Tue 3 May 2011
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: MANNING LONG – Short Shrift.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Crime Fiction IV , Reviews[4] Comments
William F. Deeck
MANNING LONG – Short Shrift. Duell Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1945. Bestseller Mystery #B118, digest paperback, no date [1950].
When Kathy Floyd is returning to the cold bosom of her erstwhile in-laws in southern Virginia, she asks Liz (short for Louise) Parrott, not at all reluctant to get into another possible investigation, to accompany her. Except for the upper-berth problem, the train trip in uneventful until Liz falls into a young man, a young man soon to suffer more fatal injuries.
Two more murders occur as Liz assists the county sheriff, with his grudging assistance, in his investigations. She discovers the murderer at the same time he does — and well before I did.
An interesting and amusing picture of Southern “aristocracy,” self-appointed and as strange as other aristocracies, wartime problems, and some peculiar people, with fair, albeit tricky play. While not a memorable novel, it does encourage me to try to find other Liz Parrott investigations.
Bibliographic data: To be added tomorrow, along with a cover image. Bill’s last paragraph is particularly encouraging!
[UPDATE] 05-04-11. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:
LONG, MANNING. 1906–. Born in Chase City, Virginia, on 3/4/1906; married Peter Wentworth Williams on 5/23/1944. No further details found.
* Here’s Blood in Your Eye (n.) Duell 1941 [Liz Parrott; New York City, NY]
* Vicious Circle (n.) Duell 1942 [Liz Parrott; New York]
* False Alarm (n.) Duell 1943 [Liz Parrott; New York City, NY]
* Bury the Hatchet (n.) Duell 1944 [Liz Parrott; New York]
* Short Shrift (n.) Duell 1945 [Liz Parrott; Virginia]
* Dull Thud (n.) Duell 1947 [Liz Parrott; New York City, NY]
* Savage Breast (n.) Duell 1948 [Liz Parrott; New York City, NY]
About Liz Parrott herself, I have found little information. She does have a husband Gordon who sometimes but not always is part of the cases she solves. One bookseller includes this information about Vicious Circle:
“Liz Parrott had never met her husband’s relatives until the strange summons to a family Christmas came. She didn’t want to go, either—from all that had heard, they wouldn’t be very friendly to an ex-artist’s model. Her suspicions of the family’s hostility turned out to be well-founded. She had only another outsider, Ruth, to comfort her. And when Ruth of arsenic poisoning, it seemed that there was a Liz to mourn her — only Liz who really cared to bring the murderer to justice.”
And an eBay seller quotes this about Dull Thud:
“In a house full of women whose men are away, one can expect a certain amount of backbiting and gossip, not to say a little hair pulling. When it comes, however, to stealing someone else’s love letters, Liz Parrott thought things were going to far. How much further they could go she discovered on a bleak morning she went shivering down to the cellar to find out what was wrong with the furnace-and found murder……. ”
May 4th, 2011 at 6:29 am
Sounds like an upper-class ‘murder, she wrote’.
May 4th, 2011 at 11:37 am
From what I’ve discovered so far, there are some similarities. Not that Liz Parrott is upper class, so far as I can tell, but in the sense that she’s an amateur detective who has no real reason to keep coming across murder cases that she does.
More like Pamela North, I think, de-emphasizing Jerry just a little.
May 6th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
I have to like a book titled “Dull Thud.”
July 4th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
A few comments, belatedly:
Manning Long’s husband was Peter Williams, a noted ceramist who designed MWA’s Edgar award.
Liz Parrot’s husband, Gordon, is an investigator with the NYC District Attorney’s office, and in the books in which he appears he shares the detecting with her; in the two titles in which Liz functions as a solo amateur sleuth, Gordon is away in Washington doing G-2 government work.
Anthony Boucher was a great admirer of the Liz Parrot mysteries. In reviewing one he wrote: “There are many mystery-mongers whom I highly esteem for various weighty reasons, but there are few indeed who are more sheer fun to read than the brusquely ironic Manning Long.” I concur with this, and also with his assessment that HERE’S BLOOD IN YOUR EYE, FALSE ALARM, and DULL THUD are particularly well done.