Tue 4 Sep 2018
A CRIME CLUB Mystery Review: JEAN LESLIE – A Hair of the Dog.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[6] Comments
JEAN LESLIE – A Hair of the Dog. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1947. No paperback edition.
As an author, Jean Leslie is all but unknown today, but in mid-40s and early 50s she wrote a total of eight works of mystery and detective fiction, all published under Doubleday’s long-established Crime Club imprint. The first three take place in Academia and feature a series character named Peter Ponsonby, a professor of some note who dabbles on the side in writing pulp mysteries. About the author herself, Hubin supplies the following information: “Jean Leslie Cornett (1908-1994). Born in Omaha, raised in Santa Monica; teaching fellow in psychology.”
Anyone interested in a little Internet research can take it from here. This may be a small foothold to work from.
The book itself, Leslie’s fourth, begins in an unusual way. The story is told by Jennifer Caldwell, a young woman who has been the secretary to a wealthy but retired manufacturer of dog food for several years now. She stops in at a lawyer’s office, one chosen at random, to explain her concerns. Her employer has just decided to cut several family members out of his will, but to add a bequest of $100,000 to Jennifer.
After telling Mr. Barclay all the details of her employer’s family, plus two research scientists who live on the property, along with two servants, she then tells him she doesn’t want the money and what can he do to help her about it? He replies that he’s a corporation lawyer and he doesn’t handle cases like this. She retorts, then why did you spend the last hour listening and leering at me? He replies, who wouldn’t?
This is, of course, yet another dysfunctional families such as vintage detective mysteries are often populated with, but Jennifer’s employee, whose largess everyone else depends on, is a fine old gentleman who know exactly who the members of his family are. Unfortunately someone decides to stop him permanently before he actually signs the new will he has threatened everyone with.
As a detective story, this one is purely middle of the road, and in fact I enjoyed it less than I did the characters themselves, all of whom had some depth to them, including the narrator, who quickly reveals that she has some secrets she’s not sharing. As for Mr. Barclay, it seems as though the attraction was mutual, and no, Chapter One is not the last we see of him.
September 5th, 2018 at 1:10 pm
What a pity the author decided to take advantage of her teaching career in creating an academic as her series protagonist. Both Cornett’s father and husband were undertakers. Think what the literature might have gained if she’d chosen to write about a mortician who fights crime.
September 5th, 2018 at 1:21 pm
Thanks for the information, Jon, much appreciated!
But do you know, there’s little that’s new under the sub. Some few years ago now, I put together a list of various crime fighters who were morticians and undertakers in their day jobs:
https://mysteryfile.com/FuneralHomes.html
September 5th, 2018 at 8:36 pm
Sounds interesting if not a priority. I’ve come to enjoy mysteries from this period even though they are often caught between the excess of the Golden Age and an attempt to write more down to earth psychologically sound novels.
September 5th, 2018 at 11:53 pm
Postwar detective fiction doesn’t get nearly the attention as the earlier Golden Age novels do, but it’s one of my favorite time periods, for reasons very much as you say, David. More books like this one will be reviewed here soon, I have a feeling, as time goes on.
September 12th, 2018 at 2:08 pm
Thanks for the list of undertakers and morticians in detective stories; it’s fantastic. I guess there really is nothing new under the sun.
June 8th, 2021 at 3:54 pm
Jean Leslie did write about psychiatrists and psychological effects of crime in at least one book. The Intimate Journal of Warren Winslow is a fascinating exploration of a megalomaniacal writer succumbing to his own lurid imagination told almost exclusively in diary entries with letters and newspaper articles making up the final section. One of the supporting characters is psychologist Dr. August Fremling who has made a study of Winslow’s novels and comes to some startling conclusions without ever having met the man. It’s a fine book, sadly her last. But it’s so far ahead of what most crime writers were doing in 1952 that I’m eager to read more of her earlier work. Based on this book I judge her to be in the same school as Jean Potts and Margaret Millar and other women crime writers who were interested in marriages falling apart and morbid psychological defects in character.