Thu 4 Jan 2018
MIKE NEVINS on 1930, HELEN REILLY and F. VAN WYCK MASON.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , Reviews[13] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
A new year, a new month, a new column. A few days after anyone reads this I’ll enter the fourth and no doubt final quarter century of my life. What ho.
For reasons I’ll explain later, a few weeks ago I began to think about the year 1930. A sad year in one respect for those of us who love crime and detective fiction, since it saw the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but a banner year in other respects since it also saw the debut of John Dickson Carr (IT WALKS BY NIGHT), the second novel of Ellery Queen (THE FRENCH POWDER MYSTERY), the third of Dashiell Hammett (THE MALTESE FALCON), and the beginnings of the long careers of two writers not in the same league with the Big Three but, I decided, worth a few paragraphs today. The first novels of both authors were published by the Doubleday Crime Club and, minus dust jackets, look like twins on my shelves.
Helen Reilly (1891-1962) is not much read today, but in her time she ranked with Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mignon G. Eberhart and Leslie Ford as one of the best known American women writing whodunits. Her first two novels, THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH and THE DIAMOND FEATHER, were both published in 1930. Several Web sources list the latter as her first book but I’ve checked the Copyright Office online catalog and found that BULLFINCH has an earlier registration date (June 20, as opposed to October 31 for FEATHER) and an earlier number in the copyright system.
Whether it’s a better novel than its successor I don’t know but I must confess I didn’t find it terribly engrossing. The setting is a privately owned island off the New England coast and the detective is a shrewd country sheriff named Tilden who apparently never returned for an encore. Our viewpoint character is not, as one might suspect after reading later Reillys, a beautiful woman in peril. Cliff Shaver, junior attorney in a top New York law firm, is sent to the island by his senior partner to find out why utilities tycoon John Bedford has torn up his will, which leaves most of his estate to his 19-year-old granddaughter, and what the old tyrant plans to do with his fortune now.
He arrives at the island just ahead of a monster storm and is introduced to the dramatis personae: old John, who’s confined to a palatial suite in the house, his son Mark, Mark’s second wife Claire, his daughter by his deceased first wife (the teenager who was to have become an heiress), his 4-year-old son by his second marriage, Claire’s ancient mother, two resident doctors and an enigmatic butler. Late on the night of his arrival Shaver visits the elder Bedford’s quarters for a legal conference and finds him dead.
It soon transpires that he was poisoned by hydrocyanic acid in the barley water he always drank before going to bed. But the rare bullfinch he kept in his room, and to whom he always gave a late snack of a cracker moistened with his barley water, is alive and well and chirping as usual. What gives here? Sheriff Tilden somehow makes his way through the storm to the crime scene and begins to investigate.
Shaver and the sheriff are convinced there may be a lead in Bedford’s locked wall safe, to which no one seems to have the combination. Tilden happens to have all the skills of a professional safecracker but the hidey-hole yields nothing to help solve the murder. Neither does anything else. Meanwhile all the suspects—well, all except the 4-year-old—take up endless pages doing suspicious things which aren’t worth the effort to itemize, and the crime is solved when Shaver enters the wrong room at the wrong time and—but I’d be a toad if I said more.
This novel definitely dates from a long way back. The teen-age girl is called Miss Anne and a man’s pajamas are referred to as a sleeping suit. Prohibition is still in force but the Bedfords apparently have a bootlegger and the family cocktail-mixer tells Shaver: “[W]e’ve got everything in the shaker except Father’s Ed Pinaud’s.†Anyone know what that is? It’s a popular brand of mustache wax. (Not that I ever had a mustache but my late brother did and I once saw a can of the stuff at his house.) I see that someone on eBay wants over $300 for a first edition. My advice to any potential buyer: save your money.
Our other 1930 debutant was the once quite popular but now long forgotten F. Van Wyck Mason. Most of the print and Web sources I’ve consulted give the year of his birth as 1901 but one or two date him back to 1897. Everyone seems to agree that his middle name was pronounced Van Wike. His birthplace was Boston but he spent most of his early years in Berlin and Paris (where his grandfather was U.S. Consul General) and didn’t learn English until he was in his teens.
After graduating from Harvard in 1924 he started his own importing business and traveled the world purchasing antique rugs and other objets d’art.
As a fiction writer he debuted in 1928, appearing in many pulps but most often in Argosy, which published several of his historical adventure serials with titles like CAPTAIN NEMESIS, CAPTAIN JUDAS, CAPTAIN RENEGADE, CAPTAIN REDSPURS and CAPTAIN LONG KNIFE. As these titles unsubtly suggest, he was a military kind of guy, serving in Squadron A of the New York National Guard and later in the Maryland National Guard. He was also something of an athlete, his favorite sport being polo, a subject which crops up in many of his novels and stories.
During World War II he put his writing career on hold and returned to the military, rising to the rank of Colonel and the position of chief historian on General Eisenhower’s staff. After the war he returned to fiction writing and eventually moved to Bermuda, where in 1978 he drowned.
He was probably best known for a string of gargantuan historical adventure novels, beginning with THREE HARBOURS (1938), STARS ON THE SEA (1940) and RIVERS OF GLORY (1942), but here we are interested in his crime fiction. His first novel, SEEDS OF MURDER, is set in late July of 1929, the last full year of Conan Doyle’s life, and introduces his series character Captain Hugh North, an officer in Army Intelligence but never seen in uniform and obviously intended as an American Sherlock Holmes since in the first few pages of his first exploit he’s called “probably the best detective this side of Scotland Yard†and “that prince of detectives….â€
Appropriately enough for a sleuth modeled on Holmes, he has a Watson and, I kid you not, another medical man, a doctor named Walter Allan who vanished after his second appearance in the series. North is visiting with Allan at Hempstead, Long Island, when both men are invited to dinner at the palatial home of Royal Delancey, a former Philippine plantation owner who made a fortune during World War I and afterwards returned to the U.S. and bought into a firm of stockbrokers.
If I mention that a house party is in progress there, can you avoid thinking that this already sounds like a traditional English country-house mystery? As in THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH, the premises are besieged by a savage storm. Before dinner can be served, one of the party guests, who is also Delancey’s brokerage partner, is found dead in his bathroom, seemingly having strangled himself with a strong chain. But why was his apparent suicide note written on a piece of paper a quarter-inch shorter than the other sheets on his desk, and how could he have reached the hook on which the chain was hung by standing on a wire-and-enamel wastebasket too flimsy to support his weight?
Even stranger, why were three mysterious seeds found on the bathroom floor, arranged in a precise triangle? North keeps his counsel and doesn’t dispute the police verdict of suicide, but before dawn the next morning Delancey himself is stabbed to death with an exotic dagger in his bedroom, and three more of those triangularly arranged seeds are lying beneath his chair.
Among the chief suspects is a former neighbor of Delancey’s who thanks to investing with the dead man had lost the fortune he’d made as a henequin planter in the Philippines, but there are a number of others: Delancey’s mistress, his abused young wife and her brother (both of whom are also near broke after having entrusted him with their money), and a sinister Filipino butler who perpetrates lines like “‘Scuse if I speak slow. Me no spik English ver’ well.â€
At times the novel veers close to silent-movie melodrama, especially at the action climax where North disguises himself as a gypsy and sets a trap for the murderer in front of a disused Russian Orthodox church. But, unlike most of the subsequent books in the long series, this one is a genuine detective novel, rife with complexities, clues, conundrums, the works. Mason seems to know his Philippine background and datura seeds but ridiculous is the best word for his notion of an inquest, held in the Delancey living room and culminating with the coroner’s jury indicting two suspects.
The novel isn’t as scrupulously fair as, say, an early Ellery Queen, and its politically incorrect portrayal of Filipinos and gypsies—oops, my bad, we’re required today to call them Roma — make it an unlikely candidate for revival in the 21st century. In later novels North was promoted to Major and then to Colonel (somehow leapfrogging over the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) and his exploits stressed international intrigue in exotic locales rather than detection, turning him into something of a prototype for James Bond and perhaps for James Atlee Phillips’ American secret agent Joe Gall. Personally I wish he’d remained a Captain and a Holmes-like sleuth, at least for a little longer.
So what sparked my interest in the year 1930? A thought that recently crossed my mind: that year marked not only the death of Conan Doyle but the birth of a man whom, like Doyle, I discovered in my teens but who may never have been mentioned before alongside the creator of Holmes. I refer, if you haven’t already guessed, to Clint Eastwood, whose new Euro-thriller THE 15:17 TO PARIS will be released this February. He’ll turn 88 in a few months. If and when we reach that age, will any of us enjoy the creativity and vigor Eastwood still has today?
January 4th, 2018 at 6:30 pm
As the Reilly specialist in the room, I have to comment.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with Mike Nevins’ assessment of it as not “engrossing”. My review calls it “a mildly pleasant but undistinguished early novel by Helen Reilly.” It’s an apprentice work. I enjoyed reading it. But then I love Reilly.
Reilly had great descriptive powers, and a few passages show her warming them up. Everything to do with boats, the boathouse or walking outside in the rain are well done.
The report from Branch, the young police surgeon (first half of Chapter 13) is also scientifically interesting.
I also liked the butler.
I read this through Interlibrary Loan. Amazed that copies are going for 300 dollars.
Have never seen a copy of THE DIAMOND FEATHER. And never seen the slightest sign that anyone has read it since 1931. No reviews, no reputation.
Thank you for a good review.
January 4th, 2018 at 7:41 pm
I’ve read Reilly off and on but never consistently. My opinion varies from book to book, but she had her strengths and no few titles are worth the time.
While the thriller angle dominated the later North’s, especially after the War, the detective element played some role well into the late thirties when North often has to play the role without the help of modern police. I especially recall a scene in one where he has to make do with his own ballistics test and fingerprinting.
Up until Mason returned to active service North titles inevitably had the word Murder in them as in THE SULU SEA MURDERS, THE SHANGHAI BUND MURDERS, and at least one post war title loosely based on the Sir Harry Oakes case in Bermuda.
Major North had a short lived radio series, THE MAN FROM G-2 and well known comic book artist Nick Cardy (Teen Titans and Bat Lash) tried to syndicate Major North, a comic strip. Later Steve Canyon, after he returned to active service, and DAN FLAGG both seemed influenced by North, certainly the latter whose hero was modeled on artist Don Sherwood’s friend the then middle aged Robert Taylor.
Like Edison Marshall, Mason was a pulp star who made the big time hitting the post war boom in historical novels, but he kept working on North, who was still going strong in the seventies.
January 4th, 2018 at 10:18 pm
The several Helen Reilly books I’ve read have all been above average, but I’ve never had the urge to read binge read them, by any means. I’ve sampled Van Wyck Mason, but for one reason or another, I’ve never gotten far into one. Perhaps it’s time to try again!
January 4th, 2018 at 10:33 pm
There are half a dozen Reilly’s available on Kindle for $2.99 or $3.99, but not Diamond Feather.
Surprisingly for a public domain author Mason does not have any books available for Kindle.
January 5th, 2018 at 12:01 am
Helen Reilly is not very well known, but in spite of how popular his historical fiction was at the time and as much as I’d like to think otherwise, I’d have to say that Van Wyck Mason is totally forgotten.
January 5th, 2018 at 12:44 am
These days almost no one is more than a breath away from at least a ebook revival, but American writers don’t fare as well as the classic Brit mystery school in that market because no one promotes them with attractive covers and reevaluations.
Writers as obscure as John G. Brandon and his Inspector McCarthy series from THRILLER are in print in attractive ebook formats while most Americans from the era are ignored save for some from the pulps and many paperback writers of the fifties and sixties.
Meanwhile the few Mason books available in some ebook format are encrypted and available only for viewers with vision disabilities who can get the coded readers.
January 5th, 2018 at 12:45 am
Re Public Domain, Mason died in 1978, so he still has a few years to go before that kicks in, I think.
January 5th, 2018 at 10:43 am
Mason’s lost race novel, PHALANXES OF ATLAN, is available in both print and e-book versions from Wildside Press. I read it a few years ago and enjoyed it. The first things I read by him were some of his Colonel North espionage novels back in the Sixties, before I ever knew he was so prolific in the pulps. I’ve read a number of his historical novels since then and enjoyed all of them.
January 6th, 2018 at 2:03 am
The people who still read Van Wyck Mason today also read this blog. Or they should!
January 6th, 2018 at 10:43 am
Steve, that observation is right on the money. I remember always having interest when a new work by Mason appeared on the paperback carousel. Personally, I preferred Samuel Shellabarger, Frank Yerby and Edison Marshall, but Mason was there.
January 6th, 2018 at 5:53 pm
I have an anecdote about Van Wyck Mason to add here. In 1978 I was writing an essay on him for one of the reference books on mystery fiction and wrote to him for some information and to ask him if he would autograph some of his books if I sent them to him. He was living in Bermuda at the time and he sent me a packet of personally inscribed bookplates to tip into my copies of his books to save me the time and expense of mailing the books to him. As it turned out this was fortunate for soon afterwards he went swimming and drowned. Any books I would have sent him would have been lost. My set of his books and that letter to me are now part of the Cox Collection at the University of Minnesota.
January 6th, 2018 at 9:06 pm
A good ending to a tragic story, Randy. Is most of your collection there at the university now?
January 7th, 2018 at 4:16 pm
Steve, Yes, my collection is at the University now. It still needs to be cataloged.
A friend who saw the letter from VWM and who reads Mystery*File reminded me that I had sent the man a dollar for postage for his reply and he returned it and asked for my autograph. He also explained why he had stopped writing the Colonel North stories by blaming his decision on “that damn Ian Fleming.”