Wed 23 Jul 2008
Archived Review: WILL CREED – Death Wears a Green Hat.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Crime Fiction IV , Reviews[6] Comments
WILL CREED – Death Wears a Green Hat.
Five Star Mystery #42; digest-sized paperback original; 1st printing, 1946.
Not too much is known about Will Creed, except that his real name was William Long (1922- ) and besides the two paperback originals he wrote for Five Star in 1946, he also wrote four more as by Peter Yates for Vulcan and Five Star in 1945. Vulcan was a publisher similar to Five Star Mysteries, so similar in fact, that I’ve compiled provisional checklists for both outfits and made them available online here. [Note: See also the UPDATE below.]
I do like the both the title and the cover of this one, and yes, a green hat figures prominently in the mystery, and I’ll get to it in a minute. Telling the story is a Manhattan-based advertising agency executive named Hal Boyd. Dead is his apartment mate and his best friend, Adrian Clay, a gossip columnist well-known around town.
Where things get interesting is that Boyd’s hat, a midnight-blue homburg is evidently a clue, because it is missing and nowhere to be found until it turns up mysteriously later in his bedroom, but green instead of blue!
Forgive the exclamation point, but that’s purely reflective of Will Creed’s style of writing. Pulp authors often wrote in the same vein, supplying artificial suspense or amazement when they couldn’t take the time (or weren’t able) to manufacture it on their own. I’ll have more to say about this later, and what it meant to me while I was reading the story, but at the moment, let’s reflect a little bit about hats, and what they mean in today’s world, as opposed to the mid-1940s… Who knows today the difference, say, between a fedora and a homburg? Derbies, OK, and panama hats, sure, but mention the names of any other styles, and you may as well be speaking Martian.
Inspector Day, whom Hal Boyd becomes friendly with (at least to a certain degree) and who allows Boyd to confer with him about large segments of his investigations — thinks hats are important too. Allow me to quote the inspector from his conversation with Boyd on page 34:
He looked at me sternly for a minute, his dark eyes questioning. “My dear Mr. Boyd,” came that soft easy voice, “it isn’t the hatness of the hat I’m wanting. It is anything out of place; anything the killer needed badly enough to risk calling it to my attention! It may mean nothing at all, your disappearing hat … but I cannot believe so. When a criminal keys himself to the point where he can do away with a human life, he knows that from that instant his own life lies in abject peril — that there is no choice once murder is done. It is a one-way street, Mr. Boyd. Therefore, anything that falls by the wayside, that disturbs the ordinary course of living, is important … to the murderer and to me. For instance, did the killer need your hat for something? It is far too labyrinthine to permit even the smallest piece of information to escape the eyes in this department, you see? That hat may mean nothing, but I dare not take chances. I am hunting a desperate person, Mr. Boyd, and I must be thorough indeed.”
Boyd thinks of the inspector as rather an intelligent fuddy-duddy, but the inveterate mystery reader knows better. The hat is important, essential, crucial and/or all of the above. The mistake I made, reference above, is underestimating Will Creed as a mystery writer.
He may have had a pulpish, somewhat clumsy, gee-whiz style that lacks the push, the elan and/or the drive it needs to survive on its own, but he also had exactly the right instincts, Agatha Christie-like, to make the plot swivel and turn on a nickel and four pennies — or in other words, wow, I didn’t see that coming! — but without the knack of pulling it off with Christie’s ease and confidence that I really, really wish that Creed had had at his command.
Or maybe he did and I’m just yapping because he fooled the socks off me, no lie. I’m going to have to go back and read it again — and if that isn’t a sure sign of a magician at work, no matter what level of expertise, I sure as shinola don’t know what is.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA. Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:
CREED, WILL. Pseudonym of William Long, (1922- ); other pseudonym: Peter Yates.
Death Comes Grinning. Five Star #47, US, digest pb, 1946.
Death Wears a Green Hat. Five Star #42, US, digest pb, 1946.
YATES, PETER Pseudonym of William Long, (1922- ); other pseudonym: Will Creed.
Curtain Call for Murder. Vulcan #6, US, digest pb, 1945. SC: Thatcher family.
Death Comes to Dinner. Five Star #4, US, digest pb, 1945. SC: Thatcher family.
Death in the Hands of Talent. Five Star #7, US, digest pb, 1945. SC: Sandy Blunt.
The Dress Circle Murders. Five Star #1, digest pb, 1945. SC: Sandy Blunt.
[UPDATE] 07-23-08. I never did finish that article on Vulcan and Five Star Mysteries, although Victor Berch and I did manage to accumulate a lot of information and material toward doing so.
It took Ken Johnson to carry on independently and without me, and it’s his Vintage Digests website that you should be checking out, not mine. Follow the link in the line before, and scroll down to either Five Star or Vulcan.
He doesn’t include many cover images on his site, however. For those, you’ll have to go to the primary Bookscans website. For the Five Star, go here, and you can find some of the Vulcans here.
July 25th, 2008 at 6:16 am
Steve,
This is an interesting article.
I’ve got a copy of one of the Peter Yates novels somewhere, probably “The Dress Circle Murders”. Will have to dig it out and read it.
Mike
July 26th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Mike
If you can find it and do read it, I’d really be interested in knowing what you think. I don’t think Creed’s book is really a diamond in the rough, but for some reason I am always amazed (and surprised) when I read a detective novel from the 40s by a no-name author, and the emphasis is on an ending that’s intended to be a surprise or a twist.
That’s what the editors wanted, and that’s what the reading audience expected, and that’s the kind of detective story every mystery author tried to write. Not always successfully, so maybe my surprise comes from NOT expecting it, at this date in time so far removed.
I hope this makes sense, but this is why I’d be interested in learning what you think of the Peter Yates book. Or anyone else for that matter.
Best
Steve
August 19th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
[…] wrote one other mystery novel under this name, that being Death Wears a Green Hat, which I reviewed here. I also appear to have liked the book I read more than Bill seems to have liked […]
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I can’t believe this! My husband worked with Will in New York in 1955-56 approx. Dear Will..
Here’s what my husband had to say about him:
“SL introduced me to Will Creed Long, another critical moment in my life, for Will had just been given the editor’s job at Advanced Management Magazine and wanted, above all, in self-defense, to take his own production editor with him. As it happened, I had come from California with two possible career goals in mind, to find work either in film production or in magazine editing. Films hadn’t worked out, but this sounded like something I could do. Will was not at all concerned that I’d had no experience in magazine production; he would teach me all I’d have to know in evening sessions on his apartment floor. I deferred to his judgment in this, for he was convincing and authoritative. A small man with taut abdominal muscles and coherent gestures, he emphasized his points with dramatic, compact movements of his hand, usually resolving into a single index finger pointing decisively in the air. The intent was normative and the effect theatrical. He was like an old player who is given by affection to teaching. And he taught well, imparting knowledge of the mechanics of production together with a pride in possessing such knowledge. And there were useful maxims as well, such as, “They don’t want to read it”, a salutary reminder that people must be trapped, seduced into readership, that sympathy can at no time be assumed.”
I have some pictures of him at my wedding, celebrating in Central Park holding a rose. Oh my! Life is long….
December 29th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Will Creed was also the author of a historical novel “The Crimson Year,” set in Vicenda (a fictionalised Florence) and centring on the di Modena family (the fictionalised Medicis). It was published in Britiain in 1948 by Collins. I read it many years ago and really enjoyed it, and picked up a second hand copy recently. The blurb ob the back of the jacket says that Will Creed was born in a village in Pennsylvania, became a night-typist in New York for want of othe employment, and spent his days writing plays which were all rejected, but one agent suggested that he try his hand at writing “murder stories.” the blurb says that the book had become a best-seller in the US.
December 29th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Thanks, Robert, this is all very useful and interesting information. If that blurb you quoted from hadn’t mentioned “murder stories,” I might have thought the Will Creed of the historical novel was a different Will Creed who wrote the mysteries. It sounds like a different kind of book altogether!