Mon 6 Dec 2021
An Archived Locked Room Mystery Review by Maryell Cleary: PHILIP MacDONALD – The White Crow.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
PHILIP MacDONALD – The White Crow. Colonel Anthony Gethryn #2. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1928. Dial Press, US, hardcover, 1928.
This is the second of MacDonald’s books featuring Colonel Anthony Gethryn. The much better-known The Rasp was the first.
In The White Crow he presents a puzzle of the locked-room variety. An elderly financier, clad only in his underwear, sits in his office chair with his throat cut. The door is locked; the window looks out on a sheer drop; there is no way a murderer could have been concealed in the room, nor could the key have been turned from the; outside.
The office boy has disappeared, though at first that seems to have no connection with the murder. He is an interesting office boy, however, with an unusual sideline for bringing in extra money. Lucas calls in Gethryn, and A.G. works side by side with Superintendents Boyd and Pike.
Not a whisper or jealousy or hostility; the police think Colonel Gethryn is just too, too marvelous. Embarrassing, their hero-worship is at times. The will is a puzzler, and some sleuthing on the part of Anthony’s brother-in-law catches a strange element there.
Naturally it is A.G. who sorts out the lot of secretaries, lawyers, and night-club habitues, deduces bow the crime was done, and finds out whodunit. Though there is good detective work done, the identity of murderer-in-chief is pulled out of a hat.
December 6th, 2021 at 9:21 pm
MacDonald is to me one of the most underrated of the Golden Age writers, and I never quite understood why Gethryn gets under the skin of critics who are perfectly happy to downright ecstatic over the blathering of Peter Wimsey or the eccentricity of Albert Campion (both favorites of mine).
This one is MacDonald still finding his footing though.
Frankly I’ve always thought MacDonald a better overall writer than many of his contemporaries as far as that went. He had a real facility for suspense and drama, penned one classic adventure novel of men in wartime (PATROL), and had an excellent list of credits as a screenwriter, and even wrote a good novelization of the classic science fiction film FORBIDDEN PLANET.
THE RASP, THE MYSTERY OF THE DEAD POLICE, THE NURSEMAID WHO DISAPPEARED, GUEST IN THE HOUSE, and THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER as well as some of his short stories are classics that offer pleasures still when some of his contemporaries with greater reputations seem flat and rather stiff. Certainly, he has a string of successful film adaptations of his work perhaps because the qualities he brought as a screenwriter were there in his prose as well.
There is a kind of reverse snobbery among some mystery critics of the Golden Age form against anyone who can write or tell a story and not just lay out a puzzle almost as if the distrust anyone with the instincts of a storyteller and not merely a puzzler.
I see it in the prejudice against writers like MacDonald, Bailey, Farjeon, and others who could actually write and create characters and not just maneuver pawns on the page and type out time-tables.
I like both, but I’m aware of a sort of reverse snobbery aimed at those capable of generating thrills and suspense and something more than stereotyped country house suspects.
And I still don’t get what is so annoying to some about Anthony Gethryn. If you can put up with Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, Albert Campion, and Roger Sherringham Gethryn seems almost benign in comparison.
December 6th, 2021 at 11:18 pm
Rightly said, David. Philip MacDonald was a writer who wrote classic mysteries that should be remembered more than they are.
I do think, though, that some of his work has been reprinted in recent years, more so than H. C.Bailey, for example, but I may be wrong about that.
This one, though, has some problems with it and is not likely to be reprinted today, and copies are difficult to come by.
December 7th, 2021 at 10:08 am
Bailey has been reprinted in a number (most) of the British Library anthologies edited by Martin Edwards.
December 7th, 2021 at 9:23 pm
I’ve always thought the distrust of MacDonald came from his ability to write thriller level action and suspense as opposed to just spinning out puzzlers. I see that in older critiques of Bailey and Farjeon, all three as adept at thrills as puzzles.
I grant you could say the same about Carr, but his penchant for humor and his eccentric sleuths seemed to counter the taste for adventure and thrills in his books, at least enough to satisfy the pure puzzle cadre.
Bailey is getting a slight revival from Martin Edwards as is Farjeon and as Steve notes some MacDonald is available in e-book form. With reprints of Punshon, Anthony Bathurst adventures, Farjeon, and Christopher Bush in e-book form Bailey and MacDonald certainly deserve to be more easily available.
December 8th, 2021 at 3:36 am
How many of you other than Steve have read this one? It’s pretty damn dreadful. It’s very right-wing, and quite racist.
The murderer – the “white crow†– is an albino negro, who (we’re told) can be identified by his stink in the dark. A white woman is depraved because she is his lover, crossing racial boundaries.
Gethryn proposes abolishing hanging and imprisonment, and replacing them with torture to death.
The trouble with MacDonald isn’t that he can’t write, but that he’s very uneven. Murder Gone Mad and The List of Adrian Messenger are classics, of course, but a lot of the others (even the famous Nursemaid) are padded to the gills, unfair, and anticlimactic.
December 8th, 2021 at 7:53 am
To make a small correction, Nick, this was Maryell Cleary’s review, not mine. I haven’t read the book myself. I knew just enough about it to know that it highly unlikely that any publisher would reprint it any time soon. Thanks for some more specific details, I think!
I suspect the reason you find MacDonald so uneven is that he was always experimenting with the kinds of stories he wrote, and not always with the best results. Since I haven’t read him in a long time, I remember only his best books and can’t further refute your opinion of his lesser work.
December 8th, 2021 at 9:18 pm
I would only point out that Sayers is just as racist as are several others of that era. Not an excuse, but a fact.
I agree MacDonald can be uneven, but despite the padding NURSEMAID works as a suspense classic if not fair play.
The truth is few of the great fair play writers play fair. Christie often depends on incredible coincidence and frankly absurd plots that can only work with wrenching suspension of disbelief.
They work only because we are willing to play the game not for any great realism.
There are misfires by Sayers (I find Busman’s Honeymoon unreadable), Christie, and Marsh, books so uneven as to make you question why you started. Carr has a few of those too. It’s endemic to a genre that expects its writers to hit one out of the ballpark every time they come up to swing yet to swing far more often than mainstream writers in order to compete and make money.
The White Crow isn’t a good book. I wholeheartedly agree. I just don’t think MacDonald falters or fails or is any worse than the majority of his contemporaries, and when he is on the nose he is much better than most of them.