most perfect example of the stereotypically bad English country house mystery that I have read was published in 1923 by an American, Carolyn Wells. Sure, Feathers Left Around takes place in America, but it might as well be in the England of the classic Golden Age country house fantasy land of stereotype.
The best thing about the tale is the whimsical title, the meaning of which we learn from this racially insensitive anecdote from one of the characters, the soon-to-be-murdered detective novelist, Mr. Curran:
So the “Feathers” in the tale are the clues left around after Mr. Curran is found dead in a locked room, presumably murdered. About 80% of the novel is devoted to the bumbling efforts of a lone police detective and a surfeit of amateurs (five or more!) to solve the case, until Fleming Stone and his “saucy” boy assistant Fibsy show up to solve the case in short order.
If this suggests that the mystery is a pretty simple one, you’re right. I penciled the solution in the margin on page 102, but had to wait about 240 pages for confirmation (I was right).
No secret passages this time, but another trick that was used, with far more elaboration, by later authors John Dickson Carr and Nicholas Blake. This is the most interesting part of the book as far as plot is concerned, and might have made a mildly interesting short story. The murder method is fairly clued too, though the motive is deduced by Fleming Stone based on information not provided to the reader.
Unfortunately, the novel is padded with ceaseless dialogue among a group of completely uninteresting ciphers, which soon becomes tedious. None of the men, with the exception of the imperious host of the house party, are really distinguishable, while one wishes that the women were extinguishable.
There’s the pouty flirt who wraps all men around her finger (even the police detective, who, enchanted by the little lady’s pouts and simpers, agrees to lie about her having enjoyed a tete-a-tete out on the balcony with the deceased shortly before he died); the obvious heroine with a not-so-dark and easily-guessed secret; and the girl who likes to talk about her dreams and the utterly unconvincing Russian Countess. ( “Fiddle-dee-dee!” the Countess exclaims exotically at one point.)
It becomes clear that there’s not a chance the author will allow one of these darling women to be the killer, their obviously being intended merely to provide “character interest” window dressing (variously humor and anxiety, as the case calls for).
The author’s frivolous treatment of her female characters is further indicated when the men of the party inform the women that they are not allowed to investigate the murder scene for clues, this being man’s work, and the women submissively assent. Agatha Christie, where are you!
Most fascinating about Feathers Left Around are the author’s attitudes about gender and especially class. It seems clear Wells has no clue what an actual police investigation is like, or, if she does, she determinedly keeps that knowledge to herself.
When the five or so men of the party inform the detective that they want to accompany him to the scene of the crime to look for clues, the detective happily acquiesces, even though it’s quite apparent that one of these men may be the murderer.
When the police detective comes to suspect that the fiancee of the house party host is implicated in the crime, the latter man orders the detective out of his house and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t leave. The detective meekly retreats.
He does, however, terrorize the housemaids and threaten them with life imprisonment on bread and water in rat-infested jails if they do not answer his questions, and even allows one of the “gentlemen” to treat them so as well. (These scenes clearly are intended to be amusing.)
In terms of social attitudes conveyed by the author, it could be England in 1860, with the police investigating the Constance Kent case. It’s instructive to compare this novel with the hardboiled tales that have come to represent American mystery — the contrast is remarkable.
Far more than most Golden Age British tales I have read, Feathers Left Around strikes me as a real relic from the nineteenth century. That novels like this had a decent following (mostly female, judging by the book ads in the back of the book) suggests there was a significant conservative mystery audience in the United States as well as in Britain.
Unfortunately, the novel also suggests that, though she may have had some mildly interesting plot ideas, Wells did not offer much else to engage the reader, aside from the sociological standpoint. Wells seems rather like an American Patricia Wentworth, though even the cozy Wentworth gives a more rigorous read, in my experience.
I want my next Wells to come from near the end of her career (her last novel was published in 1942) to see if the events of the thirties ever induced her to modernize her style. Or was she still holding those same endless country house parties with the same boring society people during the Great Depression and World War Two?
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
I haven’t read this one, but this fits overall my general memory of Wells and Fleming Stone, and even some of the antiquated social ideas would be less bothersome if she was just a better writer.
And she really never did get any better. In fact her early books were by far her best work — which isn’t saying much. While I’m perfectly willing to grant there may be arguably better books by her in general I would say that if you have read one Wells Fleming Stone novel you have read them all. There may be better books by her, but there are no hidden masterpieces, no surprises.
Even if she did pioneer a theme or plot element in her work she had so little impact on her fellow mystery writers it means little outside of historical import.
And keep in mind this one is written in the roaring twenties, the age of the flapper, of E.M. Hull, and Elior Glyn, so Wells is a good decade or more behind the times socially even then. Some of her ideas about women would have been dated in the nineties much less the twenties.
Still, I suppose she could fall into the category of the famous quote about Hillare Belloc: “His prose was scarlet, but his books were read.”
July 24th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Curt
I like the phrase you used, “racially insensitive,” but the rest of your review makes the book even more unappealing on grounds of overall ineptitude.
By the time 1935 had rolled around, using THE WOODEN INDIAN as a guide, Wells seems to have improved a notch or two as an author, moving up from inept to mediocre.
(I reviewed the latter about a week or so ago, as most of you will recall. See my review here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1306.)
WOODEN INDIAN wasn’t bad, like FEATHERS seems to be. It just wasn’t good.
— Steve
July 24th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I think Mike Grost would say the earlier stuff isn’t so bad. Some of her earlier reviews seem to have been pretty good. Probably she seemed more interesting before 1920.
Maybe there’s a question of tastes here too. The situation in Feathers was just so stock and artificial for me: country house; snooty rich people who are supposed to be charming because, well, they’re rich; humor at the expense of servants; ridiculous police procedure. Maybe some people like these artificial situations. Personally, I found it much more unbelievable than anything in Christie (not counting her thrillers).
It was disappointing how the detective comes in so late too. The novel would have been much shorter had it occurred to someone to call in Fleming Stone sooner!
To be fair, there was a fairly clued murder method and the initial situation leading up to the murder wasn’t bad (I liked the murderee, the detective story writer Curran), but interest just drained away after all the silly, unbelievable situations asserted themselves. I would have to say that among American women I prefer Rinehart and Eberhart.
However, I’ll read a Wells from the thirties and see what I think. I’m curious to see whether she changed her style, or even her tone, at all over the many years, with the rise of the tough tec tale and the tec novel of manners.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
The detective in Wells often comes in very late. It is different from a Poirot or Ellery Queen novel, where the detective is protagonist throughout.
Only one Wells book I read has any racial problems: her early stinker “A Chain of Evidence” (1907). The others (so far) have all been fine. This book is terrible at all levels.
I don’t recall problems with servants in the Wells read so far. But maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
Wells has little interest in realism on any level.
July 25th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Mike, I have Milton Propper on my list. I looked at the The Ticker Tape Murder, touchingly dedicated to his sister: it really does look like the American version of a Crofts tale!
Did Carolyn Wells change any of her views, I wonder, when she revised her Technique of the Mystery Story in 1929?
I’ll post my American reviews here in future, since Steve seems to want to them.
July 25th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Absolutely, Curt. Absolutely.
A British perspective on the American scene would be very useful, I think.
Besides it’s only fair, after all the British mysteries I’ve read and reviewed!
PS. I haven’t forgotten Milton Propper. The first review to appear will be one done by Bill Deeck.
July 25th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Curt
A few American writers of the era that might be more rewarding than Wells (roughly 1918 -1950) would include Isabel Ostrander, Ernest M. Poate, Hulburt Footner, Frances Noyes Hart, T. S. Stribling, David Frome, Phoebe Atwood Tayor, C. Daly King, Octavius Roy Cohen, Helen Reilly, Katherine Moore Knight, Elizabeth Daly, Clayton Rawson, Kelly Roos, Philip Wylie, George Dyer,Richard and Frances Lockridge, Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer, Leslie Ford, and from the pre WW I era Melville Davidson Post, Jacques Futrelle, and while he is very uneven Arthur B. Reeve.
Van Dine, Stout, Abbott, Carr, Gardner, Biggers, and Queen go without saying.
Of course that doesn’t count the hard boiled and screwball schools or suspense novelists such as Woolrich and Elizabeth Saxnay Holding, but while these writers aren’t all equals almost all of them are better than Wells and Fleming Stone.
Even a few of Mary Roberts Rinehart books are worth reading and most of Mignon G. Eberthart’s. Of the Rinehart books I would at least suggest The Man in Lower 10, often cited as her best detective story.
July 25th, 2009 at 4:18 am
With Eberhart, the situation she fell into in the mid-30s with the merging of the romance and mystery novels came to seem too formulaic to me. I read Fair Warning and Danger in the Dark and enjoyed reasonably well, but some others, like Hasty Wedding and The Glass Slipper, just seemed like more of the same. I think the most interesting later book by her that I read was one called Melora, from 1960 I believe. I’ve actually read works by about eighteen of the authors on your list, so I do have some knowledge of the Americans, though it’s inferior to many others I’m sure. It’s certainly not comparable to the reading I’ve done on the English side, which is my specialty. So I’m very interested to read people’s informed opinions on the Americans.
July 25th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Curt
I don’t really disagree about Eberhart, but may have a bit more tolerance for her weaknesses. Anyway I read them fairly far apart, perhaps recognizing that her weaknesses would be all too obvious if read too close together.
Actually I’m much better read in the English school and prefer it over all to most the writers I mentioned other than the likes of Queen and Stout etc. Even today I’m more likely to read a good contemporary British mystery than an American one outside of the hard boiled genre.
I really do think its the setting as much as anything, and admittedly the very words classical detective story conjures up images of the Yard and foggy streets and quaint little villages where the cottages have names and the great houses have priest holes and secret panels. It’s hard to compete with that with a three bedroom one and a half bath in the suburbs and a sleuth with a toothpick hanging from his lip and a beer belly hanging over his belt.
Of course a good writer can do wonders with that last setup, but it can’t really compete with those images that are etched in our mind of the classic British mystery, and to get back to Well’s I would argue in general the British do dull much better than we do. Wasn’t it Defoe that was said to employ dullness brilliantly?
That said, David Frome’s Mr. Pinkerton books did the dull thing well, but then she was cheating and used British settings and characters.
July 26th, 2009 at 2:41 am
It’s fascinating to compare and contrast the American and British schools of GA mystery fiction. It seems the Americans put more emphasis on excitement, color, emotional tension, physical action in the detective novels itself, whereas in the British all that was for a while more confined to the “thriller.” Of course, there are always exceptions. Philip Macdonald, for example, has always seemed more “American” in temperament to me (so where does he end up, Hollywood!). Wells’ Feathers Left Around is remarkably like the classic British country house mystery of beloved stereotype.
Still, I think Americans–not just the hardboiled people–did have an influence on the British, in prodding them to make the books more emotionally engaging. I’m a big “Humdrum” admirer so this is not entirely a plus for me. I wish the austere, classical clue puzzle hadn’t been shoulder out to the extent it was. Of course, Sayers and others were pushing the novel of manners idea, so change was inevitable. And a lot of the “new style” works are excellent, of course. But I think it’s a shame the Humdrums often get derided by critics (a lot of whom have probably never read them). In a book like Eberhart’s Fair Warning, where there actually is a decent little puzzle, dispassionate problem solving (who killed the fellow) tends to get crowded out by emotional anxiety (oh! I hope the nice girl and boy don’t get arrested!).
Wells does some of this in Feathers. The heroine Pauline is suspected and flees the scene, but the characters are so stock, it’s hard to care what happens to any of them. Even the characters comment that no one really cares about the murder victim who happened to be staying at the country house, so they’re going to treat it all as a puzzle. This would be fine, were there a cleverer, more intricate puzzle, instead of a short story idea stretched to novel length. The puzzle simply isn’t anywhere close to the those of Queen, Carr, Rhode, Crofts, even in their second-tier books.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:18 am
I know when John Creasey decided to push for the American market after the war he was told by American publishers that his books needed more human interest to attract an American audience (a few of the Baron books had been printed here before the war, as Blue Mask for some reason). That may be why the first Creasey character to start to have an impact was Roger West, the most human of his early heroes with his family and kids. The first Toff novel appeared in paperback here in 1964, though Mark Kilby has been created for the American market earlier.
Thriller elements made it even into some of the humdrum school. I recall a Dr. Priestly novel that ends with a duel to the death with the killer that is fairly melodramatic and some of Anthony Wynne’s Dr. Haley books lean towards melodrama (or fall right in the pit). For that matter the early Allingham’s were full of action and racing cars and thriller elements. Reggie Fortune was always saving some child in danger. Even Agatha Christie wrote The Big Four, closer to Edgar Wallace than her usual style.
Oddly enough it was Chandler’s attempt to turn the hard-boiled novel into a novel of manners that promoted it as literature much as Sayers was trying to do. The Jane Austen influence.
H.R.F. Keating wrote a very good article in one of his books about the humdrum school and its appeal, but I would argue still that humdrum in a great house or quaint village isn’t quite as humdrum to most American readers as the same in a cold water flat, a fifth floor walk up, a house in the suburbs, or a house with a picket fence. The American version of the great house mystery always seemed to me to fall a bit flat outside of the hands of Van Dine or Queen, or to slip too easily into the HIBK school.
That said, Philo Vance did influence the British school, and while none were particularly successful both Brian Flynn and John Bentley tried Vance-like heroes (Anthony Bathurst and Sir Richard Herrivale).
One major difference in the American and British schools is the presence of Philo Vance. Vance’s near superhuman presence warped the American school as much as Sherlock Holmes had the genre as a whole. Thatcher Colt, Ellery Queen, and Nero Wolfe are all cast in the Vance mold to some extent, and much of the hard boiled school is a reaction against him. Even in 1939, the year Van Dine died, Elliot Paul was still writing a parody of the Vance novels (The Mysterious Mickey Finn). A regular character in the Red Barry comic strip was a parody of Vance who was always interfering in Red’s cases. Long after the novels themselves had begun to go downhill in content and sales the figure of Vance was still the best known detective figure this side of the pond.
Also the British school switched over to novel length a bit earlier than the American school, thanks to E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. In the states it wasn’t until Van Dine and Vance that the novel length really caught on over here, even though some writers had always worked at novel length. We tend to forget just how much impact Van Dine and Vance had.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Van Dine’s twenties books were bestsellers at a time when the average detective novel sold only a few thousand copies (mostly to subscription libraries), no wonder they had influence! Plus, they had intellectual cachet, which helped with people who were still embarrassed to admit reading mysteries.
Detection writers in England tended to segregate their books in their minds between thrillers and detective novels proper (Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys vs. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Allingam’s Sweet Danger vs. Death of a Ghost, Rhode’s The Double Florin vs. The Davidson Case). Street began as “John Rhode” with thrillers and wrote a few more in the twenties that are more accurately characterized as thrillers, then shifted fully into detection. He then began “Miles Burton” in 1930 with thrillers, but there again soon shifted into full detection.
Even Crofts wrote a few more in the thiller mode, it seems to me: The Pit Prop Syndicate, Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery and The Box Office Murders. Of course, several of his tales involve murder conspiracies, which treads close to the criminal gang of the thriller; but I would say as long as the gang is “amateur” we can remain happily in detection-land.
I think that, conceptually, the British were slower than the Americans to recognize the idea of the “crime novel”: the tale that treats crime seriously. When the Hammett novels first came out, reviewers tended to categorize them as “thrillers” or “shockers.” Clearly there is a significant difference between the Edgar Wallace and Dashiell Hammett schools, but it took a bit for that fact to sink in in Britain.
When the Detection Club was formed, it was set up in opposition to the Edgar Wallace style thriller. I’m not sure a lot of critics today fully appreciate the significance of Edgar Wallace (and his sales) in Britain. They don’t read him anymore, and have rather forgotten him. Even after he died, there were people vying all through the thirties to be his “heir” (Horler, Nigel Morland, etc.).
July 27th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
In Snobbery With Violence Colin Watson reprints a cartoon from the era of a bookseller asking a customer, “Have you seen the noonday Edgar Wallace?” And his influence was enough in the States that he was a huge celebrity when he came West.
Still I think the Detection Club was about equally divided between reacting to Wallace and to Sax Rohmer. At least two of the rules are aimed directly at Rohmer — the use of Chinese villains and ‘poisons unknown to science.”
Still, in all fairness the ‘rules’ were sometimes observed fairly flexibly by some of the members.
I’ve read a few of Rhode’s thrillers, but the particular Dr. Priestly I’m thinking of was pretty much a straight detective story until the dramatic ending. Agatha Christie seemed to take some delight in coming as close to breaking the rules as she could without actually violating them.
July 28th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Sax Rohmer pretty much owned the Evil Chinaman genre, to the extent that is something of which to be proud!
Rhode’s book to which you refer is The Venner Crime. The confrontation at the end is dramatic, but I don’t believe there’s anything about it that really takes the tale out of the confines of the detective novel. With Eberhart, the tension begins on page one sometimes and in unrelenting! Crofts has some violent-confrontation-with-criminal climaxes in his proper derective novels as well.
The rules of the Detection Club were much less severe than the very limiting ones of S. S. Van Dine. I personally feel that no British detective novelist was bound to follow the dictates of S. S. Van Dine. 😉
July 28th, 2009 at 3:39 am
Of the melodramatic Anthony Wynne, by the way, my impression is he was more highly-regarded in the United States! Note he never became a member of the Detection Club (my guess he was never asked).
September 18th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
[…] Note: Curt hasreviewed another book by Carolyn Wells on this blog, Feathers Left Around, from 1923. […]
August 31st, 2010 at 11:14 pm
[…] reading The Gold Bag (1911, reviewed here ) and Feathers Left Around (1923, reviewed here )– early and middle period Wells efforts respectively–I thought I would try a late one, […]
November 22nd, 2018 at 8:28 pm
[…] book review on a blog. The comments are […]