G. M. WILSON – I Was Murdered. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover. Walker, US, hardcover, 1961.

   Unlike one person who shall remain nameless, I have no objection to the supernatural in mystery stories as long as the author presents the occult persuasively. Wilson’s spook fits that demand, even unto the spirit’s shedding of good sense along with the removal of its physical shell.

   Miss Purdy, maiden lady in her mid-50s, has been writing detective stories for 30 years. Seeking an out-of-the-way country place in which to begin her new novel, she ends up at Waterside Cottage in Norfolk.

   Unfortunately, it is already occupied — by the ghost of Lilian Kemp, seemingly accidentally drowned in Liddon broad behind the cottage. The ghost takes over Miss Purdy’s mind temporarily and dictates, “I was murdered.”

   In her attempts to see that justice is done so that Kemp’s spirit may be put at rest, Miss Purdy stirs up things. Another drowning in the broad occurs, this time definitely murder.

   While the haunt is persuasive, the author’s characterization of Miss Purdy won’t fool you: Miss Purdy has never written a detective story, nor seemingly read one. As proof, the murderer is evident to anyone with merely a minuscule knowledge of the genre, but Miss Purdy has no suspicions.

   Worse, the murderer calls Miss Purdy and tells her that there has been a dramatic development in the case and that she should meet the caller at dead of night in a deserted spot without letting anyone know of the meeting. With no hesitation she proceeds to do so. Now, I ask you: Would that be the behavior of an experienced mystery novelist? That is to say, other than James Corbett?

   Wilson, I gather, wrote additional novels with a supernatural background, most of them featuring Inspector Lovick, who stolidly does not believe in the occult and, since he also does not spot the murderer, is obviously inept.

   While Wilson doesn’t construct a tenable plot, she does write well and holds one’s attention.

Editorial Comments: (1) I do not know whom Bill was referring to in the first paragraph. It might have been any number of people at the time, including myself. I’m not as much of a purist as I used to be, but a lot of attempts to mix the paranormal with the detective story fall as flat to me as the proverbial flapjack.

(2) As Bill hints at and so stated by one blogger, G. M. Wilson may have been one of the first mystery writers to have combined the Mystery Story with Ghosts. Since her first book was published in 1948 (a non-Lovick), the claim seems unlikely, but if you’re so inclined, it does suggest her books may be worth tracking down.

(3) James Corbett was a particularly inept mystery writer whose work Bill was particularly fond of. But sentences like this one ought to be sign of genius, rather than a lack of skill with pen to paper, shouldn’t it? “She was visibly excited, yet not a vestige of her features betrayed her.” Follow this link for more of Deeck on Corbett.

(4) The author’s initials stood for the rather prosaic Gertrude Mary. I Was Murdered was the only one of her two dozen mysteries to be published in the US. Inspector Lovick appeared in 21 of them, and of those, Miss Purdy was on hand in twelve. Bill didn’t make much mention of Lovick, and then only disparagingly. Nonetheless, I’d like to try my hand at one, and if possible, sooner rather than later.

   As a novice widower I find myself thinking of three other mystery writers who lost wives to Mister Death. The first name that springs to mind in this connection is Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), who was so devastated by the death of his wife Cissie that he tried to shoot himself in his bathroom.

   Being blind drunk at the time, he missed his target. “She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound…” he said of Cissie. “She was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at.”

   Next comes Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), whom I never met but have been associated with for most of my life. He married the former Hazel Goodwin in 1919 and they were together until she died of cancer in May 1960.

   During the months of her final illness and after her death he was unable to write fiction, but he continued sending out his off-the-wall “Walter Keyhole” newsletters to just about everyone whose address he had.

   He called them polychromatic or multitinctorial cartularies since each page was printed on paper of a different color. We who have lived into the computer age recognize them as the functional equivalent of a blog. It cost him as much as $50 to have each installment prepared by a professional typing service and mailed out en masse.

   I have originals or photocopies of 188 of these, which a few years ago I organized and offered to a panting public as The Keeler Keyhole Companion (2005). Among the hundreds of topics he touched on was his life as a lonely widower in his early seventies, “a guy who lives on canned Campbell’s soups and canned Sultana pork and beans.”

   Here’s his account of the “long lonely Thanksgiving holiday” in 1962. “We [he often uses the royal we in these cartularies] had our choice of having 3 soft-boiled eggs (only thing we can cook) as a dinner, then seeing the Three Stooges conk each other over the heads [at the local movie house], or of having 3 soft-boiled eggs as a dinner and re-reading Keyser’s Mathematical Philosophy. You guess!”

   I now feel closer to that genuine mad genius than ever before. He was only a year or two older at his wife’s death than I at Patty’s. He sold the old house they had lived in for decades and moved into an apartment hotel, while I’ve recently bought a condo and put my own Toad Hall on the market. I’m no better at cheffery than Harry was but have the advantage of living in the age of that fantastic contraption known as the microwave.

   The third author in whose moccasins I now walk became a widower not once but twice. Fred Dannay (1905-1982), better known as Ellery Queen, married the former Mary Beck in 1926. She died of cancer on July 4, 1945, leaving Fred with two small children to raise.

   In 1947 he married the former Hilda Wiesenthal, who was ten or eleven years younger than he and was the daughter of a cousin of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. She died in 1972, also of cancer.

   By that time I had come to know Fred well and he had become the closest thing to a grandfather I had ever known. I went through this awful period of his life with him. There’s a photograph of him taken at this time which shows the empty devastated face of a man waiting for the dark to claim him.

   Just as Keeler had married again a few years after Hazel’s death, so did Fred a few years after Hilda’s. I got to know Thelma Keeler well and am convinced that she saved her husband’s life. I also have no doubt that Fred’s third marriage, to the former Rose Koppel, saved his. Will I luck out in my final years as they did?

   I apologize for devoting so much of this column to death but I really don’t have much choice at the moment. Less than a week before Christmas I learned that I’d lost one of my closest mystery-loving friends.

   Bob Briney was something of a universal genius. Physically he evoked Orson Welles or Nero Wolfe but was soft-spoken and totally without their irascibility and moved with a certain gingerliness as if he were afraid he’d crush something if his movements were more forceful.

   He was born near Benton Harbor, Michigan in December 1933 and spent most of his academic career in Massachusetts, at Salem State University. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and recovered from the ordeals of his dissertation and orals, so he told me, by reading most of the novels of John Dickson Carr in less than a month.

   Like the clever men of Oxford in The Wind in the Willows, he “knew all that was to be knowed”—about mystery fiction, fantasy, s-f, horror, Westerns, just about every form of popular fiction you can name, plus ballet and opera and movies and classical music and so much more.

   His ability to keep prodigious masses of data in perfectly organized form would have shamed many a computer. He wrote prolifically and with dry wit about books and authors, assiduously collected works in the genres he loved — every room in his large house including the bathroom was a library first and foremost — and corresponded with Sax Rohmer, P.G. Wodehouse, John Creasey and countless other authors.

   It was pure pleasure to read his commentary or listen to his conversation. We started corresponding in the late Sixties, thanks mainly to Al Hubin and The Armchair Detective, and met for the first time in 1970 when I took a bus from New Jersey to a science fiction convention in Manhattan that he was attending.

   Beginning in 1980 he followed in Keeler’s footsteps by putting out the pre-computer equivalent of a blog, which he called Contact Is Not a Verb (a famous line from one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels) and kept going until September 2006, a grand total of 149 issues, of a copy of every one of which I am a proud possessor.

   Bob developed diabetes and in the fall of 1990, when I was a visiting professor in New Jersey, had to have some of his toes amputated. Unable to climb the stairs of his own house, he was sleeping in a hospital bed installed on the ground floor. I traveled to Salem by Amtrak and spent a long weekend playing housekeeper: schlepping cartons around so he could access the classical music he loved, taking his clothes to the laundry, even cooking us a few meals (for whose quality I will not vouch).

   Until a few years ago we would rendezvous every summer at the Pulpcon in Dayton, Ohio. Then unaccountably this shy but gregarious man dropped out of sight. Almost no one heard a word from him or knew anything about his health.

   Finally, just a few days before Christmas, I learned he’d been found dead in his house late in November. He had no immediate family. As of this writing I don’t know the cause, or what will happen to the vast library he had accumulated over the decades. All I know is that he was one of the most brilliant and memorable people in my life.

Bouchercon, Philadelphia, 1989. Me (Steve Lewis), Art Scott, Bob Briney, George Kelley, and Mike Nevins. Photo taken by Ellen Nehr.

Bouchercon, New York, 1983. Ellen Nehr and Bob Briney.

Bouchercon, Chicago, 1984. Marv Lachman, Bob Briney, Ellen Nehr and Steve Stilwell.

   Many thanks to Art Scott for providing the photos above.

TECH DAVIS – Terror at Compass Lake. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935.

   Occasionally when I am on the fringes of a group of diehard mystery fans — which is about as close as they’ll let me get — the name Tech Davis is mentioned. Then when I am spotted, the subject is immediately changed.

   Why this happens I do not know. Oh, I know why I’m allowed only on the fringes; it’s their not wanting me to hear about Davis that baffles me. While Davis is not a good author; he isn’t an exceptionally bad one.

   His prose doesn’t elevate, indeed may be said to enervate. His detective, Aubrey Nash, is so bland that I wish he’d been given the one or two idiosyncrasies that I usually deplore in other fictional detectives whose creators can’t seem to make come alive. But he does plot well.

   In this novel, the first of three by Davis, Aubrey Nash is asked to come to the wilds of upstate New York to investigate the apparent suicide of a chauffeur — it must be suicide since everyone has a perfect alibi — and the later stabbing death of his employer in a locked room. Nash isn’t interested until he receives a telegram telling him the crime is insoluble and he shouldn’t waste his time with it.

   Recommended for locked-room fanciers, and other problem solvers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mystery fiction by TECH DAVIS, pen name of Edgar Davis (1890-1974). Series character: Aubrey Nash in all.

      Terror at Compass Lake. Doubleday, 1935.
      Full Fare for a Corpse. Doubleday, 1937.

      Murder on Alternate Tuesdays. Doubleday, 1938.

Editorial Comment:   Just in case anyone is tempted by Bill’s last line into putting together a complete set of all three Tech Davis mysteries, there are five copies of his books currently listed on ABE. Four of them are of Compass Lake, available at $75 and up, and there’s one of Full Fare, the latter having an asking price of a fairly solid $250.

   And not a single copy of Alternate Tuesdays.

UPDATE. 01-08-12.   Thanks to Bill Pronzini, I can now show you cover images for all three Tech Davis mysteries, in jacket.

THURMAN WARRINER – Method in His Murder. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1950. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1950.

    “Unquestionably, if Rhoda had been his wife, Mr. Ambo would have contemplated murder.” Ambo’s godson, John Wainfleet, who is married to Rhoda, contemplates nothing but a life of obedience to her demands.

    Or so it seems, until he reveals to Ambo that, after producing a satirical crime novel that had a modest success and a play that was still going strong, and after being told by Rhoda that he would have to stick to being a solicitor, he has a secret life in which he lives, though perish the thought not in sin, with another woman two days a week and writes successful novels under a pseudonym.

   Things are in this state temporarily, and then Rhoda’s brother ostensibly dies in an auto accident. The young doctor who examines the corpse believes death occurred before the accident, and apparently so do the police.

   Wainfleet and another man who were with Rhoda’s brother before the accident have perfect alibis. Well, Wainfleet does until Ambo starts investigating and discovers more than he wants to.

   This is the first novel featuring the investigations of Charles Ambo; Archdeacon Grantius Fauxlihough Toft, an unusual clergyman who believes in the Devil and burglary; and John Franklin Cornelius Scotter, private investigator. It is well worth discovering by those who enjoy humor, a fine prose style, and three engaging characters.

     Bibliographic Notes:

 The Ambo, Toft & Scotter series —

Method in His Murder (n.) Hodder 1950.
Ducats in Her Coffin (n.) Hodder 1951.
Death’s Dateless Night (n.) Hodder 1952.

The Doors of Sleep (n.) Hodder 1955.

Death’s Bright Angel (n.) Hodder 1956.
She Died, Of Course (n.) Hodder 1958.
Heavenly Bodies (n.) Hodder 1960.

   Only the first of these was published in the US. Warriner wrote one other mystery under his own name, another twelve as by Simon Troy, and one as John Kersey. Inspector Charles Smith appeared in all but one of the Troy books, the most well-known probably being Road to Rhuine (1952), and had a cross-over appearance in She Died, Of Course above.

   Within five months, five deaths: my wife, my youngest brother, my longtime agent, my editorial partner on the “Mystery Makers” series, and the secretary without whose gentle mentoring I’d still be batting out words on a manual typewriter. I’ll never remember this year fondly. But before it closes, and before next January 6 when I collide with my 69th birthday, I’d like to begin writing again.

   In a column that dates back to before any of those deaths, I mentioned that some of the music Bernard Herrmann wrote for the earliest episodes of the CBS Adventures of Ellery Queen radio series could be seen on the Herrmann Society website. Now it can be heard too. If you go to www.filmscorerundowns.net and then click on “CBS Audio Clips,” you’ll be able to listen to 21 Herrmann excerpts, most of them unavailable elsewhere.

   Two of the three earliest come from the 60-minute Ellery Queen episode “The Last Man Club” (June 25, 1939) and the third from “The Impossible Crime” (July 16, 1939), all three performed on a synthesizer by David Ledsam. Even without the original instrumentation, the 31-second Cue 1 from “The Last Man Club” is instantly recognizable as Herrmann, although the other two lack the uniquely ominous sound that he became famous for.

   But it’s hauntingly present in the vast majority of these 21 audio clips, and anyone who listens to all of them will perhaps understand why I’ve called Herrmann the Cornell Woolrich of music.

   You can listen to dozens more audio excerpts, many from legendary TV series like Perry Mason and Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke, if you visit www.bernardherrmann.org and then click on “Herrmann CBS Legacy.” Both of these centenary tributes to perhaps the greatest of all film composers were prepared and arranged by Herrmann authority Bill Wrobel.

   As chance would have it, Herrmann and Queen interfaced again almost a quarter century after the Queen radio show debuted. “Terror in Northfield” (October 11, 1963), one of 17 episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour with original Herrmann scores, was based on a non-series novelet by Queen.

   Herrmann’s music for that and eight other episodes of the series is available on three CDs in the recently released Varese Sarabande set The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Volume Two, which I recommend highly.

   November 30 of this year marked the 104th birthday of the world-renowned historian of ideas Jacques Barzun, who in the early 1920s was a classmate of Woolrich at Columbia University and to whom we owe everything that is known about the young manhood of the Hitchcock of the written word.

   My first contact with Barzun was in the late Sixties when I arranged for his essay “Detection and the Literary Art” to be reprinted in my anthology The Mystery Writer’s Art.

   We met in 1970 when I was living in New Jersey and working on the Woolrich collection Nightwebs. Barzun invited me to his office in Columbia’s Low Library and spent the better part of an afternoon describing for me what the university was like in the years immediately after World War I and also, of course, what the young Woolrich was like.

   The factor that seems to have brought the two together was that they were the only members of their class who had spent most of their lives outside the United States, Barzun in France and Woolrich in Mexico with his father.

   Their friendship came to an end when Woolrich sold his first novel to a major publisher while in junior year and quit Columbia under the delusion that he was about to become the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wound up one of the founders and the supreme practitioner of the dark suspense genre we now call noir.

   Woolrich’s brand of desperate anguish was not Barzun’s cup of tea. His mammoth Catalogue of Crime (2nd ed. 1989) makes it clear that he much preferred humdrum English authors like John Rhode.

   I had read some Rhode and also another humdrum Brit signing himself Miles Burton, and had noticed something very strange about both sets of books. Whenever a character asks a question of another, the verb following the second character’s line of dialogue is always the same. Always.

   Hundreds of times in each book, hundreds of thousands of times in the complete works. “ABC?” asked Inspector Boothbridge. “XYZ,” Lord Wychthorpe replied. “One two three?” Dr. Coxcroft inquired. “Eight nine ten,” Mrs. Hornbeam replied.

   The obvious conclusion is that Rhode and Burton were the same man, but apparently no one had mentioned it before me (in The Armchair Detective for October 1968). At any rate Barzun in Catalogue of Crime credited me with the discovery.

   Among those who weren’t aware of the Rhode-Burton identity was Anthony Boucher. He thought most of the Rhode books dull but usually reviewed them soberly, while the Burton novels he ridiculed and detested. Here’s his complete review of Death at Ash House from the San Francisco Chronicle for December 6, 1942:

   Here’s what he had to say about Accidents Do Happen in the Chronicle for February 10, 1946:

   These and three more snarky reviews of Burton can be found in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles (2001). Burton’s American publisher dropped him before Boucher took over as mystery critic of the New York Times but they continued to appear in England until 1960.

   The Rhodes kept coming out on both sides of the Atlantic and Boucher reviewed all of them, perhaps because as a Catholic he thought he should do penance for his sins. I remember he called one of them “the dreariest Rhode I have yet traversed.” I can’t recall anything about the book of which he said it.

   As prolific as Edward D. Hoch was — with over 900 short stories to his credit — the movie and TV media have made virtually no use of his output. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists just 9 films derived from his works (9/900 = 1 percent). No more eloquent testimony against the obtuseness of Hollywood can be adduced.

1. “Off Season.” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, May 10, 1965. With John Gavin, Richard Jaeckel, and Tom Drake. Based on Hoch’s story “Winter Run,” this is a nice little crime drama with a nasty twist. This show was the final one of the Hitchcock series.

2. It Takes All Kinds. Film, 1969, based on the story “A Girl Like Cathy.” With Robert Lansing, Vera Miles, and Barry Sullivan. Film critic Leonard Maltin describes it this way: “Fair double cross drama about Miles’ shielding of Lansing when he accidentally kills sailor in a brawl in Australia. Nothing special.”

3. “The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes.” Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, November 5, 1972. With Gary Lockwood, Joan Van Ark, and Chuck Connors. I’m sure I saw this one but don’t remember a thing about it.

    The TV series McMillan & Wife (1971-77) made good use of Hoch’s stories:

4. “Cop of the Year.” November 19, 1972. With Rock Hudson, Susan Saint James, John Schuck, Nancy Walker, and Edmond O’Brien. Based on “The Leopold Locked Room,” with John Schuck’s character doubling for Captain Leopold. Neat little impossible crime plot, with Schuck accused of murdering his ex-wife.

5. “Free Fall to Terror.” November 11, 1973. Guest stars: Edward Andrews, Tom Bosley, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Dick Haymes, James Olson, and Barbara Rhoades. Based on one of Hoch’s best stories (“The Long Way Down”), a businessman evidently crashes through a plate glass window, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground — three hours later.

6. “The Man without a Face.” January 6, 1974. Guest stars: Dana Wynter, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Donna Douglas, and Steve Forrest. Cold War espionage with a mystery slant.

    The French produced a mini-series in the mid-’70s:

7. Nick Verlaine ou Comment voler la Tour Eiffel. Five episodes, France, July-August 1976. If anybody knows anything about this production, please inform us.

   The British horror/fantasy series Tales of the Unexpected used a couple of Hoch’s stories as inspiration:

8. “The Man at the Top.” June 14, 1980. Introducer: Roald Dahl. With Peter Firth, Rachel Davies, and Dallas Cavell.

9. “The Vorpal Blade.” May 28, 1983. With Peter Cushing, Anthony Higgins, John Bailey, and Andrew Bicknell.

    — and, unless the IMDb list is woefully incomplete, that’s the extent of the film industry’s use of Edward D. Hoch’s stories.

ANNE NASH – Said with Flowers. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1943. Bart House #19, paperback, 1945.

    ’Twas the week before Christmas when the general factotum and chief roustabout of the flower shop owned and operated by Doris (Dodo) Trent and Nell Witter fell and broke his leg. Fortuitously, but perhaps not fortunately, a new young man in town visits the shop and appears qualified to fill in during the busiest time of the year.

    A day later a friend of Dodo’s and Nell’s is found stabbed to death, with one of the knives used for dethorning roses, outside the flower shop. On her body is the emblem of a fish, the trademark of Killer Karp — named thus, God help us, by the newspapers because of his habit of leaving the drawing of a fish with each murder victim — a serial murderer who had been working his way west from Boston and murdering lovely, young, and unmarried females in his travels.

    If the woman killed outside the flower shop is one of Karp’s victims, the serial killer had deviated almost totally from his previous pattern. If she had not been murdered by Karp, who in the small town of Pinecrest would murder a woman seemingly loved by all? Is the new flower shop assistant Killer Karp?

    Dodo and Nell join forces, when they can take the time from their hectic Christmas business, with detective Mark Tudor and his dog Svea to try to find the killer. There is excellent atmosphere, Dodo and Nell are real people, and the novel is well written if you don’t mind a colloquial style. The killer was evident fairly early on to this reader, but it didn’t spoil the enjoyment.

Bibliographic Data:   Anne Nash was the author of three detective novels starring Dodo and Nell between 1943 and 1945, then one stand-alone in 1946. All four published were under Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint, with Said with Flowers being the first.

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE. Universal, 1967. Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Nigel Green, Suzanna Leigh, Steve Carlson, Virginia North. Story & screenplay by Liz Charles-Williams, David D. Osborn & Jimmy Sangster, based on the characters created by Herman C. “Sapper” McNeile. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   Compared to the Dick Barton film (reviewed here ), there’s nothing as pre-adolescent in Deadlier Than the Male, which is firmly adolescent in its imitation-Bond fantasies.

   I must have seen this six times in my Senior year of High School, and I tried hard to convince my serious-film-student friends there was something really worthwhile there amid the sex, violence and Eastman Color. They told me that even I should be grown-up enough to reject this mindless rubbish, but it became available on video recently and I enjoyed it all over again.

   This was the first Bulldog Drummond movie in about 20 years, and the producers approached it with B-movie gusto, garnished it with sexy assassins (Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, whose un-self-conscious bad acting seems quite fitting here), a scar-faced Chinese bodyguard, a giant chess game and Nigel Green’s droll villainy, all splashed across colorful locations tricked out with James Bond-style fights and wise cracks.

   I have to agree with my old friends about its artistic merits, but the thing is infused with such a low-budget, gee-wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-make-a-movie elan that if you haven’t read any good comic books lately, you might like it.

   By the way, Bulldog Drummond is incarnated here by actor Richard Johnson, who also impersonated British Icons, Lord Nelson and Nayland Smith in films that were much less fun.

COLLIN WILCOX – Power Plays. Random House, hardcover, 1979. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, December 1979. No paperback edition.

   Much to the surprise of everyone involved, an apparently minor traffic accident on the streets of San Francisco unexpectedly coughs up the body of a murder victim.

   Found stabbed to death in the back seat of one of the cars is a one-time Washington columnist who in recent days had reportedly been hot on the trail of a surefire comeback story. The trail of the killer leads Lt. Hastings of Homicide on a merry chase as well. Higher and higher he goes into the upper echelons of the rich and powerful on both coasts; at stake is nothing less than his job itself.

   A lot of fast-paced action scenes keeps the story’s arteries pumping, leaving little time-out for the usual details of Hastings’ home life. What makes this not the totally successful peek behind closed doors it’s intended to be is a certain naiveness in such matters — and a lack of depth in terms of the muck that’s being raked up.

   If it matters, though, Hastings as a character pleases me, and I liked the book anyway.

Rating:   B.

Bibliographic Data:   Collin Wilcox, 1924-1996, wrote a total of 21 Lt. Hastings novels. Power Plays was the 10th in the series. One of the books, Twospot, was a joint venture with Bill Pronzini, with Hastings and Bill’s “Nameless” PI sharing the detective work. In another of the books, Except for the Bones, Wilcox’s other series character, theater director Allan Bernhardt, makes an appearance.

R. C. WOODTHORPE – Death Wears a Purple Shirt. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1934. First published in the UK as Silence of a Purple Shirt, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, hardcover, 1934.

   Nicholas Slade — “an eminent author whose name was known to everybody, though his works, with one exception, were read by nobody” — is asked by his niece to do what he can to free the niece’s estranged husband from a murder charge. The husband is a member of the Purple Shirts, a fascist organization in England, and the man killed is a high-level member of that group who is up to no good.

   Slade is known by one book — the rest being dull satires — The Gods Are Just, which he describes as “an eruption like the pimples on the face of adolescent youth: natural but unpleasant, and best forgotten once they are gone,” and at which he shudders whenever it is mentioned.

   He and his cockney, although he doesn’t talk like one, assistant, Alfred Hicks, who spends most of his time reading the articles in John Bull, go to the scene of the crime. The two of them put up at the Island Hotel, a most extraordinary inn with a most extraordinary staff.

   There is a great deal of humor in this novel, arising both from the circumstances and the characters. The portrayal of the Purple Shirts should be enough to make any fascist organization blush, assuming it was capable of it.

   The publishers say that Nicholas Slade “will inevitably come to occupy a niche in the gallery of immortal detectives of fiction.” Well, we all know what publishers are like, but they had somewhat of a point here. There was, however, only one other novel featuring Slade (ed.–The Necessary Corpse), and two works an immortal do not make.

   Still, the potential certainly existed, and any reader who enjoys the classic mystery with humor and interesting characters should find this well worth seeking out.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   As a mystery writer, Ralph Carter Woodthorpe, 1886-?, was the author of eight detective novels published between 1932 and 1940. Two of these featured Nicholas Slade as the leading character, as Bill pointed out; a former schoolmistress named Mathilda Perks appears in another two. One of these was Death in a Little Town, an early eccentric cozy which Bill reviewed in the same issue of Poisoned Pen. Look for here on this blog soon. (He enjoyed it.)