Wed 4 Mar 2015
Mike Nevins on STUART PALMER, HELEN EUSTIS, and JOHN DICKSON CARR.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns[12] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
Usually I try to have my column finished by the end of each month so it can be posted around the beginning of the next, but having a February column ready by late January proved impossible. Reason One: To my surprise and delight, a book of mine that came out last year, a little trifle called Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law, was nominated for an Edgar by Mystery Writers of America, which meant that first I had to decide whether at my advanced age I wanted to come to New York late in April for the Edgars dinner, and second that I had to find a decent place to stay that wouldn’t cost me a pair of limbs that I still need.
Reason Two: I was recently asked to write something for the 75th anniversary issue of EQMM, which comes out next year, and have been spending time trying to cobble something together that would be worthy of the occasion. I’m happy to report that the piece is coming along nicely.
Reason Three: I’m also trying to put the final touches on another book — one that has nothing to do with our genre and wouldn’t be nominated for an Edgar even if pigs started to fly — and last-minute glitches have been gathering on the horizon like Hitchcock’s birds.
Reason Four: Keep reading.
Reason Five: I simply couldn’t think of anything relevant to the genre that I wanted to say, so finally I decided to give up the idea of a February column and shoot for March. Bang.
A number of years ago I devoted part of a column to a Stuart Palmer story, now more than 80 years old, which begins at a St. Patrick’s Day parade on which the APRIL sun is shining down. I couldn’t imagine how that howler got past any editor but at least took comfort from the fact that the story never appeared in EQMM and therefore that the gaffe didn’t get by the eagle eye of Fred Dannay, probably the most meticulous editor the genre has ever seen.
A week or two ago I stumbled upon another Palmer story for which I can’t say the same. “The Riddle of the Green Ice†first appeared in the Chicago Tribune (April 13, 1941) but was reprinted in Volume 1 Number 2 of EQMM (Winter 1941-42) and included in The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (Jonathan pb #J26, 1947), a paperback collection Fred edited.
In the first scene the display window of a jewelry store on Manhattan’s 57th Street is smashed and the thief gets away. Palmer specifically tells us that the robbery took place on a “rainy Saturday afternoonâ€. A few pages later he gives us a scene that occurs on the following Monday, which he solemnly assures us is “four days after the shattering of the jewelers’ window….â€
Yikes! How in the world could an eagle-eyed editor like Fred Dannay have missed that? Palmer’s story also appears in Fred’s collection The Female of the Species (1943), and sure enough the same gaffe pops up in that printing. Double yikes!!
In another column dating back a few years I wrote that of all the authors Anthony Boucher reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1940s, Ray Bradbury, who had just died, was probably the last person standing. Recently I learned I was wrong. Surviving Bradbury by several years was Helen Eustis, author of the Edgar-winning novel The Horizontal Man (1946), who died on January 11 of this year at age 98.
Well, technically perhaps I wasn’t wrong. The book was published during Boucher’s tenure at the Chronicle and he mentioned it a few times, for example when MWA awarded it the best-novel Edgar, but he never actually reviewed it for the paper. I wonder who did. Except for her later novel The Fool Killer (1954), Eustis never wrote anything else in our genre. Our loss.
For anyone like me who began seriously reading mysteries in the Eisenhower era, the name of John Dickson Carr was then and still is one to conjure with. He’s been dead since 1977, but no one has yet come close to taking over his position as the premier practitioner of the locked-room and impossible-crime type of detective novel.
We never met but I remain eternally grateful to him not only for giving me countless hours of reading pleasure, but also for telling his readers that in a small way I reciprocated. In the last full year of his life he reviewed my first novel for his EQMM column (March 1976) and called it the most attractive mystery he’d read in months.
Since his death he’s been the subject of at least two major books: Douglas G. Greene’s biography The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995) and S.T. Joshi’s John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (1990). Now those volumes are about to be joined by a third. James E. Keirans’ The John Dickson Carr Companion will run around 400 pages and include an entry for every novel, short story and published radio play in the canon and just about every important character in any of the above, not to mention sections on such subjects as Carr-related alcoholic beverages, automobiles, weapons, London landmarks and Latin quotations.
How do I know so much about this as yet unpublished book? Because I’ve been asked by the publisher (Ramble House) to run my aging eyes over the book in pdf form and make any corrections I think it needs. That, amigos, is Reason Four behind the absence of a February column. I don’t know precisely when the Companion will be ready for prime time, but my best guess is a few months from now.
I haven’t finished going over the entire book yet but there’s one Carr-related literary incident that I’m willing to bet Keirans doesn’t mention. To know about it you have to have read the published volume of the correspondence between the Russian emigre novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and the distinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). Nabokov — or, as Wilson called him, Volodya — was fond of mystery fiction; Wilson — or, as Nabokov called him, Bunny — hated it.
In a letter dated December 10, 1943 and addressed to Wilson and his then wife, novelist Mary McCarthy, Nabokov indicates that he’d recently read a whodunit entitled The Judas Window. The title of course is that of the novel published in 1938 under Carr’s pseudonym of Carter Dickson, but Nabokov’s letter seems to indicate that he thought the book had been written by McCarthy.
“I did not think much of [it], Mary. It is not your best effort…. [T]hat lucky shot through the keyhole is not quite convincing and you ought to have found something better.†How could such a mistake have happened? Wouldn’t the Dickson byline have been on any copy Nabokov might have read? However it happened, you’d expect that either Wilson or McCarthy would quickly have corrected Nabokov’s misapprehension.
But in fact there’s not another word about the book anywhere in the correspondence, and the editor of the collection of letters, Prof. Simon Karlinsky, was unfamiliar with detective fiction and printed Nabokov’s words without comment. Somehow I wound up with a copy of the first edition of the correspondence (Harper, 1979) and wrote to Prof. Karlinsky with a correction. In the revised and expanded edition (University of California Press, 2001), both Carr and I are acknowledged in footnotes to the Nabokov letter.
March 4th, 2015 at 11:04 pm
Hmmm?
Would have been interesting if HM showed up in THE GROUP.
I don’t think Wilson liked anything much that was popular. He loathed THE LORD OF THE RINGS too.
That said, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” is a great title for an article on the genre.
Nabokov, Wilson, and McCarthy? Fly on the wall time by any standard.
I am surprised Fred Dannay missed those inconsistencies, but editors have always been prone to slips. To this day Dumas has a street in THE THREE MUSKETEERS named for one of Napoleon’s marshals and almost no one ever comments on it.
March 5th, 2015 at 2:36 am
That does sound as though he thought that McCarthy had written it. The current article in THE PASSING TRAMP reads as though Nabokov thought that she should have found something better to read, but this does sound weirdly as though he thought that she was the author. Have to say that neither Nabokov or Wilson sound like a bundle of laughs.
The slips that authors make and editors don’t pick up on are fun. In THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE Watson thinks that it’s Autumn, Holmes thinks that it’s June, and the ‘League’ thinks that it’s October!
March 5th, 2015 at 4:56 am
Always enjoy your insights and literary detection!
March 5th, 2015 at 10:50 am
RE: THE JUDAS WINDOW quotes. “It is not your best effort.” means “It is not your best effort at recommending a mystery.” The reference “you should’ve found something better” means that Nabokov thought Mary should’ve chosen a different detective novel to read not she should’ve found a way to better plot the book.
I think some papers got shuffled around in transcribing that letter. The bulk of the letter is a discussion of Gogol’s writing. THE JUDAS WINDOW comments are offhand and the portion replaced by the ellipses in Mike’s quoted passages Nabokov returns to discussing Gogol and his mother’s naïve belief that her son wrote almost anything published in Russia. Then inexplicably returns to talking about McCarthy’s like for THE JUDAS WINDOW. It’s almost as if a page is missing or got out of order. Makes no sense to me, it’s not even true stream of consciousness as sometimes letter writing can be. It’s easy to see how someone might be get confused. But I don’t think the letter conveys that Nabokov thought Mary McCarthy wrote THE JUDAS WINDOW. That makes no sense either. Nabokov wasn’t stupid or naïve like Gogol’s mother. It only reads that way if you don’t know who wrote the book.
March 5th, 2015 at 1:28 pm
Bradstreet
It is quite remarkable that Curt Evans wrote about that same passage (re JUDAS WINDOW) on his blog less than a week ago. I don’t know how coincidences like this happen, but they do.
Here’s the link to Curt’s article:
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-bells-and-bees-edmund-wilson-and.html
March 5th, 2015 at 1:33 pm
The book that Mike quoted from is: Simon Karlinsky, ed., Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Harper & Row, 1979. (Revised edition, University of California Press, 2001.)
March 5th, 2015 at 1:40 pm
I was surprised to learn that Helen Eustis wrote only the two crime novels, but it is true. I have both in paperback editions, but I’ve never read either one. Back when I was reading only detective novels, neither of them sounded like one to me. Mysteries with too much of a psychological nature, I thought. I suspect I was wrong. If anyone has read either one recently, do they hold up today?
March 5th, 2015 at 1:46 pm
Speaking of editing lapses, back when I first started reading mysteries, they used to drive me batty. A small error in location, date, or what a person said and how it would be referred to later, and I’d stop reading and couldn’t go any further. I’d wonder if the error was a deliberate clue I was supposed to pick up on, hidden cleverly away by the author. I either was so young as to not realize that it was a simple, unintentional mistake, or I couldn’t tell if it was or not.
One story I remember in particular was by H. C. Bailey, and what I spotted as a mistake tied me up so much I stopped reading the story and couldn’t read anything more by Bailey for years. (Make of that what you can.)
March 5th, 2015 at 1:49 pm
John, in Comment 4. Your explanation makes sense to me. I’ll make sure Mike sees it. I’d like to think that an editor more familiar with detective fiction would have made the context clearer.
March 5th, 2015 at 2:45 pm
Steve,
Good thing you didn’t know London. Doyle is full of mistakes including trains going the wrong direction from the station, and everyone’s favorite, Watson identifying rabbit bones as human. At least the characters description didn’t change in mid paragraph as sometimes happened with Edgar Wallace.
Even Ross Macdonald had “prone on his face,” and Ian Fleming “Bond’s knees, the Achilles heel of all skiers …” Much of Lord Peter Wimsey’s erudition is wrong on everything from art to his knowledge of wine that solves one short case.
Most fiction writers add a codicil to Chandler’s famous a man with a gun enters the room when things slow down, that being when you don’t know what you are talking about, tap dance.
Re the JUDAS WINDOW I think John is certainly right. I can’t imagine anyone thinking McCarthy wrote mystery fiction. Most likely it was recommended to him by someone. In any case Nabokov strikes me as more a Fell man than HM.
March 5th, 2015 at 3:58 pm
I reviewed THE HORIZONTAL MAN back in June 2011 on my blog. I think it holds up very well and I maintain, despite a tendency towards overwrought prose, that it’s a landmark novel in the genre for its subject matter, its intensely dark tone and its surprise ending (which I’m afraid will not be much a surprise to a 21st century reader). For those who like a diverting entertainment with pleasant likeable characters you will be sorely disappointed. Eustis’ novel is an exploration of the nasty side of human nature; its teeming with vindictiveness, base motives, and tortured souls. I have said that it is most likely a purge novel as Eustis was just getting over her cheating husband’s affairs. The murder victim is thought to be modeled after Eustis’ husband Alfred Fisher, a poetry professor known for dallying with his female students. My review, BTW, is one of the most popular posts on my blog with over 1500 hits. I think the flurry of hits (it rose from 1200+ just over the past two months) is related to Eustis’ death and the sudden interest in her mystery novels.
Link: THE HORIZONTAL MAN at Pretty Sinister Books.
March 5th, 2015 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for the link, John. You did a great job of describing the book without revealing all of the spoilers you pointed out that you could have, but backed out just in time.
It’s also difficult to recommend (sort of) a book with no redeemable characters, but is worth reading anyway, and that’s what you were able to do.
The reaction of those who left comments was interesting, too, as quite a few took your review as full reason why they will never read the book.
To tell you the truth, I felt that way myself, but after reading your comments on the comments, I now think I will, next time it turns up while I’m reorganizing my collection. The one I have is the Pocket paperback, the cover of which also graces this latest column from Mike Nevins.